The Real Cause of Perimenopause Fatigue & Pain

So you asked about our research and so I'm very excited actually to share very briefly our hypothesis, because then if I explain the hypothesis, it will then help us understand the research. So in terms of hypothesis, what do we think causes a lot of these conditions? Well, you mentioned actually trauma and anxiety and stress. So we believe that as a predisposing factor to a lot of these types of conditions, and also what can make perimenopause worse is this idea that our system is designed to survive. So the number one priority of our brain, our nervous system, our immune system, is survival. So let's take that as a first principle, because I believe that there's a logical reason for all of these illnesses and also actually perimenopause and why that can get worse with some of these backgrounds. So let's say that number one principle, evolutionary biology. We're here to survive, to procreate, pass on our genes, the next generation. Yeah. And we have developed the adaptations of all the different animals and plant life. So many people don't realize this, but actually plants, single celled organisms, invertebrates, vertebrates, mammals, human beings, our DNA contains the lineage of all the adaptations to survive and thrive and procreate. So I love this statistic. We contain 40% of the same DNA as a banana. Isn't that incredible? So what that means is we are survival machines. But actually if we look at how we're living now, we're not living according to our genetic inheritance. So for millions, well, I say hundreds of thousands of years, human beings were living in small groups, in small tribes, fresh air, out in the sunlight, moving a lot, eating, you know, organic foods essentially. And the only thing they didn't have was health care. But apart from that, they were leading lives much more according to their DNA. Fast forward to today. We now live inside boxes, don't have exposure to light as much as we need, or sunlight. We're stressed, we're sedentary, sitting down, staring at screens, comparing ourselves to everyone else on the planet through social media that.

Is our existence, and then getting triggered by it. Because the algorithm is designed to trigger the crap out of you, to just make all of that worse.

Exactly. So to basically make you feel insecure or angry, that's pretty much to the kind of most toxic aspects of social media. And so you can see that that then means that of course more of these illnesses are going to come because the system now thinks it's under threat more often than it needs to be. But what's interesting is what causes or what turns a acute Illness into a chronic illness. And that's what's really fascinating. So what turns Covid into long Covid? What turns pain, short term pain into fibromyalgia? What turns mold exposure into mold illness? What turns fear or worry into anxiety? And we believe that there's a rational hypothesis in the brain that might be causing this. So we believe that there's a predisposition in terms of trauma. So if someone's been through trauma in their background, they're more likely for some of these conditioning effects to occur in the brain. Now that can be a predisposing factor. And then also there might be genetic effects. And these things come together combined with then a trigger. So that can be a virus, a bacteria, mold, exposure, pain, etc. And these things come together and normally our immune nervous system kicks in, deals with the threat, then comes back to baseline. But in these illnesses, what tends to happen is we have that acute phase of illness, but then something chronic seems to occur where then the nervous and immune system seem to over respond continually even though the threat has passed. So in long Covid, I'm sure everyone knows someone who's got long Covid. The COVID is gone, but the body is still responding as if Covid is still present. And to kind of bring this analogy alive, or rather bring this quite complex neurology alive, I'd like to share what we call the Game of Thrones hypothesis. But then we had to change it to the fairy tale hypothesis because a lot of our anxiety patients didn't like the word Game of Thrones. They thought it was too violent as a, as a, as a drama. So they wanted us to change it. So we call it the fairy tale analogy. Now, so imagine you are Queen Betty of your kingdom. So you are the prefrontal cortex, the master controller. And you have a kingdom which is your body. Yeah. And to defend your kingdom, you have an army and a navy. The army is your nervous system, the information flows. And your navy is your immune system, which we all know about. And the system responds to threats, any invading army threatening your kingdom. But now imagine there's a drought in the kingdom, so because of the drought, the kingdom is weaker, there's less resources, and the army and navy are weaker. So that becomes the predisposition. And Betty, I don't know if you notice this in clinical practice, but when someone does get some kind of chronic illness, it often there's tends to be chronic stress in the one or two years in run up to getting the condition. And you see this in cancer, you See this, in heart disease you see this inflammatory conditions that one or two years beforehand there tends to be kind of an intensive chronic stress period. So that's the equivalent of the drought in your, in your kingdom, this stress in the kingdom. But now imagine an invader comes over the hill. Now that invader could be a virus, a bacteria, mold, toxin, pain, something that invades the body, as it were. And imagine, let's say it's Covid because we all, you know, that's a common one. So Covid comes over the hill, it invades your kingdom and your army and navy fight it off. And they think, come on, we're going to fight off this invading army. They manage to fight it off, but they become traumatized by the experience of war. So they think, I don't know, if we fought off the virus, maybe it's still here, maybe the virus is hanging out behind the hill or in the tissues or over here or over here. So the system thinks, let's keep firing off our weapons of war, our weapon, our arrows, our cannonballs, etc. And so the army and navy keep fighting even though the war is over and some of those arrows and cannonballs start landing back in the kingdom. So that's when we get the inflammatory effects in the body where our own system is over responding, causing widespread brain inflammation, body inflammation, the blood vessels, everything is getting inflamed, the heart's getting inflamed, which weakens the kingdom even more. And of course, the more and more that the army and navy think the kingdom's getting weaker, the more and more they keep firing off more and more weapons, which causes those almost autoimmune type effects. And autoimmune conditions may also follow this hypothesis till eventually the whole system is weaker and weaker and weaker. And the weaker it gets, the more the army and navy fire off their weapons of war. And so when we say weapons of war, they're triggering the immune system and nervous system. So that is causing emotional symptoms of stress, anxiety, panic. It's causing the immune symptoms of basically exhaustion, fatigue, foggy head, swollen glands, fluid type feelings. Then the physical symptoms of pain, joint pain, post exertional malaise, and then the mental symptoms of difficulty thinking and concentrating, memory problems. This is all that the immune and nervous system is over responding. And then opportunistic infections start flourishing in the system, detoxification systems start shutting down. So we get retoxification of the system and most importantly the guts. The gut becomes dysregulated, so it becomes tight and it becomes this dysbiosis so there's not a good balance of good and bad bacteria. So the whole system is now feels very different to homeostasis. And what is brain retraining? Brain retraining is in their next meeting with you, Queen Betty, the army and navy generals will come to their meeting and they'll say, queen Betty, the kingdom's under threat. We need all the resources. We need all the corn and the wheat and the water and everything. And you say to them, my dear generals, you have done a wonderful job in defending the kingdom, but the war is over. You can stand down now. They won't believe you the first time or the second time or the third time. That's where neuroplasticity and brain retraining comes in, which is the power of repetition, creating new neural pathways. So through repetition, you have to keep telling your army and navy generals that we are safe, we're not in war zone anymore. The war is over. And through that repetition, eventually the army and navy generals get the point and they finally start standing down. And how this. And, and just to finish off how this relates to perimenopause, in our view, our hypothesis, perimenopause is like the idea of a drought suddenly infecting the kingdom in the sense that it becomes a risk factor, because obviously perimenopause there and menopause itself is massive kind of hormone fluctuations. What that does is that sensitizes the nervous system, because now the nervous system's not sure whether it can be safe because there are these. These new fluctuations which have been introduced, these new weaknesses potentially. And so the army and Navy are once again trigger happy. They're far more likely to fire off weapons of war at the slightest provocation because they believe that we are in an unsafe environment, because the. There's a drought in the kingdom, as it were, and that's what can then cause an overstimulation of the nervous and immune systems in perimenopause as that risk factor. So brain retraining could potentially work in tandem with obviously, all the medications and supplements to support people in going through that phase of life, training the brain to not be so sensitive to the environment and those fluctuations.