Latest / Midlife Rising / 1: The Missing Link Between Menopause and Burnout Every Woman Over 40 Should Know

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1: The Missing Link Between Menopause and Burnout Every Woman Over 40 Should Know · Midlife Rising

0:01
Jen: You're a woman over 40 who spent your life being the one who holds it all together.
0:06
Jen: But now your body's changing and your soul is done pretending everything is fine.
0:11
Jen: Welcome to Midlife Rising, where your hosts, Sherry and Jen, twin sisters and modern medicine women.
0:18
Jen: Here to help you rewire your stress response, balance your hormones, and reclaim your feminine power.
0:24
Jen: Every episode is a rebellion against the rules you never agreed to and a return to yourself.
0:29
Jen: Join us where midlife isn't a crisis, it's a catalyst.
0:33
Jen: Hello and welcome to the Midlife Rising Podcast.
0:37
Jen: Today we're gonna show you that there is an underlying root cause to midlife and menopause symptoms that no one really seems to be talking about.
0:46
Jen: This is our first episode, and we are so thrilled to be here.
0:50
Jen: I'm Sherry.
0:52
Jen: And I'm Jen.
0:53
Jen: If you don't know us and haven't seen our podcast cover, you'll notice that we are twins.
0:59
Jen: We look a lot alike, and we also sound alike.
1:03
Jen: So we're gonna do our best to help you distinguish between our voices, and I'm hoping that you'll start to notice the differences as we go along.
1:11
Jen: So today I'm gonna sort of interview Jen, and you're gonna hear her story about how she discovered what was really going on underneath the menopause symptoms.
1:25
Jen: So, Jen, you were talking about your story before this.
1:30
Jen: So I want to ask you to first take us back to your life at 43, age 43, when you first started feeling symptoms, I think.
1:42
Jen: And tell me what what was going on in your life.
1:45
Jen: What did what did life look like for you at that point?
1:48
Jen: Okay.
1:49
Jen: So I was living in South Africa, so it was hot.
1:55
Jen: It was the middle of summer, and I was working on my PhD.
2:02
Jen: So I was in my home office, I was sweating because we not a lot of people have air conditioning there.
2:08
Jen: The houses are meant to be cool, but our house was hot.
2:12
Jen: And I was very stressed out as I was working on this thing, and we were having some financial issues at the time, and I was also getting really hot, and I was starting to feel these waves of heat.
2:28
Jen: And I was like, no, it can't be a hot flash.
2:33
Jen: It's not a hot flash.
2:35
Jen: And I was also trying to get pregnant at the time, so was in very big denial of these symptoms.
2:41
Jen: I'm like, nope, I'm just hot, it's just hot out, and I would just go for a swim and and try to get through it.
2:51
Jen: So those are the first signs that I started feeling.
2:55
Jen: And I certainly wasn't ready to be hitting midlife because I was trying to get pregnant.
2:59
Jen: I met Sherwin at age 41.
3:04
Jen: Um, and we'd already been trying for a couple of years.
3:08
Jen: And the other thing that I started to notice was I was skipping periods.
3:15
Jen: And it was more than just like it was a week late.
3:19
Jen: I started to track it and I was like, ooh, I'm skipping it completely.
3:26
Jen: And when I'm skipping it, I'm feeling the hot flashes.
3:29
Jen: Oh, so you know what's interesting.
3:32
Jen: I wonder, I don't remember really talking about this back then.
3:36
Jen: But that's actually around the same time that I was also feeling similar stuff.
3:40
Jen: My period was going all awry.
3:43
Jen: And I was also trying to get pregnant, as you know.
3:47
Jen: And yet I was just kind of chalking it up to infertility, like skipping periods and that sort of thing.
3:54
Jen: Like it wasn't, I did not connect it to menopause and definitely didn't want it to be that yet.
4:02
Jen: Didn't want to admit that I was in perimenopause.
4:05
Jen: And I don't even think it even occurred to me.
4:07
Jen: It didn't occur to me at first either.
4:09
Jen: And I was also, because I was trying to get pregnant, I was hoping those misperiods were um were that I was pregnant.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
4:17
Jen: But I also knew and validated this later, was that when I skipped a period and I actually like when I skipped the first period when I my body was actually trying to get pregnant, I felt symptoms of pregnancy.
4:33
Jen: So I knew, I knew when it when I was skipping it because it was my body, it was peramenopause, and I knew when I was skipping it because my body was still trying to get pregnant.
4:45
Jen: What I found out later was that my eggs were being fertilized, but they weren't good quality eggs.
4:52
Jen: So I was I was having lots of little tiny miscarriages like barely, you know, a couple weeks into pregnancy.
5:00
Jen: That I that you couldn't, I wasn't even testing positive for pregnancy yet.
5:04
Jen: Right.
5:05
Jen: But I was already starting to feel the tiredness and the nausea.
5:10
Jen: Well, and that actually brings up a really important point that I don't think women know.
5:14
Jen: I think they there's this misconception that your estrogen sort of is goes on this steady decline.
5:23
Jen: But uh what I learned because I was also doing fertility treatments at the time, was that my estrogen was fluctuating so much.
5:31
Jen: Like it would dip, but then it would also rise like above where it should be.
5:38
Jen: So we had to, we were doing intrauterine insemination at the time.
5:43
Jen: And I remember having to abandon a cycle because my estrogen was too high.
5:49
Jen: And I think it's partly those fluctuations in estrogen that really mess people up.
5:57
Jen: Absolutely.
5:58
Jen: I, you know what?
5:58
Jen: I think you're right.
5:59
Jen: Cause I also, and that actually makes sense for something else that I was experiencing, and that was breast tenderness.
6:06
Jen: Yeah.
6:07
Jen: And at one point, I went to my doctor, and by this point I was suspecting that this was perimenopause.
6:14
Jen: I went to my doctor and I was complaining that my breasts were sore and they were constantly sore.
6:19
Jen: Like it wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, how sometimes you get tender around your period or something like that.
