3 Steps to Reverse Perimenopause Symptoms (& Restore Hormone Balance)

- Kate. So it takes 85% of women in their thirties and forties on average around four year to figure out that their symptoms are either perimenopause or menopause. And when I exclaimed to you my surprise about this, the first thing you said was, it's because women don't trust their bodies. And that was just like, wow, it makes so much sense. Please tell us like, why is it that women that we as women don't trust our bodies?

- I think for the most part, because we've been in conditioned not two.

- Welcome to my channel where I post videos every week empowering you to biohack hormone balance in your thirties and forties. I'm Stephanie Holland, creator of The Body Brain. Reset, the ultimate guide to resetting your body and brain and feeling like yourself again in your thirties and forties. Tap that subscribe button to stay up to date on all the latest tips and strategies that me and my guests have for you every single week. And watch my free masterclass on how to reset your body and brain in your thirties and forties over ar bodybrainreset.co/masterclass. In this episode we talk about why the hormonal fluctuations of perimenopause that start in our thirties or forties are such a surprise for so many of us and why it takes so long to notice and do something about our symptoms and how to tune into our own wisdom to not just get relief from our symptoms, but to reverse them ALL and create vibrant health at the same time. Now, Kate Connolly is a brilliantly educated and certified healthcare practitioner who uses a combination of chiropractic, naturopathy, kinesiology, and energy healing to help identify what your body needs and help you consciously create a new reality for yourself. So let's go! Why is it that women that we as women don't trust our bodies?

- I think for the most part because we've been conditioned not two, for the most part, we've been taught that we put everybody else first; biologically we put everybody else first. That is actually the general nature of the female. And we're in a society where we are not only just either being a, you know, a worker or a mother or a wife or a single person. We are now trying to cover many, many different roles. We're often too busy and too tired and too caught up in what we are doing to pay attention, let alone do anything about our symptoms on a regular basis. But also, you know, if we've got any past emotional trauma that's not resolved, if there's biochemical stuff that's going awry, we'll often put it down to, whatever it is, hormonal changes, stress, you know, the thing that happened yesterday, and we're not actually starting to dive into our bodies and get more understanding about it and then be empowered to do anything about it. So, conditioned, we're conditioned to think that we just keep moving through for, for the most part. And then secondly, most of the time we don't actually realize how young we might start something like perimenopause, which is, you know, a set of symptoms that we can get as early as our thirties all the way right up into our early fifties. And we don't actually understand that that's what's happening. And so half the time, and I've heard this from so many women in my clinic, they'll just say, the doctors think they're crazy. The doctors just say, oh, it's all in your mind, it's all stress. And then they send them off and then they're kind of stuck with their symptoms with nowhere to go.

- Actually, a shocking stat in the UK is that 66% of women who go to see their doctor with clear and obvious perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms leave with a prescription for antidepressants. And in some cases, the advice to go home and relax with a glass of wine, which is the last thing, like the opposite of what we need to be doing during, during these hormonal fluctuations. So you touch on social, you touch on social conditioning, which is obviously like, we all feel it, right? We all feel the pressure to do certain things and behave certain ways as a woman. And for many of us who go against that, who go against the status quo, just even by, you know, not getting married or being child-free, we spend our lifetimes trying to justify or feeling like we need to justify those life choices. But you also touched on biochemical reasons. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is for those of us who don't really understand what biochemical means?

- So it's all the body processes. So things like digestion, you know, are we producing enough digestive enzymes? Do we have enough good bacteria in our body? Do we have high enough stomach acid to digest our food? Do we have the right brain chemicals to create emotional balance? Do we have the right hormonal balance to make sure that our cycles or lack of cycles are going through with ease? All of those things and those chemical processes in the body make up the biochemistry of the body. So not only when we're looking at something like perimenopause, are we looking at the physical and the emotional, but clearly we have to look at what's happening in all of the body systems to make sure that everything's balanced while we go through these transitions.

