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Why Rest Isn’t Fixing Your Midlife Burnout · Create The Best Me

• 0:00
  Carmen Hecox: Have you ever said, I'm fine, but deep down you knew you were anything but fine? Maybe you're tired, but not the kind of tired a good night's sleep or vacation can fix. Maybe you're doing all the right things, checking all the boxes, taking care of everyone else, and still wondering, why does my life suddenly feel like it doesn't fit anymore? Today's conversation is for the woman who is bone tired, emotionally drained, and quietly wondering if midlife is breaking her. When maybe, just maybe, it's actually trying to wake her up.
• 0:43
  Carmen Hecox: My guest today is Laura Cardwell, a midlife coach and transformational guide who helps women move through Burnout, menopause, identity shifts, and what she calls a powerful initiation into purpose, power, and leadership.
• 1:01
  Carmen Hecox: And we're going to talk about the difference between being tired and being burnt out and why vacations may not be enough, what functional freeze can look like, and why menopause is not something to fight your way through. But something that may be calling you into the strongest, wisest, most authentic version of yourself. Laura brings science, energy, humor, and a whole lot of truth to this conversation. And trust me, when she talks about cougararity, your cougar puberty, you're going to want to hear what she means. Join me in welcoming Laura Cardwell.
• 1:46
  Carmen Hecox: Laura Cardwell, welcome to Create the Best Me. This is an honor and a privilege to have you on the show.
• 1:52
  Laura Cardwell: Thank you so much.
• 1:56
  Laura Cardwell: I'm so excited to be here. I'm so excited.
• 1:56
  Carmen Hecox: Laura, before we get into today's must-have conversation, could you please tell the listeners and viewers a little bit about who Laura is and the magical stuff you do?
• 2:11
  Laura Cardwell: Thank you. Yes, sure. So I always like to start when somebody asks me all of those things is like kind of answering more like, what do I love first? You know, so I love to read. I love to learn. I love my, my kids are older now. There's a 24 and a 19-year-old. So they're in the most fun stage of their lives. And, um, I love water and I love to play. And so I like to answer that way first, because I think sometimes we get stuck answering what we do instead of who we are, you know? And so it's like, um, but then what I do for what I do in the world is I am a midlife coach and, uh, transformational guide for women in perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause. That's predominantly where I work. That, and I blend things like archetypal tools and applied neuroscience and my background in energetic kinesiology and applied neurology.
• 3:07
  Laura Cardwell: Um, and then some very specific menopause work to, to look at menopause as a process or a sacred initiation into purpose, power, and leadership.
• 3:19
  Carmen Hecox: And you have written a book called Get Unstuck.
• 3:27
  Laura Cardwell: It's called Unstuck Yourself.
• 3:27
  Carmen Hecox: Or I'm sorry, Unstuck Yourself.
• 3:31
  Laura Cardwell: Yes. I co-wrote that book with Megan O'Malley. It's called Unstuck Thrive Beyond Burnout and Find Your True Purpose.
• 3:38
  Laura Cardwell: And that book is really, I think, an important call to action for us to recognize that we are a culture of burnout. And it's a really big deal when we get into midlife, especially for women. There's a whole— we could talk about that for the whole episode, but that book points to the idea that burnout isn't just a matter of being tired. There's so much more to it. And it's a process of looking at your life and looking at your choices and looking at your relationships and looking at your career. And that really the antidote to that kind of burnout is living in alignment and on purpose. And that's what the book takes you through that journey.
• 4:21
  Carmen Hecox: And I know, I think that we use the word burnout so much.
• 4:24
  Carmen Hecox: Yeah. And I think sometimes we use it too much and maybe we use it too loosely. Can you describe what is burnout?
• 4:31
  Laura Cardwell: Sure. Yeah, we do.
• 4:35
  Laura Cardwell: It's a word that almost gets thrown around like allergies. Like, I have burnout. And I think at this point, it's a really sad moment when burnout is so common in our culture that it's a word that just flippantly gets used. So I do think it's a really important conversation. What is it actually? And what it is actually physically going on is that The adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys, which produce a hormone called cortisol. That cortisol gets released in reaction to something that is causing something that is causing that fight-flight response in our lives where we might be just really in a vigilant state of fear or anxiety that is running kind of all the time. And the adrenals are working to keep that cortisol that says you're in danger, you're in danger, you're in danger. And it keeps that cortisol flooding your system, but eventually it cannot sustain that pace. And the cortisol, it, the adrenals quit producing cortisol. And when the adrenals start to fatigue and they stop producing the amount of cortisol that you need to keep up with the fear level or the vigilance level that you're, that you might be stuck in, then you go into what we call adrenal burnout. And that's where the word burnout comes from. It's a short for adrenal burnout. And it means that the adrenals can't keep up with the pace of the fight-flight response that you're trying to live in all the time. That's the technical definition.
• 6:04
  Carmen Hecox: Yeah. And so what does burnout look like for women in midlife?
• 6:11
  Carmen Hecox: You know, the women that you've worked with, what have you seen?
• 6:12
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. So, I mean, it always, we're always going to start with a conversation that says, I'm tired.