6:25
Jen: And this was kind of, it was stronger and it was lasting longer.
6:28
Jen: And and I said to her, like, yeah, I've skipped a period.
6:33
Jen: Um, I don't think I'm pregnant.
6:35
Jen: She's like, well, let's see.
6:38
Jen: So she tested me for pregnancy.
6:40
Jen: That was the first thing she did, which I mean, which is fair, but I was like, I'm not pregnant.
6:46
Jen: And so then they went through all, like, nobody figured that this was perimenopause.
6:53
Jen: So she's like, Well, let's send you for a mammogram.
6:56
Jen: The good news is that breast pain is not a sign of cancer.
7:01
Jen: And let's go, like, go for a mammogrammogram and find out what it is.
7:05
Jen: Wow.
7:05
Jen: She went straight to a mammogram.
7:07
Jen: Yeah.
7:08
Jen: Huh.
7:09
Jen: And so I went for this mammogram.
7:13
Jen: And you're supposed to do them over 40, anyways, or at the time that was what they believed, even though there's false positives or whatever.
7:20
Jen: So I went there and they're like, and so I told them my problem.
7:24
Jen: And they said, they said, well, how much caffeine are you drinking?
7:27
Jen: And I said, I drink two cups of decaf coffee a day.
7:31
Jen: She said, Well, there's still caffeine in coffee, so you should in decaf coffee, so you should give up decaf coffee.
7:37
Jen: And those were the kinds of things that they were talking about.
7:40
Jen: And looking back on it, that was completely just a perimenopause symptom.
7:46
Jen: And nobody called it.
7:47
Jen: Like nobody went, oh, she's 43, she skipped a period, and that is a possible cause of this.
7:56
Jen: So that was like that was my frustration at the time was nobody was telling me what was going on in my body.
8:06
Jen: So back to, I was trying to get pregnant at the time.
8:09
Jen: And because it wasn't happening, finally my gynecologist did some blood work.
8:15
Jen: And she phoned me and said, Nope, your FSH is has fallen off a cliff.
8:20
Jen: I think it's FSH.
8:21
Jen: I forget what hormone it is.
8:23
Jen: And she said, there's like a 0.03% chance that you would get pregnant naturally at this stage.
8:30
Jen: FSH is the first one that they test, and it usually goes up when you start to hit perimenopause.
8:37
Jen: Okay, maybe that was happening.
8:38
Jen: I can't remember what she told me, but effectively her words were, you're not going to get pregnant.
8:43
Jen: Right.
8:43
Jen: So effectively, she's what she's saying is you're in perimenopause, but then told me nothing about it.
8:49
Jen: Like didn't ask me, are you feeling any other symptoms?
8:51
Jen: Oh, she did ask me if I was feeling any symptoms.
8:53
Jen: And I said, Yeah, I had already felt some hot flashes and felt really embarrassed that I was trying to get pregnant and was having hot flashes at the same time because that felt ridiculous, even though I wanted that.
9:04
Jen: But nobody gave me a pamphlet or something to tell me what all the other signs were.
9:11
Jen: Like I didn't know, they didn't tell me what to do.
9:14
Jen: Um, they just told me, like, that's what's happening with your hormones.
9:18
Jen: So sorry for you.
9:19
Jen: Go figure out what you want to do about getting pregnant.
9:23
Jen: Yeah.
9:23
Jen: I think that's probably the experience of a lot of women.
9:27
Jen: There's no like, there's no birds in the bees part two.
9:31
Jen: No, you know, no, people talk about hot flashes, but there's all this other stuff that nobody tells you.
9:39
Jen: Okay, enter the midlife symptom decoder that we um that we offer as a free gift.
9:48
Jen: So I'll drop that into the show notes.
9:50
Jen: How to get that.
9:52
Jen: So head on down there and click on the link and you can get a free symptom decoder.
9:56
Jen: Yeah.
9:57
Jen: Just a little perfect point for a plus.
9:59
Jen: I know.
10:00
Jen: I I didn't even think about it.
10:01
Jen: But yes, that would, I would have loved to have all, you know, a list of the 80 different symptoms back at the time.
10:08
Jen: Yeah.
10:09
Jen: We know probably, like I feel like women probably know four or five.
10:13
Jen: Yeah.
10:13
Jen: And then there's all these other ones that they're like, this is happening and this is happening, and have no idea it's even related.
10:18
Jen: Yeah.
10:19
Jen: So, Jen, you said something earlier that I want to go back to.
10:23
Jen: I think you said that besides like wanting to get pregnant, you were still resisting the idea that you were that these were signs of perimenopause.
10:34
Jen: Why do you think that was?
10:36
Jen: Besides, like, I don't want to be in perimenopause because I'm still trying to get pregnant.
10:40
Jen: Was there something else there?
10:42
Jen: There was all kinds of stuff.
10:43
Jen: There was, I'm only 43.
10:47
Jen: I'm not right, like I wasn't ready.
10:49
Jen: I wasn't expecting it that early, especially because I thought timing of menopause was a genetic thing.
10:58
Jen: And I figured that since mom went into menopause so late, like in her mid to late 50s, that we'd also be, we would also not start feeling symptoms until then.
11:11
Jen: Oh, yeah.
11:12
Jen: I totally thought that too.
11:13
Jen: Yeah, because I was trying to get pregnant, I'm like, how could I be in these two phases of my life at the same time?
11:18
Jen: Like that just didn't, I felt so much resistance around that.
11:22
Jen: And then there was this feeling of shame that I was trying to avoid.
11:26
Jen: So I was resisting it at all costs because I felt shame around menopause in midlife to begin with.
11:35
Jen: And then even more shame because it was starting so early for me.
11:40
Jen: I think there is shame around that.
11:42
Jen: Like, I think there's some women who are like, oh, great, I don't have a period anymore.
11:48
Jen: I'm only 45.
11:49
Jen: But then I think there's a lot of others who are like, uh, okay, yeah, I'd love to get rid of my period, but I'm out of menopause.
