What if our thoughts about ageing are doing more to us than our hormones?
Not the conscious ones. The quiet subconscious ones, running underneath everything else, picked up over years, without us ever really choosing them.
As a Menopause Expert at Elysium Lifestyle Magazine, the more I sit with women in perimenopause, the more convinced I am that the story we believe about ageing is shaping the way we experience it. Far more than we realise.
So many women arrive carrying a version of the same unspoken belief that midlife means decline. It rarely gets said out loud and it might come out as “I’ve lost my edge,” or “I think my best years might be behind me.” Underneath all of those is a quiet resignation that life doesn’t get better than this and that this stage of life is a downhill rather than a powerful pivot.
Your thoughts can shape your reality.Â
Maybe you start making smaller decisions, or stop stop applying for the role, or take care of yourself because what is the point. Perhaps you laugh a little less loudly and sit in what I call the Perimenopause Waiting Room. Â
What I see, again and again, is that this shrinking surfaces most loudly in perimenopause as the hormonal shifts of this stage amplify whatever soundtrack was already running underneath.
None of this dismisses the biology. Perimenopause is a genuine neuroendocrine event. Estrogen, which regulates happy hormones dopamine, serotonin and Gaba plus the stress response begins to fluctuate wildly. The nervous system, which for many of us has been running on adrenaline for decades to hold a career, a family and a life together, loses the hormonal buffer it used to have. Wake ups at 3am, which can impact your mood and a brain that feels like it is foggy.
The biology is real. Â
Biology says: my body is shifting into post menopause.
Social conditioning says: my best years are behind me.
The first is observable and the second is a story, and the latter the matters possibly more than we’ve ever given it credit for.
A study by Becca Levy at Yale followed hundreds of older adults over decades. She found that those with positive beliefs about ageing lived, on average, seven and a half years longer than those with negative ones. Positive beliefs were also linked to better memory in older age, lower stress markers, and healthier cardiovascular outcomes.
Seven and a half years. That’s a meaningful amount of time, bought or lost by the soundtrack playing in our heads.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, menopause is not called the end of anything. It is called Second Spring. The framework comes from the Huangdi Neijing, the foundational text of Chinese medicine compiled thousands of years ago, which maps a woman’s life in seven-year cycles. By the seventh cycle, the energy that once flowed outward into reproduction redirects inward and upward, toward the heart, toward the shen or spirit, toward wisdom and a different kind of vitality.
Not a fading, but a blooming, in a new form. A whole framework built on the idea that midlife is renewal, not decline.
Which brings me to a sentence I find myself saying almost every week:
How you take care of yourself now reshapes your future.
The thoughts you nurture today are the body, the energy, the life you wake up in in decades to come.
In my work I call this the Belief Soundtrack® – a playlist of subconscious beliefs picked up throughout childhood and the teenage years, playing in the background whether we can hear them or not. If you can’t find your rhythm in midlife, there’s most likely a belief playing out of tune.
They can be beliefs about menopause, about ageing, about body confidence, about a woman’s place in the world in midlife.
This week, press play on your own Belief Soundtrack and ask yourself:
- What story do I tell myself about women over 40?
- Whose voice does that story actually belong to?
- What beliefs about ageing have I inherited and which of them genuinely belong to me?
- What would shift if I believed my life was expanding rather than shrinking?
This is a moment to pause, reflect and pivot into what if midlife is the beginning of a fabulous new era filled with wisdom, leadership and when I finally stop abandoning myself era.
The mindset piece is the deeper layer underneath the medical conversation, not a substitute for it, but the inner work the rest of this transition asks of us. The menopause conversation has finally arrived; what’s still missing is this.
Jo Fiddy (Pictured) is Elysium Lifestyle’s Menopause Expert. She is a Speaker and Menopause Coaching Specialist who helps women regain their confidence in perimenopause.
Jo works 1:1 with women around the world and hosts the Pressing Play Podcast. Find her at jofiddy.com.
So this week, just notice the thoughts shaping your tomorrow. Notice the ones that don’t belong to you anymore. Notice that the way you speak to yourself today is quietly writing the next ten years.
Take the time to ask yourself.
Am I walking backwards through this chapter of my life?
