Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Menopause

Mumsnet doesn't verify the qualifications of users. If you have medical concerns, please consult a healthcare professional.

Non-medical things you've found helpful (or tried & not helped!)

4 replies

Sadik · 28/06/2023 20:03

Not a for or against HRT / other medication, but obviously they don't deal with all symptoms & some people can't/don't want to take. I'd be interested to know what non-medical things you've found have worked well / were a waste of time.

Personally things I've tried include:

Wool duvet - absolutely lovely, I'm delighted I bought it, it was a great excuse. Don't think it made any real difference but cheers me up.

No caffeine after mid-day - On the fence, I've not drunk coffee for years, but I drink loads of strong builders tea & I think on the whole regardless of meno I sleep better & am generally better mood if I drink decaff for half the day.

Not drinking wine - very, very sadly not drinking wine (especially red, but tbh white is almost as bad) makes a huge difference to how I sleep. I'm not a big drinker anyway, but up to a pint of beer / cider is fine, it's the wine that's a killer. Strangely, a small glass of cava / prosecco seems OK (maybe optimism)

Bladder training - has made a huge difference. I'd been needing to wee multiple times in the night. With a combination of pelvic floor exercises plus gradually increasing the time between wees in the day & making a point of holding on before going I rarely need to get up at all in the night now.

Exercise / weight bearing - obviously important for bone health. But there's also a really helpful explantation in Jen Gunter's book Menopause Manifesto about the tendency to put weight on & that it's because muscle burns more calories than fat. We lose muscle mass as we age but particularly so during menopause. So exercise that helps build muscle also good for controlling weight. I'm sure this is true for me - I do a lot more heavy work in spring / summer, & my weight's gone right back to where it used to be despite eating a lot more. My resolution is to come up with a way to carry that on into winter when I do more desk work, though yet to figure out how.

More generally lots of outdoors time & exercise makes me feel much better in general / less hot flushes / etc.

OP posts:
JinglingSpringbells · 28/06/2023 21:13

Are you asking for yourself? (You seem to have got it sorted!)

Sadik · 28/06/2023 21:14

Just wondering what else people had found helpful. I'd never have thought about wine being different from beer / cider if a friend hadn't mentioned it worked for her.

OP posts:
Sadik · 28/06/2023 21:15

I figure as symptoms come / go it's useful to have different things to try....

OP posts:
MeeThree · 02/07/2023 16:09

I've stopped drinking - not that I was drinking a lot but I just stopped seeing the point of it. Even a small amount of alcohol was making me feel shit the next day. An unexpected side effect of this was that my sleep improved exponentially.

I also swapped to decaf

I upped my exercise - I'm not a natural exerciser at all so just started walking instead of getting the bus one day, things like that

I stopped taking vitamins to see which ones I really needed - then focused on those rather than a multi vitamin

Went and got the nurse to double check my blood pressure and got up to date with smear tests etc (had no idea what my blood pressure was so thought it was good to check!)

My periods are still regular but painful - I've started logging them properly and then being careful in the week before that I eat well (rather than the chocolate/crisps/ice cream I crave)

I'm 50 and so far this seems to be working

New posts on this thread. Refresh page