Lucy Devine
Gwyneth Paltrow has spoken out about her menopause symptoms, revealing what caused them to 'spiral out of control' recently.
Menopause occurs when your body stops having periods due to a lower level of hormones.
This usually happens between the ages of 45 and 55, but it can happen earlier. Many women will also experience perimenopause, which refers to the symptoms of menopause while still having periods.
Symptoms include anxiety, mood changes, brain fog, hot flushes and irregular periods.
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Mum-of-two Paltrow, 52, has recently opened up about her own menopause symptoms and how drinking alcohol during the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year caused her symptoms to surge.
In January, the wildfires spread across several Los Angeles neighbourhoods, including Pacific Palisades.
Tens of thousands of people were forced to evacuate the area, with the blaze devastating several regions in a small space of time.
Many people had to flee the danger zones and a number of families lost their homes.
Chatting to menopause expert, Dr Mary Claire Haver, on her latest Goop podcast, Paltrow explained: “I’m really in the thick of it right now, so I’m all over the place.
“But I noticed my symptoms are, like, pretty well under control unless, you know, in January when the fires were happening in LA. I’ve, like, used alcohol for its purpose.
“I think I drank every night.
“I was medicating. Normally, now at this point, I don’t drink a lot at all. Maybe I’ll have one drink a week.”
Paltrow explained she really noticed the difference in her symptoms after drinking more than usual.
“It was the first time I really noticed causation in that way,” she added.
But Dr Haver explained it's something she's seen quite often, responding: “Lots of my patients say the same thing.
"They’ve really just spontaneously realised that they’ve cut back on alcohol or just quit altogether because it just hasn’t been worth it. They don’t bounce back the same way. It stays in our system a lot longer."
Anxiety is a commonly-reported symptom of menopause, and Paltrow explained this is something she has also struggled with.
“There were nights where my anxiety — like, I just thought it meant, ‘Oh, you’re not gonna be able to sleep because you don’t have enough progesterone or whatever'," she said.
“I would just wake up [and] I would get crushed with anxiety, which I’ve never had in my life. And I would lie in bed thinking about every mistake I’ve ever made, every person’s feelings I ever hurt.
"And I would be up, like, for six hours. It was crazy.”