How many women reach menopause each day?

As a sensual researcher I often search out simple ways to answer questions about menopause that I can easily pass on to others. Recently I was wondering - What is the rate of growth for women in menopause in our population? How many women reach menopause in the United States each day? How about in the world? Yup, that's my tech-geek side coming out again chewing on numbers for fun. Basically I wanted to know how many of us are there? I ran across this infographic that put a few things in perspective.


[Infographic Source]

Ask Me Anything

Recently I was a talk radio guest of Rebekah Beneteau, creator and host of Ask Me Anything Love and Sex Show. Rebekah describes herself as a former stand-up comic turned healer and coach. Her signature style draws on straight talk, humor and radical acceptance.  No topic is taboo.

When Rebekah initially made the invitation she let me know she had an avid interest in pleasurable menopause. As we became acquainted before the show, I knew we'd have a lot to talk about. In fact we talked for nearly an hour non-stop on the show and I thoroughly enjoyed it! Below are some snippets of our dialogue.

Listen to the first half hour of the conversation with this built in audio player here ---> 
Download/Play the mp3

This photo was snapped while live on the air with Rebekah and I hope you can tell I'm enthusiastic. Have a question you'd like to see addressed on Menopause Flashes? Feel free to ask in the comments. This post after all is titled Ask Me Anything, so go for it. 

---

Why I can talk with such confidence, it’s not an intellectual thing. I feel it in my body. I have to say, I know sometimes people think "Oh Yvonne, you’re from California and you're so San Francisco. You know -- it's not the same for people across the US. You're in this unique special situation."

But you know what? I'm a really down to earth, practical person. I mean I have a computer science degree. I'm not really into those kinds of mmm-- I don’t know what to call them exactly. Although I'm talking about orgasm and a definition of orgasm, I'm talking about something that I feel, that I experience. It's a reality, not just a play on words.

It can keep getting better and better. Why I say this, about me being a practical person, is because I just know there are women and men out there that think they can brush it off because I'm this San Francisco sexual person or something. But it's not true. That part doesn't matter so much, except to say that I'm really like every woman.

Every day I go through the same types of resistance that women have to having pleasure. I face those kinds of everyday decisions, those everyday choices that every woman goes through and every man goes through in order to have a good relationship. In order to have a good sex life. In order to have something that you can sustain over years and years.

When I tell the truth about what I'm feeling and just say it straight out -- Oh this is how I’m feeling today, I can enjoy the communication and the intimacy that comes with that.

It is the same in everyday in life, not just in menopause. Every day your moods are changing. Every day how you are experiencing your life changes moment by moment. So in that communication with my friend, when I'm telling him and letting him know what's happening, that creates movement. It also moves the energy through my body. It moves the energy through my life and it opens up more possibilities for more pleasure and more enjoyment.

Note: excerpts were edited for readability. The full transcript with the audio can be found at Fun, More Pleasure and Menopause: A Paradox?

Three Things My Celebrity Crush Taught Me About Menopause

This week I’ve joined the women of GenFab™ to write about: My Celebrity Crush.
Scroll to the bottom to read other blogs about crushes.

John Travolta and I grew up together. Right from the start, boy could he make me laugh not to mention my heart race with his Italian good looks.  He was already in high school when I met him, but I reasoned that was okay. I was thirTEEN, that’s only one year behind. He’d find out about me soon enough. When he ran for student body president I was with him all the way. I dreamed up the perfect campaign slogans and signs. My bold approach would show everyone else what I already knew about him. Underneath the swaggering good-looking Sweathog exterior, there’s a guy who cares. I was the perfect match for him, my brains his bravado. Only he didn’t know. I could be Vinnie Barbarino’s girl. I was sure Mr. Kotter would approve.

A year later my initial crush was elevated to full-tilt heartthrob. As Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever the familiar John was there, but a new element had been added. Staring at the theater’s larger-than-life poster he appeared an exotic man-creature with serious sexual vibes. In his sleek white suit I admired the confidence of his stance and was elated to see that he could dance! I could imagine him, finger pointed skyward slowly lowering it to point in my direction. He’d look right at me, beckoning me to come be his partner. Just thinking about it let loose a million butterflies in my stomach and a stampede of horses pounding within my chest. It was exhilarating. It was obvious to me, we had both grown up.

But being only fourteen-AND-A-HALF I wasn’t allowed to see my R-rated John until a few years later. This situation only increased my ardor. I pined and brooded, sure proof of my devotion. The popular Bee Gees hits from the movie’s soundtrack played on the radio and gave words to my amplified emotions.