• 6:19
  Laura Cardwell: Right. And so most of the time, by the time I start working with women, I particularly, like I said, I focus on women in midlife, but you can have burnout at any point in your life. It doesn't have to be midlife. It's just, it's more common because by then the mechanisms are starting to burn through the life that we were kind of running all of the time. We're not capable of sustaining that. And when we're younger, we can sustain that. So when we get into midlife, we're like, let's just say I'm in my late 30s to early 40s. I'm not calling that midlife yet, but there's like this, that moment in our lives, we're starting to be like, wait, I just cannot, these things I used to be able to do all of the time, I can't do them the same way anymore. And I'm feeling less resilient. I'm working harder, I'm showing up more, but I'm not getting the same results out of my life in some kind of way. I'm not being met either by my partners or my relationships in the same way. We might be seeing, if you're in a mothering role of some sort, you might— your kids might be putting an extra added degree of difficulty into your life by then, you know, like, and so, and so what you're seeing is like, I'm reaching for these things that have always worked, but I just can't seem to find the pace that I used to and what that looks like physically, because burnout happens on the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual level. But when we often— it's happening on all those levels all the time, but we often don't listen until it's very physical, right? So it could look like I'm not sleeping very well. I'm just not getting restful sleep and that I'm not really wakeful during the day. I'm tired all day long. That's usually one of the first indicators that something's not fully in line.
• 8:12
  Laura Cardwell: It could be that you're having a hard time getting to sleep. We call that tired and wired, where your nervous system is, is still running that all of that energy, but you can't turn it off to go to sleep.
• 8:23
  Laura Cardwell: So you're exhausted but not sleeping. You might fall asleep really easily and then be waking up in the middle of the night. And then you can't get back to sleep because the mind jumps right in where we left it off. So, so those are some of the sleep issues. But also what I see a lot of times is we start to see also other issues like digestive issues or hormone issues. We might be starting to get into some of the realm of the perimenopause fluctuations, or maybe not, but we're still having some hormone disruption. We might be starting to see blood sugar irregularities on the physical level, like We might start to be seeing autoimmune diseases or some sort of chronic something where the body is trying to keep up and it's burning through other systems, you know, or the immune system's trying to keep up and it can't. Burnout is not the same for any one person. There's, it looks different in all people, but that's kind of the, by the time they get there, they're usually looking to heal something physically. They're usually coming in trying to fix a problem and they don't realize that the problem isn't physical to begin with. They became physical as a result. And so we kind of have to unwind it from there.
• 9:32
  Carmen Hecox: Let's say, Laura, you and I have been best friends for years, 20, 30 years, and we have this standing coffee date.
• 9:39
  Carmen Hecox: And I show up and you ask me, like any best friend would, how are you feeling, Carmen? How are you, Carmen? And my response to you was, Laura, I'm okay. I'm just tired.
• 9:54
  Carmen Hecox: Yeah. Because you're my best friend and you've been with me through thick and thin, how would you be able to discern whether, yeah, you know what? I've had some heavy projects and they're using up a lot of my energy versus I'm burnt out.
• 10:16
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. There's definitely a difference between I'm tired. I went to Vegas this weekend with my girlfriends and I stayed up for 3 nights in a row and I'm 45 and I can't do that anymore and I'm tired, right? Like, that's the kind of tired that sleep will fix. Like a few nights of sleep and you will get caught up. The kind of tired that is burnout feels like bone tired. It feels soul weary. It feels mentally exhausted. It feels emotionally shut down. Like, I just can't anymore. There's, I can't, I'm done.
• 10:52
  Laura Cardwell: Those are words of burnout, you know, like, and they, they represent a much deeper kind of fatigue that is not going to be fixed with sleep.
• 11:02
  Carmen Hecox: I read something about, and hopefully you can help me understand and help the viewers and listeners understand. What is the difference between burnout and functional freeze?
• 11:16
  Laura Cardwell: So if you're in functional— oh my gosh, this is one of my favorite topics.
• 11:20
  Laura Cardwell: Okay. So when we look at the fight, flight, freeze response, if we look at the way that that is a primitive neurological pathway, it is a survival pathway. It is meant to keep us alive and it does a really good job keeping us alive.
• 11:35
  Laura Cardwell: It's constantly scanning for danger, letting us know if we're in danger, and then organizing our muscles around acting in that way. And so a well-modulated fight or flight response is there's something that happens in the environment, the amygdala triggers off a whole set of instructions for the brain, and it's all kind of unconscious.
• 11:58
  Laura Cardwell: I want to name this is all happening unconscious, but if it's well modulated, then we will flee first. And then if we can't get away from the, from the problem, we will fight. And then if we can't win the fight, if we don't think we can win the fight, then we go into freeze. And freeze is kind of one of those states that I say to my clients, you know, it's one of the trickiest ones because, you know, when you're in flight, you know, when I'm like, I just need to get away from all of this. I just, I'm, I'm like looking to go on vacation, you know, and as soon as I'm home from vacation, I'm Googling my next vacation or I can't wait to get home and just turn on Netflix, or I can't wait to have a glass of wine with my girlfriends this weekend. Those are not that there's anything wrong with any of those things, but they are usually like, I'm just trying to kind of check out from something.
