The Menopause Manifesto by Dr.Jen Gunter (2021)

“For women to navigate menopause they need facts, but they also need feminism because our bodies, our medical care, and even our thoughts have been colonized by the patriarchy.”

I heard an interview with Dr. Jen Gunter where she said, “the women who face the most challenges during the menopause transition are often the ones who have the least information about what to expect.” The intention of her most recent book, The Menopause Manifesto, is to make sure that all women are armed with accurate, data-driven information about the process; so that — as the subtitle suggests — women can “own their health with facts and feminism.”

Women don’t seem to know much about menopause not because there is no information to be had, but because older women are silenced, shamed, and made to feel irrelevant and unimportant. No one wants to hear about problems women face with their vaginas and uteruses when they are young, and they definitely don’t want to hear about them when they are attached to older women. “Menopause is not treated as phase of life, but a phase of death.”

With painstaking detail, Dr. Gunter outlines the many, many (many) changes that a woman’s body might go through as she transitions through perimenopause; into menopause, and the years beyond. She offers a clear list of symptoms a woman might face, outlines how they may vary in frequency and intensity, and presents a continuum of treatments a woman might consider to help her with her more troubling symptoms. These treatments range from small lifestyle changes to pharmaceuticals and includes detailed risks of each.

Throughout the book, Dr. Gunter’s message is three-fold: these changes are part of the experience of being a woman; it is our job to know what to expect and how to advocate for ourselves; and that none of the discomforts of this transition need to be endured and suffered simply because the medical establishment believes it is an inevitable and untreatable part of a woman’s life. There are ways to mitigate the transition and help women thrive through perimenopause, menopause, and beyond.

Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer (2021)

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal

This book had some really great lessons about mastering anxiety (along with some other not so great habits) but it was far too long and all of the excess material was deeply distracting from the heart of the book. If Brewer had stripped away all the jokes and banter and just gotten to the crux if his argument, he could have conveyed these ideas in a 20 page pamphlet.

Brewer presents a four phase plan to help readers tackle nagging bad habits, including anxiety, overeating, and smoking. He suggests that taking the time to learn both about the human mind and how it is structured and specifically how your mind works to reinforce your behaviors, then you will begin to understand why your bad habits are so sticky. Armed with this knowledge, Brewer introduces some methods to interrupt the habit loop and replace bad habits with healthy ones, enabling you to make lasting changes without relying on willpower.

Some takeaways I found useful:

— Modern humans are all addicted to something. Certainly not everyone is addicted to illicit drugs, gambling or sex, but most could find evidence of addictions in their shopping, eating, scrolling, or procrastinating. “Addictions solidify into habits, so they don’t feel like addictions — they just feel like who we are.” (31)

— In order to better understand yourself, be prepared to investigate the what and why behind your habits, addictions and worries for far longer than you might want to. Act like a scientist, collecting data about yourself, so that when it is time to implement changes, you know exactly how to target the real causes of your behaviors and exactly what types of rewards you respond to. Be ready to ask yourself: (1) What triggered this behavior? What am I feeling right before, during, and after I engage in it? (2) What am I getting from this behavior? There must be some reward if I keep doing it. (3) Did I learn anything about myself my assessing my thoughts and behaviors? (4) What is my tipping point? At what point did I continue to engage in an act, even though it was no longer making me feel good?

— Acting like a jerk about doing things you don’t like can lead you to create a “bad attitude habit loop”about certain activities (doing your taxes, taking out the trash) that makes the act far worse than it needs to be. (141) Can you adopt a better attitude toward the task, perhaps even develop an “if you can’t get out of it, get into it” mindset? Curiosity and playfulness can replace dread and complaints over the task, decreasing its power to drain you and those around you.

— When we criticize ourselves for past mistakes, we erroneously think that make us less likely to make mistakes in the future. In reality, it causes us makes us dwell on the mistakes rather than learning from them and moving on.

