A ninety-seven-year-old man goes into his doctor’s office and says, “Doc, I want my sex drive lowered.”
“Sir,” replied the doctor, “you’re ninety-seven. Don’t you think your sex drive is all in your head?”
“You’re darned right,” replied the old man. “That’s why I want it lowered!”
Hmm … wasn’t sex just a given? Didn’t you think that this one life pleasure was just something you never even had to think about? You want it … you have a partner … bingo. There it is.
I think the one subject that comes up more often than any other when I am speaking to a group is sex, or I might say the absence of sex. “The feeling is just gone,” I hear from so many women. “It’s not that I don’t want to ‘do’ it, it’s just that I can’t feel anything.”
And what about men? How many times a day do you see commercials on television for Viagra or the blue pill? Or the one that really cracks me up, which warns, “If your erection lasts more than four hours, call your physician”? What a sales pitch. I can feel men running to the phones to get that one. Four hours! But what has happened to both sexes that suddenly nature’s most primal urge has become problematic?
Well, let’s first look at stress. Stress is the biggest romance killer that exists. But the other reason is hormones. Remember, stress blunts hormone production. Both women and men will lose their sex hormones in the aging process, and the negative effects are more prevalent today than at any other time in the history of mankind. Why? We are living longer, and we are living more stressful lives.
For women, loss of hormones takes away their feeling. It’s not just that their testosterone is low; it’s that everything is low, and the ratio is off. Without hormones you have no feeling. The sex hormones are your minor hormones: estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, pregnenolone. When you are low or missing your sex hormones … guess what? No sex! No feeling! Research shows that testosterone levels in women in their forties are half the levels of women in their twenties. A similar decline is seen in the levels of DHEA, the primary precursor to testosterone. DHEA peaks at age twenty-five, slips to half that level by age fifty, and may be totally absent in the elderly. Since DHEA is a precursor to testosterone, any reduction in DHEA results in lower testosterone levels. Testosterone increases genital blood flow, which increases sensitivity and responsiveness of the clitoris. Hormonal balance, including testosterone replacement, will reawaken a sleeping clitoris. This is a good thing. This is quite a simple problem to fix if you have a doctor who gets it. I know this from experience. I lost my sex hormones, and I experienced this awful dead feeling (my sleeping clitoris). I love my husband deeply, and we have always enjoyed each other sexually very much, then all of a sudden … nothing. I could “do” it, but I would rather be reading a magazine. In fact, the best sex for me during this time was when the TV was on because then I could still watch the program and “get it over with.” But this is not the way I wanted it.
I had never been one of those women who “wanted to get it over with.” I was always a willing participant. I loved it.
I was embarrassed to tell my husband; I was embarrassed to tell my doctor. I didn’t understand hormones adequately at the time to understand that what I was experiencing was not emotional but physical. My body was not working correctly. I was experiencing severe hormonal loss. The vagina must have adequate amounts of estrogen. Low estrogen levels decrease vaginal lubrication and thin the vaginal lining, which results in vaginal dryness, itching, burning, and painful intercourse. Low levels of estrogen also reduce vaginal blood flow and impede nerve transmission, which impairs sexual function. If I’d understood the syndrome better at the time, I also would have noticed that I couldn’t sleep more than two hours at a time, that I was sweating all night, my body itched from head to toe, I had headaches, I was depressed, I would cry, my stomach was always bloated, I was gaining alarming amounts of weight even though I was eating less, my usual cheerful mood was becoming downright bitchy, I couldn’t think, I was so forgetful that I couldn’t remember who I was calling on the telephone, and then my sex drive dried up. What was wrong? I felt like I needed a psychiatrist. The life I had had left me, and I didn’t like the new one that had taken over my body. No one had prepared me, and my doctors didn’t know what to do. Antidepressants were suggested, so were diet pills, sleeping pills, fat farms, synthetic hormones, and nonfat foods. Nooo! I thought.
There has got to be an answer. As you know, I found it in bioidentical hormone replacement. It was not easy. I went from doctor to doctor, and I was horrified at the way menopause was being treated. There was a complete and total lack of understanding of this passage.
