If you’re feeling flat and off your game, it might be because of hormonal fluctuations caused by perimenopause. Perimenopause is a time of transition when your hormones are changing and this can cause a lot of symptoms.
In this video, I’m going to share with you some of the most common symptoms of perimenopause and how to deal with them. From feeling flat and off your game to weight gain, fatigue and other more specific symptoms.
So if you’re feeling flat and off your game, don’t worry, it could be perimenopause. By learning about these symptoms and how to deal with them, you can reset your body & brain and feel like yourself again.
Sign up for my free masterclass: Reset Your Body & Brain and Feel Like Yourself Again here!
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Episode Transcript:
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Okay, so if you’ve been feeling flat and off your game lately and you’re not really sure why, and you are a woman in your thirties or forties then you are going to love this live episode, I created it just for you. So if you’ve been feeling more emotional or irritable than usual, if you’ve been noticing physical micro changes in your body, if everyday life is leaving you feeling overwhelmed or exhausted or just a little bit tired, but all the time, if you have irrational anxiety about things you’ve done a gazillion times before, like driving or walking down the street, if you have brain fog leaving you feeling unfocused and forgetful, or if you’re noticing physical or emotional symptoms that just seem uncharacteristic for you, weird, random, and with no underlying or apparent underlying cause, and you are feeling curious, and maybe even a little bit confused about it all, then hold tight,
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you are in the right place because in this episode today we are gonna cover the full range of seemingly random symptoms that automagically appear in your thirties or forties or both decades. We’re gonna talk about the predestined biological event that is probably causing all of your symptoms. Yep. The one underlying cause of all of your symptoms. We’re gonna talk about the counterintuitive next step you should take right now instead of what you’re doing right now, and what you should be doing instead to feel like yourself again. So really, I’m talking about the next two steps you can be taking. But first, oh my goodness, who am I? You probably don’t know me because this is my first ‘live’ on YouTube. So I’m Stephanie Holland, I’m the creator of The Body:Brain Reset, and I help women in their thirties and forties reset their body and brain and feel like themselves again.
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And listen, I’m also here to confirm that whatever random symptoms you are experiencing right now, your body and brain are not broken, right? Your symptoms are real, your symptoms are always real if that’s what you’re feeling. Your feelings are valid, they are always valid. Something very real is happening in your body and brain. Whenever you have feelings or symptoms, something real is happening, there is something you can do about it and you can feel like yourself again. Okay, so let’s get started. I’ve got some fancy scenes here for you, <laugh>. So let’s get started with the full range of seemingly random symptoms that can automagically appear in your thirties and forties because there is a smorgasbord of symptoms that appear out of nowhere apparently, seemingly out of nowhere in your thirties and forties. And it can leave you questioning whether it’s actually happening, whether it’s all in your mind questioning your mental health, whether your mental health is compromised whether it’s something physical and whether it’s something you should be worried about and go see your doctor about. But essentially in your thirties and forties,
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Your body starts behaving differently, leaving you thinking things like, wait a minute. What’s going on here? It wasn’t this color before! It wasn’t this frequency before! It didn’t feel like this before! This never happened before! That’s the freakiest one. This doesn’t make sense. Why is this happening? This is so uncharacteristic and unusual for me. What on earth is going on with me? And worse, maybe even your symptoms are cyclical, which is extra confusing because you might have them for a couple months and then you feel like normal for a couple months and then your symptoms come back for another couple months. So this can just add a lot of confusion and a lot of stress about being confused and maybe all these symptoms are affecting your day-to-day and you’re starting to wonder who stole my brain <laugh> and whose body am I in? So for example, and I do wanna kind of go through this whole wide range of emotions just so that you know, you are not alone and all of this is completely common and symptoms can be really broad across, across the whole range of your body and your brain.
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So across, you know, physical, mental, and emotional. So maybe you are more snappy and irritable than usual. Maybe you feel this irrational anxiety that makes no damn sense whatsoever. Maybe you feel tearful and down for no reason. And maybe all of this is making you feel like you’re no fun anymore. Like you’re not having fun, but you don’t feel like you’re fun to be around. So you’re losing your sense of fun. Maybe you’re experiencing physical micro changes and that’s sort of chipping away at your self-esteem. And specifically I’m talking about weight gain and belly fat and a change in your body shape. So first of all, you, you know, you can’t, you don’t really fit into your clothes comfortably anymore, but also you kind of don’t really like how you look in the mirror. And maybe you’re noticing weird symptoms down there in the vagina, vulva area, maybe unusual dryness or discharge or your periods are out of whack and just things down there just don’t feel the same as usual.