11:58
Jen: I'm alone.
12:00
Jen: I in fact, I distinctly remember on at this has happened multiple times, but I can think of one conversation with a friend of mine where she very proudly said, Nope, I went to see my doctor and he said I'm nowhere near perimenopause.
12:15
Jen: Yeah.
12:16
Jen: So she was like, she said that with pride, which I don't blame her for.
12:21
Jen: Like, I noticed it because I was feeling the shame of being in perimenopause.
12:30
Jen: Yeah, and I didn't name the shame back then.
12:32
Jen: I was just feeling all of this dread.
12:35
Jen: Yeah.
12:35
Jen: And that's what the studies show is that 80, 90% of women in the Western world feel shame over hitting menopause and and midlife in general.
12:47
Jen: Like they they cringe at the word midlife.
12:50
Jen: Like, remember when we were talking about naming this podcast?
12:53
Jen: Yes.
12:53
Jen: There were women who who said, don't call it midlife rising.
12:57
Jen: That's too cringy.
12:58
Jen: The fact that they can't even deal with the word midlife, and yet the word midlife, it just means you're in the middle of life.
13:06
Jen: Like by itself, it is not a word that should hold any charge.
13:11
Jen: And yet it does.
13:13
Jen: Yeah.
13:14
Jen: Obviously.
13:14
Jen: We've made it mean something negative.
13:16
Jen: Society has.
13:18
Jen: Yeah.
13:18
Jen: I mean, that's, I don't know if we want to get into that today.
13:21
Jen: We know where that cut, like that's a that's societal conditioning.
13:25
Jen: Yeah.
13:26
Jen: Well, let's let's save that for later.
13:28
Jen: Well, yeah.
13:28
Jen: Let okay.
13:29
Jen: So so you're feeling some symptoms.
13:32
Jen: You are feeling some shame about feeling those symptoms and denial that they are even anything to do with perimenopause or menopause.
13:40
Jen: And so you go to the doctor, and the doctor right away doesn't really give you any kind of guidance or talk about what you might expect or give you any kind of anything.
13:55
Jen: Yeah, and I didn't just as like I didn't go to the doctor for menopause.
14:00
Jen: I went with I went trying to get pregnant, and then I went to my my GP for the symptom of tender breasts.
14:08
Jen: Like I wasn't I wasn't like, I think I'm in menopause, can you help me?
14:15
Jen: But you left really without a lot of answers and without a lot of guidance.
14:21
Jen: Or it doesn't sound like much empathy either, given that you were trying to get pregnant and someone's telling you, yeah, your chances are pretty slim.
14:30
Jen: Yeah, I I do think she said, like, I'm really sorry, but um yeah, that was kind of it.
14:37
Jen: What happened next?
14:38
Jen: Like what what when did you make the connection between your symptoms and there was something bigger going on?
14:49
Jen: Um that wasn't until a long time later because what happened was we decided, once I found out that I couldn't get pregnant naturally, or even that it was gonna happen with um IVF, we decided to go with a donor egg.
15:10
Jen: The clinic found an anonymous egg donor for us, and I got pregnant.
15:16
Jen: And so I kind of had this break from perimenopause for really two years.
15:22
Jen: Cause the first part was they were pumping me full of, as they would with anybody going through IVF, they pump you full of hormones and progesterone until your body takes over.
15:33
Jen: Because once you're, once your body's pregnant, it knows to start producing those hormones.
15:39
Jen: It's the inseminated egg that starts to produce those hormones.
15:43
Jen: So it wasn't a problem for me to produce the hormones anymore.
15:46
Jen: It didn't like my doctor at the time told me he could make a 90-year-old pregnant if they want, if they needed to.
15:51
Jen: And the 90-year-old's body would create the right hormones to hold a fetus.
15:56
Jen: That's so crazy to me.
15:57
Jen: It was crazy.
15:58
Jen: And he said, of like we obviously wouldn't do that, but anyway, so so I got pregnant and and then I went through after the beginning was done, I went through a fairly normal pregnancy.
16:11
Jen: And it was great because the hair loss stopped, um, the hot flesh has stopped.
16:17
Jen: Like it all, I mean I had all the other stuff going on with pregnancy, but um, so that was a break.
16:23
Jen: And then while I was nursing, your body's also producing those hormones.
16:27
Jen: So I also had that break.
16:29
Jen: And I went into denial again.
16:31
Jen: I was like, great, I am not in primenopause until I stopped nursing, which was so I had her when I was 45, and so I stopped nursing when I was 46-ish.
16:48
Jen: And then I started feeling symptoms again.
16:50
Jen: And then it got worse, and then I started skipping more periods until eventually and and like having quite a lot of there were all these other symptoms happening or whatever.
16:59
Jen: And over this time period, I was also getting quite stressed out.
17:04
Jen: What were you stressed about?
17:06
Jen: I had her in the middle of writing my PhD thesis.
17:09
Jen: In fact, in the middle of doing my research, I was interviewing people when I was nine months pregnant, that I was not working on my PhD.
17:17
Jen: So I had a really hard time taking time off, even though I'd had a baby.
17:21
Jen: Like I went, I went back to work after three months, not just doing my PhD, but also my consulting job.
17:29
Jen: Because we were kind of we were struggling a little bit financially.
17:32
Jen: Like Sherwin had work, but oh, there were periods like his, it was up and down.
17:37
Jen: There were periods he was in his own business, his his income was fluctuating.
17:41
Jen: So I felt I needed to work.
17:42
Jen: So it was financial stress, and then there was the stress of actually having to manage all of this.
17:48
Jen: The newborn plus, like I went to an all-day workshop when she wasn't even three months old yet.
17:55
Jen: So you're trying to pump and worrying about her at home and all the things.
18:00
Jen: Yep.
18:01
Jen: Yep.
18:02
Jen: And I wasn't really able to pump very well.
18:04
Jen: And then I was in the middle of this workshop and feeling really uncomfortable.