- Last week was fantastic. We had Christine Baxter on the show talking about the gut microbiome and gut health and how critical that is during the perimenopause and menopause. Yes. And how important it is to adjust your diet and lifestyle to cope with those changing rhythms of our body. Yeah. So let's dive deep now into perimenopause. And you already said, it does happen earlier than we think. Menopause ranges from the age of 45 to 55. So that's quite a broad range. And symptoms are known to start up to 10 to 15 years before. So we're looking at, you know, perfectly normal symptoms of perimenopause starting potentially as you said in our thirties, literally from 30 onwards. And what happens is that our hormones, testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen start to fluctuate more dramatically than usual, as if that were possible. And then they eventually plummet at the end of that window and kind of stay low forever. But the impact this has on the body is vast because every single cell tissue and organ in our body has these receptors waiting for optimal levels at these hormones in order to function optimally. So of course it wreaks havoc all over the body and brain, and it can cause the strangest symptoms that you would never usually associate with menopause and perimenopause, because we're socially conditioned to think that hot flashes are the only symptom when, of course symptoms can be really subtle, like feeling flat and off your game or very specific like gut health issues, headaches, fatigue, symptoms that mimic other conditions like depression and fibromyalgia. So it's so important for us to learn to trust our body, but what's the kind of ripple effect that you kind of see in in, in the world in in society of women not trusting their bodies? What effect is this happening on life worker relationships?

- Gosh, it impacts everything. So depending on what's happening prior to perimenopause, if they have digestive issues, if they're not eating well, if they're not exercising, if they're not looking after their mental health, everything that happens in perimenopause will escalate all of those things. Typically, when you go through that transition, what actually happens is that the role of the ovaries will actually move up to the adrenal glands. So the adrenal glands are the little stress glands above the kidneys, and they're the parts of the body that actually take on the role that the ovaries had prior to menopause. So if you have lots and lots of stress in your body leading up to perimenopause, then you're actually gonna have an infinitely more difficult time when your body tries to transition across. So if you've got a lot of preconditions for things, plus you've got a massive stress load, those are the women that actually struggle with that transition the most. And then what will happen is that if they go to the GP and the GP doesn't quite understand, and like you said, maybe they'll be put on antidepressants or something else, which actually then dampens everything in the body, including emotions, connection, digestion, feeling good, all of those things, then all of a sudden you've got this multi-system dysfunction in the body based on a really natural process. It's just that for the most part, we are not educated as to what the main symptoms are, what to look out for, and also what to do about it. Because it's actually not surprisingly mainstream information, it's actually fringe information because I don't know, maybe there's just no money to be made in helping women through menopause in an easy way. I'm not really sure what the, what the reason is, but it's, you know, it's, it's a, it's a tricky thing. So these women, half of them think they're going crazy, half of them feel like nobody understands them or sees them or understands where they're at. They can have relationship breakdowns because their libido will be affected, their digestion will be affected. They'll be constantly exhausted. You know, they'll be struggling with the day-to-day. And oftentimes just by balancing things out like the gut, doing gentle exercise and balancing those hormones out can be the difference between complete dysfunction and actually really doing well.