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Maybe you’re having a hard time sleeping, maybe you’re gaining weight you’re trying to exercise, but you’re really kind of struggling with energy and, and motivation and maybe exercise is leaving you drained instead of how it used to leave you feeling energized, right? Exercise is supposed to give us energy, but maybe it’s making you feel really exhausted right now. And maybe you don’t feel very sexy, sexual, or sensual anymore, whereas you, you used to. So also, okay, there’s different areas of life that all these symptoms affect as well. It can have this like ripple on effect in all these different areas, our relationships but especially in our work and in the workplace. So perhaps your usual sharpness has deserted you and you can’t think very clearly. Maybe you’re finding it hard to focus and your short term memory is off. Maybe work feels demanding and you feel overwhelmed and exhausted all the time, all the time, not just at work. But also in the evening when you’re kind of like not working and you often feel tired just in
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General. Maybe you feel like you’re losing confidence, you’re worried about making mistakes, you’ve started to second guess yourself, which is very uncharacteristic. Maybe you are holding it together for now, but you know there’s only so long you can fake being perky and positive in the workplace, right? Even if you’re working remotely because your energy comes across in every single email and slack message and you know it, and you’re kind of feeling like the energy you’re giving off is not very genuine, authentic at the moment. Now the longer and the short of it is that you are noticing unusual physical and psychological changes, right? And you’re a woman in your thirties and forties, right? I wanna keep emphasizing this in case you’re joining me live and you dunno who I’m talking to. I’m talking to women in their thirties and forties. So, you know, instinctively something isn’t right and you are sick of having to try to figure it out all by yourself and you’re not really getting anywhere with Dr.
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Google. And that kind of sends you down this kind of scary vortex rabbit hole that you don’t really wanna be stuck in because there’s lots of weird stuff down the, the Dr. Google Rabbit hole. And it’s not always relevant to you and it’s not always correct either. And maybe you’ve been chatting to your friends about some of your symptoms, but your friends are kind of just at as in the dark as you are and you’re all kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to figure out what’s going on. Also, they have different symptoms that they’re dealing with, and that’s if you’re, you are not too embarrassed to talk to them in the first place because some symptoms are just too intimate, right? But at at this stage, you kind of, all you wanna know is if it’s mental or physical and what you can do about it, because essentially all of this sucks.
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I mean, the worst thing about all of this is that feeling rubbish in your thirties really sucks, feeling rubbish in your thirties or your forties. Well, any age obviously, but I’m, I’m specifically talking about when we are in our thirties and forties. It sucks because that’s when life is finally in full flow. You’re just starting and growing careers and businesses and families and everything is just getting good and you’re just getting into your stride with everything. You have goals and this inventory of dreams that like, that’s like unfolding in front of you. And all you want right now is to feel like yourself again. You want to feel in control of your body and your brain. You want to feel energized and motivated in your life and in your work. You wanna feel sharp and focused and confident and in control and, you know, continue to be this self-sufficient and resourceful and capable woman. Someone who loves to have fun and is fun to be around and ultimately turned on in your body, but also turned on in your life and your career. So what’s going on when all of this is happening? So this is like part two, the predestined biological event that is probably causing all of your symptoms, probably highly likely <laugh>. So this is the predestined biological event that starts most often in your thirties or forties and sometimes
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Even earlier. And really, we have been underserved with education in this area and in women’s health in general because we have been led to think that this whole phenomenon, this whole biological event, only happens to people in their fifties. But it doesn’t, it happens to us in our thirties and forties. And because we don’t know about it, we are thoroughly unprepared for it. So here’s what’s happening during your thirties and forties, your hormones will start to fluctuate, maybe little gently, maybe radically <laugh>, maybe a combination of the two depending on the month, depending on the year. But they will start to fluctuate and eventually fall over a period of time. And this period of time is called perimenopause, and it’s your body’s way of preparing for menopause. That big scary word that happens to women in their fifties <laugh>. This is that preparation period of time.
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So listen, here’s what you need to know about menopause. The average age range of menopause is 45 to 55. So that’s probably a lot broader than you were thinking in the first place. Until last year I thought it was something that happened to women in their fifties. Okay? So this was news to me as well, but the average age range of menopause is 45 to 55, but symptoms can start 15 years before that. So let’s do the maths, right? So if your menopause was to start at the earliest age in that range at 45 and your symptoms start 15 years before that, then your symptoms will be starting as young as 30. And that’s just on average, okay? There are 3% of women, that’s three in a hundred women who actually start menopause under 40, which means that their symptoms, their perimenopause symptoms, will be starting perhaps in their teens or twenties.