• 12:41
  Laura Cardwell: That's the escape of flee in our daily looking life. Fighting is obviously fighting. You know, you feel fighting, you feel like you've got anger, it's directed at something, but freeze feels like nothing. And it's You know, we can be in a total state of freeze around something and have no idea that we're in— that we are having this major cortisol reaction. And we don't know it because freeze often doesn't have a feeling that goes with it other than maybe numbness. Like, I just can't feel anything is a good way to know if you're in functional freeze. You can be in functional freeze For years before you're in burnout. Because in functional freeze, you can still be producing cortisol. You're frozen in that state, but you are producing the cortisol the whole time. It's only burnout when you can't, when you haven't addressed the reason why you're in freeze.
• 13:36
  Laura Cardwell: And you, so not fixing it, because I just don't believe that it's a matter of fixing. It's a matter of, of, um, transforming and alchemizing, but we tend to look at it as fixing. But if you're looking at that freeze from a perspective of, okay, I know something is off and I need to look at what's causing that off, then, and you catch it in time because there'll be other physical symptoms and emotional symptoms that are going to give you that clue, then you can deal with your functional freeze before it becomes burnout. But functional, they are different. You know, like they're, burnout is definitely a place where You actually don't have the cortisol left, but you can have cortisol and functional freeze. Is it kind of like some of us, we say, gosh, I don't even know how I got to work today.
• 14:23
  Laura Cardwell: Or I don't even, didn't even, don't even remember doing the laundry, but I did the laundry. Oh, is that functional freeze? Yeah. And yes. And I also think that, um, so functional freeze can have some layers to it. And I'm certainly not an expert.
• 14:39
  Laura Cardwell: on all of it, but, um, but I definitely have some background. And so I think one of the things that we, that we find with functional freeze is that we're just kind of going along to get along. We're just doing, we're just doing to stay busy to like, there's not a, um, we're not necessarily being present to our lives. A lot of times when we're in freeze, our body is trying to keep us from being still. Because in the stillness, we would actually be able to see what might be wrong, what we're really afraid of. And so it's busy without productivity. It's a busy mind with no clarity. It's moving through your day, kind of just going through the motions. But it can also be bigger than that. You can have functional freeze around, um, lifetime stories. You know, like you can have events in your lifetime.
• 15:32
  Laura Cardwell: that put you into a state of functional freeze around that event.
• 15:36
  Laura Cardwell: And that can run in the background softly for your whole life.
• 15:40
  Laura Cardwell: But midlife is going to show you where they are. Like, there's, um, there's no way to get through midlife that some of that stuff that you haven't looked at or that's causing that doesn't come up. It's going to come up, you know? So, um, so yeah, it can look like, it can just look like I'm just going along. And then one day you're like, wait, is this the life I ordered? Is this, is this what I really want in my life?
• 16:07
  Laura Cardwell: Is this really how I'm meant to feel? I don't feel good.
• 16:11
  Laura Cardwell: I often tell women, one of the first signs is if your answer to everyone is, I'm fine, then you're probably in functional freeze.
• 16:17
  Laura Cardwell: You know, because you're not, no one's fine. Like, you know, there's like, if we really think about why we answer that way. It's because to actually tell you how I actually feel, we don't have time for that in our culture.
• 16:30
  Laura Cardwell: You know, so it's like, if you're just running around like, I'm fine, you've probably got some functional freeze going on.
• 16:39
  Carmen Hecox: And I think that a lot of women, once we reach midlife and we maybe have like an outer body experience and look at our life, I always, I always call out of body, the outer body experience, even though we're not really out of our body.
• 16:51
  Laura Cardwell: Right.
• 16:51
  Carmen Hecox: But we look and we reflect, and the word purpose, our purpose, sounds like we're not entitled to have it. What we have here today is what we should have. It's what we were dealt. It's what we chose. And so don't ask what's your purpose because you're living your purpose.
• 17:15
  Laura Cardwell: Right.
• 17:18
  Laura Cardwell: I think we spend a lot of our time, we spend the first half of our life kind of reacting, just reacting, just reacting to the life I've been given, the next moment, you know? Um, and some of that is maturity. We make major life decisions before we have a prefrontal cortex, you know, like, it's like, which is our executive functioning. It's the front of our brain that brings in the depth of understanding that we might not have, you know? So. Many of us, you know, made choices about life partners long before we could really understand the consequences of those things. Or maybe we had children, or maybe we got into a career because that was the, you know, it was the path that was laid out for us, but we never really questioned it. And those early, in the early 20s and the late 20s, you're just kind of reacting to your life.
• 18:06
  Laura Cardwell: And then you kind of get into this moment where You're feeling this less reactive. You're growing, you're maturing, and you're learning to respond to your life, which is a different place in your brain.
• 18:19
  Laura Cardwell: And you're like, wait, in response, maybe I didn't want to be a lawyer. Maybe I didn't want to, you know, maybe I— and it can look like, I've seen it look like, I didn't want to be a lawyer.