- I think we've already touched on the fact that there are two knowledge gaps here. There's the knowledge gap within women ourselves, you know, the sisterhood is kind of missing of that sharing of, of the experience and the storytelling aspect of it. But then we've also got the knowledge gap in healthcare where it's not even on the curriculum at medical school. And doctors frequently report receiving six hours of training on perimenopause and menopause with the whole of women's health lumped into reproduction & fertility. And our reproductive hormones are so much more powerful beyond just reproduction. The reason I found you in the first place was because a friend of mine came to see you. She came out being very excited about tuning into this 'Crone' her, her, her, you know, 'Crone' and, and, and my, my first reaction was like, what the F, like, who wants to be a 'Crone'? And I researched it and the word crone comes from the original words, 'Old Crown'. So it really symbolized an older woman who retained her wisdom and she was known and revered to be at the height of her powers. She was esteemed as being wise and knowing and untameable, and that was a good thing. She was deeply important within her tribes and communities. And she was actually one of the leaders and healers and midwives in her community. And the crone is really one of three archetypes, the stages of life that women go through, the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. And it really symbolizes a place of life where we place high trust within ourselves and, and the wisdom held within us. Like we trust it, we believe it, we know it's there, it's unquestioned. It's embodied by women who are free, truly free, who feel absolutely free on the inside and who are free of worrying about what other people think of her. The world will be such a different place if all the women really embraced their inner wisdom and really trusted themselves. But how rare this is. Two people in the limelight who really spring to mind when I read this are Andy McDowell and Helen Mirren who are rocking the silver hair, rocking the elegance and grace of aging. Not trying to push it away or hide from it, but embracing it and being really loud and proud about it. And I already really admire these women and I didn't realize so specifically that I admire them for that reason. But now that I read about the crone, the old crown mythology, I'm like, that's exactly why I am tuning into their energy because I aspire to grow old with grace as well. How do we tune into this inner wise woman? How do we start to peel back this social conditioning and recognize that we've got to tune into our own, our own wisdom?

- But even when you were giving me that definition, you know, I got, I got the 'jijis' everywhere 'cause it's just such a beautiful description of it. The Crone has almost been like Disney-ised, you know, all of those Disney movies with the wicked stepmother and the, and the, you know, hunched over back and the, you know, the spells and the curses and the, you know, the, you know, the whatever, the crazy kind of energy. And I think that for the most part, the collective consciousness, when they think of the crone will go back to that because that's kind of how we've been conditioned to believe that it is. When you actually move past all of that collective consciousness, social conditioning around, you know, let's just get away from the movies for a minute. Let's go back to definitions like you've just said. And let's honor the fact that getting older is actually a privilege and being able to retain wisdom because we've chosen to learn and then use that learning is a gift that you can't replace with anything else. So this is why, you know, in traditional societies they have the medicine woman and the crone and the women that are there sharing their knowledge with other people. The the women that are actually there as the truth holders and the storytellers and the healers and the women that actually hold that reverent space for other people. That's actually what I aspire to be. If every woman on the planet had that internal knowing about themselves and that confidence, how different would the womanhood be? There'd be no competition, there'd be no jealousy. All of that kind of dark energy around womanhood and sisterhood wouldn't need to be there because we've embraced ourselves for exactly as we are. And then we can share that amongst ourselves in a place of love and and compassion rather than delving into the, well she has and I don't, or she is and I'm not, or whatever it is. That kind of can sometimes put us into that shadow aspect.

- I'm still at the stage where I'm so excited about sharing this. I keep forgetting that a lot of people don't wanna talk about it. But now all my friends, male, male, male and female are like, oh, she's gonna talk about perimenopause again. Oh, she's gonna talk about hormones and fluctuating hormones and how essential they are to every single cell, system and organ in our body. But I won't stop talking about it. The less we talk about it, the, the more isolated we can feel if we don't actually know that all women are going through this. So let's get really practical tuning into our inner wisdom and learning to trust our bodies. I know one of the things you told me was really important was slowing down. So would you please tell us a little bit about the parasympathetic nervous system and how to tap into it to activate balance within the body and brain?