In the defense of the doctors, we were not meant to live this long, so menopause was something hardly thought of in medical school. Then the pharmaceutical companies seized the opportunity and handed out synthetic hormones like candy to the doctors. Finally, the doctors had something to give their female patients to calm them down: synthetic hormones that took away the nastier symptoms, like hot flashes, but did not restore sexuality (or their hormones, since synthetic hormones are not hormones). But what the heck, we’re just women.
For the men they had Viagra, which gave them back humongous hard-ons, so the men thought, Whoopee! This is better than ever. What men have never known is that even though the blue pill gives them erections, the testosterone loss they are experiencing is part of their ongoing body failure. Little by little, these men are falling apart internally, and eventually the symptoms will show up as either cancer, heart attacks, or Alzheimer’s (or all three).
It became clear to me that we women were “on our own.” There was no little blue pill developed for us. And that is probably the good news. If we had a “sex pill,” we might not be so driven to find balance with our hormones. This search for a solution will ultimately save our lives. We don’t have to fall apart and get sick if we find balanced BHRT. Of course, the answer for me was not synthetic and not a drug … the answer was bioidentical hormones, and they have clearly changed the quality of my life.
To regain your sexual feelings, it’s simple. You need to replace your sex hormones with real bioidentical sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone if you need it, maybe DHEA, maybe pregnenolone), mimicking the time in your life when you were your strongest. That is usually about thirty-five years old or even younger. Isn’t it wonderful? You get to be as sexy as your thirty-five-year-old self. You don’t want to replace your hormones to normal status for a woman your age, do you? A woman your age is in hormonal decline; that’s your problem. So if your doctor tells you that you are “normal,” tell him or her you don’t want to be normal for your age. You want to be restored to your healthiest prime. If your doctor just stares at you, thank him or her and leave. This is not the right doctor. You want the “good old days” to come back. Remember when sex was on the kitchen counter or in the bathtub, or when you were on vacation how you would try to sneak it under the blankets on the beach? Remember those fabulous, vibrant times? That’s when we were alive, ready, excited! Bioidentical hormone replacement gives it back to you. I’m giving you extravagant examples, and just because you are not doing it on the beach anymore is not the issue. You just want to feel in the mood and have a good time with it.
For me, today, my life has returned to how it used to be. There are times of the month when I am “more in the mood” than other times, although with a little encouragement I am a willing participant almost anytime. It makes me feel that I am part of the universe again. When I had lost my “feeling,” I felt as if I were on the outside looking in; I felt it was a cruel trick. I finally had the time, I had raised my children, I had put aside my own needs to take care of my family, and now I no longer had the inclination … in other words, the well was dry.
Young women whisper to me constantly that they have no sex drive; women my age just roll their eyes, like “Forget about it”; older women have given up. Did you know we can remain sexual until the very end?
How many of your friends are now sleeping in separate bedrooms? How many of your friends who once had fire in their eyes are no longer touching and joking with their partner anymore? Sex is our human gift. It is our most intimate act. It is how we communicate with our partner. Sex makes us feel alive and young. When my sex drive diminished, it was the only time I started to feel old. I have nothing against getting old; believe me, each year gets better and better for me. The wisdom that is starting to permeate at sixty gets me to thinking how incredible my thoughts will be at eighty and ninety and a hundred. Think of what I will know and will have seen. My goal is to get to each of these stages healthy and with vitality. That’s the mission and goal of antiaging medicine.
If BHRT is not working and you can’t seem to jump-start your libido, find a good sexual urologist to make sure there isn’t a physical problem that is impeding your sex life. A sexual urologist is someone you and your partner can talk with in frank terms, someone who deals with sexual issues all day long. In my book The Sexy Years, I interviewed Dr. Jennifer Berman, a sexual urologist (her address is listed in the Resources section of this book). If there is no issue physically, then find a good antiaging endocrinologist. He or she will take blood or saliva tests to determine your deficiencies and prescribe a bioidentical hormone regimen especially for you, and it won’t take long before “that old feeling” comes back. You must be clear with your doctor that this is one of your issues. He or she is not a mind reader.
If your lack of sexual feeling is psychological, you might want to read Dr. Laura Berman’s book The Passion Prescription. It is loaded with helpful information. A good therapist or sex therapist can help you through issues that might have kept you inhibited or turned off your inner light. Often, overbearing fathers or mothers or religious schools made sex unmentionable or, worse, a “bad thing,” so it might be necessary to get your head screwed on in a different way about it. The services are available, so take advantage of these professionals.
