What? Memory loss? What memory lo......?
“Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns
Dory: I suffer from short term memory loss. It runs in my family... At least I think it does... Where are they?
"Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film!" unknown.
I'm taking a little departure here from nutrition for a reason. I'll get back to it soon, but something came up the other day that I just had to document. And from the above quotes you can probably figure out what it is!
A famous writer I know posted on her facebook page the following (I've changed it a little to keep her anonymous!)
"Turned the page of my day planner this morning to see that I had written myself a reminder: "CALL ***!" And I thought, Why do I need to call ***? And then I thought, Wait... Who's ***l?
Sometimes I can just feel the brain cells dyin' off...and somewhere out there, a guy named *** is wondering why I didn't call."
What then proceeded this entry was a thread of several women of about a similar age sharing their own momentary memory lapses, or what I describe for myself as : memory farts. Those little moments that pop up and out from nowhere, where you just know something that you can't bring to the forefront of your memory. Like: what was I just thinking? What was I going to do next? Who was I supposed to call today? And my favorite and the one that happens to me the most often: "where the **** are my: keys...phone...I-pad?"
During the past year, as I've moved into menopause in a major way, my brain function and retentive processes have suddenly turned into Swiss cheese: full of holes and smelly! In conducting all the research I've been doing for this blog, I've come across numerous sites and books detailing why this happens to women during this time. I'll share my own thoughts on the reason why last, but some of the major things I've learned are the following.
It's postulated that short-term memory loss can occur when your hormones fluctuate to levels you are not used to. When estrogen levels go south ( aka MENOPAUSE!) this may and can affect dopamine and serotinin levels in your brain. These are neurotransmitters that help your brain process info and control some of your moods. A drop in these neurotransmitter levels can lead you to feeling fuzzy, confused and moody. Sounds like menopause to me. Word retrieval, concentration problems and attention deficits can also occur because of this mismatch in these levels. For your brain to work correctly, all your brain's neurotransmitter levels have to be in balance, so it stands to reason again, that if your estrogen drops, the other levels will drop accordingly, leading to the symptoms I've mentioned. Lovely.
Not all women who go through menopause suffer from this memory deficit, tho. Only us lucky ones!
It used to be believed that that your brain stopped developing pretty much after kindergarten. This was related to the thought that by this age, the size, shape and proportions of your brain were pretty much set from a demographics viewpoint. The fact that as we enter old age, our brains shrink and start to become shallow added some validity to this thinking. But it's now known from a clinical viewpoint that this thinking is incorrect. Your brain grows and adapts throughout your lifespan. You even produce new nerve cells as you age. What usually happens is that once we reach a certain part of lives, aka, the middle years or the retirement years, we stop "exercising our brains" by doing thoughtful work and duties. Gone are the days when we had to think twenty hours a day about an account we were working on, or a project that needed all of our brain power to complete. At this point we can relax and not feel the stress of producing or proving ourselves any longer. Well, your brain is like a muscle. If you don't lose it, it atrophies. If we just accept that the older we get the more forgetful we will be, then the myth perpetuates itself and we really will become brain-less. Most researchers in the neuro-business claim that using the most brain parts we can on a daily basis will help our brains not atrophy and die off. Crossword puzzles, logic problem solving books, the world wide popularity of Suduku, reading newspapers, novels, journals, anything more than just facebook updates, helps your brain work to sustain itself.
Now, I've got my own little theory based on nothing but my own observations of women going through what I am going through. It's not based on a any heavy research, but just watching and listening to my female peers relate their own menopause brain farts.
Let's start with the premise that we are all busy. We work, take care of our families, our homes, our businesses if we have them. We grocery shop, pay bills, try to get in a little exercise when we can, and then at night, we fall into bed, hopeful of some rest. What happens in reality, is that our sleep is disrupted by hot night flashes, and needing to use the bathroom more than we ever did before - even while pregnant! This sleep deprivation tends to make us moody, irritable, and in many cases, forgetful when we are not in menopause. Throw that into the mix and it seems that the drop in hormones makes everything worse. And it does. Lack of sleep, dipping hormone levels, the increasing demands of family/home/work and the ever increasing outside stressors placed on us from society, social media and fashion magazines, all pushes us to the edge and the limit of our mental capacity. It's no wonder to me that our little brains start to revolt, and the way they do this is to make us forgetful, because we just have too much to process at the same time.
So, do I think there is a cure for all this? Well, I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't think I could give it a try!
Unplug. Shut down. Tune out. Take a deep breath ( or two or ten!). Close your mind to all external stresses at least once a day if you can.
Pretty radical, huh?
When I was a kid, there was a commercial for Calgon where the tag line was "Calgon, take me away!" I don't know if you can still buy Calgon, but the thought is the same. We all need to take time for ourselves, by ourselves. We need to just run away for a while; a few minutes, or even an hour every now and then, and just be. Be alone; be by ourselves; be one with ourselves. I love to sit on my screened-in three season room and have a cup of tea whenever I can. I live in the woods, so the absolute quiet I experience when I do this is so soul refreshing that I have trouble explaining the effect adequately. Maybe you have a peaceful place you can go to, too, to just relax and unwind for a time. More than anything else, just sitting and sipping my tea in a quiet space helps rejuvinate me more than I can say.