- So we have two different kinds of nervous systems. We've got the sympathetic nervous system, which is the 'fight and flight', and then we've got the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the 'rest and digest'. And most people, regardless of whether they're aware of it or not, live almost permanently in the sympathetic or the 'fight & flight'. And it becomes so normal to people that they don't actually understand what rest and relaxation feels like. And we are living in such a fast society. You know, even just looking at social media, every, everyone's on reels. They can't watch more than 30 seconds of a video before they've gotta do something else. Or they can't sit at a bus stop for more than two minutes before they look at their phone or they can't, you know, go for a walk without listening to something or talking to someone or, you know, the ability for our body to slow down is actually extremely difficult. So when we've got the sympathetic and the, and the parasympathetic, we actually find it extremely difficult to get out of the noise in our head. So the whole journey of learning to trust our bodies is embracing this concept of entering that 'rest and digest' or that parasympathetic nervous system, which is largely controlled by the vagus nerve. So anyone who has heard about the vagus nerve and and understands the concept of the vagus nerve, it's one of the biggest nerve plexuses in the body. And it basically goes to all of our organs and it comes right out from our ears and basically goes all the way down to our reproductive organ. So all the way through. And most of the time if we're really stressed, that nerve plexus actually goes under, it stops working as well. So our, our digestion doesn't work as well, our hormones don't function as well. Our brain doesn't function as well. So we actually have to learn how to rebalance that so that everything can slow down and we can actually start to feel that sense of connection to ourselves again. Because when you're in the 'fight & flight', you're running away from lions. You're not sitting there zen in a meditation class. You're not sitting there tuning into your body. You're actually going, okay, well you know, when's my next meeting? When's the next bus? When's the next this, when's the next that I need to be doing this? So I forgot about that. And then we, we lose ourselves in those moments when we're doing all the doing. We can't do the being, which is that parasympathetic, calm, slow brain connected to self thing. So the whole point of learning how to tune into our bodies, and one of the reasons why I think a lot of people can't do that is 'cause they actually don't slow down enough to try because their nervous systems are just so wired.

- Tell us a bit about how breathing helps. You mentioned a practice of breathing five minutes a day, twice a day, and this had actually quite an extraordinary impact on your own wellbeing. Would you mind telling us the story? I

- Have suffered from a lot of eczema and a lot of autoimmune stuff in my life. And I remember going to a Chinese herbalist about, it was probably about seven or eight years ago now. And she did capillary analysis in the, in the fingernails. And she looked through and I just had hemorrhaging everywhere and I had zero capillaries and she was quite scared. She said, you know, you're two thirds on the way to cancer. You really need to sort this out. So she put me on all of these herbs and at the same time I discovered this breathing technique. And the breathing was placing the hands on the heart space, breathing in for five seconds, breathing out for five seconds and all of that. Every time you slow the breath down, you're engaging that parasympathetic nervous system. So you're calming, you're bringing in the rest and digest. And as part of that breathing, you start to think about things that you appreciate, things that you're grateful for, things that you care about, things that you love and you give yourself. It doesn't have to even be as long as five minutes. It can be two to three minutes a couple of times a day. And it just slows everything down enough that you get up to 12 hours of anti-aging hormones and your whole body starts to relax. So I thought, beauty!, I'm trying these herbs, I'll do the breathing at the same time. I did it for a month. I went back to the herbalist, all my capillaries came back, they were actually looking really good. All the hemorrhaging was gone. And I thought, great, this is working. So I stayed on the herbs for the next month, but I stopped the breathing. That's the only thing that changed. And then I went back the month later and all my capillaries had gone again. So it wasn't actually the herbs that was doing the job, which I thought it was. It was actually the breathing and it was actually slowing everything down. And I think we underestimate how incredibly powerful it is to engage in that 'rest and digest' and slow everything down. 'cause that's where we heal. That's how our body gets better. That's how our mind slows down enough that we can tune into our intuition, that we can start to trust ourselves, that we actually start to hear the things that are going wrong. And if we stay in that constant go, go, go, we miss it. We just miss it.