18:07
Jen: And it there were men in the room, and I'm like, um, guys, could we take a break?
18:11
Jen: They wanted to work through lunch.
18:12
Jen: I was like, well, so I'm gonna have to either miss some because I've got to go do this, or can we take a break?
18:21
Jen: So I missed part of the meeting because of that.
18:23
Jen: So anyway, that's another story.
18:24
Jen: There was just, so there was a lot of stress around all of this.
18:27
Jen: Can we, the one thing that I want to say about that, Jen, is um, for our American listeners, in in Canada and many other European countries, we it's normal to take a year or more for a maternity leave.
18:43
Jen: In the States, I think it's 12 weeks.
18:46
Jen: And then you're back to work.
18:48
Jen: So that's normal there.
18:50
Jen: But in Canada and many European countries, that's not normal at all.
18:57
Jen: You would stay home with your baby.
18:59
Jen: So I just wanted to bring that up as a differentiator between countries in case our American listeners are going, well, I had a baby and I went back after six weeks.
19:09
Jen: Like they go back really early, and there's no, there isn't the maternity leave policies that we have here.
19:16
Jen: That's a good point here in Canada.
19:18
Jen: Um, and and of course, they don't have those kinds of policies in South Africa because they don't have the wealth there.
19:23
Jen: Like it's such a small population that uh of that has the wealth.
19:27
Jen: So every so it's very normal to go back to work after three months or less.
19:31
Jen: And I wasn't working for a company, so I didn't have benefits.
19:35
Jen: So I couldn't either.
19:36
Jen: So um, but yes, that felt very early for me.
19:39
Jen: Whereas in the States it might not.
19:42
Jen: So I had that period of a break, and then everything started again after I stopped nursing her.
19:47
Jen: All the symptoms.
19:48
Jen: And all the symptoms.
19:50
Jen: And then we moved across the planet.
19:52
Jen: We moved from South Africa back to Canada, which was a very stressful situation.
19:58
Jen: And then COVID hit, and then both of us got laid off, and I was still trying to write my PhD and work.
20:05
Jen: Like at one point, I was writing my PhD.
20:08
Jen: I was teaching academically at a university at a post-grad level.
20:14
Jen: I had a consulting job on the side, and then I had a one and a half year old at home during COVID.
20:21
Jen: Yeah, I can't imagine.
20:23
Jen: No.
20:23
Jen: And and then, and I was working crazy hours, feeling like the brain fog, which is I was so tired.
20:31
Jen: And I was reading the same sentence or the same paragraph three times over before I could actually let it sink in.
20:37
Jen: And then I was embarrassed that it was taking me longer than normal to do my PhD, and I felt like I was a slow reader.
20:42
Jen: And I was embarrassed about that, especially with my supervisor, like I wasn't getting through five articles a day.
20:48
Jen: And so then I was trying to work harder and every, like it was just, it was making it worse.
20:53
Jen: I was so stressed out I couldn't think straight, and I was so exhausted.
20:56
Jen: I was having insomnia.
20:58
Jen: I was lying awake for two hours in the middle of the night.
21:01
Jen: And I was getting help.
21:03
Jen: I was going to a Chinese medicine doctor, um, a body talk practitioner, like lots of alternative modalities.
21:12
Jen: And all of them were like, How stressed are you?
21:15
Jen: And I'd be like, oh, I don't know, seven out of ten.
21:20
Jen: And they'd look at me and go, You're like the the Chinese medicine, the TCM said, you have zero chi in your body.
21:29
Jen: I'm not picking up like when they do all their tests or whatever.
21:32
Jen: There's nothing.
21:33
Jen: I wonder how often that happens.
21:35
Jen: Oh, all the time.
21:36
Jen: I have friends who talk about that all the time.
21:38
Jen: Like if I ask them how if they're stressed, they're like, I don't know.
21:41
Jen: Isn't everybody stressed?
21:42
Jen: Yeah, I think I'm stressed.
21:44
Jen: Because stress is so normal in our society.
21:47
Jen: We don't realize that it's wrong.
21:49
Jen: I can I I can relate to everything that you're saying.
21:51
Jen: I wasn't writing my PhD, but I was doing all kinds of other things.
21:54
Jen: It's the pressure that we feel.
21:56
Jen: And it was the pressure I was putting on myself.
21:58
Jen: It wasn't like I was putting so much pressure on myself to get it perfect, to get it right.
22:06
Jen: I was trying to impress my supervisor.
22:08
Jen: I was trying to get it done so I could get back to working full time.
22:11
Jen: All this stuff, like all this pressure I put on myself, that I didn't realize how much pressure it was until much later.
22:19
Jen: Even I think I expected burnout to look like a nervous breakdown, even though I had no idea what a nervous breakdown even looks like.
22:27
Jen: So when I woke up one day and actually couldn't get out of bed, I was so exhausted.
22:35
Jen: And it was like my limbs felt like there were bricks in them.
22:39
Jen: And I also kept getting this recurring urinary tract infection.
22:45
Jen: And I woke up feeling that and a really foggy head, and all of it at was this like perfect storm.
22:52
Jen: And I still lay in bed that that morning and then I tried to go to my desk and I was like sitting there practically with my head on the table, trying to read, and finally went, okay, I'm gonna go take a nap.
23:04
Jen: And I still tried to push through.
23:07
Jen: And I didn't think I was burned out because I sort of thought, well, I was sort of able, I have to push through.
23:13
Jen: Like I just thought I had to do it.
23:15
Jen: I have a I have to relate this story because I think that happens a lot.
23:22
Jen: I had one of my friends was telling me about a mutual friend of ours.
23:28
Jen: She was describing all the things that she was doing.
23:31
Jen: Started this consulting firm similar to you.
23:36
Jen: She was, her kids were doing some major sports thing.
23:40
Jen: She was flying all over the place.
23:43
Jen: And whole, and and my friend's perception of this mutual friend was that she's super mom.
23:50
Jen: Like she does everything and she still holds it all together.