• 18:30
  Laura Cardwell: I want to be an artist. And I've seen an artist say, I didn't want to be an artist. I want to be a lawyer. You know, it's, it's, we, we tend to say it one way and not the other, but. But I do think it is natural that as we mature, like literally mature, our brains mature and the pathways change and we have more ability to be present to our emotional states. We have, we're doing spiritual growth or personal growth work. Usually by the time we're into our, headed into our mid-years, we're wanting to know more about ourselves. And then that purpose starts to come up and we say, am I living my purpose? Am I living on purpose for purpose? Do I have a purpose? You know, and the first thing that we Google when we start to look into purpose is, what am I supposed to be doing? Like, what's, you know, we immediately ask, like, how can I do my purpose? And one of the things that we say in the book around purpose, and one of the things I deeply believe is that purpose is, is the, what we do is the result. Our purpose is who we be.
• 19:30
  Laura Cardwell: It's knowing who I am meant to be in the world and how I show up. It doesn't matter what my career is. It's who am I meant to be when I show up as my true self? And then how do I be that in relationship in a way that I don't lose myself to someone else? How do I really know how to stand in that fully? And then from there, it's the why I do things. It's why I do things.
• 19:51
  Laura Cardwell: It's because who I am, that's why I do this. And then and only then does it become what I do. And so we tend to go at it from the wrong angle. You know, like we just kind of want to start at that, like I'm going to do my purpose, but it really requires first that you fully unpack who you're here to be. And, um, and that's a journey, you know, and that's kind of the midlife journey. That's the way it sets us up for purpose in general.
• 20:14
  Carmen Hecox: Yeah. And I think there's a sense of guilt.
• 20:18
  Laura Cardwell: Oh yes. Guilt, guilt. We could talk, we have a whole episode on guilt, you know, like So many women, it's so many times that the languaging of guilt, and I'm sure your audience has heard this, but the languaging of guilt is often told in I shoulds. I should do this. I should do that.
• 20:35
  Laura Cardwell: Obligations. And we tend to talk about the idea of responsibility as burden, like what I'm meant to do, what I have to do for everyone around me. Even if we've done personal growth work and we're onto the word should, we're like, oh, I heard a should in my sentence. We will find another way to say it that still is like, I ought to, or I have to, or it hides in other words as well. But I would say the number one emotional impact of burnout with women, especially at mid-age, is, well, there's two. There's either guilt or there's what I would say is the emotional impact of overachieving.
• 21:16
  Laura Cardwell: Which is often, one is people pleasing and one is feeling like I'm not successful unless I've done— And so I think I see both of those together a ton in midlife.
• 21:28
  Carmen Hecox: What about where someone might say, I'm burnt out.
• 21:35
  Carmen Hecox: I just need a vacation. I just need a vacation. Once I go do this vacation, go on this cruise or You know, take this trip to Hawaii. I will come back refreshed. Then they come back from wherever it is that they went. It's still there.
• 21:54
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. That's how you know it's probably more burnout than it was that you just needed a break. You know, like all of us need a break.
• 22:01
  Laura Cardwell: We live inside of a culture that centers hustle and it's really not built for feminine cycles. It's not built for rest cycles. It's built for productivity and getting the most juice out of each individual as we can.
• 22:20
  Laura Cardwell: So it's not just a person. It's not just that I'm living a life that I'm giving too much. It's that we are culturally, there's a demand and there's a collective agreement to move that way. Right. And so, so you can't, you can't heal a collective problem Only by yourself. You know, like, so you can come back from that vacation, but if the first response that you're having is that you just want to put your head down on your desk, you are probably in burnout and you were not just tired and needed a rest. You know, like most of the time we can get enough juice out of a reset to keep going, you know, until we get the next one, until we get the next one, until we get the next one. And that's, that's how we kind of override it, especially in our 20s and 30s. We have all this extra energy. Our bodies run more efficiently in some ways, and we can override the signals that our body is giving us. But if you get into your mid-40s and into your 50s and you're taking vacations and they barely scratch the surface, then you are probably deeply in burnout.
• 23:27
  Laura Cardwell: And that's not going to be something that's going to be easily fixed. Burnout needs you to value yourself enough to rest.
• 23:36
  Laura Cardwell: And that's an internal job. We have got to start with that internal job of, I'm worth the rest. I'm worth it.
• 23:44
  Laura Cardwell: And I'm going to take it because I know that resting means I can show up fully when I'm there and I can check out fully when it's time to go.
• 23:51
  Carmen Hecox: Do you think that, I can't remember the word that I was going to use. Do you think that a lot of us tend to look at Maybe that trip to Hawaii as self-care, but maybe it's tough care.
• 24:07
  Laura Cardwell: I love that. I love that. Yeah. I do think, I think again, inside of a burnout culture or a hustle culture, we're sold self-care as things like trips, bubble baths, massages, and those things are They're relaxing, but they're not necessarily rejuvenating.
• 24:35
  Laura Cardwell: First of all, the whole definition of vacation where most of us are going on a trip, not a vacation.