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So we have to completely rebrand this phase of a woman’s life. Perimenopause can affect a woman at any age, and on average it starts around the age of 30. But why do hormone fluctuations cause physical and psychological symptoms? This is kind of crazy, right? So our hormones are like superpowers, right? We have over 55 hormones in the human body and the hormones that affect us in perimenopause are our reproductive hormones. They’re also called sex hormones. And our hormones are basically chemical messengers that tell the body what to do and when. So our brain, our heart, liver, bones, skin joints and muscles, bowel, nerves, bladder, vulva, vagina, everything, are waiting for an adequate supply of hormones regularly to know what to do and when so that our body and brain can function optimally. So when levels of our reproductive hormones fluctuate more dramatically and then eventually fall during the period, this this life stage of perimenopause, the body and brain go haywire, which is why you feel flat off your game and confused about these seemingly random symptoms.
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Now, we can’t avoid perimenopause, we can’t reverse it, we can’t prevent it, but, and I wanted to use this sort of analogy of Bear Hunt. Now, if you have kids or if you have nieces and nephews or friends with kids, you may have come across this amazing book called: “We’re Going On A Bear Hunt.” And I had to kind of look up the lyrics again, just say that <laugh>, I made sure that I was like saying them right. But the whole, the whole premise is that we’re going on a bear hunt, we’re going on a bear hunt. And then they keep, they keep coming up against these hurdles like, so they come across a long wavy grass and they say, we can’t go over it <laugh>, we can’t go under it. Oh no! We have to go through it. And that is exactly what we have to do with perimenopause.
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We have to go through it, but we can thrive while we’re going through it just as long as we know that it’s happening and that we are not trying to distract ourselves with other things like alcohol and food and Netflix, but actually paying attention to our symptoms and thinking, you know, proactively discovering what to do about it and implementing really effective solutions. So basically symptoms of perimenopause range from anxiety and depression to a loss of confidence. And loss of focus and concentration; from belly fat and digestive issues to insomnia and brain fog and tinnitus, and from frequent UTIs and candida and BV to palpitations, memory loss and achy joints. You name it, hormonal fluctuations can cause it. And it starts in your thirties and forties and it’s completely normal. It can be completely horrible, but you can, you can reset your body and brain.
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But I just wanna let you know that also these symptoms of perimenopause, these symptoms of hormonal fluctuations can be mistaken for just being random, disconnected symptoms or other health conditions. Okay? So you need to watch out for those symptoms, pay attention to your body, understand, try to understand that you are in this life stage and that anything you might be experiencing, there’s a high probability that it’s being caused by the hormonal fluctuations of perimenopause. Okay? So the counterintuitive next step that you should take right now is to stop whatever you are doing to overcome your symptoms because maybe you’ve tried everything in your usual tool, your usual health and wellbeing toolkit from exercise and yoga and meditation to meditation over the counter remedies and vedic herbs, but without any consistent change in your symptoms, okay? That’s another indicator that
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You’re dealing with a whole new biological reality. And that your usual toolkit probably won’t work at least consistently, at least over the long term because when you’re doing this, when you’re kind of throwing all your kind of usual toolkit at your symptoms during perimenopause, you’re kind of essentially hacking your way back to you. And that’s counterproductive because again, you’re dealing with this whole new biological reality and this can leave you feeling really hopeless and deflated and defeated because nothing you’re doing is working and you’re still experiencing symptoms. So stop hacking your way back to you, your usual health and wellness toolkit is probably not going to work for you. Or maybe you have lots of ideas pinging back and forth in your brain in your mind like a pinball machine, like should I change my diet? Should I do a detox?
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Should I quit gluten? Should I try this supplement or that super food or sign up for a new fitness program? All of which is just adding this extra layer of crazy to the confusion that you have about your symptoms. So stop all of that. Now listen, you can reset your body and brain and feel like yourself again without diets and detoxes, without supplements and superfoods and endless ex exercising. And I teach you all about this actually in my premium course. The Body:Brain Reset, which is not available yet, but it does launch in two weeks time. So you can jump on the wait list over at stephanieholland.co and I will let you know when it opens. And in fact, that’s what the page looks like when you head over to Stephanieholland.co. You can find the ‘waitlist’ link almost anywhere. So you can go, go ahead and find that jump on the waitlist, it launches in two weeks.