When I got the original movie soundtrack album, I sang right along declaring “If I can't have you, I don’t want nobody, baby!” I found out that in the movie this passionate plea was sung, not by the Bee Gees who wrote it, but by a woman with the same name as ME, Yvonne Elliman. I became convinced that this fact was not merely a trivial coincidence, but a sign of something more.

I saw John dance with Olivia in Grease, scrubbed clean for a PG audience, before I’d ever see him in what I considered his full glory, on fire dancing disco in Saturday Night Fever. But my crush had made his mark on me. I’d caught the fever. True to the hit song “You Should be Dancing”, before I graduated high school I was a self-taught dancer, my disco techniques worthy of Travolta’s attention.

Coming up with what I wanted to write, I went over the telltale symptoms of a classic crush. There I sat with my laptop studiously making notes. The click of the keys coming quickly as I got on a roll. Then it dawned on me - the list of behaviors describing a young teenage girl with a crush sounded strangely familiar. In fact it described me, and I don’t mean the teenager me. I mean the me of just a few weeks prior, the 50 year old menopausal me.  

The clickity-click of my typing stopped. My head did a little spin on that for a moment, fragments of thoughts colliding. I’m going through menopause. A crush? It seemed entirely contradictory. I read over my list, fingers still poised over the keys. Could that be? I did a quick mental checklist. The giddy highs and aching lows, the overwhelming feelings of falling for him and noticing so many things I liked about him. The intensity of emotion flooding me, not to mention the preoccupation with how he was spending all of his time, were undeniable signs of something.

I’m not sure just how long I sat there like that, staring at my screen. Then it hit me. Pieces of the puzzle came together and I had one of my menopause flashes. Thus I’d like to thank John, My Celebrity Crush, for teaching me these three things about menopause.

#1 – Menopausal hormone shifts can feel astonishingly like an adolescent crush. This is nothing I’d ever heard of before. I probably would have judged it silly if someone suggested that would be happening to me.  But expressing those overwhelming positive emotions, rather than trying to figure out if I was crazy or not, opened a window to more pleasure for me.

#2 – Mood swings during menopause can be taken advantage of for more enjoyment. Writing about my celebrity crush I saw how I actively looked for reasons to adore my crush. Thinking back about it, that was true of all my teen crushes and it remains true today. While it might be hormones that give my emotions a kick start, I’m the one who reinforces them and keeps the good feelings alive by coming up with more excuses to enjoy more things.

#3 – There’s no rhyme or reason to the intensity of menopause experiences. In hindsight, I cannot come up with any logical explanation for developing a crush so intensely for so long on John Travolta.  I cannot sensibly explain the causes of the highs and lows, or scribble down the recipe that created the potent mix of idealization and infatuation. What I can do is describe and acknowledge both the uniqueness of my experience and the common threads that bind us as human beings. Therein lies the joy of living. And so it is with my experience of menopause.

 

Down for the Count

Instantly I’m awake, aware that I was deeply asleep moments before. I don’t know why I'm awake now – is it morning or night? I’m not entirely sure. 

It’s dark. I can barely discern the difference between having my eyes open and closed. I open up my senses, scanning to identify the cause for my waking.  I hear the soft hum of faraway kitchen appliances. Only white noise, no one else is stirring. I snuggle in against the plush down of my bed, bundled against the cold of mid-winter reassured that all is well about to fall asleep again. 

Then I feel that telltale sensation within my core. Something I have only noticed a few times before and only when I've been still and quiet. It’s a vague foreshadowing, yet undeniable in its meaning. Time slows down. I realize what is coming and my brain races. “Oh NOOOoooooo!” that first reaction despondently echoes within me. I brace for what I know is next. The first rumblings make themselves known. I don't like this. I feel myself going down, slumber erased from my world in a snap. I don’t have much time. My heart is already racing.

Quelling my sudden compulsion to make a preemptive strike and throw off all the covers, I decide to do something different. I have new goals after all. I lay still. The silence outside my body remains unbroken, but inside there is an outcry, “Arrrrgggghhhhhh.” For whatever reason, that thinking, judging part of me does not handle this recurring event very well.

I switch my attention away from those struggling thoughts. I decide to feel my body, pay attention to it. I'm naked, lying on my right side, hips and knees curled. My body is tense. One hand grips the corner of my pillow. I relax, letting my fingers unfurl. The cotton pillowcase and feathers plump up giving them a buoyant lift. I relax even more and Lub-WHUMP a single robust heartbeat reverberates loudly in my chest. Seemingly in answer, a new thought pops into my consciousness. “Count the seconds” and so I do.

