There comes a point in almost every woman’s life when the conversation changes. Friends begin talking about hot flushes, interrupted sleep, mood swings and hormones. Men, although generally quieter about it, start noticing they don’t recover as quickly, their energy isn’t what it once was, and their enthusiasm for life seems to have dulled.
The conversation almost always ends up in the same place. “It’s my hormones.”
But is it? I think hormones are getting far more blame than they deserve.
In 2010, we invited the late Dr Sherrill Sellman, ND, to Waiheke Island to speak with our practice members. She was one of the pioneers in natural hormone education and challenged women and men to think differently about menopause and andropause. Rather than viewing these life stages as the beginning of decline, she, like us, saw them as transitions. More importantly, she believed menopause revealed something much bigger than changing hormone levels.
That idea has stayed with us ever since.
We can draw a fascinating analogy between menopause/andropause and puberty.
When children move through pubescence, generally between the ages of seven and fourteen, it can take four to seven years to complete, and at the end we expect children to have changed. Their bodies reorganise themselves: emotions change, hot flushes begin, testosterone surges, mood swings become evident, fat deposits (cell stacking) increase, and menstruation and ejaculation begin. Their bodies grow taller, stronger and more capable. In many ways, this transition is like a death, a changing of the guard, on the inside. Some children even express feeling like they are dying, and part of them is, as one stage of life gives way to another. When children are young, we look at their growth in awe, helped along by the surge in hormones. And yet, when we age and transition to menopause and andropause, we tend to blame our hormones for the transition as if something is wrong.
But is it not the reversal of what took place when we were transitioning into puberty? The cycle unravels itself, and the signs and symptoms that appeared in childhood appear again in adulthood, a process that interestingly can take four to seven years to move through. And in some instances, the signs are reversed – penis erect to erectile dysfunction, vaginal moisture to vaginal dryness, wanting to explore sex to not interested in sex, acne to no acne, increase in strength to a decrease in strength and the yin and yang goes on. And then we have signals like anxiety, panic attacks, restless sleeps, feeling like a part of us is dying and so forth surfacing once again.
Isn’t menopause and andropause simply another remarkable stage of transition and adaptation? If puberty represented the body’s journey into reproductive life, then menopause and andropause represent its journey out of reproductive life, into the next chapter; the chapter of pausing.
Why do we celebrate one adaptation yet fear the other? Perhaps the different question is this: What did I notice going through puberty? What were the whispers my body gave me that alerted me to the change? How did I feel? How did my body change? How did my emotions change?
And now… am I simply witnessing the body reorganising itself once again?
Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with my hormones?” perhaps we could be asking, “What has my body been adapting to for the last forty or fifty years?”
There is a significant difference between those two questions. The first assumes something has gone wrong. The second recognises that the body has been adapting every day of our lives, and perhaps now it’s asking us to pay attention. Yet somehow, over the years, we’ve created illusions and attached meanings that aren’t actually there. We hear menopause and andropause and think ageing, decline, loss of femininity or masculinity, strength decline, mood changes and endless hot flushes.
But the word menopause simply means the cessation of monthly cycles. That’s all. Everything else is a story – our perceptions, health decline, loss of femininity, ageing, weakness and so forth. Likewise, andropause has become a convenient description for changes experienced by men later in life and literally translates to cessation of man. Yet, unlike women, men generally don’t experience an abrupt hormonal shift. Testosterone gradually changes from about thirty years of age, and yet many men remain energetic, strong and purposeful well into their seventies and beyond.
Which raises another interesting question.
If menopause or andropause alone determined how we felt, why do two people of exactly the same age have completely different experiences? Why does one woman barely notice menopause while another finds it overwhelming? Why does one man continue climbing mountains while another feels exhausted walking around the block?
Hormones are certainly involved. But perhaps they aren’t the whole story.
Hormones are communication molecules. They carry messages from one part of the body to another, influencing sleep, mood, metabolism, bone health, muscle, reproduction and countless other processes. But they don’t work independently. Poor sleep, chronic stress, nutrition, movement, relationships and even our perception of life continually influence hormonal communication.
