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Your Hotflashes Started During Childhood · Living Midlife In Color

• Shar'da: Hello, welcome back. And you know what, y'all, I have to give y'all a little bit of a disclaimer. This episode is gonna be about high flashes. But wait, please, please, please, before you write me off, before you go, I don't want to hear about these high flashes, I'm gonna be talking about high flashes, but not in the way that you think. All right. I'm gonna give you a little bit of a preview. What if I told you that women of color, black women, experience high flashes more frequent and more intense than white women? How about them apples? And the reason why I want to do this today, this episode, is because I have a pretty vivid memory of me younger. We're out to eat out in public, and out of nowhere, it's like my mom just burst and just sweat, dripping sweat, dripping off her forehead, beating down. My dad is trying to fan her off with his hand. She's got the napkin, the paper towel. She's trying to dab herself. And I was in my 20s at the time. And I'm thinking to myself, What's happening? Why is she just bursting? It's so embarrassing that at the age of 20, maybe even mid to late 20s at that, I had no idea what a high flash was and how bad it could get. At that time, I thought that high flashes were something that just happened that night because I would mostly hear night sweats. And I would associate high flashes with just sweating at night. But another reason why I almost did not do this episode because at some part of me also feels like you hear about hop lashes all over. I mean, you're turning on the TV and you see the woman standing in front of the freezer, fanning herself off, opening and closing the freezer door. You got, you know, the woman with the fan, but they're trying to sell you hormone replacement therapy. They're trying to sell you medications, not hormone medications to treat hop flashes. So I'm like, the people do not want to hear my take about hop flashes. The people are getting so sick and tired. Hearing about this, but like I said, my studies have taken me down a rabbit hole and found out some things about myself that I just have to share because you know I don't believe in gatekeeping. I hope to reach the women that are already experiencing hot flashes and wondering why she is experiencing hot flashes more frequent than her friends or her co workers, and I also hope to reach people like me that 20 year old 25 year old Sardet that had no idea. What a hot flash was and why we got them. So before we get into all that, let's first go ahead and lay some groundwork. Then the groundwork that I want to lay is by starting with what a hot flash really is. So bear with me again because I'm going to get a little clinical. You know I'm a nurse practitioner by by trade. So vasomotor symptom or BMS, when you hear that, I'm sure you have. Vasomotor symptoms refer to both hot flashes and night sweats. They're different. Hot flashes are It happened during the day and night sweats are hot flashes that happen at night while you're trying to sleep. So peri during perimenopause, your estrogen can definitely fluctuate significantly before settling at that new low normal after menopause. These hormonal changes, these lower levels of estrogen can affect the brain temperature regulation symptom system. These hormonal changes, this change of estrogen affects the brain temperature regulation system, including the hypothalamus. The temperature range in your brain comfortably starts to tolerate a new narrow. So a very sudden, small temperature change can include, can induce nice sweats, flushing, sweating, sometimes palpitations, and sometimes. a chill afterwards. A woman used to come into the office talking about their having chills. I'm like, that can't be perimenopause. Because perimenopause, you hop flashes, not chills. Wrong. So basically your internal thermostat has gotten real particular about what it's willing to start tolerating. And of course, you can't talk about perimenopause and hop flashes without talk about estrogen. Estrogen definitely belongs in this hop flash conversation. But what I want you to take away is that estrogen is where the story should start. But it isn't necessarily where it ends. Now let's go ahead and drive this back to what it may mean for you if you are a woman of color. So there was a study performed by Swan. Okay. And Swan followed a racially and ethnically diverse group of women through perimenopause. And during that journey, black women consistently reported a greater burden of vasomotor symptoms. Vasomotor, again, high flashes and nice. You know what? For the sake of this, I am not going to say vaso motor symptoms anymore because I feel like it's it's getting harder to roll it off the tongue. I'm gonna start saying high flashes because that's what you know it as, and that's how I was raised knowing it as. So Vasomotor Symptoms or BMS is high flashes from this point forward. So, anyway, if you are wondering how long should hop flashes last, on average, hop flashes should last about 7.47 and a half years. But for black women, black women, you can have experienced high flashes for about 10 years. Again, that average is 7.4. But for white women, white women experience high flashes for about six and a half years. Black women have also reported during that study more frequent and bothersome symptoms in multiple studies, multiple analysis, mind you. So now it bags to question. If we are all going through perimenopause involving estrogen, we all have estrogen, black, white, Native American, Asian. Why aren't we all experiencing it the same way? So this right here, this is where