“One one thousand, two one thousand…” time slows even more. I feel thick fingers of building heat push outward from deep inside. The dense force of heat expands, moving between my shoulder blades to spread up my back and envelop my neck. Moisture springs from my pores. I notice it at the nape of my neck first, then up the hairline. Drops emerge and multiply across my shoulders and throughout the center of my back. There I feel a single rivulet fall from the dip of my spine and roll around the curve to my waist where it meets the bed. 

The blaze spreads further filling my body. Just under my skin the hotness exerts its pressure most insistently. If I could see it now, I’m sure my face would be brightly colored in the flush of this wave. I am so very, very hot now. But I stay put and with the least movement possible lift the covers away from my body. I am still counting. I’ve only reached nine.

I am in awe at the capabilities of the human body, at my body! The movement and release of energy continues and I am like a kid looking forward to what will happen next in a new action flick. I want to feel and experience the entire ride. I am radiating heat and my brain feels keenly aware. Sensations are amplified as I hone in on each.  Eleven seconds have passed and I note that my ankles break out in a sweat; the bottoms of my feet dotted with tingling vibrations. I hear a ringing, a sustained note bringing to mind chimes resonating in a great hall. 

The temperature peaks and I feel the beginning of its rapid fall. At fifteen seconds there is so much perspiration happening all at once that the surface of my skin feels dewy, glowing as if I just stepped out of a steamy shower. Vapor rises, a layer of tropical atmosphere hovers around me. The pressure from the inside subsides. I am aware of the rhythm of my heart, slower with each beat. Inside my body the roaring heat has dissipated. I breathe in deeply. Calmly I bring the covers back over me. Suddenly goose bumps materialize and chills blanket me all at once. I feel the last remaining threads of heat waft from the top of my head as I whisper the count to myself – “Twenty.”  

In the dark, motionless and silent, I reflect on what just happened. I experienced so much. Whew! This was an intense one. Only twenty seconds had passed, plus a few seconds dedicated to rearranging my prejudices prior to the count. It was fun to find out just how fast this tremendous shift in energy can be. Moreover, once I let go of disapproving and felt what was occurring in my body in such detail during those twenty seconds, the hot flash itself was fun.

As that sinks in, my critical self attacks conjuring up a dramatic scene. Legions of menopausal women, who weirdly all happen to look like some version of me, call out "What do you mean your hot flash was fun??! Them are fightin' words!"  I cower realizing that this unsettling mob would love to go a few rounds with me in the ring for stating something so outlandish, so ludicrous and contrary.

Whoa there! I stop myself and give no more attention to that fabrication.

During those twenty seconds, I'd crossed the line. That hot flash was fun. Pleased, I turn over, fluff up my pillows and drift back to sleep. 

So It Is Written Menopause Means Big Trouble

One of the things I have done on a regular basis as a sensual researcher is assist putting on courses. It is something I love to do together with my like-minded tribe. It is fun relating with the diverse people who come and I am acutely aware of the viewpoints, tools and concepts that I build my life upon. I am engaged and it is a pleasure.

Shortly after my Bloody Mary celebration, it was during one of those courses that I went through a menopausal paradigm shift. It happened simply, without fanfare, yet once done things were never the same again.

I was in the back of the course room, set to film the instructors giving the lecture. It was the first morning of a retreat and, as we do in most courses, each participant was giving their goals. This is one of my favorite parts of a retreat, hearing what people want, what they traveled here to get and what they will take home with them when they leave. Many times upon hearing another person’s goals, a new goal will be generated on the spot. Possibilities open up.

On this morning after the last person finished up, the instructors directed their attention to me. It was my turn. Yvonne? Partially obscured by the video camera, I straightened up and came into full view. An entire series of thoughts tumbled through my mind in the span of one lingering pregnant pause.

While I had not written or prepared in advance what I would say, I had big questions concerning menopause. Could I realistically expect to experience the change of life to be a good thing or, going even further, to be pleasurable? By now I knew it could take many years, like 5-10 years to go through the transition. That is a significant amount of time. Already I was running up against a multitude of hidden obstacles to enjoying it.

This is nothing trivial, pleasure and menopause. The words clashed and rattled in my brain. How will I figure out how to put these contradictory realities together? Perhaps I should just settle for tolerable. If I did figure it out, would it be sustainable or just a couple of tricks good for a few laughs?

