E24: Midlife Is Not the Problem. Your Tolerance Is

In this episode of Unmute Your Midlife, we break down one of the biggest lies women are told about menopause and perimenopause: that midlife is the problem.

If you’re experiencing fatigue, irritability, brain fog, low motivation, weight gain, or feeling invisible in your own life, this isn’t about aging. It’s about what you’ve been tolerating.

We talk about:

• Why common menopause symptoms are not the same as normal
• How chronic stress and hormone shifts shrink your decisions
• The hidden cost of pushing through exhaustion
• Why your tolerance level determines your quality of life
• The first step to recalibrating your energy and authority

This episode is for women in their 40s and 50s who are navigating perimenopause, menopause symptoms, burnout, and identity shifts — and are ready to stop shrinking.

If you’re done surviving midlife and ready to approach it strategically, you’re in the right place.

To schedule your free Unmute Session, click here.

Catch the latest blog post here.

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Transcript

Welcome to unmute your midlife, the podcast for women who are done tolerating a muted version of themselves. I'm Joyce, a nurse, committed to cutting through the noise, the miss, the dismissals. So we can talk about what's really happening.
Midlife is not the end of your power. It's where leading yourself becomes non
-negotiable. 

So I've been doing some soul searching, some analysis of the topics I've
covered so far, the topics that I want to cover. And you're probably going to
notice a shift in the episodes moving forward, not a bad shift, a good shift.
But basically, I've kind of narrowed down my vision for this movement that I've kind of created here. And it's going to be all about how to recalibrate your energy and reclaim your authority. Because I think that that is what most women in midlife, or they find themselves in this position where suddenly they feel run down. They are stressing out. They're having trouble with the mood swings. Everything that they were able to overcompensate for in the past, it suddenly overcompensating doesn't work anymore because we're so depleted, either in our hormones, our energy, our resources, and so things that we used to be able to kind of make up the difference for, suddenly they start to creep out and sometimes they can have a really, really negative impact on our lives. Other times, it's just a minor inconvenience. 

But my focus is going to be on, you know, stabilizing the energy levels and the mood swings, regulating your stress response, fueling properly. And fueling,
that includes food, supplements, pharmacology, all the things that increase our
capacity for more energy, for more growth, for being able to do more, to enjoy
more, to have the energy to be involved, to be present, to observe what's happening. And in turn, that's going to restore our leverage. Just because we hit 50 doesn't mean we've hit the peak of our career. It doesn't mean that we've finished doing all the things that we had planned for our life, far from it. But without energy, without mental energy, physical energy, we limit our capacity to accomplish all these dreams that we have, all these goals that we have, all these plans that we want to make. So I definitely want to focus on recalibrating our energy. 

And the other thing is reclaiming authority. I see a change happening, for instance, in the medical realm. You know, the information is changing. And so doctors are starting to prescribe medications and hormones that help women keep feeling and functioning their best. But the pharmaceutical companies have a shortage. Why? They know how many women are in our same age bracket. I went to pick up mine, and normally it's  $50 -something dollars. This last time, it was $256. Now, I don't know if that's a permanent price change or not. I'll find out tomorrow when I call them. But that's ridiculous. What, because supply is dwindled, you're going to increase the price. I mean, it's not like, it's not like I'm asking for something to help me have an erection. If this was happening with erectile dysfunction medications, I feel like the reaction from the general public would be a little different. And I'm not like a third-wave feminist. And I am all for men having access to the medications they need. But I am also for women having access to these simple medications we need also. 

Under the umbrella of reclaim your authority, I want to talk about how we
stop tolerating dismissal. We stop numbing ourselves. We stop shrinking to avoid
making other people feel small. If they feel small, that's their problem. You don't
have to shrink yourself so that you don't make someone else uncomfortable. You are who you are. And we should stop outsourcing decisions. We have resources available so that we can find out what we might be needing, what might be happening. There's ways to track what's happening so that you can present some empirical data when you go to the doctor. We don't have to accept the status quo. We can push for better. We can raise our standards. 

So when I say there's going to be a small shift in the messages that I share, that's basically the kind of messages I'm talking about. My focus is on recovery, regulation, and fuel. And over the next few weeks, I'll go
into some deeper detail about what each one of those means. But today, in
particular, we're going to talk about how midlife is not the problem, tolerance is.
So if midlife starts feeling chaotic, exhausting, or like you're disappearing inside
your own life, I need to tell you something very clearly. The problem is not
midlife. The problem is your tolerance. And I say this with all love, not in a
blaming way, because I was in this very same position. What I hope really is just
to kind of give you a revelation, an aha peek at, oh, I never looked at it that
way. Because a lot of times when women, we call this new state of feeling aging,
but really, it's just accumulated toleration. Like I was saying earlier, we were able
to overcompensate or find ways to deal with it all. But let's stop and think for a
second. For half a century now, you know, if you're in your 50s, for half a
century, you've tolerated, exhaustion, dismissal, inconsistency. How many of you are overcommitted? Like, you just keep taking on more and more and more. We numb ourselves because sometimes it's just too much to deal with or to think about and we say, "I can't do with that right now." And so you just learn to numb yourself with scrolling on your phone, with watching TV, with reading books, anything to escape reality and avoid having to make hard decisions or painful changes. We've been shrinking. As I said, sometimes we shrink so that we don't make other people comfortable. Sometimes we shrink because we don't have the courage to stand up and really face down someone or something that's that's trying to push back. And so we hit midlife and it's like we hit this I don't want to say a wall, but we hit this resistance within the side that says, no, we just can't do it this
way anymore. So midlife is definitely the perfect time for a recalibration because
that's when your hormones shift and so you can't tolerate it all. That's when your
recovery changes. It takes you longer to bounce back from things. Go have a simple surgery and see if you can go back to work in three days. I bet you can't. 

