Menopause was a shock - but should we blame it for everything that goes wrong in midlife?

One day you can be tootling along minding your own business and then bam! the menopause hits and all the wheels fall off.

For comedian Lucy Porter she was knocked sideways when the hormonal changes started causing debilitating symptoms. 

“Menopause was a shock,” the 53-year-old tells Ateh Jewel in this weeks Second Act podcast. “I did feel like, oh, this is inescapable.”

She was grateful when people started sharing wellness advice to help her cope. But when she found all of her ailments were being linked to menopause, she began to question what was real and what was fake. 

There have been a lot of questions asked recently about meno-washing - where so called experts are marketing products and services to us linking everything back to the menopause. 

While symptoms such as hot sweats, insomnia, anxiety, aching joints can all be very real, sometimes Lucy says it’s easy to blame everything on menopause without looking at the wider picture.

“The positivity about practicing mindfulness and doing yoga is great and I do all these things and they really do help,” the mother of two says.

“But fundamentally, I think it's fine to go actually, there is just stuff that I'm finding really hard to cope with at the moment. And some of it may be menopause, some of it isn't it?

“And I do think a lot of things get blamed on menopause now. You look up anything and if you're a menopausal woman, it's like, oh yeah, hay fever gets much worse in the menopause. And I'm like, It can't all be menopause. 

“I don't know everything that's wrong with me is menopause?”

While she has struggled with ‘terrible’ insomnia and mood swings there has been an upside.

“I'm delighted not to have periods anymore.”

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By way of allowing herself and friends to have a rant at all that life is throwing at us at this stage in life, rather than just taking another collagen supplement and a guided meditation, Lucy wrote a new book Middle-Aged Women Get Sh*t Done: A Manifesto (or a Cry for Help?).  It addresses the moment many women discover they are stuck in a ‘sandwich’ where they are looking after elderly parents and young children while navigating their own issues of menopause.

“I was talking to all of my friends and we were in such similar situations and we're all really different. 

“We do different jobs, the only thing we really have in common is age, and all of us were just having a really shitty time. 

“You're not joyful in the way that you used to be sometimes, but because you're with other middle aged women when we get together you can relax.

“I was looking at my friends and thinking, they are all so phenomenal, and they are all coping with all of this stuff in their own ways, and doing different stuff. And I just thought I'd really like to write a book, which sort of reflected what we're all going through.

She adds: “You don't have to keep it all together and just be very positive all the time. It's exhausting.”

“With everybody else's demands on you and your own demands on yourself, menopause comes at the worst possible time. You should reschedule menopause.

“I will have the menopause, but could I just do it some other time, because I've got stuff to do. The menopause and then dead. That'll be fine. Save it up for the end.”