Most women don’t understand menopause or the real cause of their menopause problems. Too often, women think of menopause as a medical condition that carries with it stress, hot flashes, anxiety, depression and other difficulties. That’s not the case.

Menopause doesn’t naturally cause these problems at all. Hormone imbalance does. And hormone imbalance doesn’t come along with menopause automatically. Women were terribly misinformed about this when told by their doctors that they needed Hormone Replacement Therapy, a fictional cure for a fictional medical condition that studies revealed caused heart disease, stroke and cancer.

Women undergoing menopause who are not in hormone imbalance are free from the problems that plague women who are.

Depleted adrenal glands drive most hormone imbalance for menopausal women. But before we consider this, let’s get the menopause story straight.

If you’re a women near or in menopause-you should know this.

Perimenopause and Menopause

Perimenopause is the transitional time preceding “official” menopause. It begins around 7 years before your last period. You’re “officially” in menopause when you haven’t menstruated for one full year.

Menopause is not a single event or something that occurs suddenly. As noted, it’s a process that begins before your last period, a process that can continue for years after it. Perimenopause and menopause involve complex mindbody changes, changes driven by hormones.

Hormonal changes in menopause take place in your liver, fat cells, adrenals, pancreas, thyroid, hypothalamus and your ovaries. The physical events of menopause are initiated by your Involuntary Nervous System, by your hypothalamus and your pituitary gland, the master gland for your endocrine system.

Three things happen to your body during perimenopause

1. Your body’s production of the hormones estrogen and progesterone declines

2. You stop producing eggs

3. Your menstrual activity decreases and then stops

These perimenopause changes do indeed trigger hormonal imbalance. But this period of hormone imbalance is designed to be short-lived. And it’s actually a signal to your body to balance your hormone system through other means.

With other words, women are not hard wired to have chronic hot flashes and other menopause problems.

The Key Issue: Your Adrenal System

While other things can contribute to hormone imbalance, adrenal exhaustion is the primary cause. Consider this: When perimenopause changes throw Far Eastern women into hormone imbalance, their adrenal glands respond to restore hormone balance.  Their adrenals function like a back-up system that kicks in when perimenopause changes trigger their temporary hormone imbalance.

But, because of exhaustion, the adrenals of Western women cannot perform properly to restore their hormone balance. And so they stay stuck in a chronic state of hormone imbalance and suffer the consequences.

This not only causes hot flashes and other difficulties, but it also it sets the stage risky health problems, including heart disease. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women.

Your Adrenal Glands

Your adrenals are round 3 inch or so glands that sit atop your kidneys. They produce a large number of hormones that have a critical impact on menopause, including aldosterone, DHEA, estrogen, progesterone and pregnenelone.

Your adrenal function can become depleted and create adrenal insufficiency, burnout or exhaustions, serious problems not easily relieved. Most physicians fail to recognize adrenal depletion in women undergoing menopause despite that fact that research demonstrates that 99% of menopausal women have impaired adrenal function.

And so the real problem for 99% of Western women is that their adrenal glands fail to produce enough estrogens, progesterone and other necessary hormones in the right balance and quantities to avoid the problems that occur when their ovaries stop producing these hormones.

Stress Depletes Your Adrenals

A woman’s adrenal glands become exhausted from years of wear and tear caused by the chronic release of stress hormones. When you are chronically stressed, your adrenals are working overtime and they never get a proper rest. And so they become exhausted and lose their ability to function.

Keep these  summary points in mind as a guide:

• Your perimenopause and menopause problems are driven by hormone imbalance

• It’s very likely that your adrenal system, designed to restore hormone balance, fails to do its job properly-because it’s exhausted.

• As a result, your hormone system is chronically imbalanced

• Hormone balance is the normal condition for women

• Your hot flashes and other problems are driven by an extreme condition- hormone imbalance

• You don’t need drugs, including hormones. You need to learn how to restore your adrenals and rebalance your hormonal system, so you can return to hormone balance.

Get Busy Restoring Your Adrenal Glands.

