Category Archive for Women’s health

According to a NY Times article and a study on PubMed, women who “self-silence” during arguments significantly increase their risk for heart disease. Men don’t. They can suppress feelings and not suffer health effects at all.

Maybe it’s because men “fight and fly” when stressed. We women “tend and befriend.” We need to talk and bond. When we women feel cut off, we stress out.

Another, more general, explanation may be that closed systems fail to thrive. When living systems are cut off from the free flow of information, matter, and/or energy with their environments, they can’t get the proper feedback to regulate themselves.

The NY Times’ Well blog gives the four signs of bottling up from Dr. Dana Jack’s book Silencing the Self: Women and Depression:
1. I don’t speak my feelings in an intimate relationship when I know they will cause disagreement.
2. Caring means putting the other’s person’s needs in front of my own.
3. Often I look happy enough on the outside, but inwardly I feel angry and rebellious.
4. I often feel responsible for other people’s feelings.

Men simply don’t have these issues. Men are emotionally wired differently. They can’t mix information and information very well. They aren’t quite so sensitive and tuned in. Just read some of the literature on babies and mothers and their intense interactions. Brain development happens in both the mother and infant. Women teach babies how to soothe themselves, to self-soothe. The infant’s social brain develops in interaction with the mother via the more primitive emotional brain. We are all about making peace and putting their needs first.
What do you do when you realize that bottling your feelings up will make you sick but when also know that saying what you feel will make the whole thing worse?

Practice opening up in the face of threat. Note the anger and then get curious. Treat it like martial arts or like walking meditation. Take very good care of yourself first so that you can do this–It’s difficult to get on top of anything when you’re tired and hungry.

My husband and I will get into spats. And I wrote the book. Then, of course, he’ll remind me. It’s infuriating. But behind it all we know we know that we’re okay.

Bottled up feelings are not good. A closed system is always self-destructive. Always. The secret is to learn to open yourself in the face of threat. To see the whole process for what it is–a momentary insanity. If you can’t do it yourself, then do it with a very good therapist. When you get this down, life with men at home and at work is so much easier.

Martin Seligman’s happiness movement, “Positive Psychology,” is popping up everywhere: Learn to think positively and optimistically, and you will experience health.Of course, Dr. Seligman is absolutely right, and his ideas are wonderful:

1. Consciously raising your mood opens your mind and expands your perspective to new possibilities.
2. Creating health is an improvement over simply treating illness.
3. You feel good when you do good for others.

But the problem is:

1. You can’t feel good when your work, health, time, money, and relationships are a mess, and you have no framework or simple process for improving it all.
2. You can’t be happy when your life is not aligned with your values, or when life has hit you so hard that you don’t even know what you value any more.
3. You can’t effectively help others if you haven’t first cared reasonably well for yourself.

Tradition has evaporated. A quagmire of so-called “expert advice” has replaced it. There’s so much to figure out in a day!

Stress is a wakeup call. When I feel it, I do the laundry and file papers. I work on what Coach U calls my “personal foundation.” When I clear the small stuff and free up my head, the big problems either go away or they become just another design challenge.

When it gets bad, I call my girlfriends. Nancy will always put it into perspective with a laugh. She always reminds me of what I know already: Happiness is only one thought away.

The RN in me smells a rat. As I was thinking and writing about estrogens, the NY Times published an Op-Ed piece on the same topic: Final Periods by Karen Houppert.

Then yesterday, I saw an ad on TV: Beautiful, hip, intelligent-looking women, bouncing around to deceptively intelligent, reasonable, upbeat talk… “No need for periods. They are unnecessary.” I heard it, and I couldn’t believe my ears.

With Seasonale, a woman only has to have a period once every three months. Now the FDA has approved Lybrel, and she doesn’t have to have a period at all!

How convenient. How out of touch with nature and who we are.

Can this actually be legal? Who approved this?

This is big bucks talking. This is not sanity.

Okay, for the almost 10% of women who really do suffer each month and have tried countless other options, maybe this is the solution. But that’s medication, not birth control!

The justification (from WebMD):

Mitchell Creinin, MD, is a researcher studying the one-year pill, and he agrees. “The idea that a woman ‘needs’ to have a period is folklore. The blood doesn’t build up inside, and it has nothing to do with cleaning out your system or proving that you’re normal,” says Creinin, director of family planning in the obstetrics and gynecology department of the University of Pittsburgh’s Magee-Women’s Hospital. “There’s no biological plausibility that a one-week break confers any protection against anything. At the turn of the century, the average number of menses per year was one or two, because women were breastfeeding or pregnant more often.”

Women at the turn of the century didn’t live as long as we do. They didn’t have additional estrogen and estrogen mimics in their meat, plastics, and spermicides. And there wasn’t estrogen in the water supply (where it fails to break down).

The caution (also from WebMD):

Other doctors…say continuous birth control may increase the amount of estrogen and progesterone that some women take in their lifetimes. The health effects of this experiment in convenience may not be known for years. After all, millions of menopausal women took hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for decades before the risks became evident.

And…

Christine Hitchcock, PhD, researches menstrual cycles and ovulation. She worries that we also don’t know if continuous birth control could affect fertility. “The use of extended birth control pills is suppressing a complex, intricate hormonal system,” she says. “There are no long-term data to show whether changing the schedule of birth control affects how fast your periods come back when you go off, whether they come back, and your level of fertility.”

I’m 55, and finally past the whole menstrual mess. Yes, I’m hot flashing as I type this entry, but I’m no longer nesting. Nurturing and feeding everyone who walks into my house is no longer my focus. I do things for others. I care for my husband, but I don’t feel the need to take care of him.

Now, from my new perspective, I watch frantic, nervous, stressed young women, who do too much for everyone, care for everything, and nest at work and at home, and I wonder about their estrogen levels.

My daughter recently discovered that six months of emotional problems and extreme stress symptoms were almost completely estrogen-related. If she hadn’t discovered it for herself and stopped taking her birth control, she would have been a prime candidate for mood-altering medication and treatment for extreme weight loss. After listening to her weep and worry over the phone for several months — all very out of character — it’s a relief to have my daughter back.

Do we have entire generations of American women who don’t even know who they really are? And what about breast cancer? If it can increase with hormone replacement, what’s to say the same won’t hold true with such rampant, long-term, daily estrogen intake?!

How do the side-effects of all this chemical manipulation change a woman’s basic sense of attraction? What happens when a woman marries a man she’s only known while on the pill, then when she goes off the pill to get pregnant, suddenly finds that she doesn’t feel the same attraction to him anymore? Could it be because, for the years she’s known him, her chemistry was wacky? Maybe the physiological factors of divorce aren’t fully understood.

So what’s a self-sufficient, liberated woman to do? Here’s advice that seems obvious to me:

• Get to know yourself, the real you. Be aware of your emotions and how your physiological needs affect you.
• Stop and get curious. If you ask, “What’s going on?” you’ll gain some perspective. Is this you, or is it the pills you’re taking and/or the food you are (or are not) eating?
• Consider the real need for the pill. Compare the real and potential long-term risks and where you are with your relationship with men or your man.
• Read up.
• Know that you’re not alone. If you can’t get it together yourself, get professional help. Talk to your doctor, and if that doctor doesn’t talk it out with you, find another doctor.

Bottom line? Find the best way to make today’s modern chemistry work for YOU.

Want to learn more? Check out this article on environmental estrogens.

Photo by eva_n on Flikr.