23:53
Jen: And then in the next breath, she said something about how, yeah, and she's got long COVID.
23:58
Jen: And I said, What's that look like?
24:01
Jen: Well, she just has, you know, every once in a while, she just can't get out of bed again.
24:07
Jen: You know, she's in in bed for a week, completely loss of energy.
24:13
Jen: And in my mind, I'm thinking, that's that's not long COVID.
24:18
Jen: That's burnout.
24:20
Jen: She's burnt out.
24:22
Jen: You know, if she if you're not getting all these other symptoms of COVID, you're like, that's probably call it long COVID or call it burnout.
24:31
Jen: It's the same thing.
24:32
Jen: She's getting long COVID because she's burnt out.
24:35
Jen: Yeah.
24:35
Jen: Her immune system's down.
24:37
Jen: She's completely exhausted.
24:41
Jen: It's the super mom thing that really drew my attention.
24:49
Jen: Because I was like, So she was praising it?
24:52
Jen: First of all, she was praising it.
24:53
Jen: But as soon as someone says she's super mom, I'm like, there is no super mom.
24:59
Jen: None of us can actually do it all.
25:02
Jen: If it's presenting, if they're presenting that way, like, oh, this exterior of I've I've got all this under control, inside or behind the scenes, they are breaking down.
25:13
Jen: There is like, it's the portrayal of it.
25:17
Jen: And so we compare ourselves to these women who seem to be able to do it all, and yet they're not, or they're not doing it for very long before they have to be in bed for a week or whatever.
25:33
Jen: Something is gonna break down.
25:35
Jen: It's not possible.
25:37
Jen: Cher, I totally agree.
25:39
Jen: And I had that too, like before right before COVID, right when COVID hit, I thought I had it and I didn't.
25:45
Jen: I was just sick all the time because Leia had started daycare and she was bringing everything home.
25:49
Jen: And your immune system was down.
25:51
Jen: My immune system was down because I was so stressed out and I was sick for a month.
25:55
Jen: Like I'd push through the week and then just kind of collapsed on the weekend.
25:59
Jen: And Sherwin wanted to do stuff and he wanted to get out.
26:02
Jen: And I'd be like, I like I remember sitting in the car and actually putting my seat back.
26:06
Jen: It was 10 o'clock in the morning.
26:08
Jen: And I remember putting my seat back and going, I can't, I can't function.
26:12
Jen: I have to lie down.
26:14
unknown: Yeah.
26:15
Jen: So that's what it felt like to be that burnt out.
26:18
Jen: And I wasn't associating the paramenopause symptoms like the UTI, the exhaustion, the brain fog.
26:26
Jen: I wasn't associating the two together, the burnout and the symptoms.
26:32
Jen: And it was, so how did you come to that revelation?
26:35
Jen: Sorry.
26:35
Jen: That was that was later.
26:37
Jen: That was after I another doctor like moved to Canada and had another, or just went in for physical or something.
26:46
Jen: That doctor also didn't tell me.
26:49
Jen: Like she said, when was your last period?
26:51
Jen: So this was when I was 49.
26:53
Jen: When was your last period?
26:54
Jen: And I said, Oh, probably a year ago, I think.
26:56
Jen: Yeah, I think it's been about a year.
26:58
Jen: And she goes, Oh, that's early.
27:00
Jen: And I sat in her office feeling so ashamed that it was early.
27:06
Jen: And I don't know how she actually said it, but I felt it like, oh, well, that's early.
27:11
Jen: Like I felt a judgment there.
27:13
Jen: And then she just said, I'm a big fan of HRT, of hormone replacement therapy.
27:19
Jen: And I think you should go on it.
27:22
Jen: I think you should consider it.
27:24
Jen: Didn't ask me about any of my symptoms, didn't ask me how I was feeling, didn't give me any information.
27:29
Jen: Again, like it was all this just pattern of like nobody telling me.
27:34
Jen: So I ended up in a natural path, and this was actually for sleep.
27:39
Jen: So alongside these other symptoms, here's another one I was feeling was I would wake up at 11 o'clock and two in the morning.
27:46
Jen: So I'd wake up at 11, go to sleep after about a half an hour, wake up again at two, and lie there till at least four.
27:54
Jen: Every single night of the week.
27:56
Jen: It was absolute torture.
27:59
Jen: And then, of course, I was even less productive at work and more stressed out.
28:05
Jen: And so I went to a natural path to give her, to tell her about this.
28:09
Jen: So first thing she did was put me on melatonin, and she recommended this kind that also had some other things in it, like GABA and L-theanine.
28:17
Jen: And I went on that and I was so excited for a couple of weeks it actually worked.
28:22
Jen: I was like, oh, thank God I'm starting to sleep again.
28:25
Jen: And then it stopped working.
28:26
Jen: And then I tried other things.
28:27
Jen: I tried valerian tea.
28:29
Jen: I tried, I can't remember all the things I tried, magnesium and every kind of natural thing.
28:35
Jen: And actually, I I was resorting to taking um antihistamines as well, because those always make me drowsy to try to put myself to sleep.
28:44
Jen: And I was like, okay, well, this isn't good.
28:47
Jen: I'm not, this is gonna be a bad outcome.
28:49
Jen: So, and I didn't want to take sleeping pills.
28:52
Jen: So she's she just said, well, melatonin declines with age.
28:58
Jen: So you're best to just start taking melatonin.
29:02
Jen: Keep taking the melatonin.
29:04
Jen: And I was like, this is my life now?
29:06
Jen: Like, am I just gonna start not sleeping?
29:10
Jen: And I kind of believed it because that's what we hear from people as like, oh yeah, old people, they go to bed at eight o'clock and they get up at four, whatever.
29:17
Jen: So I sort of assumed, like, oh, okay, I guess I start sleeping now.
29:21
Jen: But I didn't, I had never thought about the effects of it, like how much it was impacting my life.
29:25
Jen: And it it was, I was depressed because I was so exhausted.
