Coping With Hot Flashes and Other Menopausal Symptoms: What 16 Celebrities Said

The multihyphenate media trailblazer penned an essay for her own magazine to share how doctors mistook her perimenopausal symptoms for heart disease. “For two years I didn’t sleep well. Never a full night. No peace,” she wrote. “Restlessness and heart palpitations were my steady companions at nightfall. … I went to see a cardiologist. Took medication. Wore a heart monitor for weeks. And then one day, walking through the offices of The Oprah Winfrey Show, I picked up a copy of The Wisdom of Menopause, Dr. Christiane Northrup’s book, and the pages fell open to the heading Palpitations: Your Heart’s Wake-Up Call. I took it as a sign.”

She learned that those palpitations were common for women her age, writing “but no one, including my trusted doctors, had warned me, and when my symptoms showed up, we looked for the most dire explanation — heart disease — instead of the most likely.”

So she took to her soundstage and aired multiple shows about it, because no one else was talking about any of it at the time. “Until that point in my adult life, I don’t recall one serious conversation with another woman about what to expect,” she wrote.

Naomi Watts used her influence on Instagram to pose an important question: “Does the word 'menopause' freak you out?” She admitted that it absolutely did for her, and she’s starting to wrap her head around it. “It's just a natural phase of life and something half the population will be directly affected by and the other half will feel indirectly,” she wrote.

The actor dealt with menopausal symptoms at a younger age than many women. “When I was in my late 30s, I was finally ready to start thinking about creating a family. Then the M word swiftly blew my doors down,” she wrote. “It felt like a head-on collision with a Mack truck.” And she didn’t feel like she had anyone she could turn to.

“My mentors and mum didn't seem up for discussing it, [and] I didn't know how to ask for help,” wrote Watts. “Even doctors had little to say. It's oddly like an unwritten code of silence: Women should suck it up and cope, because that's how generations passed have done it.”

But Watts is committed to opening up the dialogue: “Let's conquer the stigma and address the secrecy and shame we've felt and help create a healthier foundation for future generations.”

Rom-com favorite and child star of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial fame, Drew Barrymore has spent nearly her whole life in the spotlight. Now as the host of her own daytime talk show, Barrymore shared an important milestone in April 2023 with her audience: her first perimenopausal hot flash.

Without skipping a beat while interviewing Jennifer Anniston and Adam Sandler, she stopped to remove her blazer and shared with her guests, “For the first time, I think I’m having my first hot flash!” Responding to Barrymore’s TikTok video of the incident, a viewer said, “I don't know that I have ever heard a celebrity talk about a hot flash in the moment. Thank you for being so real.”

When the Frieda actor first noticed signs of menopause, she was shocked when her doctor started ticking off the list of potential symptoms.

“The questions were terrifying,” she said on Red Table Talk. “They were asking me things like, 'Are your ears growing and there's hair growing out of them? Are you growing a mustache and a beard? Are you easily irritable? Are you crying for no reason? Are you gaining a lot of weight really fast that doesn't go away no matter what you do? Are you shrinking?' And then they ask you, 'Is your vagina dry?'”

But what caught her most off guard was this: Her breasts would get larger. She explained, “For some women when you gain weight, your boobs grow; and other women when you have children and you breastfeed, your boobs grow and they don't go back down; and then in some of the cases when you are in menopause, they grow again. And I just happen to be one of those women where it happened in every single step!”

Just like with many things that have happened in her life, the EGOT winner took to the stage to crack jokes about how dismissive our society can be about menopause — particularly the sudden, uncontrollable body temperature changes. She asked, “How can you keep a man [erect] for 19 hours and not be able to cool down a hot flash? How is that possible?”

The Empire star and Oscar nominee shared in an interview with Self that therapy has helped her navigate stardom, the pressure to be a “strong Black woman,” and the mood swings caused by perimenopause. “I was just starting to feel heavy a lot, [like] suffocating. … It just came out of nowhere,” she said.

In response to these challenges, she became a role model for Black mental wellness and celebrates the milestones that come with age. For her 50th birthday, she posted stunning bikini photos while she celebrated with friends. “It’s supposed to be over for me … but here I am,” she said to W magazine.

The actor and Goop founder has gone beyond just talking about her experience with menopause. She’s ready to redefine it. Speaking in a Goop video on Instagram, she said: “I think when you get into perimenopause, you notice a lot of changes. I can feel the hormonal changes happening, the sweating, the moods — you know you’re just, like, all of a sudden furious for no reason. I think menopause gets a really bad rap and needs a bit of rebranding. I remember when my mother went through menopause, and it was, like, such a big deal, and there was grief around it for her and all of these emotions. I don’t think we have in our society a great example of an aspirational menopausal woman.”

RELATED: 12 Women Over Age 60 Who Inspire Wellness and Living Your Best Life

Former first lady Michelle Obama opened up on her podcast about her personal experience with menopause and shared that she once experienced hot flashes aboard Marine One. “It was like somebody put a furnace in my core, and turned it on high, and then everything started melting. And I thought, 'Well, this is crazy. I can't, I can't, I can't do this,’” she reflected in an interview with Sharon Malone, MD, an ob-gyn and menopause practitioner in Washington, D.C. In the episode, Obama gets real about experiencing night sweats and taking hormones, and she highlights the need to talk about menopause in the workplace so that basic accommodations like the office room temperature can be addressed. “What a woman's body is taking her through is important information,” she said. “It's an important thing to take up space in a society. 'Cause half of us are going through this.”