— Curiosity is key to helping you dismantle bad habits — What triggered my desire for a treat? Why am I reaching for the candy? How would breaking my good habits feel? — because it interrupts the of flow of the habit and allows us time to pause and try something else. Diving deep into who you are and why you do they things you do can be satisfying. We can turn knowledge into power and answer the question: is a cookie the only thing that would ease my distress or is there something else I could do?

Emotional First Aid by Guy Winch (2013)

Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries

This book is such a gem: it is a straight-forward, practical guide for actionable ways we can manage the “everyday” emotional crises we all find ourselves in from time to time (or, often, during COVID). Much like we keep a stocked medicine cabinet, this book could be a staple on every shelf, a place to turn when we find ourselves in a challenging situation. It would make a great gift for a student heading off to college!

Diving deep into eight common problems — Rejection, Loneliness, Loss, Trauma, Guilt, Rumination, Failure, Low Self-Esteem — Winch lays out simple steps we could take to address the problem and help improve our situation. His advice is simple and almost immediately actionable, with clear explanations for what to do and why it helps.

In the book’s best chapter, Loneliness, Winch explains the common stumbling blocks for managing and overcoming loneliness and presents six proactive activities a person could take part in to build up their lagging social skills and find ways to ease back into a more full life. For example he suggests empathy exercises; recommends adopting a pet, and even advocates doing more volunteer work as possible ways to combat the pangs of loneliness.

An excellent and immensely useful book.

Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant (2017)

In the wake of her husband’s sudden death, author and CEO Sheryl Sandberg found herself it deep and uncharted waters: a heart-broken widow and single mother, navigating grief for the first time. Sheryl cast around for some guidance: she wanted a set of steps to follow or a rule book to explain what to expect (from herself and others) and how to handle these overwhelming tidal waves of emotion.

What she found left her deeply unsatisfied, her grief did not seem to fit into the patterns described in books or by acquaintances. Her grief was marked by episodes of molten rage interspersed with days of fragility more extreme than she had ever before experienced. She asked her friend, psychologist and researcher Adam Grant, to help her find her way back to steadier ground. Adam taught her about proven psychological tools that could help her and her children learn to adjust to their new lives. His advice was so valuable that the two decided to write a book to share their insights with others.

The result of their combined efforts is Option B, part-memoir and part self-help book. Sheryl shares her real world struggles with grief and Adam shares strategies that can help ease the pain. While the book is not perfect — it feels stilted at times and the book attempts to reach a bit too far at others — on balance, Option B does offer readers some good advice.

Among the most useful strategies are:

–Accepting that there is no timeline for “getting over” your grief and setting rigid rules for recovering are harmful to individuals working through grief.

–Rage is a part of grief. The anger felt at the future that is lost when a loved one dies is real and should not be seen as a sign of personal failing.

— Allowing emotions to rise up and run their course is necessary. While crying jags are admittedly difficult for those around the grieving person, it is far better to be able to openly express emotions than bottle them up. (As Sheryl notes, if she allowed herself to cry often, the moments past quickly. If she suppressed the desire, her sadness often engulfed her.)

–We need to craft ways to keep our loved ones alive in our hearts and minds. Erasing them from our words and actions makes the bereaved feel as if their loved one was never alive. (Sheryl found simply allowing herself to say her husband’s name eased the heartache she and her children felt when they thought they weren’t supposed to mention him at all.)

— We need others to help us with our grief. We cannot do this alone. Loss is part of everyone’s life and sharing our pain can help heal our collective wounds.

We are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen (2020)

“The truth is alchemical. It transmutes the bitterness of pain and dishonesty and shame into something else, something we can actually live in and stand on.” 95

In this short but powerful memoir, Laura McKowen describes the amazing, beautiful, expansive life that she found on the other side of her alcohol addiction. Rather than rehash the many sins she committed while drinking — although she does not shy away from revealing the terrible choices she made while under the influence — McKowen focuses the lessons in this book on the many, many ways getting sober has shown her the magic of everyday life.