Hormones are constantly responding to information.
Which naturally leads to another question.
Who is coordinating all of this communication? The answer is the nervous system.
Every thought you have, every heartbeat, every breath, every cell, every tissue, every organ, every hormone and every gland rely upon the nervous system to coordinate what is happening. It is the body’s master communication network.
This is one of the reasons chiropractic has always placed such importance on the relationship between the spine, the nervous system and health. Chiropractic isn’t about changing hormone levels. It is about supporting the body’s most important communication system so every cell, tissue, organ and gland has the greatest opportunity to function as it was designed.
Think about the complexity of what happens during early pregnancy.
Before a woman even knows she is pregnant, an extraordinary conversation has already begun. The tiny embryo communicates with the mother’s body through chemical signals, encouraging the corpus luteum to continue producing progesterone while the placenta develops. Later, the placenta gradually assumes that role itself.
It is an intricate conversation taking place every nanosecond between cells that most of us never even think about. The body has always been communicating.
Menopause and andropause are no different. It isn’t simply that estrogen, progesterone and testosterone change. It is that the body is reorganising itself for the next stage of life… it’s transitioning.
The question becomes: How adaptable is my system to the transition?
Every stage of life requires adaptation: pregnancy, birth, parenthood, learning to walk, puberty, menopause, andropause and ageing. The body has never stopped adapting. The only question is whether we are creating an environment that supports that adaptation or continually asking the body to compensate because we have not been listening to the feedback it has been giving.
Dr Sellman often spoke about the modern world placing enormous demands on women and men. Chronic stress, disrupted sleep, nutrient depletion, environmental chemicals, processed foods and the relentless expectation to do everything for everyone have become normal. None of these directly create the whispers of menopause or andropause. But they all increase the workload placed upon the body’s nerve system and, hence, one’s ability to adapt to the change.
By the time menopause or andropause arrives, many have spent decades asking their bodies to do more while giving themselves less. Less sleep, movement, sunshine, nourishment and recovery. And more rushing, stress and expectations.
Perhaps this transition time simply reveals what has been there all along.
At Vital Wellbeing, we often talk about the 3Ts: thoughts, trauma and toxins. Every day the body is adapting to emotional stress, physical stress and chemical stress. Remarkably, it keeps going. It repairs damaged tissue, replaces billions of cells, balances blood sugar, regulates temperature, digests food, produces hormones and coordinates approximately thirty-seven trillion cells without asking for our permission.
That is nothing short of extraordinary.
Maybe we have underestimated just how intelligent the human body really is. The power that made the body heals the body. That power didn’t disappear when puberty finished. It didn’t disappear during pregnancy. It doesn’t disappear during menopause and andropause. And it certainly doesn’t disappear as we age.
Our role isn’t to replace the intelligence of the body. Our role is to create an environment where that intelligence can continue expressing itself. Instead of viewing menopause and andropause as the beginning of decline, perhaps we should see them as invitations.
An invitation to pause… to sleep more deeply, to build strength rather than simply lose weight, to nourish the body with real food, to reconnect with purpose, to reduce unnecessary stress, and to care for the nervous system that coordinates every function within us.
The goal isn’t to become thirty years old again. The goal is to express the greatest level of health possible at fifty, sixty, seventy and beyond.
Health has never been about one hormone or one organ. But it has always been about neurological communication and adaptation. Perhaps the real conversation we should be having about menopause and andropause is not, “How do I stop getting older?” or even, “How do I stop the symptoms?” But rather, “How do I support the incredible body that has carried me this far, so it can continue doing what it has always done, which is adapt, grow and express the very best of itself?”
Additional Listening:
Listen to Drs Sarah & Randall share their insights on menopause and andropause here
Additional Reading:
- The Vital Truth by Dr Sarah Farrant, DC
- The Health Illusion by Dr Sarah Farrant, DC
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