A new study finds more day-to-day mindfulness is linked to lower menopause symptoms
As if there weren’t enough reasons to try mindfulness meditation already, experts now recommend it as a way of reducing menopause symptoms.
Menopause doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Women around this age are very often grappling with stressful life changes, whether it’s caring for elderly parents, navigating work issues or changing financial circumstances.
We now know that stress and anxiety make menopause worse, just as as it also makes mood and other issues worse. This is where the practice of being present and compassionate to oneself could help hundreds of Australian women going through menopause.
“Although the precise mechanism of action is not fully understood, mindfulness is thought to mitigate stress by avoiding emotional reactivity and maladaptive, negative, and ruminative thinking,” the US authors of a new study into menopause and mindfulness told The Medical Republic.
Their cross-sectional study of more than 1700 middle-aged women found that more day-to-day mindfulness was linked to fewer menopause symptoms.
Dr Elizabeth Farrell, gynaecologist and medical director of the women’s health organisation Jean Hailes, said she had found clinician-led and self-directed mindfulness combined with cognitive behaviour therapy had been a simple, effective and potentially cheap tool for some of her patients.
“It is really about being able to change your thoughts in such a way that you understand that, say for example with hot flushes, it’s only going to last a period of time,” she explained.
“Of course, if you have the opposite response and think, ‘I can’t handle the hot flushes. It’s terrible. It’s horrible.’ your anxiety levels increase in relation to it, and then it’s going to make it worse.”
Recent years have seen a boom in the field and market for mindfulness, with its benefits being touted for everything from depression and anxiety, to PTSD and eating disorders.
But evidence for its use in menopause is preliminary.
To test its effect, the researchers analysed the health and demographic data collected from 1744 symptomatic, middle-aged women visiting the Women’s Health Clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.
Looking at the questionnaires that these women filled out about their menopausal symptoms and the extent to which they were mindful in everyday life, the researchers found that higher mindfulness and lower perceived stress were predictive of fewer menopause symptoms.
“There was a significant interaction between mindfulness and stress on overall and psychological menopausal symptom scores. Although mindfulness correlated with lower menopausal symptom burden across all levels of stress, the magnitude of association became larger as the self-reported stress increased.”
Stress has more of an impact on some aspects of menopause than others, with the authors noting that the correlation was “most evident in the psychological domain but was not statistically significant in the somato-vegetative domain”.
“This is a notable finding, given the fact that hot flashes and night sweats are the most commonly reported symptoms at menopause.”
Unfortunately, this study didn’t test women before and after an intervention, but it did support other research suggesting the relationship between distress and vasomotor symptoms might be a result of personality factors that determine how symptoms are perceived.
“A previous study by our group demonstrated that the psychological symptoms, rather than the vasomotor symptoms, affected women’s view of menopause negatively, which is consistent with the observation that specific menopause-related symptoms may have a variable impact on women.”
When previous researchers trained women in mindfulness, they found reductions in stress, as well as a 39% drop in vasomotor symptoms and a 28% drop in the impact menopause had on women’s quality of life.
Climacteric 2019; online 17 January
