6 Ways to Take Care of Your Future Self in Perimenopause and Menopause
Graced Health Podcast
Host: Amy Connell
If you are in perimenopause or menopause, then you have probably experienced that moment where you have planned for something or wanted something to happen, and then things get in the way. You don't sleep well. Brain fog sets in. Hormones are all over the place. And it can be difficult to plan for success and get things done in the way that we envision them. Today I am sharing with you six ways to be kind to your future self from a health perspective if you are in perimenopause and menopause. Stick around.
Will you humor me and play along with a very quick game? Let's call it "In Six Months." If you are listening or watching this when it drops, it is going to be in the latter part of September 2025. So let's look forward six months, which will be toward the end of March 2026, and I want you to think about something moderately big that you want to plan.
Maybe that is a girls' weekend or a trip away with your spouse. Maybe that is a project with work or maybe a retreat with work—something where you would need to have a decent amount of time. Not a huge amount of time, but a decent amount of time to do that. My guess is if you're thinking ahead that far, you're probably thinking, "Oh, I'll have plenty of time by that time. Things will have calmed down. The stage that I'm in right now will not be here anymore. I don't have anything scheduled on my calendar, or very little. I should be fine."
Now I want you to think about six months prior to now—so in March of 2025—if we had taken that same mentality of like, "Oh yeah, in six months it'll all be fine. I'll be able to do that." Would we have been able to? I wouldn't have been able to, and chances are you wouldn't have either.
I think a lot of us are kind of delusional about our future selves and what life will look like for our future selves. I think so many of us feel like it's going to be easier, lighter, less stressful, less busy, and then we get there and it's not.
I wanted to take today's episode from a perspective of health and particularly fitness, because as a personal trainer, that's my wheelhouse, and think about how we can be kind to our future self. Now I have to say, I did not make up this term "being kind to your future self." I adopted that from Kathy Lipp, who has actually been on the show, and we talked a little bit about that in her episode about meal planning and making meal planning easier. I will link to that in the show notes if you haven't listened to that and you get a little overwhelmed with meal planning, because she has a unique way of approaching her meal planning and meal prepping, and still getting her Sabbath in. Hence the name of her cookbook Sabbath Soup.
But Kathy talks a lot about being kind to your future self, and I have to say, this is something that I have used with my kids a lot. I didn't realize how much I used it with them until the end of an academic year. My older son was probably a junior or a senior, and one of his teachers had a theme all year long. It was like the theme that was written on the top of the whiteboard, and it was just kind of a mantra. And toward the end of the year, he said something to her about being kind to your future self, and she went, "That's great. That's next year's theme." And so, to my knowledge, she still used that as a theme.
Being kind to our future self just feels gentle, and it feels like even just the pause of considering that will set us up for success. In this episode, I have six ways to be kind to your future self, and I will say there are so many more than just six ways, but I narrowed it down to six because I don't want it to get overwhelming—that's not very kind.
The first three have a longer-term view, and the second three are more applicable in a shorter-term view. The reason I'm doing this is because if you are in perimenopause or menopause, then you know that you can plan all you want and still the unexpected happens because we have nights where we're doing all of the "right" things to get a good night's sleep, and we don't sleep that well. That was me last night, by the way. We have days that our brain just cannot come up with the word that we want to say. This happens to me all the time. Thank goodness for editing, because I have to pause for a long time and think about the word I want to say. We have days where our hormones are just kind of wacky and all up and down, and because of that, we're feeling up and down, we're kind of feeling wacky, to say the least.
So I want to take this episode and offer you some things to consider for taking care of your future self so that when the sleepless nights and the brain fog and the hormones and all of the other things that I know you're fully aware of come, then we've already taken those gentle steps to be kind to ourselves.
Long-Term Ways to Be Kind to Your Future Self
Let's get into the longer-term scope of being kind to our future self.
1. Be Realistic About Who Your Future Self Actually Is
When I think about growing up, and particularly in my early twenties and mid-twenties, I had this vision that once I got to my thirties, I was going to kind of have it all figured out. I don't know why I thought that, because I think when I looked around, the people in that stage of life seemed to kind of have it all together. So I thought, "Well, I will too."
