SPEAKER_00 0:13

Keep calm and menopause on. Today we're going to talk about the ultimate stress survival guide. If you've ever felt like your stress symptoms are out of control and wonder if it's impacting your menopause symptoms, you're not alone, but you're probably right. Stress can be more damaging than smoking and especially detrimental during menopause. So join us today as we uncover some powerful strategies to manage stress and empower yourself during this transformative phase. So, as usual, it's myself, James Ellis, and my fellow coach Julie Medesi, menopause specialist health coaches here to talk you through this really important subject. And I suppose from my point of view, we talk about this it seems all the time, don't we, Julie? One of the things that I think we were talking about the other day was that if you're in a room with a load of women and they're in menopause, what tends to happen is if you stick your hand up and say who's stressed, everybody sticks their hand up because nobody seems to be not be stressed at this point in time. So I suppose one of the real things that we need to do more than anything else is talk a little bit about stress, but also mention the fact that you know stress is not always a bad thing of itself. There are two types of stress. There's what is called eustress, positive stress, where our bodies come under some kind of stressor and they improve and grow and get better. And there's de stress, which is obviously a negative type of stress, which is one that most people tend to talk about. Julie, I just wonder if you could tell us what's your experience of working with women in the menopause and their and their stress levels.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Well, it's it's an underlying theme, I think, across all different aspects, not just of menopause and peramenopause, but life in general, because it's all about more and more and more instant results, we have to do this, we're taking on everything. And certainly as women, one of the things we learn from an earlier age is that we don't say no to people, we don't set boundaries to people. So we open ourselves up and we welcome all of this stuff into our lives that maybe doesn't serve us that well. And then when we can't keep up with it all, we look around at other people who we think have it all together, when in fact they don't really. But we look around at this these images that we see on in TV shows and on social media about people who look really well organized and and able to handle everything that life throws at them, and then we feel like there's something wrong with us when we can't. And that isn't specific to women, but it all it hits women harder because when we combine that with all of the demands on our time, family and community and uh work and children and who knows what else we've committed to, all of these outside interests and friends and everybody who needs us. So that that whole feeling of not being able to say no to anything and then not being able to be all things to all people all the time, we end up feeling a lot of guilt, which causes us more distress. Um, it affects our health, which causes us more distress, and it becomes this sort of cyclical thing or helical thing that take just takes us in the wrong direction from where we really want and need to be to feel energized and healthy and manage ourselves through this period of life.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

I suppose the other key thing to think about here is that the symptoms of extreme stress often mirror those of the menopause transition, don't they? So you've got things like fatigue, you've got tiredness, you've got anxiety, you've got an increased jitteriness, you may have stress-induced uh heat transformations which could mirror hot flushes as well. And then when you've so you've got two layers of similar symptoms there, and then you're layering the fact that extreme stress affects your blood sugar balance, and menopause affects your blood sugar balance. So, what are the symptoms of uh unstable or unbalanced blood sugars? It's the same things again, isn't it? So you can actually be layering on one, two, three layers of similar symptoms. It's really hard then to work out what is actually hormonal or menopausal hormonal and what is coming from your other hormonal systems because obviously stress is a hormonal uh has a hormonal response, blood sugar balance is a hormonal response to food, and so you're getting all these things layering one on top of the other, and it's hard to work out for a woman at this age what is driving what, and have we got a chicken and egg scenario here, or do we have one of those cycles that just is never ending because one is feeding into the other?