Eat healthy, exercise and get quality sleep and rest. And learn how to turn your stress hormone faucet off and flush stress hormones out of your system.

Download “The Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets” on this page, while it’s still Free- it tell you what to do and why and show you.

The book will give you a deeper understanding of the dangers of stress and stress hormones along with some techniques and exercises you can start using right away to restore your adrenals and get back into hormone balance.

You’ll feel a lot better when you do.

One reason this is the case is the false views western women download about what midlife and menopause are really all about. But that’s changing, thankfully. These false views have led to a counterproductive “mindset”, an outlook that has burdened western women with misinformation and false assumptions.

Menopause has long been shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding. But it’s now understood as a natural part of aging. It’s the gateway to the second half of a woman’s life, a time when a woman can actually be free from worry about pregnancy and free from menstrual periods.

Most importantly, midlife is a time inner change, not just bodily change. It’s actually a time of change involving deepening and discovery. But Western culture fails to offer women a clear, accurate mindset that could serve as a map for understanding and negotiating these inner changes, changes that come naturally at midlife.

Far Eastern women expect and believe that the second half of their lives will be rich and rewarding and their culture supports those expectations and beliefs. Not so in the West.

Midlife involves powerful inner change. It’s not just about your body. But in the West “inner change” is barely recognized and understood. And the focus and often times the obsession is on looking young.

Our culture’s biases and misconceptions about women, and about aging, leave most women with the wrong outlook, one that that views aging as decline, a view that makes growing older a burden.

The idea that life is all downhill after midlife and menopause is like a cultural virus that infects many women’s minds. It’s a bogus and harmful idea. In truth, midlife opens up new possibilities for powerful growth within a woman’s personality, possibilities informed by her soul, by her deeper inner life.  Midlife awakens the soul to make a grab for the steering wheel.

If you don’t buy into the false negative views about menopause and midlife, and if you can recognize and honor your soul, then the second half of your life can be a powerful adventure. It can be an adventure filled with discovery, meaning and satisfaction.

But only if you recognize midlife and menopause for what they truly are. Instead of making the mistake of viewing menopause as a medical problem and midlife as an indication that you’re already half dead.

“Body-Only” assumptions about menopause are like flat earth theory-in error and obsolete. Unfortunately, the medical and drug industries remain committed to the idea that a woman’s menopause is a body-only medical condition. This view grants them power, control and profit.

Well if menopause isn’t a medical condition, then why do so many women think it is? Why is this wrong view so widespread in the media and in the medical community? There’s a few important reasons why, reasons you should know about. Let’s consider some of them.

One is that hormone imbalance in menopause can trigger problems that can be easily be placed in the wrong context to look like symptoms of a medical condition. For example, problems such as hot flashes, insomnia, weight gain, loss of sexual desire, vaginal dryness, moodiness, stress, depression-among others. But these are not typically indications of a medical condition.

They’re problems that get triggered by a natural stage of woman’s life. Hormone changes are a natural part of a woman’s aging. But for most Western women-these hormone changes create long-term hormone imbalance, whereas they don’t for Far Eastern women.

And stress and a chronic flow of stress hormones are the main reasons why Western women fail to regain their hormone balance. Not only does this lead to great discomfort, but it also puts Western women at risk for heart disease. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women in the West.

Did you know that while menopause is a natural part of aging and an important life stage, long-term hormone imbalance is NOT. Nor are the hot flashes, insomnia, weight gain and other menopause problems that travel with continuing hormone imbalance.

Long-term hormone imbalance is the culprit that drives menopause problems. Women can empower themselves considerably if they learn how to regain hormone balance and how to revision their obsolete ideas about midlife, menopause and about what the second half of life is really all about.

Grab the “Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets” while it’s still free. It will give you the real skinny on stress hormones as well as some tools to help restore your hormone balance. You’ll feel the difference.

Midlife Can Be Risky and Very Stressful

Consider this: When compared with people who move through midlife “well and wisely”, people who don’t

• Live a less satisfying second half of life
• Have more stress and more health problems
• Are less successful at work and in relationships, including family relationships, and
• Die younger

Do You Want to Move Through Midlife “Well and Wisely”?

