06/09/2025
🌿 Perimenopause, Estrogen Overload & the Power of Midlife Transformation 🌿
Too often in Western medicine, the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause — brain fog, fatigue, weight gain, mood swings, hot flashes — are seen as a deficiency of estrogen. The automatic response? Add more estrogen. Estrogen has become the new probiotics, or collagen of the hip but misdirected and not so useful wellness trends (I don't prescribe any of those).
But what I'm seeing in our modern, estrogen-saturated world, many women are already dealing with too much estrogen — not too little. And in the perimenopausal years, estrogen is oscillating up and down, before it starts to really drop. This is what makes testing tricky - if only we had continuous estrogen monitors!
I’ve seen women who've been recommended estrogen for symptoms like pain or fatigue or dryness/heat, without any testing or understanding of what’s truly driving the imbalance. I've seen practitioners recommend HRT when there is already abnormal vaginal bleeding, history of estrogen-based cancers, and more recently, in a smoker with family history on both sides of estrogen-sensitive cancers.
🔍 Some women in menopause — no longer cycling — still show elevated estrogen levels.
🌀 Others are prescribed estrogen despite signs of high estrogen: bloating, anxiety, irritability, sore breasts, weight gain around the hips, etc.
💊 And often, we’re treating symptoms while ignoring what the body is trying to eliminate. In an estrogen-dominant culture, where plastics, pesticides, body products, stress, and xenoestrogens flood our systems daily, clearing estrogen is often far more important than adding more.
🧬 Supporting our organs and emotional processing is key. Estrogen needs to be metabolized and cleared to avoid buildup and imbalance.
From an wholistic perspective, menopause is not just a hormonal event — it's a soul transition. As our reproductive forces recede, they re-emerge as creative, intuitive, and spiritual forces. This is a time of evolution, not just symptom management. My teachers from China and India noted that their patients in their home countries didn't have the intensity of menopausal symptoms that we see in North America. Our Yang, stressed-out culture likely contributes to these changes, more stress and more anxiety and more feeling like we have to do it all, and so perfectly.
But if we bypass this transition by overriding the body with more hormones, we risk missing a deeper opportunity — and potentially aggravating the very symptoms we’re trying to fix.
✨ What if your symptoms are not a call for more estrogen… but a call to release what no longer serves? To re-kindle your passions, to find yourself again, to slow down, to nurture you.
Clearing, detoxifying, and listening deeply to the body can bring relief — and open the door to the next chapter of your life with vitality, clarity, and purpose.
This is a powerful time. Let’s treat it that way.