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Yeah, I I think it's a I think it's a cycle, and I agree with you about the layering, and especially when it comes to like rest and sleep and recovery, because those are symptoms of menopause. And when we go to see our doctors, a lot of times they just tell us we're anxious or depressed and they want to medicate the situation. When we work with our clients, we talk about managing stress as a a first point of intervention because it's so important and it helps kind of uncover what's really going on underneath. And a lot of women think, I don't have time for this. This I'm too busy, I don't have time to set aside to do these things. And it's a it's a counterintuitive situation because when we actually learn how to make time, how to carve out time for rest and recovery and self-care, those other things can oftentimes resolve or minimize or or sort of take care of themselves. But yeah, it it is it is definitely a a layered thing and being able to get more in tune with what's going on in our body when we're feeling stressed or when we're feeling those symptoms. Because I think a lot of women, especially in the paramenopause phase, don't even realize they're there because these symptoms just feel like I'm stressed, I'm fatigued, I I need to lose weight, and that's all I need to focus on, not realizing that they those are in fact potentially paramenopausal symptoms that can be part of that layering process, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Yeah, absolutely. I feel as though we bang this drum every single time we either do a podcast or we do a live or we do a training with our with our clients in our in our membership club Fabulous Beyond 40. And we always say stress is the number or extreme stress is the number one enemy of women in perimenopause and the menopause transition, and that is not just a flippant um comment that we throw in there. There are physiological reasons for for this, aside from that layering of symptoms. When as estrogen starts to fall and and rise, it does that spike up and down through perimenopause, but it after menopause it tends to fall gradually. Comes from one of two places. One is from your adrenal glands, which happen to be the glands that produce stress hormones, and the other is from what is scientifically called adipose tissue, but most of us would know as as fat tissue. And so if you're stressed all the time and your adrenal glands are trying to produce stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, they're not going to prioritize producing estrogen. At that point, you're actually somewhat encouraging your body to produce more fat because your body wants to get the estrogen from somewhere, so it's going to get from fat. So even if it's not producing more fat, uh that may be a little bit flippant, but it certainly will try to hold on to that fat more. What is the number one thing that people tend to come to us for as health coaches? It is your increased weight, feeling fatter than before, holding more weight around the midriff, all those kind of things. So not dealing with stress or facing stress on not only multilayers on the symptoms, but also has an effect physiologically on the rest of the body and the other hormonal symptoms that play into a woman's life at this stage. So it's super, super important to be able to deal with it in sh some way, shape, or form.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Yeah, it is. And the other thing that we have to bear in mind is in addition to those stress hormones that are going on, when our body is in that fight or flight mode, it our body physiologically wants to go back to what we call home homeostasis or balance. So ideally the stress response needs to be short-lived, and then we follow it with a rest and digest cycle. When we're in constant fight or flight, not only do we have these stress hormones surging through our bodies and preferentially storing body fat, but it also prioritizes the fight or flight response over digestion. So when we're trying to people say, Oh, I'm I'm eating really well and and I can't lose weight, or I'm I'm I'm eating really well and nothing is happening. A lot of times that stress, that constant stress, is blocking the ability of our body to absorb, properly digest our food, absorb the nutrients. You know, we talked about, I think at some point we talked about the fact that we even have estrogen receptors in our in our intestinal tract and our gut micro in our gut. So, you know, we're looking to absorb the nutrients we need to help nourish our bodies and keep them healthy. And when we're constantly stressed, we're not doing that.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Hmm. Yeah, I'm glad you brought in fight or flight and rest and digest, because that is usually the thing that I again sort of like tend to repeat myself a lot on. Um, but it's it is really important for those who may be unfamiliar with this. Let me try and explain what those two things are. Fight or flight is the thing most of us are familiar with in some way, shape, or form. It's our body's response to an extreme stress. You know, if you've been driving down the road and you've had your headlights on and a rabbit or a cat runs out in front of the car, you've seen that. Usually that is the third F. It's usually freeze, right? So that is the third F that comes there when we're under these extreme stresses. And then fight or flight are obviously you either put your fist up and you fight your way out of a situation, or flight is where you run the heck and you get out of there. Really, really useful back in cavemen and women times when we were constantly fighting your sabre-toothed tigers or woolly mammoths or whatever they may be. Still useful today if you are crossing that road and a car's hurtling towards you at 40 miles an hour, you want to get out of the way pretty quickly. But I suppose the flip side of that that we don't talk about a lot is the idea of rest and digest. And there's two parts of the same physiological system, it's part of the autonomic nervous system, the stuff that takes care of itself. And quite often we find ourselves in modern-day life, as you were saying before, not just because of the stresses of everything that goes on in our life, but the stress of what's happening to a woman's body during the menopause, but also things like environmental stress as well. Do you live on a busy road that's noisy or has a lot of fumes or whatever it may be? All those things can play into our stress levels, and the challenge is having fight or flight activated when there's this constant low level of underlying stress that may not always be manifesting itself in sort of like, oh my god, I am so stressed out, but is always bubbling under the surface. I think managing that that classic thing that a lot of women talk about going from zero to a hundred in seconds.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Yeah. I someone someone said the other day, I go from Zen to bitch inside of ten seconds, and I thought, yeah, some days that feel that feels like it. And you know, something interesting is the I and I always look at the sympathetic nervous system, which is the activation of fight or flight, and I remember sympathetic S for stress, right? And uh when animals are stressed like that, it's it's a deer or a gazelle is escaping a predator, when they're finished, they don't go around and say, Oh my gosh, and just ruminate on the fact that they were chased by this predator. They shake it off physically, and that resets their nervous system. And then they go on and leave it behind. As humans, we're not so able to do that. But I I think being able to find that sort of shake it off routine for yourself is a is a great first place to focus because we need to find a way to interrupt that loop in order to bring our our health back and and it this is this is mental health as well as physical health, as well as how we experience menopause symptoms, our ability to sleep, and our ability to repair our body and our ability to exercise and and even have the the desire and the energy to play with our kids or grandkids or pets or do the things that we dream of doing when we're done working or we have you know that someday kind of thing. If we don't learn how to do that now, when we have the time, all the time we think we want and need to do the things we enjoy, we we need to know how to manage that because otherwise that can become a source of its own stress, right? Because now what do I do?