• 24:43
  Laura Cardwell: We go somewhere, like we go to Europe and then we're 6 different cities in 6 different days. That's a trip. It's an adventure, but that's not necessarily rejuvenation and rest. And then we wonder why we come back exhausted, right? Because it was like, but it's something that we wanted to do. So we had the energy because there's, there's definitely something that we talk a lot about in the book is that when we are in alignment with something we want to do, we often have a ton of energy for it. And then when we're out of alignment with things, then our body doesn't have as much energy available for that and we see it, right? So I do think we need to start to change the conversation on what self-care is. That self-care is not just these checkout moments. That's actually escapism. You know, like that's that, that flee response. Self-care is really like, I actually give my body what it needs to function optimally.
• 25:35
  Laura Cardwell: And that means I rest. That means I sleep. That means I eat well. That means I move my body in ways that feel fun and aligned for me. That means I know how to turn off my mind.
• 25:46
  Laura Cardwell: I'm— that might be meditation practices, that might be mindfulness practices, but it's all of it together. All those lifestyle things that we talk about, those make up what real rest and rejuvenation— you need all of those things to equal something that looks like rest. Rest is not just sleep. Rest is finding good breath. I mean, rest is finding pockets of moments. To check back in with the present moment. We live so much of our lives in what's coming or what was, what's coming or what was. And we very rarely take the time to move through our day really present, really in our breath, really right here in this moment. And burnout needs this moment. That's the, you know, again, that antidote is like, I'm right here.
• 26:33
  Laura Cardwell: I'm living right here. I'm not thinking about 100,000 things that need to be done. And I'm certainly not trying to unpack the argument I had with my spouse this morning. You know, it's like, I just need to breathe right here for a minute. And it's amazing, Carmen. It's amazing to me when we just instigate one life change. And that is like, I'm going, I want you to set a timer and, and every hour, and when you stand up, your timer might already do that. I want you to take 3 deep breaths and just look around, put your eyeballs on where you are in the world. Look at your toes on the ground. It takes less than 30 seconds.
• 27:09
  Laura Cardwell: And it's a complete nervous system reset. It's amazing, but we don't do it. We don't do it.
• 27:13
  Carmen Hecox: And I think we don't do it because we've been hardwired since we were young that we are to give. Our mission in life is to give, is to give and to serve and to take care of everyone else. And if we take that moment to step back and take those breaths for ourselves, look down at our toes. There's this guilt that we're being selfish.
• 27:41
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. Guilt. We're always back to that guilt moment. It's so true. I think we're seeing the landscape of guilt change as we look at intergenerational, you know, in my work, I see, um, I see the whole gamut. You know, I have a, I see women in their late 30s all the way through women who are in their 70s. You know, and so not all of that is technically midlife. Um, but if you give, if you give somebody in their early 30s the right tools, midlife's going to look a lot different than, than if you don't, right? And so, and what I've seen, what I see when I look at those, those multi-generational moments is that the guilt of my 70-year-old women and the way they experience the world is very different than the guilt of, let's say, the Gen X women. and what they perceive as what makes them feel guilty. And then the millennials and younger, what makes them feel guilty.
• 28:36
  Laura Cardwell: So across the board, I think what makes them feel guilty is a little bit different. And I think it was more clear and honest in my women that are 60-plus, I'll say, where their whole conditioning was really about that giving, that martyrdom. Right?
• 28:56
  Laura Cardwell: And it was really clear where the guilt is. Like, if I'm not serving somewhere else, then I should feel guilty about that. But it gets really milky in these younger generations because they don't think they're giving. They're kind of in functional freeze around it, right? They don't realize that they're overgiving because they have their own careers and they're doing things. They don't realize that a lot of that is still steeped in a culture that's going to demand that they give. So they get confused about why they feel guilty, you know, even though it's, it's just a different, it's just a little bit different the way that they're like, they can hide the guilt differently. They're like, well, I should, you know, they, they almost guilt themselves about the guilt in a different kind of way. Um, but all of it comes down to guilt. There's, because across the board, the one thing that hasn't changed is that women in general are raised to be nurturers. And there's, you know, like, and so how they nurture and where they're nurturing can look very different. And whether or not they understand that they are still being, um, that's being extracted from them in a way versus a choice to give it, then, um, that's where the guilt comes in. It's like, I know it's not in alignment to do that thing. I don't know how to say no to it because of all of this other confusion.
• 30:14
  Carmen Hecox: Do you find that women in midlife, that they might say, I don't have time to be burnt out because I'm being replaced. I'm in the workforce, or even maybe they're a small business owner or they're high-performance women. I don't have time because if I take that sabbatical to refresh myself, give myself what I need so that I can come back just as powerful or get in alignment, I'm going to get replaced because I'm old per se.
• 30:57
  Carmen Hecox: I mean, do you find that? And how do you get women to wrap their mind around that? No, you're not going to get replaced. You need this.
• 31:03
  Laura Cardwell: Yes.
• 31:07
  Laura Cardwell: There's a couple layers to that. The first one is that we need to reframe for ourselves that time itself is a resource and that how you spend your time has an integrity to it. And you have to value the integrity of that first.