McKowen spent decades of convincing herself that her drinking was an asset to her life: a way to dull the anxiety and unpredictability; a way to ignore her inner critic; a way to forge social connections when she felt out of step. What she realized after she was forced to give it up was that it did none of those things. Instead it robbed her of social connections, it amplified her anxiety, and it made things far more volatile than they would otherwise be. It made her a liar. Only in removing it could she see how much she was missing and how blinded she really was.

“Lying and withholding is the cheapest, easiest way to control others. You control their perception, control their response to you, control who you need them to be. In telling the truth, I was surrendering control with the hope that it would lead to something different. I hoped it would lead to something real.” 166

The author walks readers through the heartbreaking, painful process of getting sober and staying that way; and the even harder process of learning how to take her second chance and make it something extraordinary. These are essays about self-doubt transfiguring into self-love; about fears of ordinariness transforming into a reverence for the beauty of the every-day. They talk about taking full responsibility but leaving behind blame and about building a life that is unencumbered by the lies that are the bedfellows of addiction.

“This is the singular hard truth I come up against every day: I am the only one responsible for my experience. I decide what I let in; I decide who I let in; I decide how to perceive things; I chose it all. And it is, in my experience, the primary difference between those who recover and those who don’t. People who stay sick choose to keep blaming.” 178

Laura McKowen is a gorgeous writer and her words paint vivid pictures of her journey:  the horrors of being unable to control her drinking even as it was tearing her life apart but more importantly she fearlessly illustrates how she came to piece herself back together and build an entirely new life, this one built on honesty, love, and reverence for the luck of getting to live at all. Life, after all, is completely amazing all by itself…no enhancements needed.

 

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple (2016)

When Eleanor Flood wakes up on October 8th, she vows that today will be different. Mired down in the haze of a depression that she recognizes but has no motivation to treat; seeing the way her indifference and malaise effects her husband and son but unable to change, the things Eleanor hopes to make different on this day are small and simple things. She sets out to engage more with her son, infuse a small bit of romance into date-night, and perhaps be slightly more gracious to an annoying acquaintance. Eleanor gets her wish, her day does end up different. However, the magnitude of ways that her day is very, very different than usual catch her completely off-guard and shake up her entire life.

“I don’t meant to ruin the ending for you, sweet child, but life is one long headwind. To make any kind of impact requires self-will boarding on madness. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. What the world is, more than anything,? It is indifferent.”

The shell-shocked state that Eleanor has lived in for so long — self-cushioned from too much involvement or attachment in order to protect herself when it all falls apart — is cracked wide-open and there is no escaping the emotions, the memories, and the heartache that this day has in store for her. She is being forced to face the truth of her life and herself and deal with everything she has so artfully avoided, head on.

As the day presents Eleanor with one bizarre challenge after another, she finds she can no longer dodge her growing list of problems — personal, professional, martial — and so, in her own messy, clumsy way she begins unpacking all of the things she has worked so, so hard to suppress.

“Building a wall around the past: it seemed like the only solution at the time. And for years, it had worked. But today the wall had kinda buckled.”

What happens to her is that she must accept her flaws, and how they have affected the people around her, even though it is terrifying and painful. She feels “the ache of the myriad of ways she has disappointed” her family. Her detachment had created a rift between her and her husband; between her and her son; and between her and the world she fought so hard to keep from causing her pain. October 8th will be the day she finally takes a step towards closing the rift, a step towards making things different.

“If underneath anger was fear, then underneath fear was love. Everything came down to the terror of losing what you love.”

Just as she did in her best-seller Where Did you Go Bernadette?, Maria Semple has created a main character who is definitely flawed, most likely crazy, but still undeniably lovable. Eleanor’s story is complicated and winding, filled with wonderfully funny moments and achingly tender ones as well. You understand Eleanor’s neuroses and confusion (even if it her flavor of crazy is foreign to you), because Semple’s outstanding writing makes you feel and understand them so poignantly. You cannot help rooting for Eleanor to make her day, and her life, different.

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Re-read. Original post published on November 13, 2016