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Yeah. I'd never thought about that analogy before of sort of like taking it into the natural world, and you're absolutely right. If you look at sort of like any nature sh show that you might have seen about the plains of Africa, you know, you'll see a load of antelope there all chewing cod and grass quite happily, and suddenly a lion comes up and they're absolutely off running trying to get out of the way. Once one of them's taken down, they just go back to chewing the grass as normal. And they're relatively okay with the fact that while the lions got that meal, their former friend, now they've um now they can just go back to back to normal because the lion's got what got what he wants, and we tend not to not to do that. I was talking to somebody the other day about the importance of not being stressed when when you eat, and it kind of plays into that analogy as well that quite often people say to me, Oh, I eat brilliantly. Okay, well, what are the tech circumstances of you eating that brilliantly then? Tell me what that looks like. Well, you know, when I'm at work, I grab a salad and it's got some protein on it, it's got some nuts on it, I've got the good fats in there, I've got a nice colourful array of vegetables. Okay, and in what circumstances are you then eating this gorgeous salad that you've taken that time out to prepare yourself? Well, I'm eating it while I'm, you know, I'm so stressed at work that I don't have time to take lunch, I'm eating it while I'm answering some emails or you know, trying to complete a project project or meet a deadline. And however great that meal is, your body is less likely to digest it well if you're eating it under stress, and as we know it nutrient density and nutrient availability play a real role in how our bodies react to food, and that meal may be wonderfully neutrally dense, but if you're not making it avail available to yourself, I mean I'm sure it's better than eating you know a bag of potato chips and some chocolate, obviously, but you still aren't getting the best out of it, you aren't optimizing it, and I think that is one it's a word that we don't use often enough when it comes to health care in in general, across all healthcare, I believe, that we are often talking terms of you know what kind of gets us by rather than what gives us the absolute maximum best return for what we're putting into something, and sometimes just being able to find that balance and swipping uh switching over to the parasympathetic nervous system can be something that is is really really important. So if you don't you know in a second I'm gonna ask you about techniques for for for our listeners who might want to reduce stress and how they can actually bring some things. But number one for me would be when you're about to sit down and eat, sit down and eat, take 10 big deep breaths beforehand, activate that rest and digest system to try and get the best best out of it. So let's come into some stress management techniques then. I was in my local kombucha shop the other day. Uh, the owner's wife makes some really funky cool t-shirts in there, and she's got one that is a woman who's looking quite uh stressed out, and on it it says, Yes, thanks, I have fucking tried yoga. So without delving into the really simple, easy stuff, then things like you know the stuff that people are often told, let's do some meditation, let's do some yoga. How can a woman at this stage of life start managing that stress, Julie? What you what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Well, I've got many thoughts on that, and and even though I absolutely love and probably need a t-shirt like that, um, yoga is really good. But I think I think some of the things for especially when we feel so time compressed, as you said, taking time to eat your meal at at work. I I remember having this conversation with someone recently saying, nothing in your work unless you are working in the emergency services at the hospital, is so important that it can't be spared for ten minutes. Ideally twenty or thirty, but there's nothing that can't wait for ten minutes while you take time to mindfully eat. And that not only helps you better digest your food, but it also makes a difference in the satisfaction you get from your food. Because let's face it, there is an emotional component to eating. There's the trigeminal nerve that goes back behind your jaw and releases our feel-good hormones that that satisfy and soothe us. So so wanting to eat is a physiological thing is uh for for emotions of stress as well as as well as for our body's um nutritional needs. And it's one of the reasons why you see animals and babies kind of chewing on things when they feel a bit distressed. Um, because it stimulates that. Uh one of my um master coaches at Precision Nutrition used to call that nature's valium, just chewing. Just the the action of chewing. So what are you chewing on? Um but taking that time gives you and and being mindful when you eat gives you a lot more satisfaction. And I think mindfulness generally, because a lot of times I mean when I'm guilty of having driven someplace and not remembered going there because I had so many things on my mind. Or eating something and not even realizing how the plate got empty because I wasn't paying attention to what I was eating. So so being mindful of the things that we're doing, even the simplest daily activities, can make a difference in calming down our system. Breath work is great because it's portable, nobody needs to know you're doing it. You can do it anywhere, and it's very calming to your nervous system. So I like box breathing, which is inhaling, holding your breath, exhaling, and then holding the exhale with your lungs empty, and you can change the count to what works for you. I usually do a four or a six box breath, which would be inhaling for a count of six, holding for a count of six, exhaling for a count of six, and holding for a count of six. So that that can work wonders. Any kind of body movement, you know, even if you have to hide in the bathroom at work, you can have a little dance party. Um that can be your sort of shaking off ritual, like the animals do. It any th any kind of movement is going to sort of reset your nervous system and and it feels good. Um spending time outside can be great. Fresh air and sunshine, any chance you can get it. Again, even if it's for five minutes. And I think the the bigger piece of this is remembering that the things we do to manage our stress don't have to be grand, they don't have to take a lot of time. The simpler the better, because then we're more likely to do it. So anytime you can squeeze in five minutes or ten minutes will make a difference in in how you feel. And then of course, meditation or reading something pleasurable, or watching some comedy, or anything that helps you smile and play. Now this is an interesting phenomenon because I maybe ten years ago I my coach asked me, How do you play? And I ended up in tears because I didn't re I didn't know how I'd lost the ability to play. And think about the joy that kids get when they're playing whatever it is. They make up their own games, they make up their own languages, it doesn't matter. But find different ways to play that feel good because play is one of the best in laughter, one of the best stress reducers I know of. So those are a few simple ideas.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Yeah. I think it's key here to think as well. They're great ideas. I love the fact that you mentioned the amount of time it needs to take to do some of these things. Because one of the things that we're often told by our clients is I just don't have the time to do that. I don't have the time to meal prep. I don't have the time to you know take half an hour of my day and eat, etc. And really, if you're doing if right now you're doing nothing to relieve the tension, to find that balance between your fight or flight and your rest of the dig and digestive systems, even one, two, three minutes can make a huge difference. And for people who tell me that they still don't have those one, two, three minutes, I always encourage them first of all to just go away and take a time diary for a day. Just grab a notebook, and every 30 minutes, just write what you've done for the last 30 minutes and just see really how busy your your day is. We've become so conditioned to taking time to maybe like spend 20 minutes scrolling Instagram reels or TikTok reels or you know reading the news just before we go to bed on our mobile phones. Because we've got this barrage of information all the time. I think we often forget that you know that phone and that easy access to information takes away so much of our lives that off quite often, if you take a time diary and just write down what you've been doing, you'd be surprised at how much time you're actually spending doing other things. And then it's a simple trade-off, isn't it? The trade-off is do I want ten minutes on TikTok, or am I willing to do five minutes on TikTok and then spend five minutes going and having a mini dan dance party in the i in the bathroom at work, just closing my eyes for five minutes and doing some deep breathing, stepping out into the garden, and all those things because they are such small habits, we can do them really simply and easily.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Yeah, and I would I would argue that this smaller steps are better anyway, because even though we a lot of times we have this attitude, go big or go home, if it isn't something big, then it doesn't really count. But it it all counts because it all adds up. And if you did five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the afternoon, that's ten minutes a day. By the end of the week, even if you skipped a day, you would have put in an hour towards self-care. And if you ask most people that I don't have an hour to spare, well, if you ca if you break it down into those smaller pieces, you you totally can. And and I I think there are just there are a lot of different ways that we can do that. And it the important thing is to do something that doesn't feel busy that makes you feel good, that you enjoy. Because a lot of times we'll take a break from one thing only to fill it with something else we feel like we should be doing. So this needs to be very much focused on on yourself, not on anybody else.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