Speaking of laughs, the afternoon I looked up menopause in the thesaurus flashed across my mind. This was a few days prior. There it was printed clearly in black and white, only two synonyms –

1) climacteric which basically means climax and it’s all downhill from here and

2) midlife crisis.

While the meaning of midlife crisis is absurdly obvious, I went one step further on this little word exploration and looked up crisis.

Of course I really did not have to do that, but on that day I was looking for confirmation that menopause was the opposite of a pleasurable life. I found what I was looking for. The first synonym listed -- big trouble.

I reminded myself that the instructors were not waiting for me to blurt out all these questions. They certainly did not want to hear about my intellectual detour leading to big trouble. They’re asking for my goals. Okay this is a sensuality course. Forget the how and the figuring, what do I want? Sensual goals are based in pleasure and enjoyment. They involve the senses and experiences of living and relating.

It dawned on me that the seed that sprouted all of my questions and concerns gave me clues to what I do want, what my desires are for this time in my life. At the kernel of that seed I uncovered my goals.

Oh how quickly my supposedly fuzzy menopausal mind worked! Without further hesitation I spoke.

“I want my transition into menopause to be fun for me and for those around me.”

“I want to experience the changes I am feeling in my body from menopause pleasurably.”

Stating my goals out loud to the instructors and to the class, I felt them land. There was no clash or confusion. What I wanted was clear. Recorded as I gave them, written in black and white in the course log, they are just as real as the entries I’d seen in the thesaurus. But unlike those commonly accepted definitions cataloged for our use in that reference book, my goals had intention behind them, power to bring about a lasting paradigm shift. So it is written.

My Big Brain on Human Hormones

On 6 August 1991 the World Wide Web was opened up to the public. On that day in history I was a computer science techie programming in Silicon Valley. Yup, it’s okay to call me a geek and Yes, I do like math.

I continued working in Silicon Valley through the mid-90’s until I retired to be a sensual researcher. I mention this now because that nerdy inquisitive, data-gathering, puzzle-solving intellectual side of me has been quite useful in my menopause research. I am questioning my assumptions and the popular ideas regarding menopause, so at times I take that big brain out for a spin. On this ride I explore menopause and hormones.

Hormones…I ponder what I’d heard and thought I knew. Everyone knows that it’s your hormones that cause menopause, especially all the troubles right? Lowering estrogen and progesterone I’d heard of. I'm pretty sure those hormones are made in the ovaries and that they are the hormones that are replaced when a woman undergoes hormone replacement therapy (HRT). But as I think on it, I'm not entirely sure about even this little bit of information. I had more doubts the further I went into the topic, so I backed up a bit.

Do I even know what a hormone is? What exactly is a hormone's role within the body? How many hormones does the human body have? When did science discover and begin working with hormones? How much does science understand about hormones?

As I informed myself a picture developed based on facts I found of interest. Starting with the most basic information I got clear on what a hormone is and what they do. Hormones are chemicals present in all multi-cellular organisms. Hormones are the body's cellular communication system. When you get more than one cell together to make a living thing, those cells need to coordinate with each other. Nature came up with hormones to be the messengers between individual cells, tissues and organs. Hormones regulate metabolism, all of the chemical and energy reactions in the body. Inside the human body hormones help maintain a constant state of critical things such as temperature, amount of water and salts, and amount of sugar. Hormones tell the body when it needs rest, when to wake from sleep and when to go into a high state of alert.  Hormones regulate growth, sexual reproduction and more.

In 1902 the first definitive proof was discovered that a hormone exists. The first hormone identified was secretin. The rest of the century marked huge growth for the field of endocrinology including two new hunger hormones discovered in the 1990’s. Currently science has identified over 100 naturally occurring human hormones that tell our cells or organs to do something or to stop doing something. Names I'd heard, but didn't realize were human hormones began popping to mind. Insulin is a hormone. Adrenaline is a hormone. Steroids are an entire class of hormones which includes the commonly known sex hormones. Estrogen is a subclass of steroid hormones containing three distinct hormones. The list of human hormones goes on...serotonin, testosterone, dopamine, oxytocin.

Some of the most recent research on hormones and human behavior shows that hormones don’t cause things, they modulate them. The messages or information that a hormone delivers is contained in the interactions between hormones not only in the individual hormone itself. It also shows that the brain monitors not just hormone levels, but the rate at which hormone levels are changing. Nobody is entirely sure how our bodies do it, but to me all of this points to a wonderfully complex, robust and adaptive system that science does not entirely understand.

