Ep. 17 - The Daily Reset Every Woman Needs After Menopause

If you've been feeling stuck, frustrated, exhausted, or disconnected from yourself after menopause, this episode is for you.

Many women believe they need a dramatic overhaul to feel better—a cleanse, a retreat, a new diet, or another wellness protocol.

But what if the answer was much simpler?

In this episode, Sophie shares four daily resets that can help you reconnect with your body, your mind, your relationships, and your purpose.

You'll learn:

• Why morning light may be one of the most powerful health tools available
• The mindset question Sophie asks herself every day
• Why connection matters more than perfection
• How to realign with what matters most in this season of life
• Small daily habits that create profound change over time

If you've been waiting for a sign to start again, this is it.

Apply for a complimentary Breakthrough Session:
https://sophieuliano.com/apply

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

If you are in menopause, post-menopause, post-menopause is basically any time after you've gone through menopause. So postmenopause can be from 50 to 70, those postmenopausal years. And if you're feeling a bit stuck right now, just stuck. Nothing's really feeling alive or moving forward or glittery or good. It could be symptoms in your body that don't seem to be getting any better. You might be feeling a bit just ah, you just need a change, but you don't know where to begin. Then in this episode of Tea with Sophie, I am going to be giving you four daily resets that you can do every single day because very often what I see in women, particularly women over the age of 50, is things start going in a direction that doesn't feel good. Body starts breaking down, inflammation gets worse, aches and pains get worse, they're feeling sluggish, the belly fat won't budge, their mood isn't great, maybe a bit of brain fog, maybe a lot of chronic stress. And so many women reach for I need a huge cleanse, or I need to go away and do a retreat, or I need a big juice cleanse, or I need something huge and big to be able to sort of jerk me out of this rut that I'm in. And while retreats can be absolutely amazing and retreating away from your everyday life, it doesn't negate the need and the possibility of a daily reset. So today, in this episode, I'm going to give you just some little resets, four specifically little resets, that you can do, that you can take, make every single day, that over time actually really make a big, big difference in your body, in your energy, in the way that you feel about yourself and your life. Okay, so a reset. What is a reset? Think about it. You have a device, and very often when the device goes wrong and it's not working or it's slowing down, what do you do? You have to reset it. Sometimes it's like we need a factory reset here, or you look at your phone, and as we are often remind ourselves, just turn it off and turn it on again. That is basically what a reset is. And then suddenly, oh, it's working again. And with our devices and our phones, that obviously is a mechanical thing that we can just do that or a computer, it might need a little bit more of a reset. It might have to go into the computer store or the Apple store. There might have to be, there might have to be, it might be necessary for there to be some deep diagnostics to really figure out what's going on. And I'll come back to that in a little bit. But for the most part, on a daily basis, you need to use your phone to get by. But more importantly, you are in your beautiful body and you are living with your mind, body, spirit. And so why not give it the little software updates and the little resets that it needs every day to feel a little bit better? Reset number one is your body. Now, there are some very, very simple little resets that you can do every single day to reset your body. And I am going to start with what I see with so many of my clients as one of the most subtle but powerful little resets that you can do. What you want to ask yourself is if I can't, if I'm not able to overhaul my entire diet and all my lifestyle pillars today, what is one simple thing that I can do today to support my biology? And this is a really beautiful place to start. Getting morning light in your eyes, going for a walk. So it's a really beautiful reset because what you're doing is you are resetting your circadian rhythms, basically. And we have this beautiful natural circadian rhythm that goes completely out of whack often as we get older, because of so many different, it's multifactorial why it does. So, very quickly, let me explain your natural biological circadian rhythm when it aligns with the natural day-light, night, night, day cycles of the earth on which we are, on the spinning ball on which we are residing, when you align your biology, your circadian rhythms with the natural circadian rhythms of the earth, you are going to feel a hundred percent better. A hundred percent better. So you can go away and do a great big retreat, go on vacation. On that vacation, and on that retreat, you might be sleeping well, you might be eating well, you might feel a hundred percent better, and then you come home, and then it all starts again. The stress comes in and the stress of your daily lifestyle. So here's your little body reset. Try to wake up a little bit earlier in the morning. It can be 10 minutes, it can be 15 minutes. Now, many of you might have to set your alarm as you start waking up this new establishing this new rhythm. So you might go, you know what? I'm just if I if you normally wake up at 6, just try 6.45, 5.45, excuse me. That's how I started to change my circadian rhythm because I knew that if I could start matching that rhythm with dawn, with sort of when the sun comes up, I knew that it was going to be better for me in