If you're experiencing frequent migraines during perimenopause, you may have noticed that they often arrive around the days when ovulation would likely take place, and in the days prior to menstruation.
These are times of more erratic hormonal change.
So, should women turn to a hormonal solution for migraine relief? Is the flux in hormones during perimenopause the cause of migraines?
It’s easy to mistake correlation for causation.
As we head towards menopause, all women experience more unpredictable levels of hormones, just as all women must experience a drop in hormone levels post-menopause. However, since not all women experience migraines during perimenopause, and since through these years of change, hormone levels cannot predict the onset of symptoms, other factors must be involved.
Hormonal changes in the menstrual cycle create a sensitive time, but it’s a life lived out of balance that creates symptoms.
Conventional medicine can sometimes provide symptom relief (with possible side-effects), but fails to address the root cause.
Holistically-minded women may spend a lot of time and energy trying to make changes in their diet, find the right supplements, and go for treatments. These may offer improvements, but migraines and other symptoms can keep reappearing.
That’s because until we look within ourselves and understand how we are the co-creators of our health, the years of perimenopause and menopause may be bumpy indeed.
Treating symptoms through external methods is like treating multiple polluted streams without halting the source of pollution, upstream in the river.
From my own experience and from supporting women in perimenopause and menopause for almost a decade, the appearance of migraines during the sensitive times of our menstrual cycle offer a good indication of how stressed we’ve been over the previous month.
We can live with internal chaos (our personal pollution) through innocently creating stress. Better understanding the nature of the human experience allows us to reach freedom from endless cycles of stress, thus reducing the patterns of internal chaos that lead to symptoms.
Yet, influential menopause doctors will rarely discuss the importance stress plays in the intensity and frequency of migraines.
Instead they will blame a woman’s hormones for the appearance of migraines and offer HRT to improve the situation, even though:
There is no research that points to HRT being an effective medicine to prevent migraines.
Migraines are a known side-effect of many hormone therapies.
The North American Menopause Society 2022 position statement on hormone therapy does not even mention migraines or headaches as one of the symptoms HRT can help relieve. However, it mentions headaches as a possible side effect (adverse advent) from treatments.
A British Menopause Society document entitled Migraine and HRT suggests that if migraines appear to worsen from hot flushes and night sweats, HRT “may help reduce the likelihood of migraine but is not in itself an effective migraine treatment.” The same document also notes how some women’s migraines worsen while on HRT, particularly when an oral form is taken.
Luckily, we don’t need to change any circumstances out there, or fix any hormones or chemicals within to experience fewer migraines and spend more time in well-being. The body knows how to bring us back into balance on a physical level once we harmonize the internal chaos, through reducing the stress we experience in our lives.
Despite what the media and medical establishment tell you, healing migraines and other symptoms that often appear during perimenopause and menopause is simpler than you think.
If you yearn to be free of your physical and emotional symptoms without constantly relying on products or treatments, and if you’d like to get through the month without migraines, check out if one of my coaching packages could suit your needs.
Learning how to heal yourself through the sensitive years of perimenopause and menopause is life-changing, and will serve you not only during this month, and this year, but for decades to come.
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