it gets deep. Cause you know I had to figure out why. And to be honest with you, there really isn't a clean-cut answer. There's an umbrella of reasons why. Researchers looked at Your session social economic status. Fancy for how much money you have. Okay. They looked if you were one of these kind of people who were chronically stressed. I don't mean the stress like you're out driving and somebody cuts you off and you get a little, you know, upset. No, I mean that stress that you just can't seem to dodge one thing after the other. And your body has to find itself constantly having to adapt to these stressors. Okay. If you were the type that experienced childhood adversity, and we're going to get into that because that's that one's going to get deep. So bear with me. If you're the type that constant discrimination, discrimination could be a reason why we may experience hot flashes longer and more frequent than people of other races. And then there's the things like smoking, that's what you can control. Your BMI or your weight, that's what you can control. Physical activity, get up, girl, you can control that mental health or other medical conditions. And then, of course, one thing that we don't really take into consideration is if you have access to health care. Some people don't. Some people live in a very rural environment where the nearest clinic is miles away. And it may be hard to get to. So race tells us that there is a disparity, but race by itself doesn't tell us why. The disparity exists. So let's talk about two pieces of research that really got my attention and what I really want to bring to you in this episode today. First, your childhood. Your childhood matters. The things you experience in your childhood can be a reason why you may experience more frequent and more intense hot flashes. There's this thing that's called ace, not ace of space, we're not playing cards. ACE A C E mean adverse childhood experiences. And so what an ACE is, is a potentially traumatic or chronically stressful experience that you have in your childhood. Examples of ACEs could be the some things that are obvious, like physical or emotional, or even sexual abuse. But the things that are less are emotional neglect, emotional abuse, because not all abuse takes form by way of hand or you know, physical. If you constantly witness violence in your home or in your neighborhood, you know, I remember quite some years ago that I dated a guy and he grew up in a rough streets in a rough town and he would tell me how difficult it was to live in such an environment. Things that I was shielded from when I was a child. Constantly hearing gunshots outside of your home, being scared to take the stairs in the building that you live in, being scared to walk to the bus stop. These are things that can be considered ACES. All right. Or if you lived in a household where there was substance abuse problems, and I'm not talking about just your parents, it could be your siblings too. When I like I said, I'm a provider and I am constantly meeting 20-year-olds, 21-year-olds who have been struggling with alcohol since the age of 13. Hard drugs since the age of 13. That they have not been able to kick now that they're 20 and 30 years old. All these things count. If you grew up in a household where someone has a mental illness that they had trouble getting a hold of, if you lived in a household who if you lived in a household that was a product of a very rocky and very scary separation or divorce, all these things. Our ACES. All right. These are things that we don't really take into consideration when we're talking talking about traumatic experience. And like I said before, if this information is triggering, I apologize. And I want to take this time to also say that this is a time where we need to, if if if this is something that applies to you, it's okay to seek out mental health. As a matter of fact. Cognitive behavior therapy has also earned its place when we're talking about controlling hot flashes. So, what can childhood adversity do? Well, of course, we all know that childhood is a major period of when our brain is developing. So, repeated adversity can influence developing that brain and stress response system. So, better yet, the Developing brain adapts to the environment that it experiences. And if your your brain is constantly in fight or flight mode, con constantly stressed. A child's brain learns how to survive their environment in skipping. And sometimes though adaptations don't simply disappear because you have grown up. And so here is the connection that I'm trying to make right here. Bear with me. Here's the connection. That swan study, that swan study we talked about before. Follow 332 women, black and white women, for about eight years. And throughout the entire eight years, they checked in on them about once a year. And these this is the results that it found. Childhood abuse or neglect was associated with approximately seventy-three percent higher odds of high flashes. It gets worse. Hold on. Childhood abuse or neglect was associated with approximately 75% higher odds of night sweats. Isn't that insane? So that means that if you were a woman that experienced childhood abuse or neglect, you have 75% higher odds of experiencing. Hot flashes during the day, anytime, or night sweats at sleep. But wait a minute, wait a minute, this is the part that really shook me to my core. Childhood physical or sexual abuse histories were associated with one and a half to two times as many physiologically detected vasomotor symptoms during sleep. I don't even know how to take that. I don't know if I should be more upset at the fact that so many vulnerable children were abused when