so many ways. It was going to match the light rising and coming through my windows, coming into my eyes, the retina of my eye. It was going to prompt this beautiful cortisol release that I wanted and needed to be able to get into my day with energy, to feel better, to lift my spirits, to use that beautiful surge of cortisol to get done everything that I needed to get done. So it started with okay, we're just gonna go 15 minutes. And I would naturally wake up, or my alarm would wake me up at about six. So I just thought 545, that that's doable. And that's how it started. And then when I woke up at 5.45, I was so thrilled because it very quickly became a habit. It usually takes about two or three weeks for your rhythm, your natural rhythm, your biological rhythm to adapt to that new wake time. But when it does, it's almost miraculous that you'll get to a point where you actually won't need an alarm to wake you up, which is really what happens for me now. I don't. And I actually used to sleep with blackout um drapes, but I don't, or blinds or whatever. I don't now because I want the natural light to come in my windows. And depending on the time of year, you know, obviously in the summer it's it's earlier, but that helps as like a beautiful natural alarm. My dog is another natural alarm, I will say, my little Pomeranian, because he he's got his own rhythm. And I think his rhythm is calibrated to be a little bit earlier than mine. So now, you know, at 5:45, there's a little dog standing on my chest, literally all four feet on my chest, like staring into my eyes. So that's that's actually a really cute little alarm as well. But my point is that that's a little reset. Now, as part of that reset, what you want to try and do is try to get light in your eyes as soon as you can after waking. I say to my lovely clients, and if my clients are listening, you'll know because you hear this all the time, is try to get daylight before screen light. Now, it's not always easy to do because sometimes there's things that you've got to do first, and it'll depend on the time of year. So, some of you who live in the northern hemisphere and you have really long dark mornings, that's when I would recommend a very inexpensive little light therapy lamp that you can get to flood your retina of your eye with this light to try to get you up. It's after menopause, it just becomes so important, I think, because after menopause, we can feel more sluggish. The aches and pains come in. Maybe we're not sleeping as well at night, maybe we're waking up three times to go to use the bathroom, maybe we've got hot flashes. And so there's a lot of sleep disturbances that can happen in the night during menopause and can continue on well into post-menopause. And so it's we also want to reset our nighttime routine to go to bed a little bit earlier as well. But I can promise you that if you start moving in the direction of resetting that rhythm, because it sometimes feels a little counterintuitive, if especially if you've not had a really good night's sleep, you'll think, well, I can't. I've just got to lay in, I've got to sleep in. Now, if you really need to do that, obviously, if you've only had like four or four hours sleep or five hours sleep or whatever, then you know, give yourself some grace. You you might need to. But for the most part, what I'm really talking about is establishing a different rhythm, setting a different rhythm, resetting your circadian rhythm. And if you do this, you will sleep better eventually. You just will. Because what you're doing when you're getting the light in your eyes as much as you can, either through a therapy lamp or ideally getting outside. It's not sunlight, it's just daylight. You don't have to stare up at the sky. You can go for a walk, get light in your eyes, you can potter around outside. Ideally, it's best not, it's it's it's significantly lessened the effect of these light waves coming into the retina of your eye through glass, through a window. So you actually do want to try and get outside if you possibly can. Um, 20, 30 minutes is is best, but don't let better be the enemy of best or perfect. If you can only get 10 minutes, just do that. Just be aware of getting that light in. And again, if you can get it before screen light, because the problem is with getting on a screen, is that we all know that when you're on the screen, it just hijacks you. You think you're just gonna pop in for five minutes to answer a couple of texts, or I'll just have a little look at Instagram. I'm so guilty for this. And then I was saying to my husband the other day, I said, Oh my gosh, I am back to setting a timer now on my phone because it's just so powerful. It just drags you into that rabbit hole and then 20 minutes later or 30 minutes later, and you're never gonna get that 20 or 30 minutes back. And that is the most valuable time in the morning. Because, as I said, that is when if you get this cortisol in your eyes, your light in your eyes, it's going to help give you this beautiful surge of cortisol in the morning. And again, you don't get that time back. And so I always say do as many of the hard things as you can in the first two or three hours of the day. Get them checked off your list, get the rocks in the jar as I teach my clients. The most important thing is get them done first. In the Ignite program, we call them our no matter what's. And they're the things that we don't necessarily feel like doing, they're the hard things, but we get them done while we have this sort of we're in the, we have we're in the jet stream, as it were. We've got this beautiful flow available to us. So that is a little reset that all of you can can put into place right now. It's not difficult, it's not expensive, you don't need anything. You do need a little bit of discipline to do it. You need to make a decision