A clinician-researcher explains how hormonal shifts during perimenopause trigger anxiety and overwhelm by activating the amygdala. She offers two tools: compassion to rewire your brain toward the prefrontal cortex, and a simple trick of lifting your eyes upward to calm the threat response right away.
Let's talk about this neuroplasticity a little bit more because I get so many women coming to me saying, I'm, I'm just so anxious. I just can't get rid of it. And it's getting worse now that I'm in perimenopause or menopause. Yeah. Or I have it now for the first time and I just feel out of control. I feel overwhelmed. I'm waking up during the night. Like, how do you even start to tackle that issue?
I mean, oh, I can approach this from a professional lens and give you some professional answers. Or from a personal lens and go, oh my gosh, me too. This is really an interesting season of life. For me, I'm in my early 40s and this is kind of my— I feel almost like I'm back in those teenage years of unpredictability, hormones everywhere. I guess I want to approach it from a personal point of view and say, oh gosh, I really get it. And also, even though I know a lot of the stuff, I mean, I know the stuff, I study it every day, I read about it, I research it every day, I still sometimes I sometimes find it very, very hard to implement in my everyday ordinary life because I am, um, raging with hormones or my estrogen is dropping. Um, so the first thing I would say is compassion. Compassion is incredibly powerful tool. Compassion also helps rewire your brain. Passion can get you out of the threat center of your brain, which we can often inhabit a lot when we're managing hormones. We're in fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. All of those threat responses feel very strong. Compassion can help kind of soothe the threat center of the brain, the amygdala, and get you in the prefrontal cortex, which is where you make grounded, good, logical decisions. I don't know about you, but I often feel like in this— talking about perimenopause, it attacks me at the level of perspective. Yeah. I think everything is awful. I am awful. Everyone around me is awful. And I just want to run away. Whereas if I can extend a narrative of compassion, Um, it helps me get grounded in that prefrontal cortex. In the short term, the one that really blows my mind is if you're— this is a short-term solution, but if you're finding yourself in a moment of anxiety, just lifting up your eyes and looking upwards helps switch off some of the activity of the amygdala and the sympathetic nervous system, which is where anxiety kind of lives.