We don't need to accept that we will now be forever forgetful, and that foggy memory feeling will become our new best friend just because we are going through menopause. Take time for you.
Your brain will love you for it.
If anyone who reads this has anything to add, please FEEL FREE! I welcome comments and always learn from the experience and wisdom of other women. And I celebrate that wisdom and pass it on.
During the past year, as I've moved into menopause in a major way, my brain function and retentive processes have suddenly turned into Swiss cheese: full of holes and smelly! In conducting all the research I've been doing for this blog, I've come across numerous sites and books detailing why this happens to women during this time. I'll share my own thoughts on the reason why last, but some of the major things I've learned are the following.
It's postulated that short-term memory loss can occur when your hormones fluctuate to levels you are not used to. When estrogen levels go south ( aka MENOPAUSE!) this may and can affect dopamine and serotinin levels in your brain. These are neurotransmitters that help your brain process info and control some of your moods. A drop in these neurotransmitter levels can lead you to feeling fuzzy, confused and moody. Sounds like menopause to me. Word retrieval, concentration problems and attention deficits can also occur because of this mismatch in these levels. For your brain to work correctly, all your brain's neurotransmitter levels have to be in balance, so it stands to reason again, that if your estrogen drops, the other levels will drop accordingly, leading to the symptoms I've mentioned. Lovely.
Not all women who go through menopause suffer from this memory deficit, tho. Only us lucky ones!
It used to be believed that that your brain stopped developing pretty much after kindergarten. This was related to the thought that by this age, the size, shape and proportions of your brain were pretty much set from a demographics viewpoint. The fact that as we enter old age, our brains shrink and start to become shallow added some validity to this thinking. But it's now known from a clinical viewpoint that this thinking is incorrect. Your brain grows and adapts throughout your lifespan. You even produce new nerve cells as you age. What usually happens is that once we reach a certain part of lives, aka, the middle years or the retirement years, we stop "exercising our brains" by doing thoughtful work and duties. Gone are the days when we had to think twenty hours a day about an account we were working on, or a project that needed all of our brain power to complete. At this point we can relax and not feel the stress of producing or proving ourselves any longer. Well, your brain is like a muscle. If you don't lose it, it atrophies. If we just accept that the older we get the more forgetful we will be, then the myth perpetuates itself and we really will become brain-less. Most researchers in the neuro-business claim that using the most brain parts we can on a daily basis will help our brains not atrophy and die off. Crossword puzzles, logic problem solving books, the world wide popularity of Suduku, reading newspapers, novels, journals, anything more than just facebook updates, helps your brain work to sustain itself.
Now, I've got my own little theory based on nothing but my own observations of women going through what I am going through. It's not based on a any heavy research, but just watching and listening to my female peers relate their own menopause brain farts.
Let's start with the premise that we are all busy. We work, take care of our families, our homes, our businesses if we have them. We grocery shop, pay bills, try to get in a little exercise when we can, and then at night, we fall into bed, hopeful of some rest. What happens in reality, is that our sleep is disrupted by hot night flashes, and needing to use the bathroom more than we ever did before - even while pregnant! This sleep deprivation tends to make us moody, irritable, and in many cases, forgetful when we are not in menopause. Throw that into the mix and it seems that the drop in hormones makes everything worse. And it does. Lack of sleep, dipping hormone levels, the increasing demands of family/home/work and the ever increasing outside stressors placed on us from society, social media and fashion magazines, all pushes us to the edge and the limit of our mental capacity. It's no wonder to me that our little brains start to revolt, and the way they do this is to make us forgetful, because we just have too much to process at the same time.
So, do I think there is a cure for all this? Well, I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't think I could give it a try!
Unplug. Shut down. Tune out. Take a deep breath ( or two or ten!). Close your mind to all external stresses at least once a day if you can.
Pretty radical, huh?
When I was a kid, there was a commercial for Calgon where the tag line was "Calgon, take me away!" I don't know if you can still buy Calgon, but the thought is the same. We all need to take time for ourselves, by ourselves. We need to just run away for a while; a few minutes, or even an hour every now and then, and just be. Be alone; be by ourselves; be one with ourselves. I love to sit on my screened-in three season room and have a cup of tea whenever I can. I live in the woods, so the absolute quiet I experience when I do this is so soul refreshing that I have trouble explaining the effect adequately. Maybe you have a peaceful place you can go to, too, to just relax and unwind for a time. More than anything else, just sitting and sipping my tea in a quiet space helps rejuvinate me more than I can say.
We don't need to accept that we will now be forever forgetful, and that foggy memory feeling will become our new best friend just because we are going through menopause. Take time for you.
Your brain will love you for it.
If anyone who reads this has anything to add, please FEEL FREE! I welcome comments and always learn from the experience and wisdom of other women. And I celebrate that wisdom and pass it on.
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