Life in Perimenopause: A Season 2 Intro

Why am I talking about perimenopause in the next season of conversations?

Welcome to the season of Work Family Me and the conversations I've had with subject matter experts across different areas of health centring on the hormonal transition of perimenopause and menopause.

Prefer to listen to this 25 minute introduction of season 2 of Work Family Me click here: Perimenopause and life - an introduction to season 2.

As a burnout prevention and leadership coach with a background in female sexuality and health I've been surprised by how many women, including my clients and the women in my leadership groups, are caught off guard when we talk about menstrual cycles or hormones or physiology in relation to things like health, career, leadership, burnout, boundaries.

What often happens is a disconnection between our bodies and how we see our identity or showing up in the world. Those seem to live in slightly different places in our brains. And I really notice how often the body is downplayed or ignored or dismissed or shamed. So we've kind of been conditioned to dismiss its signals. And this is a critical window of hormonal change.

I work with women in their late thirties to their mid fifties, other ages too, but particularly in this phase where we're often handling big things in our career or in our parenting or in our business growth or in our education or in our marriage. And it's also when our bodies are shifting and the hormonal underlying changes are often unrecognised or misunderstood.

Those of you who know me know that I'm passionate about helping us see ourselves as whole humans, integrating different parts of our psyche, different parts of ourselves, and recognising the support that we can give ourselves in aspects of our lives. So in this season, I've gathered these conversations as a resource to offer different perspectives, insights and ways to support yourself through the hormonal transitions of the 40s, which is a fact, right?

If you are in a female body in your 40s, hormones are a reality for you. Often at the same time, you may be holding down a career or building a career or a business or having a job or caring for family and navigating life and hormonal changes will be part of that life.

My hope is that these conversations and articles offer you some more awareness and tools and language to better understand what might be going on for you. So for you to be able to describe your experience, to maybe join some dots, to validate what you're going through and know that you're not alone and maybe equip yourself to have conversations with people who might be able to support you or to change your life and your habits and your behaviours in ways that feel nourishing for you at this stage of your life.

We're living in such an interesting time as women. Interesting is a good adjective, right? It captures a lot. In a way, in the previous season, I touched on how we're at the forefront of a generation balancing parenting, working and earning money and doing that differently with our partners than maybe generations previous to us. And in this season, we're diving into how we are looking at hormonal changes. We're at a kind of forefront here where we're more aware of hormonal changes, we're having more conversations about perimenopause and menopause than ever before. We're seeing it in popular culture, on social media, in magazines, but we're also in the early stages of understanding in terms of, yes, there's research, yes, there's some evidence, but we're not generations deep into the study of perimenopause and menopause.

So for many of us in our 40s, we're at a point where we have some data, we have some conversations, we have some research, but we don't have decades of that. We don't have a wealth of information and a way that that's played out in terms of consequences and impact before us. And we don't have decades of role models to guide us in terms of the support or maybe the medication that is available for us or the replacement that is available for us. And at the same time, we often have this overload of people talking at us in terms of quick fixes or things that we can do that magically are going to change our experience of perimenopause and menopause. People making money off our confusion.

I think we're just starting to understand that hormones are at the heart of so much of what's happening to us. And many of us are still seeking help for different pieces of that puzzle without realising maybe how they might be linked. There's also a part of me that's saying, yes, hormones might be at the heart of so much. And also there are other pieces at play here. There are other pieces within the context.

Hormones are not everything that are impacting us as women. There is a piece of bias, conditioning, expectations, health in general, structures that don't support us that we also need to look at. And we can't dismiss over this time of our lives and say, it's just my hormones as an excuse for everything else that might be going on in our lives.

I want to pull out a few points before we dive into the interviews as of the next podcast release.

The first one is timing. I have been surprised at how many of us have a fixed image of menopause happening in our fifties. Yes, the fifties is often a milestone decade because we typically hit that 12 month mark without a period. So we actually reach menopause. But in reality, the body starts shifting long before that. Perimenopause, so the lead up to menopause, can start in our late 30s, often starts in our early 40s with changing levels of progesterone and oestrogen. So we need to update our understanding of when the hormonal transition really begins and normalising the early 40s for that window of when we might start to see changes, when we might start to experience different things within the way we're operating in a day to day. I've put together a resource with a little graphic of timing and phases that I found really helpful and that you can access through the links below that looks at the timing in a slightly different way. And maybe will be helpful for you to be able to position yourself within that.

Another thing that I think we're beginning to realise is the wider impact of hormonal changes. The shifts we experience in this phase of our life go beyond hot flushes or night sweats. Hormones affect how we think, feel, sleep, digest, move our bodies. Whether we're awake or not, they influence so much of our functioning, whether we are male or female, whether we are aware of it or not.

One of the experts I interviewed, Kath Berry, described us as humans as a sack of chemicals. And I love this analogy because it highlights how normal it is for hormones to be impacting and shaping our daily experience.

So when we think about indicators for perimenopause, there may be things that we're noticing in terms of sleep interruption or in terms of maybe how we're digesting food or our insulin resistance or the way that we are experiencing stress that are also regulated by hormones, but not necessarily only showing up in our body.

I spoke with one expert, Kelly Stirling, who called this phase a recalibration. And I really resonated with that word. I think it's a beautiful way to describe it of recalibrating. There is almost like a Lego piece being taken apart and put back together in a different way. So the transition isn't just physical, it is emotional, cognitive and maybe even spiritual if that's the way we think about our lives.

So when we think about the changes we're going through, we might also want to think more widely about the support we want to give ourselves or the time and attention that we want to spend on decluttering our spaces, decluttering our lives, rejigging the way that we're going forward.

