The Menopause Stores

View Original

Anxiety as a Menopause Symptom – Let’s get to the bottom of it.

Here is the Psychiatry Version of Anxiety:

“A nervous disorder characterized by a state of excessive uneasiness and apprehension, typically with compulsive behavior or panic attacks.”

I was diagnosed at age 13 with “anxiety”, by male doctors in the early 80’s. I am now 54 and have dealt with “anxiety” for more than 30 years.

Anxiety and panic attacks are essentially the same thing. That is your body reacts in the same way. If I have a true anxiety attack or panic attack, the first thing that happens is my blood pressure goes up. As I have read through multiple articles, the correlation between anxiety and high blood pressure is beyond similar.

Hormonal spikes are also said to cause high blood pressure. Which can make your heart race. Which can make you feel “anxious”. I think we may have a few of those during menopause.

Hmmmmm.

You mean it is possibly a hormonal imbalance that doctors claim is high blood pressure, which doctors claim is an anxiety attack, is just a normal happening in my body?

Doctors cannot track a hormone imbalance, there is no device you can wear daily like a heart monitor. Seriously, there is NO test for this, and we have been suffering for thousands of years.

Men lose one erection and boom, a blue pill.

Many men, back in the day used to call us hysterical and lock us up like property due to these “attacks”. They were ALLOWED to do this. They still do. How many women are still shamed to think they have a “mental disorder” when they do not?

It was and is a form of control over the female body. Essentially, they want us to feel crazy so they can call us things like “emotional” and said we were “overreacting”. Sound familiar at all?

I want to debunk the generalization of Anxiety. It is an overused word for the mysteries of the body we know nothing about, even in the 21st century.

My friend Michael had REAL anxiety. Couldn’t leave the house, scared of the world. THAT is anxiety. What women have is hormonal spikes that NO ONE can track or monitor yet we have been assigned the class of “anxiety”.

Doctors are lagging on female research, and they don’t want us to know what is going on so they can still have that modicum of control over us and our bodies.

Anxiety, en masse, is a man-made disease and we can regain our control over this by more understanding of our own bodies and not relying on others to tell us “How we feel”.

By the way, my “anxiety” was diagnosed as a medical condition when I was 39 after 6 trips to the emergency room, in 6 months, with a heart rate of 200 beats a minute. It had progressed as I aged, that’s how it was finally caught.

Supraventricular tachycardia for which there was a surgery to fix it. Surgery. My “anxiety” was fixed by a surgery because it was a heart condition. Again, I go hmmmm. Yet the doctors gave me a diagnosis of “anxiety”.

Listen Ladies, question everything ok?

In no way am I saying anxiety is not real but I spent years thinking I was mental when I wasn’t. YOU do NOT have to spend your life this way.