One of the many things I did as a tech geek is build personal computers from components like motherboards, RAM, hard drives, etc. then install the operating system and application software and test the completed computers. They were called IBM clones in those days. I would build each in the same way, typically 10 at a time, using the same components and following the same recipe for installing the software. Then I’d put together the entire computer network and train people how to use them. You would expect that each machine would perform the same. The name clone implies it. However, more often than not, each machine, even as identical as I could make them, would have individual idiosyncrasies. I’d have to make adjustments to get around some of those quirks. I didn’t think it should be that way, they were clones after all. But it was that way and to do my job effectively I stopped expecting it to be any different. I explained it away, that it must be due to tiny differences in electrical components and materials, but I never really knew why.

Now I’m thinking, here we have the human body with far more complex interconnected natural systems tweaked and tuned by nature for many thousands of years. It would be foolish of me to think that a woman’s hormonal system in major transition could be so easily explained. While doing research, again I was surprised at how fuzzy my knowledge was on the topic of hormones. Yet I have so readily agreed with the stereotype and stigma society tosses out about menopausal women, you know - it’s her hormones, as if I know the full implication of what it means.

Where does that leave me? My nerd side wants to go on a quest for more details to fill in the blanks, but from my sensualist perspective I am most interested in my experience of life. My head was clearing up on the topic. I could separate fact from mystery. I could wrap my mind around the fact that there are things about our bodies that we experience moment to moment, yet science is at a loss to explain why or how.

Becoming aware of my propensity to want to qualify and quantify my experience and look to science for answers, I also realized that there could be an entirely different way of going through the change and approaching midlife. I appreciate science and facts, but it is not my goal to become a medical or scientific expert. Do I even have a goal related to menopause? Getting informed had freed me up. It is also clear that I would be looking elsewhere for what would guide me through this transition. 

Menopause Myths Crumble from Curiosity

Talking about what was happening in my body created an expansion in how I viewed menopause. Applying the tools I have used for years as a sensual researcher I began to notice and describe the sensations I was feeling that I had previously lumped all together under the heading menopausal, otherwise known as something weird is happening to me. 

For example, I noticed the frequency of hot flashes, one easily identifiable sign of my transition into menopause. With a researcher's curiosity I noticed that all my hot flashes are not the same. Heart pounding sometimes comes with a hot flash, sometimes not. I noticed the differences in intensity and duration, the various times of day or evening they happen and so on. Quickly the fear faded and curiosity came to the forefront. 

I became interested in my body in a new way. I was ready for information and more importantly, I wanted a specific type of information about menopause. First I wanted to know from a physical standpoint what changes do occur in women’s bodies in the transition. Honing in on that topic I informed myself in an intentional way. Although the book Wendy gave me about menopause was over 650 pages, I simply went straight to the chapter on the physical foundation for what women experience. I read with a just the facts ma’am attitude, which was only about 20 pages, and then put the book away to digest what I'd read.

There are some key things that I took away from that first quick reading. I was introduced to the term perimenopause. I realized it is a transitional period of time that is comparable to going into puberty. Great shifts in hormones take place in both. I found out that our ovaries do not stop functioning altogether just because they no longer release a mature egg each month. 

I was surprised by the fact that our hormone levels during this time do not simply decrease in a linear fashion down to minuscule amounts, but in reality various hormone levels may dramatically rise while others fall. Then they shift around again, until a new balance is reached within our bodies, a balance that is healthy and normal yet not mandated any longer by reproduction. Contrary to the popular myth that I believed, we do not lose all of our sex hormones. In addition, our bodies are capable of producing all the hormones we require to be healthy sexual women for a lifetime. 

I also learned that entire populations of women in cultures different from the USA experience the change into menopause without discomfort and without medical hormone replacement therapy. I had heard of a few exceptions to the rule that menopause is very rough on a woman, but they were just that - exceptions. This really got me thinking. Where did I get the beliefs I have about menopause? Until I was experiencing it myself I didn't realize I had such firmly held viewpoints on the subject. Except for the rare women, the lucky few, I had never considered that menopause could be gone through without discomfort for entire populations. It was not a part of my reality, nothing I'd ever heard before. Hummm really, entire populations of women…the menopause myths I had constructed were crumbling, a new story was emerging. Could it go that way for me?

A new possibility opened up as I rolled this new information around in my mind. What I’d been led to believe would be an unpleasant but tolerable period of my life suddenly switched into the possibility that I could have a somewhat neutral experience. I did not see how any of this could realistically be good or pleasurable. That would come to me later, but at this point I was grateful for the information and interested in what I would uncover next.