Alanis Morissette uses Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) to help manage her menopause symptoms.
Singer Alanis Morissette
The 52-year-old singer said the menopause feels like a “truth serum”, and she has turned to HRT, which replaces oestrogen and progesterone that the body produces less of during that stage of life, as it helps to relieve symptoms, including hot flushes, brain fog, and mood swings.
Alanis told The Sunday Times Style Magazine: “The procreative imperative keeps me ooey-gooey, then when that goes away I’m in my authentic truth.
“The other day someone said, ‘Why would you start HRT, because when you go off it in your seventies it’s like you’re experiencing it [menopause] for the first time?’
“And my question was, who’s going off it?!”
The Ironic hitmaker relocated from Los Angeles to San Francisco Bay Area in 2018 because she struggled with the City of Angels’ pressure on women to appear young.
Alanis – who has since moved back to Los Angeles – said: “I really had to look at this. There was grief of going from the playful maiden into the mom – it’s an archetypal head spinner. I’m embracing the older woman with some ‘I know too much’ humour.
“I’m all about women doing what the f*** they need to feel right. I have zero judgment. Personally, I do the ouchy facials because, you know, I like collagen, a*******.”
Last June, the seven-time Grammy winner – who has sons Ever, 14, and Winter, six, and daughter Onyx, nine, with her 46-year-old husband, hip-hop artist Souleye, real name Mario Treadway – admitted she “would not be alive” without therapy.
The Thank U performer said she still “struggles” with suicidal thoughts and believes much of her depressive nature comes from being “highly sensitive”.
After making her admission about being saved by therapy, she was asked if she was suicidal and told The Guardian newspaper: “All the time. I still struggle with it. I have an anxious, depressive tendency. Those who are sensitive are much more susceptible to their environmental information.
“If you put a highly sensitive person in an environment where they’re brow-beaten or reduced, they’ll basically want to kill themselves. It’s the worst. If you put a highly sensitive person in an environment where they’re supported, championed, and listened to, they thrive.”
Alanis – who believes couples therapy is hugely important in her marriage – has struggled with addictions to work, love, sex, and shopping, to which she takes a “Whac-a-Mole” approach of tackling whenever one issue or another pops up.
She said: “I call addiction ‘relief-seeking measures that kill you eventually’…
“There are some people who would get very mad at me for implying at all that [sobriety] is nuanced. Because for those of us who were drinking at seven in the morning, well, there’s nothing nuanced about that. So, I guess it depends.
“For me, it’s whichever addiction is bringing you to death very fast. Which one is it? Which one’s ruining your relationships? And then there’s the Whac-a-Mole approach, which is, ‘OK, I’ve stopped not eating. And now I’m working my ass off. Oh, yeah, and I took a few too many pills.’
“The Whac-a-Mole, that’s what we have to keep an eye on.”