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And The Body:Brain Reset is the best friends guide to perimenopause and the secret to feeling like yourself again, you will learn how to balance your hormones and restore your zest for life. It is a 14-day curriculum that guides you to create your own individualized body brain reset strategy that aligns with your own personal health and wellbeing values. Just jump on the waitlist over at stephanieholland.co and I will link below in the show notes as well. So what to do instead? There are actually two things here. So first of all, you know for sure that something is definitely off with you. You’ve noticed that things have changed lately and you’ve got all these different symptoms. You know it instinctively even though you can’t put your finger on it or articulate it perfectly. And even though you don’t understand it, I just want to reinforce and emphasize to you trust yourself, trust your intuition, you know something is instinctively off. Trust that and pay attention to it. So don’t let anything or anyone else ever lead you to question yourself. Not your doctor, not your partner, not your friends. No one, never second guess yourself. You know that something is up. So trust that,
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Really trust yourself. And secondly, instead of hacking away at your symptoms and going round in circles in your mind trying to figure out what to do, take a step back, take a deep breath and acknowledge your extraordinary body. If perimenopause is the cause of your symptoms right now, then your body is essentially in survival mode and it’s doing the best it can without the usual steady supply of the hormones it needs to function optimally. It is, your body and your brain, they are getting you through the day, they’re getting you through the work day. They are helping you show up for life and your relationships and they’re doing that on a limited supply of the fuel it needs. So stop pushing yourself through your symptoms and hacking your way back to you. That is extra exhausting. Just, I invite you to take a step back, take a deep breath and acknowledge your body for carrying you through your life right now.
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You are going to need to love your body back to health and wellbeing. So what is love? What is loving in your body? It’s simply acknowledging your physical and emotional symptoms right now. Trusting yourself, trusting your intuition, and not second guessing yourself and not thinking that you’re crazy, but really trusting yourself and slow down. Pay attention to what your body is telling you. You can’t hustle your way through this. All this hustle language and hustle culture and being sort of results oriented and achievement oriented doesn’t work for this. You can’t fake your way to feeling like yourself again, you have got to love yourself back to you. And then you can get really practical, right? Start taking an inventory of your symptoms. Your symptoms are just your body’s way of talking to you, right? It’s letting you know that something is up. It’s letting you know exactly what to pay attention to you.
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Whether you need to pay attention to your, your, your focus and your concentration, your brain, whether you need to pay attention to your skin, to your vagina and what’s happening ‘down there’. Whether you need to pay attention to your digestion, whatever is going on for you, you just need to pay attention in that area, in that body system. Your body is just giving you clues about how to take care of it. So essentially your body language is changing during perimenopause. When your hormones start to fluctuate in your thirties and forties, your body language is changing. That’s all. Now, there are 34 officially recognized symptoms of perimenopause and probably many more. And in the next episode I’m gonna share them all with you so you know what to look out for. There are some that are really random that you would probably never associate with perimenopause. Also because you’re in your thirties and so why would you associate it with something that you associate with some, with women in their fifties? There are also symptoms that are every day symptoms of other conditions that you can misdiagnose for yourself and, you know,
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Treat wrongly because, you know, you think it’s a different condition, but also that your doctor can misdiagnose and mismanage because they think it’s different symptoms as well, a different different condition, a different cause of your symptoms as well. And also the kind of everyday symptoms you’ve probably heard about because they are associated with perimenopause. But anyway, we are gonna talk about that in the next episode. In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and subscribe share with your best girlfriends because the likelihood is very high that they are also going through their own version of perimenopause confusion and their own combination of symptoms and their own new body language in their thirties and forties as well. Every woman needs to know about this. Every woman needs to know about perimenopause and be prepared for perimenopause. I don’t know why anybody, nobody teaches us about this.
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We should all know about this at the same time as as periods and pregnancy and contraception. But you know, let’s face it, education in those areas are pretty scant as well. So we need to educate ourselves. And so that’s what I’m here to do. That’s what my channel is all about. So subscribe for tons more information coming at you about how to thrive during perimenopause and essentially how to turn perimenopause into a portal to a whole YOUuniverse. So don’t forget to sign up for the wait list for The Body:Brain Reset over at stephanieholland.co/waitlist. It is going to launch in two weeks time and it is life changing perimenopause education and an action plan to reset your body and brain so that you can feel like yourself again. I’ll put the link in the show notes below. Otherwise, till next time, beautiful. Have a beautiful day, have a beautiful week. I’ll see you next time. Bye.