Often, after a woman gives birth, the nerves get cut during the common episiotomy (the cutting of the vagina to make room for the baby to come out), and the new mother is sometimes left with no feelings because the nerve was severed and blood flow to the genital area has been damaged. Couple that with the fact that often after giving birth, a woman suffers from such low progesterone that she experiences the common postpartum depression, and you have a recipe for disaster. Along with the “blues” and depression comes a loss of sexual feeling or appetite. Most doctors don’t know or realize that temporary restoration of natural bioidentical progesterone will not only take away the depression, but will also restore the woman’s sexual feelings. Think about the positive effects of that. Having a new baby in the house is wonderful, but we all know it is a very stressful time. Add the mother’s depression and weepiness, and the poor new father feels completely left out and alone. If there has been nerve or blood flow damage, a sexual urologist can help.
As much as I know and like Brooke Shields, I disagree with her doctor’s treatment. This is a criticism not of her, but of her doctor. Perhaps an antidepressant was her only option, but it made me wonder whether by giving Brooke an antidepressant, her doctor, like so many others, was demonstrating that most likely he or she didn’t understand the hormonal system.
Once the umbilical cord is cut, all the progesterone whooshes out of the mother into the baby. The mother is left in a complete state of hormonal imbalance, which we all know wreaks havoc on her emotions. Depression is often the result. A qualified doctor who understands the hormonal system and how it works would take a blood test to get a hormone panel, replace the missing progesterone to appropriate levels, and possibly replace some estrogen short-term until the woman’s body can rev up again and start producing a full complement of hormones.
Unfortunately, most doctors go the pharmaceutical way. Why would you take a drug when you could take an exact replica of what your body makes and replace what is missing? Besides, if a woman is nursing, she most probably has to stop nursing if she is taking a drug. You wouldn’t want your baby to be getting antidepressants from breast milk. And as you have read earlier in this book about rhythmic cycling, nursing is the greatest thing you can do for the mother’s immune system and the baby’s. The longer you nurse, the more eggs you save, and the healthier both mother and baby will be.
Also, there is always the danger that once on an antidepressant, it’s hard to get off. Antidepressants make you feel good unnaturally. The object in BHRT is to get to a place of such balance that no antidepressant could ever compete.
As you become more informed about bioidentical hormone replacement, you will understand that lack of a sex drive is not an imposed sentence on menopausal women and men. Men can get their testosterone brought back into peak range through replacement. Sometimes men are also low in DHEA, which is another hormone present in both men and women that works in concert with testosterone.
Women can also restore their hormonal systems to balance when they are with the right doctor. Sex does not have to become a distant memory as we age. It can be a vital and satisfying part of life and bring much pleasure and closeness to a relationship.
I truly believe that marriages break up during menopause from lack of understanding. Women who are not hormonally balanced can hardly stand to live with themselves, and it is very difficult on the other members of the family. If the man of the house is getting dumped on day and night because of hormonal imbalance and then on top of it is not having any satisfactory sexual contact, after a while even the nicest guy will say to himself, What do I need this for?
Getting your hormones balanced with real bioidentical hormones can bring you back to the woman or man you used to be.
Sleep … glorious sleep. You never appreciate the fact that sleeping is a daily function until you can’t sleep. Without hormones, it is really impossible to sleep. Without sleep, prolactin keeps escalating. Prolactin is a pituitary hormone that induces lactation and prevents ovulation. Prolactin is the domain of nursing mothers. A mother with a new baby needs to be awakened many times during the night to feed her baby … thus the high prolactin. Nature has provided this phenomenon for the new mother.
A young healthy reproductive woman has a full complement of hormones, and if she goes to bed early, sleep is a given; but as we age and begin to lose our hormones and develop bad sleeping habits, the body gets confused and prolactin keeps escalating.
T. S. Wiley writes in Sex, Lies, and Menopause, “At the end of perimenopause, cortisol soars and estrogen and progesterone hit bottom … just as they do during labor and delivery. At this point in the template, your immune system revs up so high that it may attack your cartilage and mucous membranes, and that scenario creates joint pain (arthritis), allergies, and an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis can also happen. Once your immune system has attacked and halted thyroid function, with the insulin resistance from sleeplessness, you just keep getting fatter” [and more and more tired].