29:30
Jen: And those few weeks of bliss when I started sleeping through the night just reminded you of how good it could be and how bad it is.
29:37
Jen: I didn't realize how bad it is, how bad it was until yeah, I didn't realize how badly I was in it.
29:43
Jen: And it was her that finally said after months of trying to figure out why I wasn't sleeping, she suggested I take an adrenal support.
29:53
Jen: Because she said you might be a little burnt out.
29:56
Jen: So quick sidebar adrenals are the glands that produce cortisol, this all the stress hormones in our system.
30:04
Jen: And if they're constantly producing cortisol, then your adrenals are going to be exhausted.
30:11
Jen: So I started this adrenal support supplement, and within a week I was sleeping again.
30:20
Jen: Within two weeks, my hot flashes went away.
30:26
Jen: After a while, the UTIs went away, everything, all the symptoms started going away.
30:33
Jen: And that's when I just went, oh it wasn't just primenopause, it's the burnout.
30:41
Jen: Yeah, it's the adrenal glands.
30:43
Jen: Oh, and share, one other thing.
30:46
Jen: So then I also remembered that way back when I was doing my fertility treatments, that doctor has said to me, when your ovaries stop producing estrogen, your adrenals are supposed to take over.
31:05
Jen: That was how he said it to me.
31:07
Jen: It's more complicated than that, but your adrenals are supposed to take over.
31:11
Jen: And if so his what he said was that until your adrenals take over, you're always going to feel symptoms.
31:19
Jen: And it's not until it's, I mean, you and I know this now, that you don't have to wait until.
31:27
Jen: Like I think what happens with a lot of women is they get symptoms.
31:31
Jen: I mean, you and I know this because we were talking to some of our aunts who still have hot flashes in their 60s.
31:38
Jen: And I wonder whether it's, and this here's something for you to research is it the women who how do I say this?
31:46
Jen: Maybe their adrenals kick in when they finally stop working and their adrenals have a chance to recover.
31:54
Jen: And that's when their adrenals take over, as your doctor said.
31:58
Jen: Yeah, because like Cher, for me, it was my adrenals weren't taking over.
32:04
Jen: Yeah, right.
32:05
Jen: They didn't.
32:06
Jen: They're too because they were so burnt out.
32:08
Jen: They couldn't.
32:09
Jen: So the adrenal support helped, but then every time I went off the adrenal support, I started feeling symptoms again.
32:17
Jen: It wasn't until I actually started dealing with my stress and how and my busyness, my compulsion to stay busy, that I was able to start learning how to take the pressure off myself, how to slow down, and how to actually heal my adrenals instead of just taking a supplement for them.
32:40
Jen: And now, yeah, I still have episodes of staying awake for two hours in the night.
32:45
Jen: I mean, I have a six-year, but she's now seven, who wakes me up and I still sometimes have those nights.
32:51
Jen: Um, so it took me a long time to heal from that because I wasn't, I didn't slow down at first.
32:55
Jen: I was like, okay, yeah, now I'm on a supplement, I'm good.
32:59
Jen: Yeah.
33:00
Jen: But it wasn't, you're still not at the root cause.
33:04
Jen: So you're getting symptoms.
33:07
Jen: You've realized, okay, it's perimenopause.
33:11
Jen: You realize the symptoms are actually a result of burnt-out adrenal glands.
33:16
Jen: You realize that's because of stress and the pressure that you're putting on yourself.
33:21
Jen: But you're still not, it sounds like you're still not at the root cause.
33:24
Jen: So, what was causing you to put so much pressure on yourself?
33:27
Jen: You're right in that I wasn't at the root cause yet.
33:31
Jen: So I had to, I had to learn how to slow down.
33:34
Jen: I couldn't just slow down.
33:37
Jen: That was like it just was impossible for me to stop because I constantly felt like I needed to be productive.
33:44
Jen: I used busyness to numb out feelings and emotions.
33:48
Jen: So it was sort of like a drug for me or an addiction.
33:52
Jen: At the time, I sort of looked at it and I said, Well, I have all this stuff that I have to do.
33:56
Jen: I have to work.
33:57
Jen: I have to, I have to finish this PhD.
33:59
Jen: I felt like it was this external situation that was stressing me out so much.
34:03
Jen: Yep.
34:03
Jen: The never-ending to-do list.
34:05
Jen: What I didn't realize at the time was that it was my own perfectionism that was making me overly stressed and busy.
34:15
Jen: My people pleasing.
34:16
Jen: So I was saying yes to more things.
34:18
Jen: I wasn't standing up for myself.
34:21
Jen: Even with the doctors, I didn't stand up for myself.
34:24
Jen: I didn't say to them, I didn't say to her, I don't want HRT.
34:29
Jen: I said to her, okay, I'll think about it.
34:31
Jen: I didn't ask her for more information on it.
34:35
Jen: I didn't advocate for myself.
34:37
Jen: And that's because I didn't want to rock the boat.
34:39
Jen: I was too ashamed in that moment.
34:41
Jen: I um I didn't want to offend anybody and I was afraid to say no to things.
34:46
Jen: So I was constantly trying to prove my worth and my value by this productivity and busyness and how smart I was and how capable I was.
34:57
Jen: I didn't ask for help.
34:59
Jen: So all of these things were creating this perfect storm for burnout and menopause symptoms.
35:05
Jen: Right.
35:06
Jen: The glorified busy, busyness, busy mom, busy person.
35:13
Jen: If you're not busy, you're not important.
35:15
Jen: Yeah.
35:16
Jen: And even when I started teaching that to leaders and women in in corporate, I still wasn't fully accepting it myself.
35:24
Jen: Like I wasn't able to fully slow down myself.
35:27
Jen: It was a it was a process.
35:29
Jen: So how did you get to that?
35:31
Jen: Like how once you were able to sort of see, okay, I'm at least participating in causing my own stress.
35:41
Jen: And this is coming from, you're starting to realize this is coming from my own people pleasing, perfectionism, all of that stuff.
35:50
Jen: How did that change then?