If you want to move through midlife well and wisely then let me explain what’s involved.

Recall for a few moments when you went through an earlier important life stage-adolescence. Your adolescence was a bridge between childhood and adulthood. Once you were on that bridge you were no longer a child.

Now in many ways your midlife passage is an even more powerful life stage. It’s a bridge between the first and second half of your life. Once you’re on that bridge, the first half of your life is over and the second half has begun.

Now imagine if you went through adolescence with no clear idea about what it was. Think of how you might feel if you thought your increase in size and your growth of facial hair, if you’re male and breasts if you’re female , were evidence that you were weird and that something was wrong with you.

Well most people today go through the stage of midlife unaware about what it is and what it involves or what it requires. They have no map for the territory they’re in, and so it’s no wonder they get anxious, stressed out and lost.

It wasn’t always that way, but today too much attention goes to our outer life, and too little to our inner life. But because of the superficial view of life portrayed today by the media and other quarters, few people are aware that midlife is an important stage of life or that the first and second halves of life are very different.

To go through midlife “well and wisely” you have to know

• what midlife is,
• what it involves and
• how to meet the challenges and opportunities it brings.

Turn Toward Your Deeper Identity

At midlife you arrive at a crossroads where you encounter a “natural movement within yourself” to shift your identity and dive deeper into life. This is as much a natural part of midlife as the growth of breasts or facial hair is a natural part of adolescence.

If you recognize this “natural movement”, you can turn in its direction and begin to write a new screenplay for the second half of your life. But if you don’t recognize it, then you live the second half of your life with the wrong script, the script for the first half. This mistake breeds a ton of stress, heartache and lost opportunities. Perhaps if you look around you can see it in many people’s faces.

You can feel a lot of chaos, anxiety, depression and imbalance during your midlife passage. It comes with the territory. The turmoil of midlife usually enters into your consciousness as anxiety over who you are.

These Cultural Biases Cause Great Harm

Both men and women go through midlife changes. But for women it’s more intense, because of menopause-the physical signature of midlife for a woman. And menopause signals a much more dramatic life change for a woman. The culture tends to wrongly regard menopause as a medical condition and the gateway to decline. It locks women into a first half of life screenplay where they feel the second half of their life is downhill and their best years are behind them. This is baloney. But unfortunately, it’s powerful baloney.

It’s not so much that a woman can’t have children anymore, it’s that she’s DONE having children and it’s more accurate to say menopause and midlife are the beginning of her “beyond child bearing years” rather than the end of them.

Menopause Problems are Not “Natural”

You need a New Mindset to protect yourself from getting dragged out to sea by powerful cultural biases against aging, biases that are blind to midlife and to what the second half of life is all about. Menopause is not a medical condition and midlife and menopause are primarily a psychological and spiritual time, the biology is secondary.

Women get caught in difficult menopause problems because of hormone imbalance. That’s not natural. Far Eastern women have few if any of these problems, because their adrenal glands are not depleted by years of chronic stress. Western women get caught in what we call the Menopause Vicious Cycle^TM, a dangerous problem that not only drives hormone imbalance and menopause problems, but heart disease as well.

Let’s continue our focus on women for now. Much of what we say about women has relevance for men too. In a later article we’ll focus on men exclusively.

Women in the Wrong Mindset Miss the Music

Think of it this way, women with the wrong mindset about eating out, go into restaurants to hold the utensils and use the bathroom. They miss the food.

Women with the wrong mindset about menopause, go into midlife as if it was about medical symptoms like hot flashes, getting older, looking less attractive and slowing down. They miss the growth and the adventure. They miss the turn toward the “deeper parts of themselves”, the parts begging for a new screenplay and an adventure that does justice to the second half of their lives.

Women need a “New Mindset” that honors their midlife and menopause as a time of natural and necessary turmoil. This turmoil signals and announces important inner changes, changes that lead into a deeper and more meaningful phase of life.