to do that. Getting up a little bit earlier, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, you might have to start by setting an alarm, get out of bed, see if you can get some light in your eye. It might not be immediately, but I'd say if you can do it within 60 minutes of waking up. And even if you're not doing the light thing, try not to do the phone thing. Try this is another little layer of reset that I give my clients, is that we I encourage them all and teach them all to do a little bit of a like a sort of magical mindset morning ritual, which is where you find your north star and you do that through meditation, visualization, prayer, journaling. So as a community, we we all do this together. You find your little north star. You you give yourself that time with God or universe or whatever your connection is, and and connecting to your future desired self, your future self. We in my community, and it's very much what I teach, we give ourselves that time. Because again, if you don't, you're not going to get time later in the day for that connection. You're just not. So get up a little bit earlier, get light in your eye, connect to your North Star. So that is a beautiful reset that you can do every single day. And all of these resets really are one day at a time because we only get one day, don't we? We we don't want to think, oh, I've got to do this forever. It's just for today. And the beautiful thing is that no matter what happened last week, last year, or over the 10 last 10 years of your life, women come to me with a lot of like, oh, grief and difficulty and regrets and everything, feeling like a failure. And it's just like, okay, we get to reset. We get to reset just for today. So that's reset number one. That's a good way to reset your body. Okay, reset number two is your mind. Now we've already touched on this, but we wake up carrying yesterday, yesterday's disappointments, yesterday's worries. And so yesterday's um we can have an emotional hangover. We might have had a big fight with a with a spouse or a partner or a boss. We might have just had a really crappy, crappy day. We might have had a day when we're just holding things in, the worst thing to do. What I again, what I teach my clients is we need to actually allow and feel our emotions. You're going to feel very, very stuck if you're not into the practice of doing that, of really feeling into particularly the really hard emotions. But a beautiful daily reset that you can do, all of us can do, is every single day when you wake up, just ask yourself the question. And you can ask yourself this before you even get out of bed. Okay, so you wake up and before, as we we talk about in the Ignite program, the supervillain, before she gets in and starts telling you how terrible your day is gonna be and how awful your body feels, and all these crazy, you know, stressful things that you've got to do in the day because she will get to you. She does push-ups while you're sleeping. But before she does, you can just lie there and ask yourself, who do I want to be today? Who do I want to be? How do I want to show up for me, for my life, for everybody in my life? Who do I want to be today? That's a really beautiful reset question. Who do I want to be today? Who do I want to be today? And then depending on your faith or how you pray or how you meditate, it could be, you know, God, help me to be that version of me today. Help me. Help me. Help me to get out of bed and be that person. For many of my clients, it's like we have this beautiful connection with your future self. And it's like, hey, I know you're depending on me showing up today and being that version of me today. Who do I want to be? I want to be the most loving version, compassionate, understanding. I want to honor myself. I want to go to bed feeling like I've really taken care of myself today and those around me. Whatever it is, it's going to be different for everybody. And that question will elicit different answers, but it's really beautiful. So who do I want to be? Calm, present, strong, connected, courageous, bold, whatever it might be. Every morning is an opportunity to become that woman again. And reset number three is reset your relationships because this is the reset that nobody talks about. But we are, everything is interpersonal. We're in relationship with others all the time. And so we tend to think of resets as I would need a juice cleanse, I need a supplement, I need to Sophie, tell me what to eat, and all of that. And although that is a very, very large part of what I teach, this piece is very, very important. And you can reset a relationship or reconnect a relationship every single day. You have the power to do this today. Okay. So what I'm really talking about is resetting connection. Connecting, because connectivity, connection, deep human connection is really what we all want. One of the biggest mistakes and patterns that I see in women over 50 is perfectionism. Perfection. I've got to do it right. I've got to be perfect, or I've got to do it right, whatever that is. And that really comes most of us, a pattern born out of our childhood, when we felt that we you have to do it right, you've got to do things a certain way in order to be good, approved of, loved, successful. So we grow up with that. We spend our lives trying to be perfect, whatever that might be. It's a it's a it's a low standard because it's it's an impossible standard. But nonetheless, we try. And therefore we're always failing. Trying to be the perfect wife or the perfect friend or the perfect whatever it might be, worker, or do this diet perfectly, or eat whatever it might be. And then the the real danger of that is that we end up just throwing in the towel and giving up because we then say to ourselves, and this is a pattern that I identify in many, many women who I work