Wonderful things happen in the night if you go to sleep early enough. Early is between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. I know, I know, nobody goes to sleep that early; it is one of the reasons we are in such poor health in our country. As a nation we are sick because we don’t sleep. In fact, sleep loss is the new American deficit. We are fat and diabetic from lack of sleep. We are dying from cancer and heart disease from lack of sleep. Our healing hormones have no chance to do their work without sleep.
When you lose sleep, you really can’t catch up. Your hormones don’t spring back like that. Sleeping less than you need affects at least ten different hormones, not just melatonin. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sleeplessness causes shifts in all these hormones and changes appetite, fertility, and mental and cardiac health.
The National Institutes of Health concludes that six hours of prolactin production in the dark is the minimum necessary to maintain immune function like T-cell and beneficial killer-cell production. But you can’t get six hours of prolactin secretion on six hours of sleep a night. It takes at least three and a half hours of melatonin secretion before you even see prolactin. So if you don’t go to bed two or three hours before midnight, there won’t be enough time for this hormonal action to happen. Remember, if you sleep enough each night, you will lose weight as a result of your cortisol going down. Now you’re listening, aren’t you?
If we go all the way back before electricity, we had to go to sleep when the sun went down. There was no light—at all—so there was no choice. During the night healing hormones would go to work. Going to sleep early caused cortisol levels to drop, and when the cortisol levels were lowered, insulin levels lowered. We had no choice but to sleep until it was light the following morning. When the sun came up, cortisol and insulin levels would rise. Nature had it all worked out beautifully. Plenty of sleep, increased vitality and energy, controlled weight because the lowered insulin at night helped to keep weight at optimum. This is the way it is supposed to work.
Did you ever think that going to bed early was a component of weight loss? If you are eating correctly, exercising in moderation, and going to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., you are ahead of the game.
I tried this experiment on myself this year. I do eat correctly almost all the time, I do exercise in moderation regularly, my hormones are balanced, but there was some extra weight hanging around me through the middle that I just couldn’t shed. I have a lot of stress in my life, and I tax my adrenals regularly as a result. I know that if one hormone is out of whack, they are all out of balance.
So for the past year, I have been going to bed at 9:00 and 10:00 in the evening most nights. Guess what? Without trying, without changing my eating program or changing my exercise routine, I lost ten pounds … from sleeping!
And one more thing—you must sleep in complete darkness. Even the smallest bit of light keeps your cortisol from lowering. Put tape over the computer lights, and the light on the phone, and the light from your digital clock. These tiny bits of light will all affect your sleep and keep your cortisol level high. There was a study done where they put people in a completely dark room except for one tiny pin light on the backs of their knees, and their cortisol stayed high as a result.
In Lights Out, T. S. Wiley says that “an avalanche of peer-reviewed scientific papers supports our conclusion that when we don’t sleep in sync with the seasonal variation in light exposure, we alter a balance of nature that has been programmed into our physiology since day one.” The National Institutes of Health confirms that it is a scientific “given” that light and dark cycles turn hormone production on and off and activate the immune system. According to T. S. Wiley, “If the lack of prolactin at night doesn’t get you, the lack of melatonin ultimately will. Melatonin is the most potent antioxidant known. Less melatonin and more free radicals mean faster aging even without chronic high insulin racking up a ‘clock time’ of four years for every one you live.”
