The Hormone Shift: A Guide To Thriving In Every Decade Of Our Lives

The Hormone Shift offers an empowering new approach to take charge of our hormone shifts through every stage of life. Dr. Tasneem Bhatia explains how to tackle our ever-changing hormone cycles through every decade, specifically addressing major milestones in every young girl and woman’s life: puberty, pregnancy, fertility, perimenopause, and menopause. 

An Excerpt From The Hormone Shift

The Superwoman Shift: Owning Your Power

Ages 39– 55

When you turned forty- six, did you look in the mirror and say to yourself, Hey, where did all those wrinkles come from? How can this be? In my head I’m still a twentysomething Hustler!

With all those amazing Superwomen out there, doing amazing things, these years should be a celebration of all they have accomplished, refined, learned, and created. As one of them, you’ve earned the right to no longer be thought of as a twinkling Superstar but, now, as a true Superwoman. I know you can look and feel every bit the part, even if you might start to feel that those great days are behind you.

Here’s the deal: This fourth phase is a critical one for women— a time when illnesses or diseases can often first show up, and the sum of our adventures from previous decades hands us a health report card that may or may not be to our liking. (I wrote about the very real Superwoman syndrome in my 2017 book The Superwoman Rx.) This is also a time of dramatically shifting hormone levels, when the arrival of perimenopause and then menopause looks or feels like a midlife crisis.

Maybe you’re used to being full of energy and not needing much sleep . . . and then suddenly a stressor (your family or your work situation changes) arrives and you can’t manage things like you once did. You don’t have the same energy level, but you think you do, so you will yourself into believing and try to power through. The symptoms start hitting you and it feels like they’re controlling you, rather than the other way around. One of my patients summarized it perfectly: “I’m itchy and bitchy!”

We can’t be blasé about this, thinking, Well, you know, yeah, it’s no big deal that my periods are getting kind of irregular or I feel more tired all the time. Maybe I’m just off, you know, because I’ve got so much going on. No biggie, right? Wrong! I’ve yet to meet a woman who, without advice and treatment from a medical professional, had absolutely no perimenopausal symptoms, breezing through these years without a speck of worry. It’s gonna happen, and my job is to get you ready for it, so you do feel that calming breeze instead of being hit with a major hurricane.

Now more than ever, Superwomen need to confront and change the trajectory of conversations that might be happening with their regular doctors. If your symptoms are being diminished or dismissed, no, they are not in your head. And no, you are not just “getting old.” You don’t have to listen to the insulting “Sorry, but you should suck it up and endure them” or “You’re fine” spiels. Instead, it’s mandatory you take a proactive approach to your overall health and your hormone health. So much of what you may feel and experience during these years is reversible— if and when you establish and follow your own personalized roadmap to wellness.

Superwomen should have confidence that they’re going to be living longer than women of previous generations. Doing so gives you the time to make the changes you need to make, whether you do it in incremental shifts or an enormous leap into a totally new lifestyle.

Common Hormone Issues for Superwomen

As discussed in the preceding Superstar section, perimenopause is the time when those annoying symptoms— hot flashes, night sweats, irregular cycles, fatigue, anxiety, depression, intense moodiness, disrupted sleep, and weight gain— arrive, and it’s usually when you least expect or want them. The dysregulation of cortisol, our stress hormone, can go haywire even before your estrogen and progesterone levels start to drop. You might notice that your tolerance of stress changes. Perhaps you were proud of how well you could juggle dozens of projects at a time, but now the slightest hitch is taking you near the edge.

Those Hustler days when you went away for a fun weekend and arrived back home as the sun was about to rise, then you showered and got to work knowing that a few large lattes would see you through the day— well, those times are a distant memory (maybe, you have to admit, that is not always a bad thing.). Or maybe you just don’t feel that great and you don’t know why and that feeling starts to bleed into your relationships and into your work. 

Your family and friends might be dropping hints. If so, that likely causes a little bit of a spiral. You feel so crummy that you start selfsoothing to make the discomfort go away. You find yourself eating the wrong stuff, so you gain weight. You’re frustrated that you’re gaining weight, and that makes you feel less sexy. Your libido disappears. You start to feel foggy. An incremental slowing down of your body’s systems is a normal part of aging, and it explains why Superwomen can find it that much harder to do things that used to be easy— those things that have always kept you fit and healthy. Know that this slowing down is connected to the slight decline in your hormone levels.

Excerpted from The Hormone Shift written by Dr. Tasneem Bhatia; published by Harper Collins.