35:51
Jen: Like, how were you able to change the way that you operated in the world?
35:57
Jen: It's funny because that was also kind of a combination of factors.
36:02
Jen: Two main ones were I was going through this personal growth path.
36:06
Jen: And the other one was some of the stuff that I was researching for my PhD.
36:10
Jen: So, first, like personal growth path, it was I realized that on the outside, I looked like I had it all together.
36:18
Jen: Inside, I had this constant self-doubt.
36:21
Jen: I was constantly criticizing myself for not getting enough done, for not doing it well enough.
36:28
Jen: And I finally identified that as issues with my own self-worth.
36:32
Jen: So I was trying to prove my self-worth to myself through all these external things instead of really innately feeling valuable and loved.
36:39
Jen: Sorry if I can interrupt for a second, just so our listeners can sort of identify that.
36:43
Jen: It's the self-critic.
36:46
Jen: That inner critic is a sign, like that is that little voice of self-worth or lack there.
36:54
Jen: That little voice on your shoulder that's constantly like telling you, you can't do that.
36:58
Jen: Nope, that's too big.
36:59
Jen: Don't share that, don't offend that person.
37:02
Jen: That is you not feeling worthy of the role you're in, worthy of sharing your voice, worthy of having an opinion, scared people aren't gonna like you.
37:12
Jen: All those things.
37:13
Jen: So all and all those things I trace back to my childhood, our childhood.
37:20
Jen: Right.
37:20
Jen: And that's a longer story, but I I realized that I was people pleasing, and I didn't realize I was a perfectionist because I'm not a detailed kind of person.
37:31
Jen: Oh, yeah, me too.
37:33
Jen: But whenever I put something out there, I was checking it three times.
37:37
Jen: I was when I was writing, I could I found it very difficult to write because I always wanted the sentence to be perfect the first time out.
37:46
Jen: Um, so I wouldn't allow myself to, so that that was like writer's block, it was coming up.
37:51
Jen: So I realized that these were coping mechanisms that were driven by limiting beliefs, subconscious patterns, and coping mechanisms from our childhood, which came from mostly parents.
38:04
Jen: You know, like if we were punished, we were spanked.
38:09
Jen: If I made a mistake, got spanked, then I tried hard, like I tried hard to not get spanked again.
38:17
Jen: So I we became like you and I both became the good girls because I was terrified of getting punished.
38:22
Jen: So some kids would become like really rebellious.
38:26
Jen: I just tried my best to be perfect and to please mom so that I wouldn't get punished.
38:31
Jen: Well, and that's like just to add on, I felt that obviously as well.
38:37
Jen: But I think there's something more than like it goes deeper than parents, even.
38:42
Jen: Yeah, it's oh well, it's societal norms.
38:44
Jen: Like it, it's so it's all of the comparison in schools.
38:48
Jen: It's that's just the way it is.
38:50
Jen: So our parents um were taught how to parent.
38:54
Jen: They learned it from somewhere.
38:56
Jen: So, like when I look at mom's mom, she was constantly busy.
39:00
Jen: Mum was constantly busy.
39:02
Jen: Um, so I also thought that I had to be busy to prove my value to mom.
39:08
Jen: And then that later turned into I need to be constantly productive and be the go-to girl and be the responsible one in order to prove my worth at work.
39:18
Jen: And so all of that made me extraordinarily busy.
39:21
Jen: And I looked like when you look around, I've talked to so many women about this, they look around and often there are the men aren't operating the same way.
39:30
Jen: I mean, sure, there's there's workaholics, there are those men who are out there, but it's it comes from something different.
39:39
Jen: It it stems from a different place.
39:41
Jen: Yeah.
39:42
Jen: So then, so there was, so that was the childhood part, like all kinds of stuff there that we can get into in other episodes.
39:47
Jen: But then there was also what I learned through my research was the patriarchy and capitalism.
39:54
Jen: Well, capitalism is part of patriarchy.
39:57
Jen: So patriarchy in a nutshell.
39:59
Jen: And that was women come second best.
40:03
Jen: All of the stuff that tells us that women are supposed to be mothers, women are supposed to be subservient, uh, women come last.
40:11
Jen: We have to put our children first and our spests first and be a good wife and be a good mother.
40:15
Jen: There's so much messaging that comes from that that was also keeping me busy.
40:21
Jen: Yep, absolutely.
40:23
Jen: And we're all prone to that.
40:25
Jen: Yeah.
40:25
Jen: And I had internalized all of that.
40:29
Jen: So combined with my childhood conditioning and coping mechanisms, like I felt like I kind of felt like I was a disaster.
40:41
Jen: Like when I think about it, like, and people be like, what?
40:44
Jen: Like you have it all together.
40:46
Jen: You had this corporate job, and you've got a PhD, and like it looks like I had my shit together, but I felt like a complete disaster inside.
40:56
Jen: I wonder how many women feel like that.
40:59
Jen: You know, like it looks like the super mom that I was talking about earlier.
41:03
Jen: Like from the outside, it looks like she was a supermom.
41:06
Jen: And I wonder how it felt on the inside.
41:09
Jen: I was teaching because I also realized that this busyness and all of this conditioning keeps women from being good leaders in workplaces.
41:19
Jen: So that's what I was teaching was how do you get out of the busyness so you can be more strategic and be a better leader?
41:26
Jen: And so that's exactly what I heard from them.
41:29
Jen: We don't have to wonder how many women it affects.
41:31
Jen: They kept telling me that.
41:33
Jen: So it sounds like, you know, that's a big part of the root of the problem is the societal conditioning that we've all been exposed to, and not just exposed to, but it's running in the background continually.
41:52
Jen: And so that is leading to the pressure that you're putting on yourself.
41:59
Jen: And the pressure is leading to burnt out adrenal glands, and that is leading to the symptoms.
42:07
Jen: And that, I don't know what to call that, that cause and effect, you know, one leads to the other, leads to the other, leads to the other.