Now here’s the problem: When you are losing hormones and cannot sleep, your doctor most likely will prescribe antidepressants and/or sleeping pills. If your hormones were balanced, believe me you would not have trouble going to sleep. Once you get on the antidepressant merry-go-round, you’ll have a hard time getting off. Why take an antidepressant when balanced hormones and a regimen of proper sleeping will do the same thing, but more effectively and naturally? Because it’s easier for the doctor to give you a pill, and you will feel better. You will sleep better with an antidepressant; you will stop complaining to your doctor. He can go on about his business without having to do the work of trying to get to the bottom of why you seem to need an antidepressant. In essence, you are allowing your doctor to give you a Band-Aid instead of fixing the problem. Then the problem will continue to get worse and worse. He will up your dose, then give you sleeping pills. Your emotions, which were originally calmed down by the antidepressants, will get harder and harder to control. Doesn’t this upset you? But you keep taking the pills because you are feeling so much better … for a while. Then you are going to be bothered by the fact that even though you are enjoying your drugged sleep, and your drug-induced daytime calmness, you will start asking yourself, Why am I gaining so much weight? And you will get fat on antidepressants. The reason is that you haven’t addressed the underlying cause of the problem, which is hormonal imbalance. It happens to everyone—all of us experience hormonal decline as we age. Shockingly, it is happening at earlier and earlier ages. It is not uncommon for women in their mid- to late thirties to start perimenopause because of the stressful lives they are living. Stress blunts hormone production.
Now the antidepressant scenario continues. Guess what—you will lose your sex drive, you will continue to get more and more depressed, and you will eventually get sick because the antidepressant has been a Band-Aid masking the underlying problem, which is hormone decline. Without hormones, the internal “you” starts to decline, then the diseases of aging begin, among them heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
The good news is that bioidentical hormone replacement therapy can rectify this entire scenario, along with sleeping, eating right, and managing stress. It’s a little tricky and will need constant “tweaking” from your doctor because of your surging hormones. But a good qualified doctor will know how to handle this. Remember, sleeplessness and stress will change your hormone levels, and the fact that the surges come and go will change your hormone levels. This is the exciting part of this new medicine; when you are working with your doctor to balance during this tricky phase, you would call when you have even the smallest symptom, because every symptom is an indicator that things are not in balance … and balance is the goal.
As we get older, we tend to produce less DHEA and at the same time more cortisol. I’ve already discussed the dangers of living with high cortisol. Everyday stress blunts hormone production: the argument you had with your husband this morning, the gardener and that damn blower he uses, highway traffic, daily schedules, convincing your teenage daughter that she can’t wear that to school!
I’m also talking about the big stressors in life: a death in the family, a serious illness, that near miss in the car yesterday, divorce, sick children or spouse, money problems, an abusive home, an abusive boss, the daily news about the war and trouble on the globe, 9/11 and the fear of another attack. These are just some of the stresses most of us are living with on a daily basis. Cortisol was originally designed to give us energy to run from saber-toothed tigers, but our bodies never expected that we would be running from the saber-toothed tiger many times every day. We are all under too much stress, and it leads to chronically elevated cortisol levels.
Young people have career stress, middle-aged people have stress from fear of being marginalized, senior people are stressed from ill health and money instability. Stress, stress, stress! No wonder we are all so sick. No wonder we are all on different forms of drugs.
I saw a documentary on one-hundred-year-old people recently, and they were asked, “What’s the secret?” Each one of them (unrelated) said the same thing: Avoid stress and confrontation, and get used to change quickly (by the time you get to be a hundred, you have lost everybody in your life, and if you get dragged down every time someone dies, the stress will eventually get you). We can learn from these wise old (young) people … some of whom claim they are still sexually active!
Stress is the great aging accelerator. All those things you are letting “get to you” are making you old. Calm will keep you young. Stress will literally age your body both inside and out. The danger of continued high cortisol will eventually lead to heart attack, stroke, and/or diabetes. People with diabetes have high insulin, and when you have high insulin you automatically have high cortisol. As I have said and will say over and over in this book, hormones are an internal symphony. When one instrument (hormone) is off, the whole concert is discordant. You can’t keep eating sugar, which raises your hormone insulin, without affecting all your other hormones. Why do you think people get cranky after they have eaten a lot of sugar? Because their insulin went sky-high, and now all the other hormones are “off,” throwing that person into hormonal imbalance. We are a walking, talking symphony of chemicals. That is why diet and nutrition are so key to successful aging. When we were younger, hormones were pouring into us at all times, so we could binge on French fries, milkshakes, hamburgers, candy, and cookies; or when we were in college, we “drank till we puked” (remember that one? ugh!). Nevertheless, our bodies could bounce right back because of all the hormones filling our “tanks” at all times.
