Latest / Joyful Menopause / Episode 37: You're Not Fighting Your Hormones. You're Training Your Brain.

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Episode 37: You're Not Fighting Your Hormones. You're Training Your Brain. · Joyful Menopause

• 0:00
  I want to say something today that I hope takes some pressure off of you.
• 0:03
  Willpower is a function of your thinking brain, your neocortex.
• 0:07
  That's where it lives, and your thinking brain is exactly what you lose access to when you're under stress.
• 0:13
  So when you tell yourself,"I'll just try harder tonight," what you're actually doing is asking a part of your brain that has gone quiet to overrule a part of your brain that has taken charge.
• 0:23
  That's not a fair fight, and losing it is not evidence that something is wrong with you.
• 0:28
  So today, I want to talk about what works instead.
• 0:31
  So let's get started.
• 0:33
  Menopause doesn't have to feel like you are living in someone else's body.
• 0:37
  Your host, Lynda Enright, has spent the last 25 years helping women to thrive in midlife.
• 0:42
  Here you'll find science-based practical advice that you can start using today to get real results for your health.
• 0:47
  Welcome to Joyful Menopause.
• 0:54
  If you've been with me for the last two episodes, you know the hard part already.
• 0:57
  Menopause is a neurological event.
• 1:00
  Estrogen acts as a brake on your stress response, and when it declines, your brain becomes more stress reactive.
• 1:07
  And eight chemicals that govern hunger and fat storage are being disrupted from two directions at once.
• 1:14
  If you're joining new, you're fine.
• 1:15
  Start here.
• 1:16
  I'll fill in what you need.
• 1:17
  So the obvious question is, if the deck is stacked, what actually helps?
• 1:22
  Not another diet, not more discipline, something that works on the wiring in your brain itself.
• 1:27
  Let me tell you why I use emotional brain training, or EBT, with women in this transition specifically.
• 1:33
  There's four reasons.
• 1:34
  The first is that it targets the stress response directly, not the symptoms, not the behaviors, the root cause.
• 1:41
  And as we spent two episodes establishing, the stress response is the primary driver of midlife weight struggle.
• 1:48
  The second is that it works with neuroplasticity, your brain's ability to change.
• 1:53
  It's not limited to when you're young, the way we used to think.
• 1:57
  We now know that the brain builds new circuits at any age, including during the menopausal transition.
• 2:04
  Every time you use one of these tools, you're laying down new wiring.
• 2:08
  The third is that it doesn't require willpower.
• 2:10
  This is the critical one.
• 2:11
  Willpower is a neocortical function, and the neocortex is less accessible in brain states three, four, and five, where you're feeling more stressed, which is where most perimenopausal women are spending a great deal of their time.
• 2:24
  I honestly would say, where most of us are spending a great deal of their time at any age.
• 2:28
  EBT changes the wiring itself, so behaviors you want become more automatic, and behaviors you're trying to move away from become less so.
• 2:38
  And the fourth reason is that it's actually sustainable because it builds actual brain capacity.
• 2:44
  You're not following a plan.
• 2:45
  You're becoming a different version of yourself in your brain.
• 2:49
  Okay, so three tools in order.
• 2:52
  Tool number one, what's my number?
• 2:54
  The first and most foundational tool is also the simplest, and I'll be honest, it sounds almost too simple to matter.
• 3:00
  Check in.
• 3:01
  Just check in.
• 3:02
  Name your brain state one to five.
• 3:04
  That's it.
• 3:05
  So brain state one is feeling great, present with a glow.
• 3:08
  Feeling two, feeling good, present, but no glow.
• 3:12
  Feeling three, or stress- brain state three, a little bit stressed.
• 3:16
  Four, definitely stressed, and five, completely stressed out.
• 3:20
  So that's it.
• 3:21
  You're just going to check in.
• 3:23
  That's the whole tool.
• 3:24
  And if I could only keep one, this is the one tool that I'd keep because before you can change your brain state, you have to know what it is.
• 3:31
  The check-in makes the invisible visible.
• 3:34
  So now what's different in midlife is the speed.
• 3:38
  With less hormonal buffering, you cycle through brain states faster and less predictably than you used to.
• 3:44
  We all cycle through brain states one through five all day long, but when you have less of that hormonal buffer, it goes faster, and it's less predictable.
• 3:52
  So a hot flash, for example, can take you from a brain state two to a four in less than a minute.
