PROFESSIONAL ARTICLE

By: Dr. Sandra Neto | Sexologist

How does menopause affect women's emotions?

"I wasn't like this. What is happening to me?"

If you have already asked yourself this question, I want to start by telling you one thing: you are not going crazy, and you are not alone.

We talk a lot about hot flashes, menstrual changes, and sleep. But there are changes that no one sees from the outside. It’s you crying at a television commercial. It’s you losing patience with the ones you love most and feeling guilty five minutes later. It’s you walking into the kitchen and not knowing what you went there to get. It’s also that sudden desire to cancel plans and be alone, or taking a criticism that you would have let slide before and having it sting all day long. And because no one sees it, it becomes harder to explain and much more difficult to ask for help.

There is an explanation for this, and it is good news, because it takes the weight off your shoulders and prevents you from turning these things into a negative conclusion about yourself.

In perimenopause, your estrogen does not drop slowly, as is commonly thought. It goes up and down without warning. And estrogen doesn't just work in your ovaries; it is what helps keep serotonin and dopamine in balance, the substances that regulate your good mood. Imagine someone is turning the volume knob on your emotions without asking your permission. And so, what disorganizes you is not the lack of hormones, but rather this unpredictability.

There is another piece to this. Your progesterone gives rise to a substance that acts as a "brake" on that same volume knob, almost like a tranquilizer; it is what normally prevents your emotions from shooting to the maximum. As your cycles become irregular, this natural calming effect is no longer predictable. That is why that anxiety appears for no reason, or you feel your fuse is shorter than you were used to.

And that brain fog you feel? It also has a reason. Estrogen acts on the areas of your brain that store memory and help you be attentive and organized. That is why the complaints are almost always the same: the word that doesn't come to you, the name that gets lost in the middle of a sentence, the impossibility of doing three things at the same time as before. Let me tell you one thing, because it is a fear I hear a lot in consultations and I want to spare you from it: in most women, this fog is temporary and improves after menopause. It is not the beginning of dementia.

To this is added your sleep. Waking up several times a night, month after month, steals from you precisely the hours when the brain organizes memory and recharges patience. Anyone becomes more irritable like this.

Even so, your menopause is not the same as anyone else's. There are women who go through this phase practically without incident and others who feel completely scared by what is happening to them. And that doesn't mean anything about you!

If your sadness or anxiety drags on for weeks and takes away your enjoyment of things, please don't wait for it to pass on its own. Talk to someone or seek specialized help because you simply don't have to "just put up with it" because you are in menopause.

Because no, you are not "annoying." You are adapting to a body that changed the rules in the middle of the game. And you are still you.