E8: Has My Mind Turned Against Me? (Intrusive Thoughts and Anxiety in Perimenopause)

Hormone fluctuations can create a chemical storm that affects our thoughts and emotions, but calm is coming.

1. Name it, don’t shame it. Label intrusive thoughts out loud — “This is anxiety, not truth.”
2. Ground your body first. Slow breathing, light stretching, a cool towel — get your body safe so your mind can follow.
3. Regulate your nervous system daily. Morning sunlight, hydration, balanced protein, and magnesium support.
4. Reach out, don’t isolate. Talk to your provider or join a community for support.
5. Keep a “reality anchor” notebook. Write: “What’s true right now?” It breaks the loop.
6. Your peace isn’t gone. It’s just waiting for you to come back to it.

Emotions travel 80,000 times faster than thoughts. All reasonable and practical thinking arrives in our nervous center long after the emotion has expressed itself.

If you want to prevent holiday stress and overwhelm this year, join the free 5-day pre-holiday workshop. I'll teach you how to calm the chaos, reclaim your peace, and sleigh the season your own way. (Because your sanity deserves more than sleigh bells and spreadsheets). Learn more at The Jingle-Free Zone.

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Transcript

Thank you so much for tuning in. If you have ever felt like your own thoughts
turned against you, racing, looping, spiraling out of nowhere,
this episode is for you. Welcome to the unmute your midlife podcast where we take you from foggy and forgotten to focus and lit up. I'm Joyce, your nurse turned
midlife resurrection strategist and the cheerleader in your pocket, and I'm here to
remind you that your next season is your power era. 

Today's episode is called Has My Mind Turned Against Me? And it's all about intrusive thoughts and anxiety that we experience in paraminopause. First, I want to point out that no matter where you are in your journey, you're not crazy, you're not broken, and you're not alone. I remember The wild paths that my thoughts would go down when I was in the thick of perimenopause and, of course, didn't know that I was in paramedipause. I actually thought I was going through a spiritual battle. And at the time, the church that I was in believed heavily that everything was spiritual. I know I would notice the discontent or discomfort I was feeling a lot of times it would be when I was in the car driving to and from work because that was my time alone. I was not a mental health nurse. I was not a women's health nurse. I worked with hearts at the time. And so everything about menopause was foreign to me. It wasn't something that was on my radar, wasn't something I knew to look out for. 

Did you know that the suicide rate for women is highest between the ages of 45 and 54? There was a study by the National Institute of Health that found women in menopause had a sevenfold increase in suicidal ideation. This can be explained by a combination of things. One, improper depression treatment. Two, a lack of hormone treatment. Three, the difficulty women experience being heard by their medical professionals. When you go seeking help from someone who's supposed to know how to treat you and you walk away feeling gaslit or guilty for wasting their time, you're told this is normal, you're just going to have to wait it out. It's very, very disheartening, very frustrating and can definitely increase the amount of depression and hopelessness that women feel. Now, I'm excited that Gen X has come along and said, we're not going to be treated like this and has demanded more research and has demanded better options. And so we're starting to see a change there, there are still plenty of women who are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to treatment options. 

Now, I don't want you to think I'm here just to speak gloom and doom
because I'm not. I'm coming at you today with hope. I'm going to share some
validation, some science, and some support. So one of the things that's causing this change in thinking or this obsession with intrusive thoughts is the hormone
fluctuations that we experience, especially estrogen and progesterone.
When they drop, it affects all the neurotransmitters, but especially it affects
serotonin, which is one of your feel -good neurotransmitters, and GABA, which is a
neurotransmitter that regulates your mood and your sense of calm. So women who were completely level -headed, completely logical, We can switch to obsessing over these intrusive thoughts. We don't ask for them. They just intrude into our day. They can sometimes be about our health, worrying about every weird symptom or change in our body. Does that mean I have like a fatal disease? Does that mean I have cancer? (Looking everything up on WebMD). They could be about safety. And here in Oklahoma, you know, we experience a lot of tornadoes. Our family was out on the road during tornadoes one night and we all had storm PTSD for a few years after that also during paramedopause. We might worry about left ones. You might not have been a helicopter mom, but now all of a sudden you're worried about your kids, probably because they've started driving or going to parties with friends, and you're just always fretting over their safety. We might have just obsessive thoughts about our self -worth (or lack of it). 