they were young, or the fact that That abuse you experienced when you were younger carries on to you well into your middle to late 40s. That's crazy. So something that happened to a woman decades before menopause was associated with how she experienced haplashes decades later. That just makes me stop. You know what I mean? And then I found some research on discrimination. That spawn, that swan is for the people. The swan be looking into helping us out. In 2024, they did another analysis. This time the analysis involved about just a little over twenty three hundred women. And they found that greater discrimination was associated with greater odds of reporting vasomotor symptoms. Chronic discrimination was associated with some persistently higher system patterns. But and this is important, I don't want Wait, but this is this is important. I'm not saying that racism equals hot flashes. The point that I'm trying to make here is that choose your provider carefully. Okay. There isn't such thing of receiving discrimination from your medical provider. As a matter of fact, there's another study. As you can tell by now, I'm a bit of a geek. I love to read. So there's another study that reported that Black women were less likely to receive hormone replacement therapy from their provider. Now I know what you're thinking before I mentioned that I was not handed out hormone replacement therapy because I didn't feel qualified and educated enough to do so. That's completely different from what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the providers who were doing it for some, but not all. Lifetime social experiences may be one one piece of a much more compli complicated physiological story. I'm not telling you again that high flashes causes racism. Please don't take that from here. That's not what the research says. I'm telling you that there is research showing discrimination is associated with vasomotor symptoms, and that's a conversation I don't remember having with anybody when I was in the office. And we I mentioned before. That discrimination could also be by way of the environment that you live in. You could be in an environment, in a poorer environment, in an underserved environment. I've been to these places where the clinics, the healthcare doctors' offices, the hospitals are very few and far between. But what you see most, what you're gonna see is you're gonna see the cash advance stores and you're gonna see the liquor stores on every other corner. But for the woman who is trying to get to her doctor's appointment to take care of herself and her family. Those places are miles away. Can't even take a bus out there. But wait, there's more. There's more. So far, I talked to you about how your childhood can affect your basal motor symptoms. I talked to you about discrimination, how that can affect your basal motor symptoms. But there's a third one that I found out. There's stress. Stress also deserves its place in this conversation because stress interacts with multiple physiological symptoms: anxiety, depression, sleep, social economic strain, discrimination, trauma, health conditions. All these little things they don't exist in separate little boxes. They all play on each other. I can't imagine that there is a lack of stress where you're under social economic strain. I can't imagine that you're not stressed when you're feeling like you're being discriminated against. I can't imagine that discrimination does not cause stress. I can't imagine that socioeconomic strain does not cause stress. The relationships between all these things run in both directions. So symptoms themselves can create stress and disrupt sleep. I don't want you hearing stress matters and translating that into thinking that it's your fault. I want you hearing that your environment also belongs in your health history. So this takes me back into it's okay to get therapy if you need it, because the last thing you want for yourself is experiencing is all those things you experienced back in the day in your childhood, growing up and your upbringing. to show up as an adult when you're trying when you made a little bit of headway to get get yourself together. And there's a concept. There's a concept called weathering that fits beautifully into this conversation. And weathering proposes that cumulative social and economic adversity could contribute to health deterioration over time. And I think you've seen this. I think you may have seen weathering without even knowing it. Have you ever, I watch it on reality TV, I watch it on crime TV, and they'll show these people who are my same age, but who've had it a lot harder than myself. They've been in and out of jail. They've been struggling with substance abuse. They're your same age, but boy, do they look like they've had 10 plus years on you. That is weathering. A woman finally arrives to perimenopause carrying your own health history, your childhood experiences, dealing with stress, internal stress, stress of your environment, social economic circumstances, stress of relationships. Stress of your parents and changing hormones? Point, Lion, is your ovaries didn't turn 45 in isolation. Your entire body did. And that body came into midlife carrying everything that it's lived through. So that's why black women, women of color, report more frequent and more intense hot flashes. Boy, boy, did I just blow the lid off that one? It gets so deep, y'all. So when I say let's get to the root, I'm not saying forget about hormone therapy, no, because menopausal hormone therapy is an effective treatment for appropriate candidates, of course. There are also non hormonal treatments, including certain antidepressants and non hormonal treatments