If you look at menopause without understanding the deeper goings on of midlife, it’s like you’re watching people dance without hearing the music.

Midlife’s Inner Territory

The turn toward your deeper, more essential identity often meets with strong resistance from forces within you, forces that would like to maintain the status quo. Because to them, it feels like you’re leaving known territory for some foreign land. This is one reason why your midlife passage can be filled with stress, doubt and fear.

It is as if your identity loses its solid ground while you are in movement between different possibilities within yourself. Psychologically you can feel like you’re living on a suspension bridge. Any emotional upheaval is like a strong wind that can leave you feeling out of control as the familiar images that have defined you in the past no longer seem fixed, secure and reliable.

Like a lobster who becomes vulnerable when she sheds her shell because she needs to grow into a bigger one, in midlife you’re breaking free from a role and an identity that’s too small for who you truly are. Don’t believe the commercially driven propaganda. It’s a time of growth, not of decline. Don’t miss it.

If you resist change and rigidly hold on to the old images of your first half of your life identity, you run the risk of missing life’s deeper opportunities. You then might develop a kind of chronic dread about having to face growing old and, inevitably, of having to die. Life, in such circumstances, can lose its bright colors and become something that you merely endure with fear and worry rather than living with any gusto and passion.

Midlife Chaos and Opportunity

In the chaos of midlife, your deepest possibilities and opportunities emerge most clearly. You’ll enter midlife with well established and familiar patterns of identity, many of them part of your “conditioned self-image”. Your work and family life may have become predictable sources of identity and enjoyment.

Then all of a sudden you can begin to feel depleted. What you have worked hard for and what you have valued starts to seem lacking in some vague way. This doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It means that the deeper forces within you are stirring. They’re grabbing for the wheel of your life.

Your everyday life can begin to feel like a drama that someone else has arranged. You lose energy for what you do every day; it becomes repetitive and boring. Even your most prized possessions may all of a sudden appear to be just “things”, things that no longer mean very much to you.

You can find yourself worried and anxious as the old wounds in your self-image begin to feel very sore again. As a kind of panic sets in, you might find your connections to people in your family and work lives feel strained. You begin to question everything that seems to have a hold on your time and energy. And you can feel a strong appetite for freedom.

Midlife is a time when the old images that you had relied upon for self definition no longer seem to work well. But, as yet, there are no new images on the scene that could provide you with a clear sense of identity. As a consequence, your experience of yourself, of the “I” or “me” that you tend to identify with, can become uneasy and indefinite.

If you fail to understand this territory, you might become rigid and inflexible in an attempt to hold on tightly to what was. This can result in a narrowing and constricting of your life as you forfeit the opportunity to claim options for growth that are possible at midlife’s crossroads.

Beware Your Surface Identity

Your surface identity will try to find and cling to some sense of certainty that could keep it secure and safe. You could say that when your first half of life identity travels in the second half of life, it likes to have an itinerary clearly and precisely mapped out. It does not like surprises. It even avoids the scenic routes so that it can stay on the main road where everything feels familiar and predictable.

Midlife can be a time when your old maps for life no longer fit the territory that you find yourself in.

As the great writer Dante put it in his Inferno,

“Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”

Midlife Triggers

Circumstances that can make you intensely aware of midlife turmoil are both internal and external. The external ones include such realities as the physical evidence of your aging, the death of a parent, your children leaving the nest, and the closer view of your own death on the visible horizon.

These situations are depressing, but this kind of depression is in the service of midlife change because it destroys obsolete values. In the same way that changes in sunlight trigger the growth of plant life in the spring, these tough and painful situations are also triggers. In fact, they trigger the awakening of the deeper you, the “you” that should naturally move onto the stage at the second half of your life. See it for what it is.

Your Bottom Line and MESICS Training

The bottom line is that in the second half of life you need to live from who you deeply are and what you truly want and love. If you don’t, then stress will follow you around like a heat seeking missile with your name on it. The kind of nagging stress that you feel when you’re driving along and you realize you made a wrong turn and you’re heading in the wrong direction, but you don’t know how to get back.