We have different stress response at this age. We have a change in our metabolic needs and metabolic demands. So instead of trying to recalibrate, A lot of women just keep trying to keep pushing through with the same rules, the same mechanisms that they used when they were 35. That's not resilience. That's that's drift. We're drifting away from our true north. We're drifting away from ideal standards. There's a long -term cost of this. If you keep tolerating that low energy, here's what happens. You stop advocating for yourself. You decide it's just too hard. just too much work and so you just you give away your authority and you let other people decide for you you stop initiating just think of all these ideas that you used to come up with plans that you used to have even if it's something simple like we should start a clothing closet at the hospital so that if people come in from my house fire and they need clothes we've got some to give them but then when it's time to go and implement that you're like I just don't have the energy to mess with that. And so it doesn't get done. Think of all the good, helpful ideas that are out there floating around in women's heads, not getting initiated because they're too dang tired. You stop escalating your career. There's no reason for you to say, "well, I've arrived. This is it. This is the top." I mean, if you're happy with where you're
at, cool. But if you think, "man, I wish I could do more. I wish I could make
more. I wish I could be more." You completely can, but you'll have to stop
tolerating the low energy in order to make it happen. When we're low energy, we
delay conversations because you know what? Hard conversations, they take a lot of energy out of you. You start accepting good enough or lower standards.
I mean, you end up, you like shrink your standards, things that you wouldn't put up
with, say, as a 25 year old. Now you're like, yeah, whatever. I just want to go
home and put my feet up. I just want to go home and take this bra off. That's
because of low energy. Now, I want you to think about if you keep tolerating that,
what's life going to look like five years from now? It's not just your body that's
going to be different. Your whole identity is going to be different. You're going to
wake up and look in the mirror one day and go, who is that person? Or you're
going to be driving home after some serious conversation with a friend or a co
-worker or some blow -up that didn't go well, and you're going to think, when did I
become like this? This is not how I normally would have reacted to that. But
there's an alternative. Midlife can be different. You can have a self -led midlife.
You can stop asking what's wrong with me? And you can start saying, okay, what is
happening and what do I need to adjust? That is self -leadership. It's not
motivation. It's as not boorah cheerleading. That is leadership. That is you adjusting in real time based on the data that you're taking in from what's happening to you. And I know it probably sounds like a little bit of work. Maybe in the beginning it'll feel like work. It'll feel hard. It'll feel heavy. There's a beautiful goal at the end. And that beautiful goal is you get to be that vibrant, excited, push
-forward kind of person that you used to be or that you want to be. You get to
take back authority over your body, over your recovery, over your fueling, over what kind of treatments you can have and not have, what you're going to tolerate from your family, from your friends, from your boss, for your coworkers, from the people trying to cut in front of you at Walmart, whatever the case may be. When you have more energy, life changes, your outlook changes, your reactions change.
You get to be more proactive instead of reactive. It's a beautiful thing. So this
week, I want to give you one thing, one little lever that you can pull to start
to activate the mechanations of change, right? I want you to track your recovery,
not your productivity, not your weight. You don't have to step on a scale. Your
recovery. And what I mean by that is, I want you to keep track for one week. You
can just get a napkin and put it by the side of your bed. You don't have to be
all official about this, right? What time you're going to sleep? What time you wake
up? How many times did you wake up during the night? I know I've done past
episodes about sleep, and you can go back and listen to those. I can't stress
enough that sleep is your number one recovery tool. If you're not getting good
sleep, you're going to be endlessly frustrated with your energy levels, with your
health situation, because you have to have sleep. That's when you recover. That's
when your body does all the magic. And that's where your new path to increasing
your capacity is going to start is getting better sleep. It's probably one of the
biggest symptoms that women complain about to me is I just wish I could sleep
again. And here's why I'm asking you to keep track for one week, okay? Because this is a step for you to raise your standard. Midlife is not a decline. It's a
leadership test. The question is not, why is this happening? The question is, how
long are you going to tolerate it? So again, just get a napkin or a scrap piece
of paper or your favorite notebook, set it by your bedside, and you're going to
write down, what time you go into sleep, what time you woke up, and then how many times did you wake up during the night? And then you can look at that data. Next week, we'll talk about it. It's going to tell you a story. It's going to give you
a glimpse of whether or not your body is recovering properly and that is going to
be a clear indicator of why you have low energy. That's it for today.
If you feel like you're ready to implement instead of just consume the Unmute your
Midlife program is where we do this kind of work. I'll leave a link in the show
notes for you to schedule a free unmute session to explore more. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure and hit subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes and I will see you back here next week.