Menopause Symptoms: Loss of Female Libido
If you're a woman in your forties, you know that menopause is right around the corner. You may already have started to feel differently: your periods have started to become more irregular, you may be gaining a little weight unexpectedly, or have trouble sleeping, or have occasional hot flashes. These are signs that you are in the lead-up period – called perimenopause – to having your final menstrual cycle, after which you will finally hit menopause. While it doesn't feel great, it's a natural and unavoidable part of getting older.
Menopause affects women in different ways, but nearly all of them are connected with the changes experienced in your biology after you have your last period. When menopause hits, the ovaries stop functioning as well as they used to. This leads to changes in hormone production, especially estrogen, the hormone that's intimately connected to a wide-variety of important bodily functions including mental acuity, regulating mood, and fertility. Since estrogen takes part in managing a healthy metabolism, less of it in the body leads to an accumulation of fat and an overall lowering of energy. A decrease in estrogen levels is also part of why women start to experience osteoporosis – bone loss – as this hormone is a crucial part of the process of promoting bone maintenance and formation. But one thing which surprises many women when estrogen production starts to decrease? Their sex drive plummets.
Estrogen and libido are uniquely connected in a roundabout way that nonetheless shows how important this hormone is. Technically, it is androgens – male hormones, like testosterone – which take the lead in promoting a higher sex drive, but they can only do this job when in the presence of estrogen. Without it, androgens can actually decrease the desire for sex, which is why women reaching menopause often suffer from a weak sex drive despite technically having higher levels of testosterone in their body. It turns out that neither male nor female hormones can do the job on its own: they need each other.
Besides affecting libido on a chemical level, low estrogen can affect the sex drive in even more ways. Estrogen affects the health and vitality of the uterus and vagina, and when things begin to change physically in this area, it can affect the desire to have sex. After estrogen levels go down, women often experience vaginal dryness. Without the natural lubrication that comes with arousal – something that used to make sex simple – vaginal intercourse instead becomes painful, meaning that women are more likely to avoid trying to initiate sex in the first place knowing that it will probably hurt. Mood also has an enormous impact on sexual desire, and since women who experience a decrease in estrogen levels often feel sudden swings in mood from sad to angry to depressed, it becomes less likely that they will be in the mood to be intimate. This could put a strain on a woman's personal relationships, leading to more stress, which can keep the libido down even more.
The good news is that there are several ways to help restore sex drive. For example, there are lots of different natural and homeopathic supplements that can help some women to increase sexual desire. Some of these come in the form of aphrodisiacs like epimedium (horny goat weed), avena sativa, or damiana leaf, which go to work directly on the genitalia to make you more easily aroused. Other treatments can treat individual symptoms of estrogen loss, like maca, which can improve mood and promote better hormone function, and wild yam, which can decrease vaginal dryness.
Other options include hormone replacement therapy, which comes in many forms – pills, creams, and patches among them – which introduce more estrogen into the body to make up for what has been lost through the effects of menopause. While this treatment is not for everyone, it has been shown to provide some benefits and reduce the side effects of menopause, and that includes low libido. Many women who take hormone replacement therapy have seen an improvement in their sex drive, having more sexual thoughts and desiring sex as frequently as they did before menopause.
The problems of menopause will affect every woman. The important things to keep in mind? 1) It happens to all women, 2) there are ways to deal with them, and most importantly, 3) they won't last forever