RELATED: What Experts Want BIPOC Women to Know About Menopause

The front woman of the '80s pop group the Go-Go's, Belinda Carlisle was not keeping her lips sealed when she spoke to the Home & Family show on the Hallmark Channel about her experience with difficult menopausal symptoms. “The worst thing for me were the hot flashes, which started in the beginning not being so bad, then it just got to be debilitating, and I would carry a change of clothes in the car,” Carlisle said. “I would watch my friends go through it, and I thought, Oh god, I hope I don’t have to suffer like that.”

RELATED: Can Hormone Therapy for Menopause Prevent Weight Gain?

The actor and activist opened up about her experience with menopause, sharing that she and wife Christine Marinoni were “going through the menopause together.” In an interview with the Daily Telegraph’s Stella magazine, she spoke about how “freeing” it is to go through menopause and what it’s like to experience it at the same time as her partner. “The freedom that comes from no longer being fertile is huge,” she said.

When The X-Files and The Crown actor was dealing with the hormonal transition in 2017, Gillian Anderson wasn’t at all sure what was happening to her. “It was at the point that I felt like my life was falling apart around me that I started to ask what could be going on internally, and friends suggested it might be hormonal,” she recalled in an interview published in Lenny Letter ahead of the release of her book, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere. “I was used to being able to balance a lot of things, and all of a sudden I felt like I could handle nothing. I felt completely overwhelmed.”

Anderson, who portrays a sex therapist in the Netflix series Sex Education, added, “How wonderful would it be if we could get to a place where we are able to have these conversations openly and without shame. Admit, freely, that this is what’s going on. So we don’t feel like we’re going mad or insane or alone in any of the symptoms we are having.”

RELATED: Mindfulness May Help Improve Menopause Symptoms

In March 2015, actor and activist Angelina Jolie wrote in The New York Times that she had chosen to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed because of genetically being at high risk for ovarian cancer. (She also opted for a preventive double mastectomy in 2013 because she carries the BRCA1 gene linked to breast cancer.) The procedure threw her into premature menopause, but Jolie was unwavering about her decision. “Regardless of the hormone replacements I’m taking, I am now in menopause. I will not be able to have any more children, and I expect some physical changes,” she wrote. “But I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong but because this is a part of life. It is nothing to be feared.”

And when she spoke to the Daily Telegraph later that year, she’d had no change of heart. “I actually love being in menopause,” she said. “I haven’t had a terrible reaction to it, so I’m very fortunate. I feel older, and I feel settled being older. I feel happy that I’ve grown up. I don’t want to be young again.”

RELATED: 7 Fun Ways to Move More at Midlife

The Divine Miss M had a no-holds-barred response when talking to Oprah Winfrey about her journey to menopause and how women are treated as they get older. “I did have night sweats and hot flashes at first. Then I did this soy and primrose oil thing, which helped tremendously,” she said. “I don’t suggest that anyone obsess over menopause or aging. Still, it is true that in this culture, they throw you out when you get older. I see it all the time, especially in my business. At my age, you’re playing somebody’s mother — and there aren’t even a lot of those roles!”

RELATED: Insomnia: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments That Will Help You Sleep

In 2014, Kim Catrall of Sex and the City partnered with Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company that makes prescription menopause treatments, to raise awareness about the life change that happens to an estimated 2 million American women every year. As an entertainer, she had to pretend she had hot flashes on screen before she ever dealt with them in real life, and she thought that experience prepared her for menopause. But her reality was different than what she expected. “I realized I still had questions. But the more I learned and listened to what my body was telling me, the more I relaxed, adjusted, and realized I could manage this by working closely with my doctor,” Cattrall said in a press release.

Sometimes the menopausal symptoms aren’t even the root of the health problem. The former talk show host first took a hiatus from her self-titled show in early 2018 to battle the thyroid problems she developed from the Graves' disease she was battling during her menopause journey. Speaking to People magazine, she said that she was diagnosed with Graves' disease nearly 20 years ago, but neglecting a routine endocrinology appointment created a hormone imbalance that was causing high blood pressure and mood swings.

She went on to say, “With the menopause, I wasn’t pointing a finger to any particular thing. I was just feeling like ‘All right … this is I guess how it’s supposed to be.’ I feel 100 percent better than I was a few months ago. I had a storm going in my body is the best way I can explain it,” she said at the time.

Emmy-nominated comic actor Cheryl Hines has definitely not been curbing her enthusiasm for starting a conversation about painful sex after menopause, often due to vaginal dryness and lack of estrogen. As the paid spokeswomen for Painfully Awkward Conversations, a campaign sponsored by the makers of medicine for sexual function and menopause-related issues, she urged women to address the issue with their healthcare providers — because there is treatment — and to talk to other women for support.

“I know a lot of women, a lot of friends, who are experiencing painful sex after menopause, and I want them to be empowered to be able to talk about it with their friends and their healthcare providers,” she told People magazine. “I’m glad I can get that conversation started and let everyone know that there’s no stigma to it.”