• 3:59
  One terrible night's sleep can have you starting the day at three or four- before you even had breakfast, before anything has actually gone wrong.
• 4:08
  So the cues matter.
• 4:10
  Let me give you the ones I use with women in this transition because the triggers in midlife are specific.
• 4:16
  So think about, what's my number when I wake up at 3:00 AM?
• 4:19
  The middle of the night waking is one of the highest risk moments for getting out of balance.
• 4:24
  Check in right there.
• 4:25
  Before you reach for your phone, before you start spiraling about tomorrow, before you head to the kitchen, if that's something that you maybe would do, just ask yourself,"What's my number?" Second one, what's my number before I open the refrigerator at night?
• 4:37
  Evening eating is common for so many of us, but during this transition, it's usually driven by elevated cortisol and brain state, not by actual hunger.
• 4:46
  Check in.
• 4:47
  What's my number?
• 4:48
  What's my number when I feel a hot flash coming on?
• 4:51
  A hot flash is a physiological stress event.
• 4:54
  It activates your th- sympathetic nervous system, so it's an opening to use a tool rather than just bracing for the hot flash.
• 5:02
  What's my number when I'm overwhelmed, when I want to escape?
• 5:05
  Overwhelm in a brain state four is very common in perimenopause.
• 5:10
  Again, I think these things are common all through life, but they...
• 5:13
  our buffer gets smaller during the years of perimenopause and menopause.
• 5:17
  When we can recognize it as a brain state rather than as evidence of a personal failure, that can be genuinely transformative.
• 5:25
  And then the simplest one, what's my number right now?
• 5:28
  In this moment, just take a moment, one, two, three, four, or five.
• 5:35
  One thing I want to be really clear about, a one isn't good and a five isn't bad.
• 5:39
  You're not grading yourself.
• 5:41
  You're not judging yourself for being at a high- a, a lower brain state.
• 5:44
  Higher number is lower brain state.
• 5:46
  You're just gathering information.
• 5:48
  When you can do that frequently with curiosity, with compassion, not judgment, that's what we're aiming for.
• 5:56
  So the second tool.
• 5:57
  You've now checked in.
• 5:58
  You've learned how to do that.
• 6:00
  You've noticed that your number is climbing.
• 6:02
  Now what?
• 6:03
  So this is the fastest route to bring it back down.
• 6:06
  So here's how you do it.
• 6:08
  Breathe in through your nose for a count of four, then out through your mouth for a count of six to eight, and repeat that three to five times.
• 6:15
  The extended exhale is the active ingredient.
• 6:18
  That's where we move into that parasympathetic rest and digest.
• 6:23
  So here's why.
• 6:23
  That long exhale, it activates specifically your vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve sends a signal of safety to your brain, which shifts your nervous system, again, out of that sympathetic, which is the fight or flight, and into the parasympathetic, which is rest and recover.
• 6:40
  And here's why it matters so much right now, specifically.
• 6:43
  Without estrogen's buffering effect, your HPA axis has become more hyperreactive, so the alarm triggers more easily, more intensely, and it takes longer to settle down.
• 6:54
  Connecting and breathing works directly against that pattern.
• 6:59
  I especially want you to try this during a hot flash.
• 7:02
  A hot flash, again, is a sympathetic nervous system event.
• 7:05
  Your hypothalamus is firing because it's lost some of its estrogen-mediated temperature regulation.
• 7:11
  Breathing won't eliminate the hot flash, not to, to lead you astray, but it can reduce its intensity and how long it lasts by, again, countering that sympathetic activation.
• 7:23
  And over time, and this is what's really great, regular practice of these tools actually literally rewires the circuits in your brain.
• 7:32
  The research on neuroplasticity shows us that repeatedly activating the parasympathetic pathway builds and strengthens that pathway, which makes calm more accessible and the stress response less automatic.
• 7:45
  You're not just coping in the moment, you're changing the default.
• 7:48
  So the third tool is movement, and movement is one of the most power tool- powerful tools we have for lowering stress hormones.
• 7:55
  It's also free, which is awesome.
• 7:58
  But I want to talk about it specifically in the context of menopause because not all movement serve the same purpose, and I think this is where a lot of women get stuck, doing the wrong kind of moment- movement for what their body actually needs right now.
• 8:10
  Restorative movement: yoga, stretching, Tai Chi.