• 31:28
  Laura Cardwell: That's learning to deprogram and decondition the stories around how you're meant to give and the way that you're meant to all the time, that selflessness, that's, that's really, um, and that people pleasing and all of that, that's like self-worth. True self-worth is the first step in a lot of that. Like, I am worth the rest, you know, like, and, um, because underneath all that guilt, always underneath all of that guilt, there's a fear. There's fear of being abandoned, fear of being rejected, fear of being disappeared. I mean, we could have, again, a whole episode on the way we disappear women after menopause. You know, like, it's, um, and, and the crazy part about that is that we are in menopause, we are postmenopausal for more of our lives than we are in any other timeframe of our life, you know. So it's like, there is a deep fear because we are culturally disappeared. Right. So But I think that the antidote for that fear is purpose.
• 32:32
  Laura Cardwell: If you're really beginning to find who am I here to be, what is my most authentic voice? I have a framework that I call the Initiation Codes, and they kind of follow this framework, which is it starts in your identity. Who am I?
• 32:48
  Laura Cardwell: And from that identity, I find my truth, and I begin to learn how to be my truth first and then vocalize my truth in ways that create better boundaries, that create better, um, living experiences for me and the people around me. When we start to speak a truth, people listen, you know, it's, um, and it, and it resonates because it's coming from truth and, um, and authenticity. And when we, when we really begin to be who we're here to be and we speak our truth, then we find our full power. And when you find your full power, it's, it's often at this moment where you start unplugging from external validation. And all of the dopamine and reward system that you were getting for doing the thing that you were told to do, whether or not you wanted to do it, you know, but you got all of this reward and you have to, you know, we have to decondition that. That's a dopaminergic pathway and dopamine. That's the same thing as being addicted to sugar. It's the same thing as being addicted to heroin. You know, that's all the same pathway is I'm being, I'm getting all this dopamine for being rewarded in that way. And so we're unplugging from this external power source and we're replugging into something much deeper, much wiser, much more ancient, much more divine. And that's source energy of some sort. It's an internal wisdom that comes from an internal place. And it's rooted in something that's so much bigger than this external validation. And when we do that, we actually create a whole different set of Neurological pathways and neurotransmitters and neurobiology. And, and so we become something that's now like literally a different vibration.
• 34:25
  Laura Cardwell: We're literally oozing an energy that's very different than the one that was plugged in over here. It's a different energy source and it starts to radiate out instead of needing to be ingested in. And then from that, we can really discover purpose. Like, okay, here I am. in this real deep moment of like, this is who I am meant to be. And then there is a way that I'm meant to serve with this being. And once we do that, once we really embody all of that together, then we become the role model of that. And that's leadership. And so we become what I call the initiated woman.
• 35:03
  Laura Cardwell: And that is someone who knows herself so deeply, can speak her truth so clearly, is plugged into her own internal resource system, that she is wise beyond her years and that she is here to lead others.
• 35:15
  Laura Cardwell: And so I think that's what has to happen in that moment is that we have to know that we are as much a part of the problem when we perform because the guilt tells us to, or the drive tells us that we need more. And that's often— that's up to us to change. No one's going to change it for us. We have to claim it back and we have to value the time as a resource. Time and money are both resources and your time and your presence are precious and you get to choose who you bring that to and where you show up with that. And then you have to trust that you will be supported in that in some kind of way. Because it can be really— Look, I'm not going to It's messy, you know, the messy of becoming who you're really meant to be. There's a reason why the butterfly is such a great metaphor for that. It's like, it's a messy process of melting down to truly nothing. There was nothing of the old of you that still exists. And that happens in menopause. You know, we're literally changing hormonally and biologically and neurologically.
• 36:21
  Laura Cardwell: And we're becoming something so much bigger than that. You know, there's a big trust that has to start happening. And it starts in an internal place. That was a lot, but yeah. And so if I understand you correctly, your framework helps women cut out the noise and have step 1 to re-identifying or identify who they are, but through these simple little steps.
• 36:52
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. So there's, um, that's the framework of my, um, of the Initiated Woman work, you know? And so the book, the Unstuck Yourself book, Megan and I wrote that because we saw so many people trying to fix burnout by just hacking their way through it, you know? And then, and we were like, look, the, the, the real antidote to burnout is finding purpose.
• 37:17
  Laura Cardwell: The Initiated Woman journey is like, how do I do that? How do I do that? Because I mean, we can just say, okay, well, go be who you're meant to be. Well, how do I know? How do I know who I was here to be? You know? And so that's really where the Initiated Woman journey comes in.
• 37:30
  Laura Cardwell: It's like, there are ways to know, there are ways to plug into that internal guidance. And there are maps that we can use, archetypal tools that we can use, but it's really learning to, to, to cut out the noise and look at like, where did the story come from? You didn't come into this world. feeling guilty for not making dinner for your family or whatever? Where did it come from? And so we have to question those things first and we need support systems in that. We need community around it because it is a messy process. And there's usually a lot of fear of what will happen if I start saying no to people. There's a ton of fear in there and we have to know how to deal with fear. And we are not a culture that teaches us what to do with fear. We talk about fear, we intellectualize fear.
• 38:16
  Laura Cardwell: We're starting to talk about nervous system issue. We're hearing a lot about nervous systems, but we still don't value like, oh, I am afraid of that. How do I work with that?
• 38:27
  Laura Cardwell: So not totally. I think we're getting there.