MESICS Training includes training in the art and science of going through midlife well and wisely. For now, just know that the turmoil you feel represents life working on you rather than evidence that you are defective or lacking in some way. Don’t give yourself a hard time. If you can learn how to loosen up any inflexible ideas of who you “should” be, you might then become sensitive to a kind of internal guidance. Midlife change actually comes with a good manual, if we know where to find it and how to read the language it’s written in.

If you want a reliable midlife map and expert help and support on how to make midlife and the second half of your life something really special–then contact me now at DrManganiello@comcast.net

How about you? Do any of the following describe you in menopause?

• You are having trouble with hot flashes, insomnia, weight gain, anxiety, depression or other problems-but you don’t want to take risky medications

• You are feeling a lot of stress and anxiety-but you don’t know what to do about it

• Your family or friends tell you that you’re more moody and grumpy than you used to be

• You are having problems with sex

• You’re feeling bummed out and your life feel all downhill from here

• You just don’t feel well a lot of the time

You Are Not Alone

If one or more of these statements describes you, you’re not alone. Millions of women suffer problems with menopause and midlife-unnecessarily. Yes that’s right, unnecessarily. Here’s why.

Most women are badly misinformed. And so they don’t know what menopause and midlife really are and what they can do about them. But fortunately all that is beginning to change.

Would you like to know about these changes? They are already making a big difference in how some women go through menopause and in how they live the second half of their life.

Are You Stuck in the “Old Menopause Mindset?”

If you’re like most women, you operate out of an “Old Menopause Mindset”, an outlook that views menopause as a medical condition that comes with “aging and decline”. This Old Mindset rests on misinformation and wrongheaded ideas.

Most women develop an Old Menopause Mindset because of what they are told by

• physicians,
• by men who head drug companies,
• by their mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts,
• by the media, and
• by their society and culture.

Unfortunately, the information that you have been told, that your mother was told and that your grandmother was told—is simply incorrect. Nevertheless, these incorrect ideas still define what many women believe and expect, and so what they experience. Our beliefs and expectations often define our reality.

Consider this: In primitive cultures, if a witch doctor puts a curse on someone by telling them: “You will die in 48 hours”, there’s a very good chance the cursed person will die within 48 hours.

Why did she die?

Because her “mind was set” on the witch doctor being all powerful and his curse being deadly. Her beliefs and expectations killed her.

What’s Behind the Old Menopause Mindset?

Many things are behind the Old Menopause Mindset, including money and power. John R. Lee, M.D, now deceased, was an international authority on menopause and women’s health. He put it this way:

“Menopause as a disease has been largely fabricated by physicians and the pharmaceutical industry.”

Over a decade ago, Dr. Lee published his views that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was dangerous. He saw it as a serious health threat to women’s health. Dr. Lee’s ideas were not taken seriously at first, and, unfortunately, his views proved to be correct.

A National Institute of Health’s Women’s Health Initiative Study confirmed Dr. Lee’s and a few other doctor’s worst fears. The study’s results were shocking. They showed that women on hormone replacement therapy for menopause were at increased risk for heart disease, cancer and stroke.

“Voodoo Menopause”

Since so many women have now stopped hormone replacement therapy, breast cancer rates have dropped remarkably. For years, millions of women were led to believe that menopause was a medical condition requiring “medication”. This is a kind of Voodoo Menopause that affected both doctors and women. Keep in mind that most medical physicians get their information from drug company reps, not from independent research. And that drug companies spend upwards of $15 billion a year marketing to physicians.

Sound scary? Well it is. Medications can be a godsend when properly prescribed by well-informed medical professionals. But when the bean counters in drug companies view women as customers, then women are intentionally misled for profit.

And the problem is not limited to hormone replacement drugs. Tranquilizers and risky antidepressant medications are routinely prescribed for menopause problems too.

Consider this: Not long ago medical physicians regarded a woman’s hot flashes as a sign that she was emotionally unstable. That’s ridiculous. Do you think you have hot flashes because there is something wrong with you? Let’s hope you don’t. If you do, that’s the Old Menopause Mindset shovel hitting you in the head.