You have to understand perimenopause doesn't just change your body. It changes your brain chemistry. So the thoughts that feel terrifyingly real are often physiological. It's not a moral failure. It's not a personal failure. It's not a spiritual failure. There's something chemically going on in your body, something zoological going on in your body that's causing this. There's this chemical storm happening, but the column is coming. I just want to share when I went through the worst part of my hormone changes and was really struggling with feeling like failure, feeling invisible, feeling like maybe I should just leave that my family might be better off without me. One of the doctors that I worked with at the hospital was seeing me for a pulmonary issue. And he said, "don't make any decisions right now because you are sleep deprived." I had only been getting three or four hours of sleep at night for a few months. And he said, "you have reactive depression from this lack of sleep. I want you to take Zoloft for a month." He gave me the lowest dose possible. We argued about it a bit because I didn't want to take an antidepressant. Fortunately, this was someone, a colleague that I worked with at the hospital, and he said, "look, you know the dose is available. This is a very low dose. You don't even have to taper off of it when you're done. Just take it for a month so that you can get caught up on your sleep, and then you can decide what to do with your life." And so I did that. And what it did, it did knock me out. I mean, if I wasn't at work, I was sleeping. And my husband was so sweet about it because he would see me fall asleep pretty much within minutes of sitting down in a chair and he would turn the TV down and he would get the boys and he'd have him go play outside or go in their rooms and shut their doors or do something quiet. Got to let mom sleep, okay? And after about two weeks, I started to think a little bit more logically or a little bit more like my old self. 

And in the midst of all of this is also when I got my first tattoo. It is a cuff that goes around my right wrist and I wanted it as a reminder. There were so many things going on during this time besides my hormones. I had lost my dad to cancer and now my sister was going through a cancer battle. We had some
pretty serious shake -ups at our church where we were involved in the church
leadership, and I was tired of feeling like I lived in a glass house, and I was
tired of putting people on pedestals. Because A, they don't belong there,
and B, they're going to let you down. (At least that's the way I felt at the time).
So I went through a lot of things. You know, besides the hormone stuff, there
really was kind of a spiritual battle happening in my case. When I got to the
other side of it, I wanted this little tattoo to remind me, so I would put
it where a watch band would go, to remind me, "I am his and he is mine." That's the short version of it. Because I am named by God. That "I am his and he is mine" is short for: I am healed; I am more than the sum of my mistake; I am not alone;
I am his beloved;I am filled with his power; I am forgiven; I am his child;
I am safe; I am free from the power of sin; I am his delight;
I am chosen; I am transformed; I am a victor; I am divinely gifted;
I am his ambassador; I am a radical. That "he is mine" is: He is my strength;
He is my comfort; He is my savior; He is my salvation; He is my shelter when I
am scared; He is my strength when I am weak. The list goes on and on. So my
tattoo is kind of my talisman to remind me. It's my grounding instrument,
I guess you could say. 

A funny little tidbit for you. Emotions travel 80 ,000 times faster than thoughts. So all reasonable and practical thinking arrives in our nerve center long after the emotion has expressed itself. So give yourself some grace if you are struggling with emotions that get triggered by your intrusive thoughts or your anxiety. Again, it's all chemistry in motion. So many women have shared with me their own intrusive thoughts or struggles with anxiety that they experience. One was
telling me, you know, what if something bad happens that I can't recover from? Or
what if I forget something important and it ruins everything? What if I can't keep
up anymore? I was seriously considering going to nurse practitioner school and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to remember all the far. Ya know, you just, you don't know what you don't know! But the thoughts that you're experiencing, or that you hear other people talking about, they don't mean that you're
losing control. They just mean that your nervous system is overloaded.

So, let's talk about some ways to cope. First of all, name it don't shame it! When you can label those intrusive thoughts out loud, just say when you get that thought and it's and it's bothering you, just say it out loud with your voice so that you can hear it: "This is anxiety. This is not true. This isn't fact driven reality." However you want to phrase it. When you say it out loud, and your ears hear it, it reaches your brain. 

The next thing I would say is focus on something grounding. For me, it's my tattoo. I think about that and all the sentences that are represented by the two sentences in ink. But you could ground your body by doing some breathing, doing the box breathing, doing some stretching, getting a cool washcloth, and getting your body into a safe place so that your mind can follow to that safe place. 