• 38:30
  Carmen Hecox: Yeah. And I think what I like about what you said is that it helps a woman kind of dismiss where people might say, oh, Oh my gosh, she's in menopause.
• 38:40
  Carmen Hecox: Ignore her. She's in menopause. She'll get over it. Or where others might say, she's going through a midlife crisis.
• 38:48
  Carmen Hecox: Just let her go through it and she'll find her way back if she ever does.
• 38:52
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. That's the sentence that I want to replant. What would happen if we envisioned a world where menopause was coming? similar. I call it cougar puberty, which is your cougar puberty.
• 39:07
  Laura Cardwell: And it's like, and it's kind of reclaiming the word cougar, not to be like a predatory woman, but like, let's reclaim that as like this kind of, you know, this self-imagined being that is empowered and in her purpose and has apex focus on what she is here to do and the legacy she is leaving.
• 39:27
  Laura Cardwell: And what if we were to teach women early on that they, they're going to go through a puberty when they're In, you know, 8 to 15 range, and they're going to be a hot mess. And, and everybody at that time says, yeah, she's going through puberty, that's a hot mess, you know, like, and then we, we were to fast forward and say, okay, she's going into perimenopause, she's going into menopause, she's going into her second puberty. It totally is a second puberty. Mm-hmm. It mirrors your first one pretty deeply, you know, it's like, You don't have the same— your estrogen is changing in your brain. Your brain is literally changing because it doesn't have the same hormones. You're all over the place. All of those things are true. What would happen if we had a culture that was like, oh my gosh, it's finally happening for her. She is crossing her last threshold into her full power, into her full leader. We'd have to value women. enough to care that women could become purposeful and powerful in leadership. That's a whole different story, but that won't happen unless we do it, right?
• 40:36
  Laura Cardwell: So it's like, what happens if we prepare women and we say, look, it's not going to be an easy journey, but it is a spiritual initiation into some— and if you are willing to embrace that and really become who you're here to become, that is world-changing.
• 40:51
  Laura Cardwell: That is world-changing initiation. It's not just me. We do it as a generation. I mean, there's, I don't think it's, I don't think it's on accident that, that we are waking up to what menopause really is at the same time that the world needs what we have to offer. Like, I don't think that's an accident. I think it's a call to action.
• 41:10
  Carmen Hecox: And I think that, I think a lot of mistakes that most people do, or most women do, is that they try to fight a against perimenopause and menopause instead of embracing it, seeing the gift that comes with it. Because the minute I stopped fighting it and embraced it, I realized the power that comes from going through perimenopause into menopause. And my body changed because I was no longer fighting it.
• 41:44
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:44
  Carmen Hecox: And was embracing it.
• 41:44
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. Well, I mean, we are so conditioned. It's so deeply, deeply, deeply conditioned in our unconscious that we are not valuable unless we are able to produce children or we're young and sexy.
• 42:02
  Laura Cardwell: That's our value in this culture. And so we have to change the cultural story, first of all, that actually our value our most valuable time is in our postmenopausal years. And that's up to us to change.
• 42:17
  Laura Cardwell: We have to quit. I mean, I love the pioneers in the field of perimenopause and menopause right now, but so much of it is about symptom management or trying to feel as young as you can for as long as you can. And I want those things for all of us. I want us to all feel young and I want us to all feel vibrant, but I don't want it to be because we need to be sexy, that we need to be beautiful. I want it to be because it's not just aging well, it's really understanding that menopause, there's no way possible to come out on the other side of perimenopause and menopause the same person. It's not possible. And trying to hold on to that person is what's causing your pain. Like you said, it's like it is causing so much of the stuff that's happened. It's causing the symptoms, you know, like it's causing the emotional, mental symptoms for sure, but it's also causing some of those physical symptoms. And what happens if we're like, I'm going to go through the process and I'm going to have the right amount of support I need, and I'm going to not try and hold on to that woman that I was. Because I'm about to become something so much deeper and bigger and better.
• 43:33
  Laura Cardwell: And, you know, like, we just, we just have to change that narrative. We have to start really saying, yeah. So, you know, for me, I went through early menopause. I went through menopause in my late 30s and was postmenopausal by my early 40s.
• 43:48
  Laura Cardwell: I had no idea that's what was going on for me, that, you know, and none of my doctors were going to tell me that. But now I think I, I think that can feel that kind of life mission for me. And it lines up with all of my purpose is like, we have an opportunity here to shift the cultural narrative across the board in so many ways. And it all revolves around us having a conversation that says, I'm willing to let go of the woman that I was. I'm going to open my palms and I'm going to get curious about who I could be.
• 44:17
  Laura Cardwell: How about creating the best version of yourself.
• 44:21
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. Yes. Where have we heard that before? I feel like that's come— that sounds very familiar.
• 44:32
  Carmen Hecox: Exactly.
• 44:33
  Carmen Hecox: What can women do right now?
• 44:38
  Carmen Hecox: They know, they know they are in burnout.
• 44:45
  Carmen Hecox: And they're afraid to reach out to someone to get help because it makes them look weak. What can they do right now? What steps would you give women right now to help them start to see the light that there is a beautiful life on the other side if they just let go of burnout?
