Struggling with making the bed, walking up stairs? Is your favourite yoga class all of a sudden a lot harder? Have you said ‘Gosh I’m so unfit’ a lot lately? Maybe it’s not that you’re unfit, maybe it’s your fluctuation in hormones playing havoc with your breathing.
Studies show that 20% of Women will experience shortness of breath as they journey through perimenopause, I think it’s WAAAAAYYYY more but I’ll get into that later.
There are 52+ symptoms of menopause, I’ve listed some of them here. Now if you’ve googled menopause symptoms then it’s likely that breathlessness didn’t come up on the search, but science is starting to pay more attention to this ‘rare’ symptom. But most
So why does breathlessness turn up during our perimenopause journey? Here’s the thing your incredible cyclical hormones have been adjusting the way you breathe monthly since puberty. Both estrogen and progesterone play a big part in our respiratory health and as these start to fluctuate and reduce our breath starts to feel the effects.
Now I will try my hardest to go full on breathing nerd on you, but I do think it’s important you understand what is going on with this changes, so here goes…
What estrogen gets up to
Let’s start by chatting about estrogen, estrogen has been found to support our respiratory system and enhance the structure of our lungs and airways. It’s also been shown to reduce inflammation response which protects the lung tissue from damage. As estrogen fluctuates and falls, that gorgeous support falls with it. With a heightened inflammation response we see an increase in inflammatory lung conditions such as asthma. With a reduction in structure and strength we see snoring and sleep apnea.
Estrogen also maintains muscle health, as it declines we can start to see weakening of the muscles including 2 key muscle for breathing, your diaphragm and your tongue. Our primary breathing muscle, the diaphragm should be doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to breathing (should be, for many people it isn’t doing it’s job even before menopause but that’s for another blog). If we are not exercising the diaphragm during this hormonal change then it can start to get weaker and cause the secondary breathing muscles to start working harder, bringing our breath up to the top of our chest. This can make it feel like you can’t get that meaningful deep breath that you used to.
The tongue is the same, it can become weak during perimenopause if we don’t exercise it and keep it in the correct position (check out my post on the tongue and perimenopause). This weakening can see an increase in mouth breathing as well as a chance of the tongue obstructing the airways during sleep.
Progesterone playing its part
Now progesterone has been shown to support the movement of all our breathing muscles as well as keeping our airways open. So just like above when its starts to decline we can lose some of the movement if we aren’t regularly exercising those muscle and we can start to see closure of airways, especially during sleep.
The other symptoms playing around with your breathing
Now as i said earlier i suspect that more than 20% of women on their perimenopausal journey are experiencing breathlessness and that’s because that 20% does not include people who have other symptoms that are probably causing shortness of breath, including anxiety, osteoporosis, insomnia, heart palpitations, dizziness and allergies worsening.
It’s not all doom and gloom I promise
Look, yes your 2nd spring can bring some big changes in your breathing as well as other areas in your body and mind, but these changes absolutely do not need to be permanent. Creating a daily routine to retrain your breathing is where you need to start. That’s exactly what my clients do in the friendly breathing programme. If you want to understand the 3 steps that my clients take then watch my free training where I give you exactly what we do to overcome breathing challenges in perimenopause and beyond.
(pssst, you get a 2nd freebie with the training that you absolutely don’t want to miss)