Here is where bioidentical hormone replacement and a qualified doctor are your best friends. For women of perimenopausal and menopausal age, putting back your hormones to your healthiest prime can calm you down, get you off drugs and antidepressants, help you get a good eight to nine hours of sleep at night, and keep you rational. Just sleeping soundly each night will lower your cortisol, but if you are already so stressed that you don’t sleep more than four or five hours a night, you need to have a blood test and put your hormones back in balance. For men, just slapping on that testosterone patch each day (or whatever form your doctor chooses) can mean the difference between 100 percent vitality or no vitality at all, or between “getting it up” on demand or “shooting pool with a rope.” (Sorry!)
Things are different now, and that is why aging takes some work. You have to find a way to change your lifestyle to eliminate stress. When you become perfectly hormonally balanced, these things will “roll right off your back.”
Of course, lifestyle is an overused word. We tend to think of it as the kind of houses we live in, the cars we drive, the vacations we take. These are all just peripheral things—little bonuses for our hard work. True lifestyle is how you manage your work, the time you allow for play, and the routine you find that is best for your system.
I have found that the one thing I must concede with aging is that my body will no longer take the abuse I once hurled at it. I am watching the young actresses who are in the gossip magazines going to constant parties, up late every night, drinking, drugging, not sleeping, not eating properly, driving their hormones out of whack, all of which creates the imbalances in their moods, screaming at photographers and their “people.” We read about them or see them on the gossip TV shows and get exhausted just thinking about their lifestyles. There is no envy watching from this vantage point. Who would want to be that chaotic at this time in our lives? By the time the TV gossip shows are over, I am pretty much ready for bed and sleep.
But it wasn’t always like this. I used to think that nighttime was when I could really get to work. Many nights I would wait until my husband went to sleep, and then I would get up and sit in front of my computer until around 3:00 in the morning. I liked it. I could speak with you, my readers, without interruption. The silence of the night freed my brain. Around 3:00 in the morning I would fall asleep, and then the alarm would go off at 7:00 for a full day’s work, whether it was running to the studio or business meetings during the day. Once a month, I would fly to Florida to be on the air on Home Shopping Network for twenty-five hours, getting very little sleep. As soon as I got back home, I would be into it again, and the craziness would continue. It seemed normal. It was my lifestyle. I thought I knew what I was doing because I was on bioidentical hormones, eating real food; I loved my life and my husband; I loved my work. But something was still wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was feeling blue, kind of depressed, exhausted. Occasionally, I would take a Sunday and lie around in bed all day, but that didn’t seem to be enough.
Then, Christmas Day five years ago, I woke up in tears. Tears, on my favorite day of the year! Nothing had happened to make me feel this way. The kids were coming over, Alan woke up and told me how much he loved me, it was all perfect. I called my endocrinologist and apologized for bothering her; she said it was okay, she was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas. I asked her what was wrong with me. I had balanced hormones, and my lifestyle was perfect. Silence. Then she said, “Perfect? What a joke! How long do you think you can keep this up? What did you expect?”
I couldn’t believe her cold, hard reaction. “I keep telling you, Suzanne, that you have to change your lifestyle or face very serious consequences. You can’t keep breaking down your biochemicals through overwork and not enough sleep, along with constant stress, and then not give yourself equal time to build back up.” Then she said the clincher: “The next call you make to me will be that you’ve had a heart attack!”
“Heart attack!” I exclaimed. How could that be? I have zero plaque in my heart and arteries, I eat properly. She said, “How much sleep do you get? You get so little sleep that your cortisol is soaring and your adrenals have finally flatlined. You are a recipe for a heart attack. You are burning it at both ends. No hormone replacement or dietary program can possibly compensate for the burden you put on your body by not resting it. The stress you are under at all times is fighting against all the good things that you do for your life.”
This silenced me. Meekly I asked, “What can I do?”
“Sleep,” she said. “Sleep, sleep, and more sleep; daily vitamin B injections. Change your lifestyle if you want to live.”
I heard her. I suddenly realized the craziness of what I was doing.
I have always gotten some perverse pleasure from “outworking” everyone. I think it comes from being called a lazy good-for-nothing by my drunken father as a child. But it was deeper than that. I realized it had to do with my self-esteem. If I had self-worth, I would not treat my body with such disregard.