I will tell you what hot flashes actually are. And I will tell you how you can decrease the number of hot flashes you have and possibly eliminate them all together.

But for now, back to the “Old Menopause Mindset” that you probably have downloaded, the one the pharmaceutical companies want you to adopt.

Old Menopause Mindset Ideas

Here’s some Old Mindset ideas you need to watch out for. These ideas are false.

• False: Menopause is a medical condition that requires medication or “hormone therapy”

Women have suffered and died as a result of this now discredited idea. You can control your hot flashes, insomnia, depression, weight gain, moodiness etc, without risky drugs

• False: Hot flashes, insomnia, depression, weight gain, moodiness etc, are a natural part of menopause

• False: Life is all downhill after menopause and midlife

• False: Midlife is a bridge into decline and old age

Note: Aware women become elders—not elderly, and midlife is a bridge to a deeper life, a life that can be well-lived, loved and understood

• False: Old age is a wasteland of wrinkles, illness and irrelevancy

So if a women believes all these false Old Menopause ideas, what do you think her menopause, midlife and second half of life will be like?

Again, take a moment and ask yourself: What is your mindset about menopause?

The New Menopause Mindset

The good news is that the “New Menopause Mindset” shows us how to safely prevent and remedy menopause troubles. But there’s a problem.

Because although the “the Old Menopause Mindset” is dead wrong—it’s deeply ingrained in the minds of most women. And special interests who profit from the Old Mindset would like to keep it that way.

But why should your menopause be difficult and even dangerous—when it doesn’t have to be. Not if you have a New Menopause Mindset. Here’s some of what the New Menopause Mindset truths are all about.

• True: You don’t need to risk your heart and well-being to reduce or eliminate menopause problems such as hot flashes

• True: Many Far Eastern women have no hot flashes, no depression, no insomnia, no weight gain, no etc.

Because they are not caught in what we call the Menopause Vicious Cycle™, (MVC) a vicious cycle of hormone imbalance triggered and maintained by stress.

• True: The Menopause Vicious Cycle not only makes you feel miserable with menopause problems but it also puts your heart at risk. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women.

• True: You can learn how to avoid getting caught in the Menopause Vicious Cycle and you can learn how to stop it

• True: Midlife is a profound stage of your life

Midlife brings forth your deepest possibilities, and you can learn to recognize, honor and realize them.

• True: It’s not that you have grown too old to have children, rather, it’s that you’ve entered a stage of life where you’ve grown beyond having children

• True: The second half of your life is meant to be the best

So Why Should You Stay Stuck in False and Dangerous Views About Menopause and Midlife?

Consider this: You can learn safe and powerful ways to

• get relief from your menopause problems, including hot flashes, depression, low energy and mood changes
• create and maintain hormone balance
• avoid and stop the Menopause Vicious Cycle
• protect your heart and dodge the heart disease bullet
• write a great screenplay for the second half of your life and live it with gusto

And you can separate yourself from the women who are misled by lies, misinformation and by the wrongheaded views of a culture obsessed with youth and the things keep women stuck at the surface of life.

Women are growing weary of a culture that is blind to many of the things that really makes life worth living for a woman, including the wisdom and well-being that only come to her with age.

Age is something to be honored, not disrespected. That’s why the ancient Roman’s called anyone under 50 “junior”. The second half of your life is not only NOT downhill-but it is actually wired in to be the deeper, better and more enjoyable half of your life.

Do these ideas sound a chord in you? Are you interested in learning more about the New Menopause Mindset so you can go through menopause safely and move into the second half of your life as an adventure?

If yes, then keep a look out for my new book. It will be ready soon and really open things up for you. It’s called “The New Menopause Mindset: How to Avoid the Mistakes Most Women Make”.

Listen, well informed women go through menopause a whole lot better than misinformed women. I want you to be among them. Because then you will live a longer and more fulfilling life.

If you’d like information sooner, write me at wandastevens@comcast.net