- Yeah, right. And so there are a lot of people like me who are super active during the day, super healthy, exercise a lot. Like for me, when I take a break, I pick up my hula hoop and put music on and I am moving. So stillness doesn't come naturally to me. Yeah. And I know that the day runs runs away from a lot of people. So my hack for doing that is that as soon as I become conscious when I wake up in the morning, as soon as I become aware that I'm awake, I start that process and I put my, my right hand on my chest and my left hand on my belly and I start that breathing. And I don't set a timer and I don't try to ritualize it, you know, contain it within, you know, five minutes on the timer. 'cause I don't wanna touch my phone. I just do it for I don't know how long. Maybe 5, 7, 10 minutes naturally. And I do the same when I go to bed at night, as soon as I, my head hits the pillow and I close my eyes, I do my breathing. So that takes the pressure off me having to schedule five minutes during the day. But I've got loads of other things I wanna do, including hula hooping. It is actually better to do it first thing and lasting anyway, because that's when our brainwaves are at the most suggestive. As you wake up and as you go to sleep, you're more likely to be in the alpha brainwave state where anything that you do is actually gonna be entrained really beautifully into your body. Doing it during the day is actually much harder anyway. So it's, it's perfect doing it at the beginning and the end.

- Well, maybe that's why I sleep so well. I've always been an 8 to 10 hour sleeper and if I get less than eight hours, I'm, I'm kind of grumpy. So I'm like a champion sleeper. And maybe, maybe that's why. So second step, second really practical action is just to start paying attention, right? To pay attention to those soft mumblings. How on earth do we start doing that?

- Speaking to a lot of my clients, they'll just say things like, oh yeah, this has been really hurting for on and off for about eight years, but that's just normal for me. Or, yeah, I just get really sick every now and then in my tummy and I feel a bit yuck. But you know, that's probably normal. That kind of thing. None of that's normal. We should not be living with pain, with nausea, with sickness, with any of those things. We should never feel any of those things ever. And if we do, there is something wrong and we do need to look at it. So allowing ourselves to slow down, there's lots of different ways that we can do that. Having a bit of time off screens. So even just having a bit of a screen detox can give us, it's a bit of a shock honestly, but it gives you that ability to kind of slow everything down and actually start to pay attention. And when you slow down enough that that rest and digest nervous system takes over, then you are gonna feel it. There's practices like yoga nidra where they very specifically go through every part of the body and you get awareness of every part of the body. There's lots of meditations on mindfulness where you slow everything down and then you start to become aware of, oh actually sitting here, you know, my back really hurts on, on the right or you know, oh, my shoulder kind of hurts and I don't really know why. And those kind of things, rather than us just going, oh, well I'll just move and I'm sure it's fine, we can actually give permission to go, oh, I wonder why that's sore. I wonder why I don't feel well, I wonder why that's happening. And then as we get naturally curious, we can start to dive and see what's actually going on. Which I think most of the time if we are too busy, we don't, we don't give ourselves that opportunity.

- It's as simple as, you know, starting to notice or hold that thought in our head when we think I'm tired. Rather than going, oh, I'm tired, I'm forgetting about it. I'm tired. Oh, why don't I just sit for five minutes and close my eyes? Or if I work remotely, why don't I just lie down for 20 minutes because nobody knows what I'm doing. I'm working remotely. If I'm hungry, oh, I'm hungry. Why don't I just grab a snack? Why don't I just maybe have my meal early today? Oh, I'm really angry. Well sit there and feel your anger. Allow you to process that anger. I remember learning from Brooke Castillo on her podcast a few years ago that you actually, if you feel a feeling all the way through something like anger, you actually can't hold onto it for more than 90 seconds. And I've tried it and I've timed it and she's right. I can't hold onto anger for more than 60 seconds. It's phenomenal. So if you really like allow it to bubble up within you and feel, oh, literally, and it sounds so silly, but you sit there and you go, I'm so angry. I'm so angry. Ugh, I'm so angry. It actually bubbles up through you and you can't hold onto it. And it just disperses the anger. It's so powerful. So actually not buffering, not trying to push it down and keep it festering inside your body and just allowing it to bubble up. It only takes 90 seconds. You touched on the screen detox, so this is kind of like tip number three. It's all very well, well and good to say, oh, take a week off screens. But I think you can also do this in a very kind of like light way. So for example, I took all social media apps off my phone and that makes a huge difference to how much time you spend on social media because if instead you access your social media on your desktop, you actually spend less time doing it because desktop isn't optimized for scrolling as much as your mobile apps are. And also then if you go one step further and schedule 45 minutes social media time on your desktop every day, you start to go, wait a minute, I don't wanna spend 45 minutes of my day on social media, even though actually on your phone just checking in and out every five minutes sometimes or at least once an hour, you're actually spending two and a half, three and a half hours on your phone, which is way more than 45 minutes. So it just pull, brings into perspective what you're actually doing. And then when you learn that getting that hit from social media just is basically activating the same parts of your brain and the same behavioral addiction response as being addicted to heroin, that really makes you think twice. There's this fantastic book by an Australian guy called Adam Alter called Irresistible, where he explains the kind of the, the kind of, in a way, chemical addiction to this, these online hits we get from social media as being exactly the same behavioral response as an addiction to heroin. And that really, really puts things in perspective. Have you found any sort of hacks for how to take these digital detoxes yourself?