When I got to my thirties, I thought, "Oh my goodness, this is bananas. I've got these two kids that are twenty months apart. What in the world am I doing? I'll have it figured out by the time I'm in my forties." And every single time I think, "Oh, I'll have it taken care of. I'll have it figured out," I don't. You know why? Because life changes, and we get hit with things that we've never done before.
I tell my kids all the time, "I've never parented a 21-year-old." And while my younger one is currently 20, I have parented a 20-year-old. Guess what? I haven't parented a 20-year-old like him because he and my older kid are totally different. I've never done that before. I've never gone through perimenopause before. I've never had to figure out how to move and fuel my body in this stage of life.
We have to be realistic about what our future self is—who she is, what she's capable of. And even if we don't know, let's be realistic about that. Let's not have these delusions of grandeur about, "Oh, well I'm going to be able to—number one, I got it all figured out. I'm going to be able to do all of these things." Let's pull it back and be realistic.
2. What Would You Consider Successful in the Future?
I recently had a week where my kids had gone back to school, my husband was out of town for the week, and I had this small moment of clarity. I don't normally have these moments of clarity, but I had this small moment of clarity because I knew that that week I was calling it a "grind week," and I wanted to get some things done. I also knew that whenever I reflect upon a week or a day, the most soul-filling experiences don't revolve around checking off boxes of things to do, but revolve around checking in with the people I care about.
Because of that, I took a moment to decide ahead of time what would I feel was successful at the end of the week. So when Friday comes and my husband's back home and I'm winding down for the week, what would feel successful? I had some projects I identified, but also I had some people I wanted to connect with. I did kind of a spontaneous book club thing where we didn't read a book, but we brought books that we enjoyed and that we recommended, and those are the things that helped me to feel successful at the end of the week.
Now that was obviously a shorter-term future success, but we can take this same mindset, look into the future, and decide what we want to be successful. This is a thing that fitness goals are made of. Back when I used to run half marathons, I knew that if I followed the 13-week program, then I would probably finish relatively well for the half marathon that I wanted to run. Now, if you're not running a half marathon anymore, don't worry. I'm not either. I still have two friends who are running long distance, and I'm cheering them on and I'm also so jealous of them. That's just not something my body can do.
But let's look into the future and think about what's going to be successful. I have a client I'm working with right now, and in a few months they are going on a vacation where they're going to be doing a lot of hiking. The hiking involves trails and hills and incline, and she lives at sea level. So it's a little harder to train for lots of hills and lots of incline when you live at sea level. We are setting her up for success in the future by adjusting her workouts right now to get her used to doing some incline work. We're doing that on the treadmill, we're doing that on a stair climber, and so her success is being able to hike and not be too breathless and being able to keep up and not being so sore she can't do it the next day. So we are training for that now.
And of course this can be broader than just our health world and our physicality. I have a young woman I mentor who is a senior in college. She just left to go study abroad and she'll be in London for the next academic year—the entire academic year. So she'll be there for about nine months, and I love working with her. She shows up, she has great questions, she puts a lot of thought into our conversations. And she asked me something like, "Do you have any advice as I go into this time of studying abroad of what I can do that will make it a success?"
And I said, "Well, what I want you to do is think about when you're flying home in May, coming home from studying abroad, what would you consider being successful?" So we kind of talked through that and I said, "You know, that's for you to decide, but maybe that means that you hit a particular number of European countries. Maybe it's that she hits several historic sites in England. Maybe it's that she tries various coffee shops around town." I mean, she gets to decide what that is. But I wanted her to think about what she would consider a success in May when she is coming home, because it would be very easy to say like, "Oh, I'll do that next weekend," or "I'm too busy," or "I've got a test," and then just pushing, pushing, pushing the things that we really want to do that would make it such a great experience aside for other things.
Now, obviously I did not tell her to ignore her studies, but I am saying let's think about and prioritize the things that are important. So obviously, considering what would be a success in the future can be a lot of different ways, but I think it's worth considering in our health and in our physicality, especially what we need to be doing right now to ensure that we can do whatever it is that we are wanting to do later.
