The symptoms of menopause can come on fast and as unapologetic as an uninvited house guest. It can be even more alarming if you weren’t warned you’d be replaced by a hot, hungry, hormonal, and chaotic stranger. It might not feel like much, but you are not alone in your journey of navigating these scary menopause symptoms, especially when you don’t know what’s happening.
When you want to keep menopausal madness at bay, here are 10 things that all menopausal women know too well. And if you have yet to experience menopause due to your age, here’s what happens during menopause that’s better to know before it happens.
Here are menopause symptoms that feel genuinely scary when you don’t know what’s happening:
1. You’re always hangry
You go out to sushi with a large group of extended family members. Everyone else is done eating, and your order still hasn’t arrived. You go into hunger-related psychosis and, like the whipped-up Cavalry coming round the bend at the Battle of Gettysburg, you unearth your waitress in a bus station and demand to have your halibut sashimi.
She makes the mistake of arguing with you, a ravenous, perimenopausal woman, saying it’s not her fault because the sushi bar is backed up. After which, you rail at the pretty, petite manager who smiles the entire time you’re yelling because she thinks you ordered a “tuna roll” when you said, “heads should roll.” And then there’s a moment where you sort of step out of your body and look down at yourself yelling, and you kind of casually think, “Wow. I’m crazy.”
Then you return to your body and the table, whereupon your siblings, nieces, and nephews treat you like you’re strapped to a self-detonating bomb. Quickly, your mood swings in the opposite direction. You’re overtaken by remorse and leave the waitress a 25 percent tip, even though the kitchen ran out of your halibut sashimi and you had to eat your sister’s soggy seaweed salad.
2. Your moods are completely unpredictable
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You’re offended the next morning when your husband and daughters tiptoe around you as if you were a vat of nitroglycerin. The flip between moods like rage and tenderness is just a sign that your perimenopause is progressing as it should.
“(In menopause,) this never-ending cycle of demands on women’s time can create emotional and sensory overwhelm that feels like hyper-vigilance that never ends. We get very busy with being busy, and intuitively, I think people know it’s not very good for us, and can result in a poor mood and poorer health as we spiral emotionally and drag our physical health down with us,” Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, an obstetrician-gynecologist, explained.
3. You experience hot tsunami waves of hot flashes
You’re picking up a latte at your favorite coffee shop when suddenly your entire body is awash in a hot tsunami. It starts behind your knees, sweeps mercilessly up to your groin, floods your armpits, and rolls into shore at your hair follicles.
You ask the manager if you can, just briefly, step into her freezer locker, and she lets you, probably because she heard about you from the manager at the sushi restaurant and thinks you might be unhinged. While you’re in the freezer locker, you eat a wheel of gruyere.
Life coach Donna Begg explained that “About 75 to 80 percent of women experience vasomotor symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, and migraines during menopause, though the severity varies. The good news is that a large number of women find ways to manage them without hormone replacement therapy. These include improved energy and metabolism, healthier joints and bones, decreased stress, and better sleep.”
4. Everything makes you hungry
Standing up makes you hungry. Looking out the window makes you hungry. Sleeping makes you hungry. Breathing makes you hungry. Your mail carrier thinks you’re pregnant, which both flatters (because she thinks you’re young enough to get knocked up) and appalls (for obvious reasons).
5. You cry at the silliest things
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After everyone’s in bed, you watch the Friends episode where Phoebe Buffay thinks a stray cat is the reincarnation of her dead mother. Which makes you think about what would happen if you died and your children looked for your reincarnated soul in stray cats or feral possums and how that would ruin their lives and they’d end up living in the gutter with grocery carts full of stolen cat food, which makes you cry ceaselessly, but you can’t help thinking, as you’re crying, that this loss of fluids might waylay more hot flashes?
6. TV shows don’t entertain you like they used to
The following morning, you see local billboards for the horror film The Strain. Where a worm is coming out of a woman’s eyeball, which makes you feel that, as a society, we’re basically doomed if this is the kind of stuff we call entertainment.
7. Your body goes through electric-like shocks throughout the day
That afternoon, while cleaning the house, you feel like your body is full of electric shocks and you’re the kite Benjamin Franklin used to discover electricity. You think you could plug the vacuum cleaner into your mouth and vacuum the whole house.
You don’t want your son to touch you in case your electric shocks collide with your watery hot flashes, and you inadvertently electrocute him. And he already doesn’t have a lot of hair. And he isn’t yet in need of an implanted defibrillator for his estrogen-weakened heart.
8. You feel like your body is out to get you
That night, your body and hormones become passive-aggressive. One minute she’s hot and bothered, the next she’s as frigid as Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface.
9. You become emotional at the thought of losing your husband
Once your kids are asleep and you have insomniayou’re overtaken by a stingingly desperate love for your husband. Because at 53, he’s already beginning to die more quickly than you. You can’t stop hugging and kissing him. You can’t help smothering his feet with your feet.
Then, just as quickly, his irregular sleep breathing pattern annoys you, and you ask him to roll over. You’re unbearable. He pelts out of bed and dashes out (as quickly as a dying old man can) to get an emergency supply of your meds from the 24-hour pharmacy.
Shannon Colleary is an actor, author of five books, and writer of the movie “To The Stars.” Her blog, The Woman Formerly Known As Beautifulfocuses on relationship and lifestyle topics.
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