The third thing is to regulate your nervous system every day. If you can get outside and touch grass and see the sun rise or the sunset. It does wonders for your nervous system. You also need to make sure that you are taking care of your physical needs, that you are getting hydration, that you're going to the bathroom, that you're taking in enough protein. You have to have that protein and amino acids to build the cells, to nourish your mitochondria, to have all of
the elements in place for the chemical reactions that your cells are doing.
Magnesium, extremely important, especially for midlife women. Now, I mentioned that sometimes GABA levels can get decreased. I'm not going to recommend you go get a GABA supplement. If that's something you think you might need, you should talk to your doctor. Because if you are on any kind of blood pressure medication, GABA can reduce your blood pressure. And if you're already taking something for low blood pressure, I mean, for high blood pressure, taking something to lower your blood pressure, and then you take a GABA supplement too. You could actually cause yourself to have a dangerously low blood pressure or to have a hypertension that leads to fainting or passing out or getting injured. GABA supplements can also make you drowsy. So if you take something that makes you drowsy and then you add that to it, then you might be falling asleep while you're driving. But there are some foods that Gaba is naturally found in, such as fermented foods, like kimchi, miso, and tempe. It's in tea, green, black, and oolong. It's in spinach, broccoli, sweet potatoes, several vegetables. If you want to toy with adding it through some foods, knock yourself out. But if you're wanting to take a supplement, I would definitely talk to your health care provider first just for safety's sake. 

Let's move on to number four. Reach out. You're going to want to isolate yourself. You're going to want to go climb into bed, pull the blanket over your head, and stay there forever. Resist the urge to do that. You know, you can talk to your health care provider. Most employers offer a cap of some kind, a CAP where you can have so many visits a year with a health professional. There are online communities. You can even jump on my rejoiceful living page on Facebook or join our private Facebook group where you can share anything you want and get support from the other women there. There's several online mental health resources now too. BetterHelp is one. I know several people who have gone through the online options to get some mental health treatment, just to help them through some rough patches, and they've found it to be very effective and very private. I would say the state of mental health in the United States right now is not in a great place. There's just not enough resources to go around, but if you're able to use the online resources, or if you have access to in -person resources, definitely take advantage of that. It's not like you're going to have to be there forever. You are there to prop yourself back up and get yourself back in the game.

Number five, keep reality anchor notebook. You could write in there "What's true right now?" It helps break the loop. If you're not a journaler, or you're nervous about somebody finding your journal and reading it, then I guess you could do this on post-it notes and then throw them away. Or you could write in code. Or you could just ask your family, "hey, don't read my stuff." On my my journal, that I was going through, in the front it says "this is my personal journal this is not to be read by anyone without my express permission at the very moment you were about to read it...snooping would be a huge breach of trust and very damaging to the relationship between me and the nosy reader." That's what I put right inside the cover. 

The last thing on my list is your peace isn't gone. It's just waiting for you to come back to it. Remember what I said in the beginning: This is a chemical storm. The calm is coming. The hormones will settle down or you'll get some replacement hormones or you'll get some vitamins or something will change to where this doesn't feel quite so chaotic and you have control of your brain again. Let me just reframe this right now for you, okay? Your mind is not betraying you. It's just sending you signals that it needs better care.

The season of perimenopause is a transition. It's not a punishment. It's a
transition, a transformation. Did anybody watch A Bugs Life? And you remember the caterpillar and he was, you know, the big fat caterpillar and he had like a foreign accent. I can't remember what it was. You know, they were circus performers. And then he went into his cocoon and he came out. He said, "I'm a beautiful butterfly." He still looked like a caterpillar, but he had wings. Okay, whenever I think of transformation, I think of him! Anxiety is not forever, but it is a signal that maybe you need to slow down and simplify or ask for help. It is not in any way, shape, or form a reason for you to feel ashamed or have an excuse to isolate yourself away from everyone that loves you. 

Now, I do have something very exciting I want to tell you about. I have a workshop coming up later this month. It starts on November 17th. It centers around prepping you to be stress -proofed for the holidays. I'm pretty excited about it. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's five days, each day is going to focus on a different aspect of the things that cause us stress or overwhelm during the holidays. It is going to be completely free. I'm going to post the content on my YouTube channel and on my Facebook page for anybody to see. If you want to get the power pages for each day, you'll want to register so that I can email them to you. I'm calling it the jingle free zone, a midlife woman's guide to call on the chaos and slay the season. If you struggle with holiday stress or you're battling perimenopausal anxiety, then you want to watch this series. The videos are going to be short, sweet, and to the point. And then the companion power pages are just to reinforce what you're learning. So I promise this is going to be a minimal investment of your time, maybe 30 minutes a day for those five days. If It gets you back into the joy of the season. It gets you to feel just a little bit more festive this year than it's totally worth the 30 minutes a day for five days, right? So watch for that link, register so that you don't miss out on any of the goodies. 

That's all I have for today's dose of midlife truth. But remember, you are not foggy, forgotten, or finished. You are just getting lit up for your next season. And if today's episode, struck a chord with you, make sure you share it with another woman who is struggling to unmute her own midlife. Until next time, keep unmuting, keep rising, and remember, your midlife resurrection starts right
now.