3. Breathe
And of course, we're all breathing all the time, but I'm talking specifically about mindful breathing—intentional breathing. When we regularly practice mindful breathing—you can call it meditation, you can call it intentional breathing, whatever you want to call it—but when we practice that, then we actually will see a lot of health benefits, not only in the here and now, but beyond.
Mindful breathing can reduce our stress, it can improve our mood, which is, I realize, a bit more acute. However, improved mood upon improved mood upon improved mood can help us definitely long-term. It can increase your sleep quality by reducing your insomnia. It can just provide improved sleep metrics. Again, yes, that's one night, but over time, that's going to help your health benefits long-term. It can actually slow your respiration rates—so the rate at which you are breathing—which can help with your lung function, so that helps with your heart and your lung health long term. And then of course, it can help with our emotional regulation. Again, it builds on itself, and so over time we're going to have improved control over anxiety and anger and our negative mood.
And then it also provides positive changes in your brain activity and the oxygenation of it. I will put all of the research of that in the show notes so you know that I'm not making it up.
But taking the time for that intentional breath—and for my other Jesus followers out there, pairing that with maybe meditating on the scriptures, like it says to in Psalm 119:97 where it says, "I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways"—all of this can be so beneficial to our health, not only now, but to our future self. I had a great conversation on this show with Anne Swanson who wrote the book Meditation for the Real World. I will link to that episode in the show notes. But her book, Meditation for the Real World, is phenomenal. She gives very applicable ways of breathing, of meditating just in small bites that are so very doable and provided in such a way that we can continue doing them—not just like one and done, check the box and, "Okay, I meditated this week and I'm not going to anymore." Long-term breathing will help be kind to our future self.
Short-Term Ways to Be Kind to Your Future Self
Let's go into the shorter-term ways of how we can be kind to our future self.
4. Meal Plan
I'm going to say this next one, and some of you are going to roll your eyes and groan, but I stand by it. Number four: meal plan. Okay, pause for the groan.
According to the food data company Food Genius, as many as 80% of Americans don't know what they are having for dinner by 4:00 PM. That's a lot of people, and I'll be the first to admit that meal planning is kind of a pain in the butt, and especially if you are empty nesting, maybe you're like, "Oh, we'll figure it out. It doesn't have to be that big a deal." And it doesn't have to be that big a deal, but I encourage you to make it a little bit of a deal.
Can you have some protein on hand that you can pull out—some protein from the freezer? You can pull out some vegetables from the freezer if you want to do that. They don't have to be fresh vegetables, but frozen broccoli or frozen cauliflower or something that you can pull out. You can have a good vegetable on the side and then throw in a piece of fruit.
For about 15 years now, my general meal planning is: What's my protein? What's my veggie? What's my carb? This is just something that a registered dietitian that I worked with when I was competing in triathlons had recommended to me, and it's just kind of stuck. It's easy to remember, it's relatively easy to do. What's my protein? What's my veggie? What's my carb?
If you're like, "Okay, the veggie and the carb, I can do, but what about the protein?" I actually created a download, a free download called the Protein Prep Playbook that will help you set yourself up for success by preparing proteins ahead of time that you can freeze and have available when you are ready for them, because that's the way I operate. I am not creating meals from scratch all the time. However, I will meal plan because it will make it easier for me to make the kind of choices that I want to make, that will help me feel and function better, so that I'm not eating leftover Fritos for dinner. And leftover Fritos every now and then is fine, and I'm not shaking my finger at leftover Fritos. What I am gently encouraging you to do is think ahead of time so that your future self is not wondering what's for dinner at 4:00 PM like 80% of Americans, because your day is busy enough, your day has enough decisions as it is. We don't need to put one more thing on our plate at 4:00 PM. At 4:00 PM I'm done. I don't want to make any more decisions and I certainly don't want to have to figure out what's for dinner.
5. Plan in Your Workouts
I have a handful of friends I regularly see through what I call "walks and talks." So they are friends who live in the neighborhood. We get together and we go for a walk together, and we talk and catch up. I have friends that I will go to lunch with or go to coffee with. Whenever I make these arrangements, I put them in the calendar because I want to honor my friend and I want to honor that time with my friend. I want you to give yourself that same consideration of honoring that time for yourself.