like VIOSA. I'm sure you've seen, you know, people on TV talking about VIOSA. But treat the woman who also has some underlying stress. Give her options. Don't just replace the hormones ignoring everything else that she's going through. How can we reduce the symptoms? I also Let me l I hope when you when you listen to me, when you take when the point that I hope you get from this is I am not anti hormone therapy. I am not anti medication. I'm reduced I'm not gonna reduce a woman to one hormone when there's an entire life attached to that body. So what can my girlies actually do about this? Because I'm not just gonna rain on the parade without offering the sun afterwards. What I want you to start doing is I want you to start tracking your s your symptoms. And these days, there are plenty of apps that you can use. You can track your periods. That's a good one to track. You can track your symptoms, like I mentioned, hot flashes, night sweats, mood, anxiety, the whole nine. Or you can take it old fashioned and you can just write it down on pen and paper, get you a calendar, write it down. Next thing you need to do is to take that tracker, take your piece of paper, take your calendar, whatever it's that you're using, and you need to talk to a professional healthcare professional, a professional healthcare provider. Don't go to anybody like I was doing back in the day, who the f the very first moment you mention hot flashes or perimetopause, they're giving you the deer in a headlights look because they have no idea what you're what you're experiencing. And they already made in their mind that they're not going to have that conversation with you. They're going to ship you off to women's health, okay? What you can also start doing, my girl is start protecting your sleep. Easier said than done. I know. Try to get yourself six, a minimum of six hours of sleep at night. And then, of course, you don't want to have perimenopause blanket or cast a shadow over everything else that you have going on, other health conditions. Okay. If you're diabetic, get that under control. Thyroid, get it under control. Because don't suffer just because you've been told that it's just menopause. And for the women who are 37, 38, 39, thinking, Lord, please let this miss me, but you know you won't because you watched your parents go through it. Learn perimenopause before you are in the middle of perimenopause. Know your medical and your family history. Take care of your cardiovascular and metabolic health. Because women who have higher lipid levels or higher cholesterol and women who have higher BMIs or a little bit on the heavy, thick them thick, whatever you want to call it, it's all baby slim thick slimming the waist thick in the thighs is still thick in the thighs okay if you're a heavy if you have a heavier bMI that may put you at risk for having more frequent BMIs pay attention to your cycle and when your body is changing okay because I would rather teach you per what perimenopause looks like at 37 than to have to met you at 45 and wondering what in the hell is going on My goodness, y'all. I feel like I went off. I feel like it's getting a little heavy. So let's take a little pause before I wrap up with Final Reflection. And we are going to do XR the MP. So XR the MP is a segment that I like to do where I answer questions that I have been asked. People DM me with questions all the time. I'll take one. I'm going to answer it here. So if you have a question, go ahead and DM me with your question or leave a comment under the under the video. And I would love to answer it. But then if you also want a more intimate segmenting, you are all welcome to apply to join me inside of my Midlife Method community where I get together and answer questions on a monthly basis. Now, question is, ooh, and I love this one too because it's more of a personal. Because sometimes I think that I'm a little too heavy on the clinical, the nurse practitioner stuff. And I give you guys a hard time about that. So I love when I get a question that's more personal. And the question is, Sharday, what's something you care less about now that you're 40? This is a good one. You know what? Something that I care less about now is being right. Back in the day. I always had to be right. I always had to I had to have the last word. And today I care so much less about that stuff. You know, there is a sense of wisdom and maturity when you just can learn to disagree with the person, learn to agree to disagree with the person. And there is also a sense of maturity and knowing that you still have some room to grow and learn. I tell my nephews all the time that the smartest person in the room is a person who is willing to admit when they are wrong and also know that there is plenty of room to grow and learn. So, like I said, if you have a question, go ahead and leave that in the comments. And I will love to answer. thank you for whoever sent me that. I won't say your name, but I I thank you to whoever asked me that question. So anyway, let's go ahead and get to the wrap-up. Estrogen matters, brain matters, your health history matters, your childhood matters, your stress may matter. All these things matter and all these things can be used to address the question as to why black women experience more frequent and intense hot flashes. And for the women who are in this boat, I hope I provided some validation to you today because it's not just in your head. we have to stop separating hormones from the body that they live in. And maybe we shouldn't separate the body from the life that is lived either. All right. Hope you enjoyed this episode of Living Mid Life in Color. Same woman. New chapter. Until next time.