Midlife Symptoms Have a Cause: The 5 Layers and the 17-Year Window

From the video captions, as spoken.

So let's start with a list and see if you can relate to any of these. Hair loss, bloating, body aches, and joint pain. The sensation of tension or anxiousness that can kind of come out of nowhere, Fatigue and exhaustion that can feel like sleep, no matter how much you sleep, it doesn't shift it. Brain fog.

Burnout. Moodiness. Low libido. Weight gain that does not budge, even if you alter how much you're, what and how much you're and even if you exercise more.

Insomnia, not being able to sleep well through the evening. Can anyone find themselves in a few of those? Or can find another version of yourself in some of those? Okay. So that list is the list that Women bring to me over and over and over. In the window roughly between 35 and 65 and beyond. Now, that window is what I'm going to define as Midlife.

You know, I think when people hear the word Midlife, they often think like night sweats and hot flashes. Maybe a hormone patch, okay? But as many of you here know, Midlife is so much bigger than all of that. Now, Midlife really touches a Woman on 5 layers all at once. It touches her on the physical layer, on the mental layer. It touches us on our emotional body. It touches our relational layer, our relationships in our lives, and it impacts the spiritual layer.

Now, all 5 are moving at the same time in the same Woman and often without anyone really informing her straightforwardly what's happening to her. This is a season that is also, in my opinion, one of the most glorious openings that a Woman gets to experience in her whole life. And a Woman who comes out on the other side of this can actually have the freedom to feel and be more honest and more deeply connected to her own vital life force.

So today we're going to look at all 5 layers. The challenges that Women experience, especially in the physical layer and the solutions, so that you can experience you and those you love, can experience this season as an opportunity for who you're becoming. All right, now some Women they sail right through the hot flashes and they still lose themselves in the season. Some Women never get a single hot flash and they're in the thick of it anyway. So let me share with you a little a timeline first because a lot of Women have never even heard this from their own physicians.

Now Perimenopause, that can begin as early as 35. Absolutely no reason it doesn't start for some Women around 32, 33. Okay? Menopause averages around age 52. So this is up to 17 years of hormonal shifting, often without any warning, and for most Women without adequate support. This is 17 years, friends. Think about it this way.

17 years is the same stretch that a child spends from kindergarten all the way through a 4-year degree. Okay? At 54, I'm still in late Perimenopause myself. So I'm talking to you from inside of this on the other side of my suffering and not from the far away side of it.

Now a few more reasons why I offer this talk freely and so regularly and as passionately as I do. I want to reduce the suicide rate among Women in this season. I want to help reduce dementia and I want to reduce the number of Women who die from a fractured hip which is roughly 1 in 5 within the first year of a hip fracture. You know what it is, how we do for ourselves in our 20s and our 30s kind of set the stage for whatever's going on in our 40s and our 50s. I didn't hit it out of the park in my 20s and my 30s. I will be honest. Now, what you do in your 40s and your 50s, there's no ship that cannot come back on track, okay? No train.

What you do in your 40s and your 50s will largely determine your experience of 65 and beyond all the way to your final exhale. So we are always setting the stage for the years ahead of ourselves, and we're investing in the ones after that. Now, here's another thing about that list. The list being the hair loss and the fatigue and the joint pains and the weight gain and all the things, okay?

Many of the Women that bring that list to me, they've already been to a doctor. They've already had labs run, and they've been told everything looks normal. That phrase, everything looks normal. They walk out of these appointments with the very same symptoms they walked in with, and now they have a sense that, is this either A, just in my head, or B, is this just what getting older looks and feels like? Neither of these are true. Every symptom on that list that I opened this conversation with has physiology underneath it. Every symptom is measurable, and almost every one is treatable.