with, well, if I can't be perfect, why bother? And then we give up. And giving up is the worst feeling because it engenders that feeling of failure, which leads to a feeling of shame, which is one of the worst feelings. So, what I want to offer you in this little reset is connection over perfection. Connection because what we're really seeking is we don't want to feel perfect. That's a weird feeling, and nobody can ever feel that way. It's completely unattainable. And what does it even mean? But I think we can all understand what connection feels like. Connecting deeply to another human being, to a friend. We seek that connection, we seek that connection in everything. Connection is enjoyment, connection to our food, connection to nature, connection to music, connection to love, and connection to others. And as we get older, honestly, a kind of loneliness can sit can set in. You can be even in a supportive marriage, even in a huge family, even in a big friend group. A deep sort of loneliness can tend to set in. Sometimes a lot of women I work with have tended to isolate a little bit. Maybe they are literally physically isolated. So connection. How can you reset a little connection today? And it could be a reaching out to somebody who you haven't reached out to for a while. It could be an email. But if it's an email, make sure you really take the time to write that email really carefully as if you're writing a really beautiful letter. I just read a really good book, shout out to a book called I've always got a nonfiction book and a fiction book on the go. And the one that I've just finished is called. Called, I'll link to it if you're watching this on YouTube, I'll link to it in the description. It's called The Correspondent, and it's a beautiful book, and she's a letter writer, and it really inspired me to want to get back to actually writing letters rather than emails because so much care goes into writing letters. My um, my but all of my grandmothers used to write letters, and I used to write letters to them. It's a dying form, isn't it? It could be a letter. It could be going out and buying a beautiful card for somebody who you haven't spoken to into a while, and just forging a deep connection, telling them what's going on with you, finding out what's going on. It could be an email, it could be a text, if the text is carefully written, as odd as that might sound with a text, but not just like, hey, how are you doing, or what's new, but hey, I was thinking about you. You could, I actually prefer a lot of the time to do a voice text. I love doing voice texts, as annoying as it might be to receive because somebody hears your voice. Um but but really, you know, hey, I have been thinking about you. I love you or I miss you. And I would when would be a good time for us to have a conversation, a chat, a lunch, a dinner? Could be that. Um, so the other thing, and I and I I I just want to to finish this little connection piece with this, is a moment of appreciation is a beautiful way to connect. And I sometimes forget that even, I mean, I've been married for 27 years, and I think sometimes even in our marriage, my husband and I can forget to really, really connect in our day-to-day life because we're like ships passing in the night often because we're both busy and we're both doing our thing. And so sometimes I have to remind myself what is the best way that I can deeply connect with this man who I see every day, or it could be my daughter who lives in the, she lives on the East Coast, I live on the West Coast, so we FaceTime a lot. But just to have a moment of deep connection and appreciation is a beautiful way to connect, just to stop for a moment and say, Hey, because it'll take the wind out of somebody's sails if you do this, by the way. Sometimes I'll just stop my husband and I'll and he does this to me sometimes, and I'll go, hey, I just forgot to say or I want to say, and I literally will take a moment how much I care for you, I respect you, I appreciate you because, and tell that person why you appreciate them, really to give a moment. I appreciate you so much. And honestly, this is especially, especially powerful if you if it's with somebody who you've had a bit of an altercation with, a bit of an argument with, haven't spoken to you for a while, because it just breaks the, it like melts the ice of sort of resentment that you're both holding on to, and it just melts everything and it opens the door for connection and compassion and love. So that might be a way in for you, just really deeply appreciating someone someone. Um, and even if there's nobody, if you live alone, and that's you, you can just do it in little ways. You know, just going out to the store and going and the cashier or somebody that you meet in your daily life, you can always connect by appreciation. Albeit the store was at Trader Joe's the other day, and you know, the the lovely girl who was packing my bag and everything, just for a moment, I could tell she was really rushed. And I said, you know what? I love the way that you've you've done your hair. And she went, Oh. And I said, it just, I appreciate it, must have taken you so long to do that because it was quite elaborate, her hairstyle. And it was just got us talking. And then we had that little lovely moment of connection that was beyond just throwing, you know, my lentils and my, you know, and my bags of arugula into the into the shopping. And it was just a lovely moment of connection. And that's how you can reset even a day when you're feeling crappy, honestly. All right, and this takes us to reset number four, which is reset your direction. So sometimes we're not exhausted because we're busy, we're sort of exhausted because we have disconnected from what really, really matters. So ask yourself what matters most right now? What do I need to stop doing? What do