The practitioners and experts we may want to invest in, personal trainers or nutritionists or coaches or therapists or acupuncturists or interior designers may all play a role in this rejigging of who we are, how we see ourselves, what works for us at this time of our life.

I've put together another resource, a little kind of checklist with indicators that you might notice in yourself as your hormones start changing. Again, you can access that through the links below. Use it as awareness of what might be linked to hormones so that you can join some dots for yourself, ask questions of your healthcare practitioners, and track what you might be seeing in yourself in your day to day.

Another piece of these conversations is how we see ourselves, how we see perimenopause and menopause, the language we use around these transitions that matters. And as I've become more sensitive or attuned or moving in circles where my social peers or colleagues around me are having conversations about menopause.

I hear a lot of conversations filled with fear or judgment or competition. And what I'd love to encourage through these conversations is a moment of conscious choice in deciding for yourself how you're going to view this phase of your life. Do you see it as an opportunity for growth? A second spring, as they call it in Asia?

A moment of recalibration.

So reflecting on how you position perimenopause in your mind is a powerful tool in a way as you go forward. It informs how you might think about it, how you might respond to people, how you might take care of yourself. Do you see it as something to be feared, something to be embraced, or maybe just something neutral, natural? It's just a part of what we're going to be doing as humans and female bodies.

So bringing some choice and intention to what you're going to choose to see this phase as. And what I find so fascinating with a kind of intercultural study background is differences in how menopause is viewed across cultures. Different people and societies have viewed women and aging women and menopausal women in different ways, different ways of moving and eating and functioning in society leads to totally different experiences of it, which is such kind of proof that the way we live and how we approach these quote unquote physical transitions also has a profound impact on the way that we experience them.

So along those lines, it can be incredibly inspiring to have role models in this phase of your life. Women who are post menopausal, women who are in their late 50s and beyond that are healthy, that are inspiring to you, that are living lives that you see as full, see as thriving. So taking some time to seek out women over 55 who you enjoy listening to, looking at, whether that's on social media, in your family, in your community. Almost having those stories as anchors, as you navigate your own experience can be so, so helpful and something that I've really enjoyed consciously doing.

One of the things that every single expert that I speak to talks about, and I spend my day to day working with in terms of both burnout prevention and leadership, and that we all know we don't give enough attention to in our busy day to day, is the power of lifestyle changes and general health.

Out there, there are so many quick fixes or trendy solutions that are clamouring for your attention. But what I see over and over again is that the baseline foundation of health comes from slow and steady work. We know what that is. Moving your body, fueling it with nutritious food, hydrating well, setting boundaries around your practices around health and managing stress.

This is the work that I do with my clients every day. And I know that it feels easy to say and often goes against patterns of behaviour and thinking about ourselves and the way we use our time, ourselves and our health and the importance of that or the lack of importance thereof. Changes in how we use our time so that we can exercise, changes in how we socialise so that we can limit alcohol or whatever it is can often feel impossible when we are working to tight schedules, when we have packed days.

Mindset and behavior work here to allow yourself to care for your health is so, important in this window. It's easy to put off self-care, thinking, I'll get to that when things calm down. Literally all of my clients come to me because they are struggling to implement the day-to-day changes.

Now is the time to prioritise your health. The lifestyle choices we are making in our forties will impact us long into our sixties, seventies and beyond. We can hear the evidence around this being a critical time for our health for the rest of our lives. So this is also a call to action. Yes, listen to these conversations, but also take this as fuel to create change in your day to day.

Take one thing from each interview and actually implement it. Those of you who've worked with me know that I am passionate about taking theory and putting it into practice. I know that takes time. I myself spent six months changing how I did my mornings and the kind of breakfast that I ate, right? What I drank when I got up, what, how, when I ate, what I wanted to stop doing in the mornings.

It sounds like a little thing to change your breakfast. It took time to become my new normal, but it's so worth doing that. And so often I see a narrative and women who feel powerless in the face of biology thinking perimenopause or menopause is just something that happens to us and it's going to be awful. It's going to be terrible. But what we can do is take back some control through the choices that we make.

How we nurture our bodies, how we set boundaries, how we care for ourselves. And of course, all of that is wrapped up with our level of self-esteem, our level of confidence, and that's so much of the work that we do. I know it isn't easy, but I do want to galvanise us all into action. You can't see me, but I'm literally clenching my fists and feeling so excited about this because it is necessary for us as we live these long lives that we do that with health.

Finally, these conversations have been interesting for me on a personal note. I'm 43. I've started noticing changes in my own body and I have since I turned 40, sleep changes, hot flushes, irregular periods and other indicators that let me know that I'm in perimenopause. Luckily, I know that because of the background and studies that I've had and I've been able to care for that, make lifestyle changes.

And I've also been faced with some decisions. Do I replace my hormones? Do I do some different kind of health testing? What am I tracking? What kind of support do I want to pay for? Do I want to do weight training? How am I going to do that? So it's been really helpful to be able to tap into these experts for myself as I've been negotiating those decisions.

I hope that these conversations help you feel more informed, supported. And although I feel like the term is so overused, yes, empowered in a place of power. The resources I've mentioned are linked below and I encourage you to have a look at them to maybe better understand what's going on for you and to have some anchor details, feel free to print them out, use them, make notes on them. Use them for conversations with your own healthcare practitioners.

Thank you for joining me in this season of Conversations with Maude. I hope they feel these conversations feel like a hug. This season feels like a hug, informative, validating, warm, open to you. If you ever want or need additional resources or booklists or recommendations or want to chat with me about how a menopause savvy coach could help you and support you, you can obviously always reach out to me.

Download these 3 perimenopause resources to support you:

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Maude Burger-Smith