Hot flushes, night sweats and mood swings are some of more common perimenopausal (pre menopause) symptoms experienced by Singapore women. Hot flushes in particular can come on like a freight train in the middle of the night, jolting you bolt upright, making you feel like you’re in the throes of a serious fever, jacking up cortisol levels and of course it can be a real struggle to get back to sleep again. The root cause of severe perimenopausal symptoms are unbalanced hormones and the root cause of those are physical, mental and emotional lifestyle factors.
Now we spend a lot of time in our hormone workshops and with our clients unpacking the elements of sleep, nutrition, emotions, movement and environmental toxicity that are the key contributors to unbalanced hormones that lead to the uncomfortable symptoms of perimenopause. And whilst these are absolutely necessary sometimes we want to find relief as quickly as possible so we can get a good night’s sleep. As we were researching this topic we came across a great paper1 that summarises the efficacy from a scientific standpoint of all the complimentary and alternative treatments. We’ve put them in this table below along with our comments.
Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Menopause
How to read the table? Simple. What we compared here is purely the reduction in hot flushes and nothing else. So if you have 10 hot flushes a week and you see a 50% reduction that means you're only having 5 hot flushes a week. A 100% reduction would be zero hot flushes a week. We tried to include %s where we could but it wasn’t always possible due to the way the data was displayed.
Conclusion
So what to do with all this information? If you're unsure then we would recommend doing all of these things:
- learn how to do big diaphragmatic paced abdominal breathing. Make this a daily practice and introduce ad-hoc as soon as the symptoms come on (52% reduction in hot flushes)
- take a reputable herb cocktail, make sure all herbs are organic wild grown and then there's no downside (73% reduction in hot flushes)
- diffuse organic wild grown lavender essential oil in the evening to aid sleep (50% reduction in hot flushes)
- work with a reputable hypnotherapist or other emotional coach who can find and weed out unhelpful negative emotions from childhood
And then of course focusing on getting a great night's sleep (to rebuild optimal hormone balance), great nutrition (especially good quality fat - the building blocks of all hormones), exercise (to help the liver remove excess hormones from circulation) and detoxifying the accumulation of environmental toxins.
To your health, happiness and longevity,
The Levitise Team
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[1] Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Menopause, 2019. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6419242/
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