42:16
Jen: I don't feel like anybody else is talking about this.
42:19
Jen: I certainly didn't hear it from anywhere.
42:21
Jen: And in all of my research on midlife menopause, didn't nobody said it to that way to me.
42:31
Jen: And I wouldn't even call it a line.
42:33
Jen: It's a vicious cycle because what happens, and this is this is researched academically, is that women who start to feel the symptoms of menopause, they start to feel like my memory's going.
42:51
Jen: I'm not as productive as I used to be.
42:53
Jen: I can't pull off the same hours, and they start working harder.
42:57
Jen: They overcompensate.
42:59
Jen: And what that we you and I both know, share that when you start to overcompensate, you get more stressed.
43:06
Jen: And the longer you work, the like you start sleeping less, and then you wake up exhausted, and then you're even less productive.
43:14
Jen: It's a vicious cycle.
43:15
Jen: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
43:17
Jen: It's a cycle.
43:19
Jen: And I would say that patriarchy is at the center of it.
43:23
Jen: I talk to some women and they're like, yep, that tracks.
43:27
Jen: That is logical.
43:29
Jen: I don't see a lot of people actually helping to helping women to not just get through midlife, but how to thrive in midlife by looking at this combination of factors in this way.
43:42
Jen: Well, and I even envision like what kind of leaders can we be?
43:49
Jen: What kind of elders could we be in the future if we let go of all of this conditioning?
43:58
Jen: Like right now, midlife is like the Beginning of the decline.
44:01
Jen: It's the beginning of the end.
44:03
Jen: So the younger, you know, it's the people in their 30s, maybe they're the women at least.
44:08
Jen: Men, it's a different story.
44:10
Jen: But for women, it's kind of like you start to become invisible and um and less relevant in our society when you hit midlife.
44:22
Jen: Qualify that though.
44:23
Jen: That's what we've been, that's what society subliminally tells us.
44:27
Jen: It's not true.
44:29
Jen: Of course.
44:29
Jen: That's probably what the biggest myth, actually.
44:32
Jen: Yeah.
44:33
Jen: But what if we could dispel that among like, I don't know, all the listeners within, you know, and beyond.
44:43
Jen: Yeah.
44:44
Jen: Like, what could the world look like if women in midlife began to actually stand up and lead and and be and feel good and and let go of the conditioning?
45:00
Jen: Like what the our our society would look entirely different.
45:04
Jen: Like, how cool would that be if we could like not even just talk about it, but go to work feeling these symptoms and say, my brain's foggy.
45:14
Jen: I need a break.
45:15
Jen: And actually be able to say that at work without and admit it without being afraid that you're not gonna you're not gonna get promoted because the executive team thinks, oh, she's done now.
45:25
Jen: She's in menopause.
45:27
Jen: Like imagine that's just a work scenario, but like imagine how much more ease we would have in our lives and harmony because we're able to not only talk about the symptoms, but like feel like the like talk, just like, for example, the rage, the menopause rage that people talk about.
45:46
Jen: Oh, yeah, did you go crazy when you were in menopause?
45:49
Jen: And I'm like, no.
45:50
unknown: Yeah.
45:50
Jen: But so many women do feel that rage.
45:53
Jen: And then they're they're labeled as oh, yeah, she's just going crazy.
45:56
Jen: She's in menopause.
45:58
Jen: Imagine if we didn't even have to feel that rage.
46:01
Jen: Yeah, it didn't even come up because we actually know how to nix the symptoms and we know how to alleviate.
46:07
Jen: We we don't even have the symptoms to begin with.
46:09
Jen: Yeah, I think it'd be a beautiful world.
46:11
Jen: So, Jen, let's wrap it up here.
46:13
Jen: If you could go back and tell yourself at 43, if you could talk to that version of yourself that's almost 10 years ago now, what would you tell her?
46:24
Jen: What are the I wish I had stood up for myself better.
46:29
Jen: Like I would have told her.
46:31
Jen: She wouldn't have believed it, but I would have told her that getting older and going through menopause isn't shameful.
46:38
Jen: That's what I would have wanted her to know and truly internalize.
46:43
Jen: Because it would have made my life a lot easier.
46:46
Jen: It would have made me feel a lot easier.
46:49
Jen: Like it, first of all, it's like it sorry, I'm gonna go on a tangent, but it's shown that when we accept the symptoms and we have support for them, that the symptoms are feel less severe.
46:59
Jen: Yeah, we're gonna talk about this on a later podcast, actually.
47:01
Jen: So let's save that conversation.
47:02
Jen: But yeah, if if you feel less shame, then the symptoms are less severe, then that's a big one, letting go of the shame.
47:12
Jen: Yeah.
47:13
Jen: So that'd be the number one thing that I wish I could have told her is that this could feel like a rising instead of an embarrassing falling off the cliff.
47:23
Jen: It's all downhill after 40 kind of feeling.
47:26
Jen: I love that.
47:27
Jen: And I think that's what makes your story so powerful that it's not just about hormones.
47:36
Jen: It's not just about estrogen decline.
47:38
Jen: And it's not even just about burnout.
47:41
Jen: It's about waking up to the ways that we've been taught to ignore ourselves, ignore our symptoms, push through them.
47:50
Jen: It's the ways that we've been taught to that we come last.
47:55
Jen: All this societal conditioning and underlying beliefs that we've created as a result.
48:00
Jen: That is what the midlife rising is about.
48:03
Jen: Yep.
48:05
Jen: So, dear listeners, if this if Jen's story resonated with you, and if you've been wondering what's really going on with your body or your energy, then you are in the right place.
48:16
Jen: We have so much more coming your way.
48:19
Jen: Make sure you follow the podcast, rate, and review, subscribe so that it shows up in your Spotify feed.
48:26
Jen: And if this lit up something in you, share it with another woman who needs to hear it.
48:32
Jen: So that's it for today.
48:33
Jen: Come back for another episode.
48:35
Jen: We have so much more in store for you.
48:36
Jen: Thanks for listening.