And you can also anchor it, and we talk a lot in our with our clients and in our in our membership group, about anchoring the smallest step you can do that could make a change to something that you already do as a matter of course. And that might be the classic one is the old idea of standing on one leg while you're brushing your teeth. That is more to activate balance, I mean physical balance rather than than the notional idea of balancing the body. Um, but it could be when you brush your teeth, you're just going to take 10 deep breaths after you've after you've done it, which or or do a minute's box breathing. So every time you brush your teeth, a couple of minutes of doing some box breathing, at the end of the week, if you you brush your teeth, assuming you do it twice a day, 14 times, you know, again you've added on quite a large amount there. It could be every time you um put on the kettle, do 10 deep breaths, or spend a minute listening to a meditation, but anchoring it with something that you do already is a matter of course, and we've all got things that we do as a matter of course during the day, haven't we? Waking up, going to bed are the two key ones, brushing our teeth is another one, going to the bathroom is another one, putting the kettle on for a coffee or a tea is another one, and there are many, many other things that you can say every time I do X, I will also do Y, that allow us to bring in these things on a really small basis without it adding an extra, dare I say, level of stress to our lives. Because that is the other thing, isn't it? You tell somebody who's already stressed that they've got to add in a stress reduction protocol as well. We don't want to be at a stage where we're adding in actual more stress about doing the stress protocol.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