I started on a regimen of sleep and vitamin B injections. At first, sleep was impossible. I had so screwed with my internal clock that dopamine (a brain chemical linked to energy mood) was pouring in at all times, making sleep impossible. My cortisol levels were sky-high, and it was Dr. Galitzer who gave me tinctures and drops to start the process of lowering my cortisol. I put myself on a schedule. I went to bed at 9:00 and did my best to fall asleep. At first, my doctor gave me a prescription for two weeks’ worth of 50 mg trazodone, a mild sleeping agent, to try to retrain my body to sleep. After two weeks, I took melatonin (6 mg) before bedtime along with two Tylenol PM caplets. Melatonin is an important hormone that triggers the sleep mechanism. Read about it in chapter 2. Soon I was falling asleep on my own.
Then I changed my daily schedule. I told my office I would take phone calls only between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. Before or after that was off-limits, and they were to send e-mails that I might or might not answer that day. This new schedule allowed me to write my books during the day. My office was suddenly quiet because the phone wasn’t ringing. I had all my doctors’ appointments scheduled for only one day a month so I wasn’t driving into town several times a month. Business meetings were scheduled the same way. Television appearances were all cleared through my husband, who is very protective with my time and vigilant about not wasting it. At the end of each day, I stopped working at 6:00 p.m. and made a beautiful healthy delicious dinner for Alan and me.
Guess what? A calm came over me. I woke up happy, grateful, and well rested every day. My libido increased. The extra five pounds I had been carrying around disappeared. I looked fresher, younger. People noticed.
All my blood work improved. Dr. Galitzer kept using words like “perfect.” I knew it, too. I had made such progress in my life, but I think without constant vigilance it is easy to slip back to old negative habits. I had had a slip, just like an alcoholic. I had to ask myself some hard questions. This kind of work is agitating and upsetting. I realized that in addition to overwork, lack of sleep can contribute to feelings of depression because of the hormonal imbalance from raised cortisol. Sleep and a determination to change have paid off. It was a change in my lifestyle that did it.
I wake up pretty happy almost all the time these days. But I have learned never to get cocky. The body needs tender loving care. Without it I am the loser.
One of our dearest friends and my husband were business partners for many years in the early 1970s. I watched the schedule my husband’s partner has been on with awe for years: flying back and forth to New York each week, then back to L.A. the next day to run the production company; late nights, early mornings, diabetes that I never knew about. My husband and I had dinner with him and his wife regularly over the years, and we all loved being together. This intense schedule went on like this for years. He was a “wonder, invincible, successful,” enviable.
Then came the phone call: “My husband has had two major strokes,” said his wife. Both Alan and I felt numb. How could this be?
In my grief for him, I started to think about the craziness of his lifestyle. In understanding physiology, I know that cortisol could never have had a chance to go down with all the flying and late nights. When cortisol doesn’t go down, insulin doesn’t go down, a very dangerous scenario for a diabetic. Because he didn’t carry weight, he didn’t appear to be diabetic, but most likely his adrenals were so revved up that he couldn’t put on much weight. Eventually he would have, but the stroke got him first.
Today, he is in the fight of his life. He has the will of a soldier, and in one year he is walking slowly and speaking well enough to go to work. I know where he came from with the stroke, and his progress is nothing short of a miracle.
I tell you these two stories so you might see yourself in the big picture. The body is not invincible. The chaos of your youth will kill you in your later years if you do not make a change in your lifestyle. Nobody is above it. No hormones can fight it. You have to understand the toll that stress takes and care enough about living to realize that changes have to be made.
You hear stories of fifty-year-old-men suddenly dropping dead from a heart attack. It is usually followed by “He had just been at the doctor’s and was told he was fine.” These men and women who drop dead suddenly are usually A types, “superworkers” who burn it at both ends. They don’t see sleep as anything other than a nuisance. It catches up … even big strong “he-men” can fall. Learn from these stories. All the vitamins, supplements, injections, hormones, and vegetables in the world can’t fight biochemical breakdown (exhaustion). The body can do only so much, and then it breaks down, and the picture is not pretty.
Lifestyle is a choice. Choose to live well, manage your stress, eat healthy, value sleep, and think good thoughts. Avoid stress and confrontation, adjust to change, maximize your energy, and enjoy your life. This is the only life we’re sure that we have. Don’t waste the opportunity.