• 8:14
  This activates the parasympathetic nervous system, lowering cortisol and supporting sleep, especially valuable when cortisol is chronically elevated, which in this transition it usually is.
• 8:25
  Walking.
• 8:26
  Walking in nature, even better.
• 8:28
  Even 10 to 20 minutes outdoors has been shown to reduce cortisol, lift mood, and support brain state one directly.
• 8:36
  I think it's one of the most accessible and really underutilized tools that we have.
• 8:41
  Again, free.
• 8:42
  Go outside, go for a walk.
• 8:45
  Strength training.
• 8:46
  Two to three times a week with doing some resistance training is particularly important during menopause.
• 8:52
  As estrogen declines, you begin losing muscle mass, and insulin sensitivity decreases, so resistance training directly counters both of those.
• 9:00
  It rebuilds muscle, it improves insulin sensitivity, and it shifts body composition.
• 9:06
  And lastly, joyful movement.
• 9:08
  Dancing, swimming, hiking, playing, whatever brings you joy, this boosts your dopamine and your serotonin, and remember, those are exactly the two chemicals that both stress and declining estrogen are depleting.
• 9:21
  So movement that brings you actual joy is replenishing the very chemicals that this transition is taking away.
• 9:29
  So I want you to sit with that for a second.
• 9:30
  Joy isn't the reward you get after you do the hard work.
• 9:34
  Joy is part of the mechanism to get there.
• 9:37
  I want to close the tools section with something that's at the heart of all of this.
• 9:42
  EBT or emotional brain training is not symptom management.
• 9:46
  It's not a coping strategy.
• 9:48
  It's rewiring.
• 9:49
  It's getting at the root of what's going on in your brain.
• 9:52
  Every time you check in, you're building a new neural pathway.
• 9:56
  Every time you connect instead of reaching for food at 9:00 PM, you're laying down a new circuit.
• 10:03
  Every time you move your body when your ba- brain state is dropping, you're strengthening a new pattern.
• 10:09
  Your brain is neuroplastic.
• 10:11
  It can change at any age, and midlife is not too late.
• 10:15
  And honestly, I'd make the argument that midlife is exactly the right time because the disruption of this transition destabilizes the old patterns, and that creates an opening, a moment where new patterns can actually be built.
• 10:29
  You're not trying to fight your hormones, you're training your brain So your next step, here's what I want you to do.
• 10:35
  Check in 10 times a day and choose at least two of the menopause specific cues we talked about, the 3:00 AM waking, the refrigerator at night, the moment before a hot flash.
• 10:46
  That, that's your whole assignment.
• 10:47
  Not perfect, not forever, just start doing it.
• 10:50
  Because any, any interruption that you can have of that stress response is better than none, and every check-in is a repetition, and repetitions are what build new healthy circuits in the brain.
• 11:02
  I want to end with this because I think it matters deeply.
• 11:05
  What we've talked about across these three episodes is hard.
• 11:08
  Perimenopause and menopause are genuinely challenging transitions for sure.
• 11:13
  The physiological changes are real things that are happening, and the weight change can be real too.
• 11:19
  The brain state disruption is real also, so I don't want to minimize the importance of doing this work.
• 11:24
  But I also want you to hear this: this is not an inevitable decline.
• 11:29
  This is not something you simply have to endure, and it is absolutely not a willpower problem.
• 11:35
  This is a call to go deeper with your self-care.
• 11:38
  It's an opportunity to build the kind of stress resilience that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life.
• 11:43
  The women who develop these tools during perimenopause don't just manage the transition better, they come out the other side more regulated, more self-aware, and more capable than they have ever been.
• 11:55
  The goal is not to get back to who you were.
• 11:57
  The goal is to become the most regulated, most resilient version of yourself.
• 12:02
  Doesn't that sound amazing?
• 12:04
  If this series of, of podcasts resonated with you and you'd like to go further, whether that's learning all of the brain state tools, addressing the functional nutrition side of menopause puzzle, or exploring what a more comprehensive prog- program might look like, I'd love to connect.
• 12:20
  Reach out to schedule a call.
• 12:21
  My email is in the show notes.
• 12:23
  And also, there's a link to a free video, Stress, Your Brain, and Menopause, where I walk through all of this with visuals so you can just see more all about making sense of it.
• 12:33
  So that link is also in the show notes.
• 12:35
  Thank you so, so much for being here, for your commitment to understanding your health at a deeper level.
• 12:41
  Be well, and I'll see you next time.