No, but I I will tell you from personal experience, as counterintuitive as it seems, on the days when I do my my thing that's attached, which is in it at in the afternoon, in between um two appointments that I have standing every day of the week, I go out for a walk. Now, I haven't lately because of the summer heat, and that's the hottest time of the day. But when I do that, no matter how much I have to do, when I come back, I'm always more productive. I always feel more refreshed, I feel more focused, I I feel more mentally clear. And even though it seems like I don't have the time to do that, and I say that in air quotes, um, it's it it brings me more time and more productivity into my afternoon because it gives my mind and body the the rest that it needs. So a lot of this has to do with our belief systems and our attitude toward these things. So it isn't about adding in necessarily, it can also be about taking away. So, as you say, keeping a time diary, look at those things. What do you really need to do? Are you doing things because you feel like you should do them? Or are you doing things because it's important to you? They're things that you want to be doing. We don't always have to say yes to everything. I think learning how to say no is probably one of the biggest stress reducers on the planet.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Absolutely. Okay, so we're coming up to the top of the uh of the half hour, so we're um running a little short on time. So let's talk about a couple of things that can help people that we offer for free then. So, first of all, we've got our mini course. It's called Mind Over Menopause. You can get that at mastery or men on mindset.com, and obviously, we'll put the URL in the show notes. Five minutes a day, a couple of videos from myself and Julie on alternate days so you get the best of both worlds from us, and at the end of it, you we encourage you to create something called a menopause vision statement, which helps you set out kind of like a gatekeeping uh statement that you can use to help filter all your decision making about how you're gonna go. So that's number one. The second thing, if you really need some some deeper help, is you can book a free 45-minute call again with either of us. You can choose which one you want to speak to, and we offer that you can jump onto our diaries there at freecall.fabulousbeyond40.com and book in, and we're happy to discuss anything with you, really. But the idea is to give you the framework to go away from that call with some concrete steps to make in whatever it is about your menopause transition that is troubling you the most right now. So do take advantage of those two things. First of all, that free mini mini course, mind of a menopause. You can get that at masteryourmenomindset.com, and our free call, 45 minutes of our time, that we're happy to give to you. That is at free call.fablessbeyond40.com. We'll put the both of those into the show notes underneath, uh, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're watching on your on your favourite podcast player, and you've not got the privilege of seeing um us fading in and out as our internet connection gets worse and better throughout the call, but you're just listening to us, um, you'd you'd have to watch some of our uh videos on YouTube to realise how we do occasionally pixelates because we both live in semi-rural areas without the best internet connection. So, Julie, before we uh close up then for this week's episode, anything else that you'd like to add to to the conversation today?

SPEAKER_01 31:22

I I think I think the biggest piece is is understanding that your self-care is not a selfish thing. It is actually your most important responsibility, and you're the only one who can do it for you. So getting getting support and learning how to do that is a hundred percent okay. It's it's never wrong to ask for help or ask for support, and we're here to provide that for you. We have some great free resources, please do take advantage of them because we want you to feel vibrant and live an amazing life.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

Fabulous. Okay, everybody, we will see you next time. It's been James Ellison Julia Medesi from Fabulous Beyond Forty. We'll see you soon. Take care.