• 45:12
  Laura Cardwell: Yeah. Or just submit themselves and just do what it takes to get to the other side? I would say, and we say this in the book, but I think the number one tool that we have in our toolbox is curiosity. I think getting curious with your burnout, sitting with your burnout, like have tea with your burnout, as if your burnout is a friend of you that's so tired, And just sit down with her and say, girl, talk to me. You know, like, what's going on for you? Get curious with why I feel that way. Get curious with the roles I'm playing that maybe don't feel right. Get curious where, you know, get curious about your intuition. I know something is off here. I just don't know what to do about that yet. You know, and just, we're such a culture of name, blame, fix. You know, like, it's like, okay, now I know it's this. I'm gonna, I'm, I, I can wrap my brain around that and this is the protocol I need to fix it. So much of midlife, menopause, and burnout, what they really want from us is to just slow down and to become present to the moment. And in that openness, in that curiosity, you cannot fix or hack your way through menopause.
• 46:28
  Laura Cardwell: You can't speed it up. You can't, you know, like it is going to unfold the way it's going to unfold. And And so that means we have to learn to get uncomfortable in discomfort or find our comfort in that discomfort. You know, like, how do we reteach our nervous system to say, you know what, I don't know, I don't know, and, and be okay with that energy? And I think the way that we do that is to get curious with it. You know, curiosity lets us play in the realm of the unknown. Curiosity activates neurotransmitters that allow us to go deeper, get more meaning out of our lives. And actually it's the neurotransmitters of happiness and bonding and sustainability. And those are the kind of neurotransmitters we can activate when we get curious and we ask, okay, so what's the deeper thing going on here?
• 47:18
  Carmen Hecox: And you have a tool, don't you?
• 47:21
  Laura Cardwell: We do. In the book, we have a— the whole last part of the book is called the Integrative Somatic And that is based on years and years and years of our combined work between all of the certifications and thousands of hours of training that I have and all the certifications and thousands of hours of training that Megan had. We just kind of sat down and we were like, what's the best of the best of those modalities? And what is the way that we have seen it really work for women based on those things? And then what are the things that, of all of that, What is the way to go through this that is the most effective and efficient and also easily accessible? Because we don't always all have time to do, you know, thousands of hours of something. You know, it's like, like, what's the thing I can do right now? And so in that book, we have everything from like, I only have 30 seconds to I have an hour to sit down and really be with this.
• 48:17
  Laura Cardwell: And that integrative somatic experience will walk you through depending on how much time you have, how deep you can go. But the whole, the whole process is there.
• 48:26
  Carmen Hecox: Laura, where can people learn more about you and work with you?
• 48:34
  Laura Cardwell: Yes. So if they're curious about initiation codes, they can take the initiation code quiz and kind of see where they are in that process. And that's initiationcodes.laurapardwell.com.
• 48:44
  Laura Cardwell: And that's also how they can find me is at lauracardwell.com, my website, or I'm on Instagram pretty actively, which is lauracardwell.midlife.
• 48:59
  Carmen Hecox: That's great. And I will post that information in the show notes so that people can take that quiz and kind of figure out where they're at to have a starting point and then have a tool that they can go back to you and say, hey, here's my Here's my scorecard, or here's, here's what your quiz said.
• 49:14
  Laura Cardwell: Yes, exactly. And then from there, there's all sorts of options. They can keep going from there.
• 49:21
  Laura Cardwell: And they can purchase your, your book, yours and Megan's book, anywhere?
• 49:26
  Laura Cardwell: They can, they can purchase it anywhere online. It's available Barnes Noble, Amazon, bookshop.org. You can get it anywhere.
• 49:34
  Laura Cardwell: They may not be able to find it in their local bookstore, but they should be able to get it online.
• 49:37
  Carmen Hecox: Laura, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your tips. Thank you so much. It was amazing.
• 49:45
  Laura Cardwell: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so grateful.
• 49:49
  Carmen Hecox: Great. I will include all of your links in the show notes so that people know exactly where they can get some midlife help.
• 49:57
  Laura Cardwell: Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much.
• 50:00
  Carmen Hecox: I hope this conversation helped you see burnout menopause and midlife in a completely different way.
• 50:08
  Carmen Hecox: Because maybe that deep exhaustion isn't proof that you're failing. Maybe it's your body, your spirit, and your life asking you to stop performing, stop pushing, and finally get curious about what is no longer working. Laura reminds us that midlife is not the end of who we are. It can be a beginning of a more powerful, more honest, and more aligned version of ourselves. And that shift starts with curiosity, asking, what is my burnout trying to tell me? Where am I saying I'm fine when I'm really not?
• 50:49
  Carmen Hecox: And who am I becoming now? If you want to learn more about Laura Cardwell, Take her initiation code quiz or connect with her, head on over to createthebestme.com/ep181, or you can find her links down below in the show notes.
• 51:10
  Carmen Hecox: And make sure to come back next week for another amazing episode created just for you. Until then, keep dreaming big, take care of yourself, and remember, you are enough. You are beautiful, strong, and capable of creating the best version of yourself by embracing your second puberty as the amazing gift it offers you. Thank you for watching. Catch you next week. Bye for now.