I need to start doing? Because a reset isn't always about adding more, often it is about removing something that no longer serves you. And this one goes back to this last little reset is the phone, putting down the phone. But I would say when you're resetting your direction, one of the most useful tips that I can give you is start making a list of things that you no longer want to do, that you want to stop doing. Actually, make a list. These are the things that are robbing me of my direction, my purpose, my true north. They just pull me away from that all the time. So I'm gonna stop doing these things. And it could be I'm gonna stop scrolling. I will give myself on a timer, five minutes in the morning, five minutes in the midday, and five minutes in the evening. Could be other than that, I'm gonna stop scrolling. I'm gonna stop going to bed so late. I'm gonna stop binge watching hours of Netflix. I'm gonna stop you, whatever it might be, see what comes up for you. I'm gonna, I want to. Now, the real key here, and I'm gonna finish on this, is on that list of things that you want to stop doing, the key word is want, not should. Never, ever use the word should. You're gonna hear this in everything that I talk about. If you use the word should, you're going into shame. And that habit will not change. You'll not do away with old habits that you don't want, and you will not gain new habits. If there's a I should be doing this, I should be, I should be eating better, I should be going to bed earlier, or I shouldn't be. Shoulds and shouldn'ts don't work. End of story period. So here are the things that I want, that I want to stop doing because I want to stop scrolling so much because I want more joy and energy and time in my life. I want to go to bed earlier because going to bed earlier will mean that I can, you know, read my beautiful fiction novel that I tell everybody I haven't got time to read, or it's gonna give me a bed and night's sleep. Okay, so you're gonna make your list of things that you want to stop doing. And when you look at that list, make sure that you have a because, because then immediately you're giving your brain, your mind, a very powerful reason why and what really that is going to give you the reward, as it were, for stopping doing that thing. Okay? So hopefully you have found this episode of Tea with Sophie useful. I'm gonna just recap because I've written it down here. So here's your little daily reset is one, resetting your body that's getting up a little bit earlier and getting light in your eyes. Two, resetting your mind by asking yourself a powerful question: who do I want to be today? And that can be part of your magic morning ritual, finding your true north. Reset number three is resetting your relationships, finding deep connection, forging deep connection with another human being. And reset number four is reset your direction by figuring out what you want to say no to, what you want to say no to, what you want to stop doing, because fill in the blank, you're gonna get this amazing reward, different reward, something better than scrolling or staying up binge watching. Not to say that I love series on Netflix, but I'm very disciplined about it. Because often what I say no to is a deeper way of something else that I'm saying yes to, that I really, really need, whether it's rest and calm and restoration or whatever that might be. One of the beautiful things that I see in the women who come into the Ignite program is that they give themselves to do all of this on a much deeper level. And one of the things that they do, I think the biggest thing that they do is that they stop trying to piece together advice from a hundred different places, because that can really keep you stuck. And instead, what I help women to do is to create a personalized path for their health, their energy, their confidence, and their life. And very often the reset requires, it not very often, always requires resetting patterns. Because underneath all of this, the deeper work that I think is available to us as women in menopause and beyond is to look at the deeper patterns and identify the deeper patterns of people pleasing, perfectionism, sabotaging ourselves that can run so, so deep. And very often you need somebody to help you to see those patterns. We can't see them ourselves. It's very, very hard to. And that's where working with somebody might really help you to do a sort of much, much deeper reset. And that can be one of the most valuable things that you will ever do in your life and could completely change the trajectory of the next 10, 20, 30 years of your life. So find somebody who you could work with. It could be a coach, it could be a mentor. If you're interested in finding a little bit more about working with me within the Ignite methodology, you are absolutely welcome to click on the link in the description and book a complimentary breakthrough session. And this is with me personally. We can look at what you're struggling with and determine whether or not this methodology and this work is a good fit for you. But either way, ladies, do your daily reset. These are easy. Every single thing that I've gone over today costs nothing. Costs nothing. And you can do it very, very easily. So go ahead, do these little daily resets, and over time, one day at a time, this is what leads to massive transformation. Small, seemingly insignificant actions, when done consistently over time leads to gorgeous, incredible results. This is how transformation happens. Not through going away and doing a great big, you know, as I said, retreat, reset, but what you do in your life every single day, one day at a time. All right, my matcha tea has sunk to the bottom now because I wasn't sipping it or stirring it. So I'm going to enjoy that. And I'll see you next week for another episode of Tea with Sophie.