Menopause – Mood Changes and Anxiety

Transcript

“Probably the most significant complaint other than low sexual desire in menopausal women is mood changes and mood irritability and anxiety. And when women are experiencing mood changes and anxiety, that elevates cortisol levels in their body, which then affects metabolism and fat distribution. It also causes inflammation in the entire body, not just in, you know, your pelvic area, but your brain, your heart, your joints. So everything bad that happens to us in life is related to inflammation. And stress is one of the biggest factors that increase inflammation in the bodies. So when we’re under conditions of stress, all of our symptoms and auto-immune symptoms and immunity in general are going to be compromised. So I feel really strongly that it’s my responsibility to educate people about the impact of stress, to educate and arm my patients with information about stress reduction and give them tools for stress reduction.

I think in the future that the surgeon general or somebody is going to mandate that all physicians become familiar with meditation and the health benefits of meditation and educate their patients about it. There are already NIH grants and funded clinical trials and actual clinical studies that show that patients that practice meditation are healthier, that meditation is being used in cancer patients and patients with auto-immune disorders, and patients that are meditating compared to those that are not are doing better and improving and responding better to therapies. So what’s going in our brain and our mind affects our bodies. And if we’re not in alignment, mind, body, spirit, things will start to break down. Symptoms will get worse. And I guess the bottom line of what I really want to say, and what I do believe, is that we play a role as,

I’m going to talk about myself as a person, in our health and wellness. We go to doctors and we ask them for their opinions and we ask them to help us and treat us and give us medications or do our surgeries and all those other things. And over the course of my career, and I’m now in my fifties, I’ve realized that I am what I do. And for that matter, all doctors. We do about maybe 60% at the most, or many times less. And the other 40%, the patient, the onus is on the patient to do. And their part of the job is, A: complying with your treatment, B: buying into and believing in what you’re doing. Having faith in “”this is going to help me, this is going to make me feel better”” and also doing the work, the internal work. It’s an inside job about quieting the mind, managing stress, because it’s going to happen no matter where we are, no matter who we are, stress is going to creep in, and that we have tools for managing it.”