- I don't know that there's any particular hacks to doing that apart from just try it for a week. A lot of really high level entrepreneurs do it for a month per year and they, you know, make it a, a detox. So we detox our bodies, we de we do, you know, yoga retreats and we do, you know, food things and exercise things and why not, why not screen things? Screens are actually one of the biggest health things that we have. You know, the more we watch, the more depressed we get, the, the less active we are, the less happy we are. You know, it actually really changes our biochemistry in our brain when we watch more screens. So I think it's just to cut it out and see what happens, you know, not forever. 'cause that's not practical, you know, we still have businesses to run and people to talk to and things like that. But just as a bit of a reset, but also as a, as a bit of a wow moment of, oh my goodness, actually I'm outrageously addicted to this stuff. Or, wow, I actually cannot believe how difficult I find it without how to keep my brain occupied with something on a screen. It's, it's just, yeah, it's next level.

- You mentioned the digital detox practice of entrepreneurs, and I know that Bill Gates does that and all, you know, a lot of these famous big tech entrepreneurs do that. They also are famous for restricting screen time for their children because they know the detrimental effects of social media. So Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs are both famous for saying that they limit their kids' screen time. So that's, that's, that's a powerful enough realization for me. Say every woman was educated about these rights of passage and really taught by the sisterhood and our elder wise women how to trust our bodies and tune into our own wise women. In your mind's eye, what's the world look like when all women are tuning in in this way?

- For starters, a lot more connected. There's always gonna be women that aren't gonna buy into it. I think that's just the nature of having a diverse society. But if that's our conditioning, if our social conditioning is to support and to connect with ourselves and to have inner confidence, because we have allowed ourselves to get to know ourselves really well through whatever practices that is through, you know, community rites of passage, meditation, you know, knowledge about nutrition, those kind of things. We're going have a world full of empowered people. And those empowered people are not gonna be living through ego. So there's not gonna be as much conflict, there's not gonna be as much health issues, is not gonna be as much giving away our power to authorities. I mean, who's a bigger authority over your body than you? And at the moment, most people are giving that away. They're giving it away to professionals of whatever description, whatever they are. And they forget that actually, well, I know my body better than anybody and my body is saying, no, I don't wanna do this. Or actually I'd rather do that. And imagine if we all just did that anyway, we'd actually feel infinitely more healthy, more empowered, more, more functional as a human. There'd be less jealousy, less ego, less frustration, less anger. We'd have better, more solid, more quality relationships. We'd have better, more solid and more quality careers. And in my ideal world, we would actually use that to support and lift each other up from a vibrational perspective emotionally and in every way so that society actually becomes an infinitely more pleasant place to be. Where we don't have to be embarrassed about ourselves anymore. We can actually be really proud.

- I think for me, a stronger sisterhood is what I'm most excited about. Kate, thank you so much.

- Oh, thank you for having me.