The Midlife Mental Load

Johanna is sharing an episode from The Chalene Show where Chalene Johnson breaks down the seven overlapping forces quietly dismantling the mental health of women over 40 right now. It is not just hormones. It is not a character flaw. And it is definitely not a morning routine problem. If you have been lying awake at 3am wondering why you cannot cope the way you used to, this one is for you.

🤩 The Chalene Show 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chalene-show-diet-fitness-life-balance/id911042029?i=1000772013789

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Swingin' through the ears with ragged on the rules. Midlife's calling honey where nobody's fools. Got that fire side where I'm not just shine. This is our time, yeah. We're feeling so divine. Oh, it's rubbin, living, driven, fold and free. Women open in midlife. Just you wait and see. Dance through the changes with a heart so strong. This is our anthem.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Come and sing along. Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Not Your Mother's Midlife. I'm your host, Joanna, and today I'm sharing an episode called the Over 40 Mental Health Crisis. And the reason I wanted to bring it to you is because she names something that I think a lot of us have been quietly carrying without really understanding why. It's the Shailen show. And in this episode, Shaylene does something I really respect. She stops talking about morning routines and discipline and optimizing your life, and she just gets honest about what is actually happening to women our age right now. She opens with a question: Have you been lying awake at 3 a.m.? Heart racing, mind going, and you cannot figure out why, because nothing is technically wrong. No single catastrophe, no obvious reasons, just this lo harm of overwhelm that will not switch off. If that's familiar, then this episode is going to feel like a relief. Shailen lays out seven forces that are converging on midlife women right now at the same time, and she makes the case that it is a combination of them, not any one thing that is causing so many of us to struggle in ways that we cannot quite explain. The first is the hormonal piece, which is the obvious one, but she goes further than most people do. It's not just that estrogen drops. See, estrogen comes up in every second episode. It's that estrogen, progesterone, and other hormones are involved in regulating mood, stress response, and sleep. And when they start fluctuating unpredictably in perimenopause, the nervous system is destabilized. Not metaphorically, actually destabilize the anxiety, the 3 a.m. wake ups, the feeling that you can no longer cope the way you used to. They are neurological. Then she gets into the sandwich generation piece, which is gonna hit a lot of people who listen to this. That's the generation of women who are simultaneously raising kids or having kids move out and dealing with that shift, while also stepping up for aging parents. And some also are helping to raise grandchildren. You're the person that everyone needs, and at the same time you're going through something significant yourself with very little space to acknowledge that. She also talks about identity. There's a particular kind of disorientation that happens when the roles that have defined you for years start to shift. Professionally, as a mother, as a daughter, as a partner, and you're left with a version of yourself that you don't quite recognize. She describes it as a sense of identity that women cannot quite name. But that's exactly right. It's not depression exactly, it's more like losing your footing. Like, you know that feeling, any of us who have had a baby, and after that first baby or second baby, you kind of get to know yourself again because you're like, gosh, who am I now? I don't know who I am because I've just spend my whole time taking care of somebody, and it is it's quite a shift, and it happens again in midlife. The other forces she covers include AI and job anxiety, which is real and it's hitting a lot of women who built careers over decades and are now watching the landscape shift faster than they can track. Social media and decision fatigue, the relentlessness of information and comparison that we're all swimming in every single day, and the story was sold about what midlife would look like. That one she gets particularly direct about. We're told this would be the freedom years, and for a lot of women it doesn't feel like that at all. What I love about the way she frames all of this is that she is not catastrophizing and she's not asking you to feel worse about your situation. What she's doing is naming the load accurately because when you understand what you're actually carrying, you stop blaming yourself for struggling under it. Your nervous system is not broken. It is responding to a genuinely heavy set of conditions. I will link the full Shaleen episode in the show notes as usual. And thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend, and please share it on your social media. It might help someone else, and it definitely will help me grow my followers. Subscribe to my podcast and to my YouTube, there's lots of videos so you never miss an episode. And until next week, I am Joanna, and this is Not Your Mother's Midlife. Bye bye.