You do not need to work out every single day. I'm okay with that. But what I do want you to do is at the beginning of the week or the end of a week looking forward, I want you to think about when am I going to move? And if you really want to be kind to your future self, how do I want to move?
For me, this is very intuitive. I kind of have a general schedule that I loosely follow. It does change here and there, but I know when I am working out, and a lot of that has to do with my work schedule. I have clients I have to work around. You have people you need to work around whether or not you're getting paid for it or not. You have a schedule. So schedule in and plan your workouts. Even if it's at six o'clock in the morning and you're like, "I get up, I brush my teeth, I go to the bathroom, and I'm out the door walking or running or going to the gym or whatever that is 15 minutes later," I encourage you to still put that in your calendar, whether it's a digital calendar or a paper calendar, because it's a commitment to yourself and just like I want you to honor your time to your friends when you're going on a walk and talk, or when you are having coffee or lunch or if it's a meeting for work, you're going to put that on your calendar. You honor your time for them, and I want you to honor your time for yourself, because we are the first people to let ourselves down, and I don't want you to do that to yourself. You're working too hard.
6. Schedule in Some White Space
And finally, number six: schedule in some white space. I am the first person to admit—I am raising my hand—I am terrible about this. I am so terrible about scheduling white space, and especially about allowing it to happen organically.
One of my top five Clifton Strengths is Input, which means I like to learn. I like to see, I like to hear. This is one reason why I love podcasting so much, especially when I get to interview these amazing guests. I love Input. Because of that, I've got something in my ears or coming in through my eyes so much. When I do that, that is not allowing my brain the time that it needs for deeper thinking, for reflection, maybe just for some creativity.
You know when I get my best ideas? And I know I'm not alone on this because I've heard people talk about this. I get my very best ideas when I'm in the shower. You know why? Because there's no one in my ears at that time. There's no one talking to me at that time. My brain actually gets to think.
When we take some mental breaks and have nothing that we're looking at that we're hearing, that can reduce that cognitive fatigue. I mean, how many of us have ended our day like, "I'm done. I do not want to talk. I do not want to hear, like I'm just done." We can have better focus, we can have better attention throughout the day. It reduces our stress, which we've had a lot of conversations about chronic stress on here, and if you like to listen to health stuff, you know that chronic stress is not so great for our health long term.
We've talked a lot on this podcast about "be still" time. That is what I've coined for time with just me sitting alone in peace and quiet with Jesus—not coming with a bunch of prayers, not coming with a bunch of praises, but just quiet presence—and that's so impactful. I shared a long time ago in a podcast episode that that's kind of why I'm doing what I do today because I took intentional time just to be sitting with Jesus, and that's where he started to reveal to me this next phase of my life, this Graced Health space.
So I am the first to tell you how impactful it is, and I am the first to tell you I suck at it. I am not good at it. But scheduling that white space is so undervalued until we do it, and when we do it—if you're anything like me, you think, "Why don't I do this more often?"
How wonderful would it be to put in our calendar 15 minutes a couple times a week and protect that just as much as we protect our time with our friends and protect that time of white space and letting our brain just decompress for a little bit? How kind would that be to our future self? I'm talking myself into doing this. This is something that I need to do more often.
Can you schedule in more white space so your future self can be filled the way that you love to be filled?
Recap
Let's do a quick recap and then I'm going to give you a little bonus one that we'll be talking about more next week.
For our six ways of being kind to our future self:
And as a bonus way of being kind to your future self, if you consume alcohol, can you reduce that some? I'll be having a great conversation with Sylvia Subirana with Unconscious Moderation next week, and she's going to be talking about a unique way of reducing alcohol where it is "change your thoughts and change your drink."
Hey, if you have a friend who you would like to be kind to, would you share this episode with her? Sharing this Graced Health Podcast is one of the greatest ways that you can support the podcast. It's free, it's easy—it's just a screenshot. Or just go to your podcast player and hit that share button. Send it to someone who might like to take care of her future self, and that way she can also be introduced to what I am calling the most grace-filled corner of the wellness industry, because you know, the wellness industry has kind of gotten crazy.
Okay, that is all for today. Go out there and have a graced day.