317: The Midlife-Anxiety Connection

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Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast, made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them. Not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.

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Hello, friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley.

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Today we’re going to talk about something that I’ve actually never addressed on this Podcast, which is the topic of anxiety, and specifically, how it relates to midlife.

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Anxiety is definitely not the most likable human emotion. I think most of us would agree with that. Most of us would probably prefer to travel through the rest of our life, never experiencing anxiety again. And yet, it is a part of the human experience. And like every emotion, anxiety has very important Intel for you.

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So I thought it would be helpful to explore on today’s episode, why the midlife female population is especially susceptible to experiencing more anxiety,

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and most importantly, what we can do about it, how we can navigate anxiety with more grace and ease.

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So let’s start where we so often do on this show, which is just really getting clear on what anxiety is. Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness, of worry of fear, a lot of people would probably associate anxiety with stress.

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And like I said before, it’s normal, it’s natural, it is a part of the human spectrum of emotion.

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And typically, we feel it in response to a perceived threat, or danger.

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And remember, the brain doesn’t know the difference between real or imagined. So it could be a real threat, a real danger. Or it could be a conjured threat or danger in your mind. Something that you’re telling yourself a story about, that you’re creating, but doesn’t actually exist.

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And anxiety manifests. Of course, it has a physical manifestation as all emotion does. There’s a way that we feel it in the human body, and all of us would probably describe it slightly differently.

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But often, some common symptoms of anxiety in terms of how we’re experiencing it in the human body are things like an increase in heart rate,

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difficulty concentrating, or maybe even the opposite, hyper concentration, restlessness, maybe sweaty palms, maybe a pit in your stomach, maybe tense muscles.

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And just like not all stress is bad stress, like stress has a very beautiful side. It’s what helps us to grow and expand as humans. Anxiety also has a very useful side.

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It can be tremendously helpful when we are in situations

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that are presenting us with real threats, real dangers.

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And

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it can become problematic when we are experiencing it in high volume on a consistent basis. And anxiety is starting to interfere with our daily life.

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Even though there’s no real threat in our midst.

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And like I said before,

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all emotion exists for a reason.

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And anxiety is no exception.

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I would propose that anxiety exists. Just like all emotion exists to relay messages to you.

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And those messages might be about your biochemistry.

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Those messages might be about your mental and emotional state

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about your relationship to the world around you. There’s lots of different messages that anxiety may have for you.

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But what’s interesting about anxiety for me personally is that I have worked with a lot of clients over the years who rumble with anxiety. A lot of midlife women,

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but I personally have not had a lot of experience with anxiety. I’ve certainly felt it in my lifetime but I have

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It’s never been a frequent visitor

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until recently. And when I say recently, I mean over the past couple of years.

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As I moved deeper into the throes of perimenopause, which I am thick in the throes of right now, the more frequent visits I seem to be getting from anxiety.

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And they’re very predictable, by the way. So about three days out from my cycle starting

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anxiety shows up at my door.

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And the way that it usually goes for me is I feel anxious from the moment I wake up. And that is not a normal state for me.

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So I start to feel a little anxious in the morning, my mind is all over the place, I have trouble focusing.

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And one of the tail tail signs for me, that I’m experiencing anxiety is I start to tell myself stories about why I’m feeling anxiety, which usually is somewhere along the lines of all the ways in which I’m failing, all the ways in which I could do better.

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All of the ways in which I’m missing opportunities.

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And those opportunities might be spending time with family and friends. I mean, it can look like a lot of different things. But I marinate in self doubt, when anxiety shows up.

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And when it first showed up, I really wasn’t familiar with it at all, you know, on a because again, I hadn’t been feeling this on a regular basis. But now that it seems to be showing up every single month,

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in very timely fashion,

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I have come to predict it.

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And that has been lovely. Because I am able to mentally prepare and coach myself through the experience of being with anxiety. I realize not everybody has that luxury of knowing when anxiety is going to show up.

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But let’s talk a little bit about why there is such a

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correlation between midlife for women especially and anxiety and please don’t hear me saying that I don’t think anxiety is a very real issue for men. Absolutely it is.

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But because I work with the female midlife population,

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I really can only speak to my experience of working with that population.

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So one of the things of course that happens in midlife is that hormones are shifting. And I think this is a really important thing to recognize and honor as it relates to anxiety. Because a lot of people are touting this message, that it’s all in your head. Just think positive, change your thoughts and anxiety will go away. But that is not necessarily true.

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Because during a hormonal shift like perimenopause and menopause is the body undergoes very drastic hormonal changes, specifically, the decline of estrogen and even testosterone.

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And estrogen plays a key role in regulating our mood and our emotions.

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And as estrogen is declining, that hormonal shifts can lead to mood swings, irritability, and yes, anxiety.

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And for me, this just this is a way I extend compassion to myself around sort of this new relationship that I have with anxiety because the education of understanding what is happening hormonally in my body allows me to greet anxiety in a way that is helpful to me.

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So I’m not making it worse, I’m not a necessarily suffering, because I remind myself that hey Courtney, it makes a whole lot of sense that a few days before you start bleeding,

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estrogen is declining

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and you are more susceptible to feeling things like anxiety.

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So chemistry is absolutely can be at the root

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of anxiety, especially at midlife

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as can nervous system dysregulation.

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So the nervous system plays a really crucial role in helping us to regulate anxiety. Because again, anxiety is a very normal

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response to stress.

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But when stress in our life becomes chronic or excessive,

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it makes sense that our anxiety would also correlate with that.

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And I talked, I’ve talked so much about stress on this show

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about the the oscillation that needs to happen between our fight and flight system, that sympathetic nervous system and the rest and digest, which is the parasympathetic nervous system.

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And what happens often at midlife is we are being confronted with a lot of new stressful challenges. We are loading in more responsibility into our life than we’ve ever had. And some of the things I always use the highlight that is just this combination between the aging process which in and of itself can be stressful, depending how we’re thinking about it, but also what’s happening internally, our bodies become a little bit more pro inflammatory. We aren’t as great at regulating our stress at midlife because of estrogen and progesterone declining.

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But then we also have lifestyle factors. at midlife a lot. If you are in a career, you are often in the throes of your career at midlife,

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you might have the added pressure of thinking about how you might eventually work less as in retirement.

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You might be contending with losing friends, or helping friends through some really difficult life transitions at that stage of life.

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Helping with aging parents, kids going away to college,

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maybe wanting to change careers, I mean, there’s so much baked into

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what might be feeding midlife stress. So I say this I feel like on almost every episode, but midlife is a period where we have more opportunity than ever to bring stress in. And we carry the least amount of hormones that are helping us to regulate stress. And if we do not have ways

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of decompressing and regulating our nervous system in ways that support our well being, we end up reaching for things that end up jacking up our nervous system and chemistry. So we create more anxiety for ourselves, which of course isn’t helpful.

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So just to recap, so far, far, some of the players in midlife, anxiety hormones, nervous system dysregulation, which is highly connected to stress.

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But also,

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we when we have these factors that play the hormones shifting, nervous system dysregulation, more stress than we’ve ever had,

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we also experience a lot of sleep disturbances,

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and not sleeping well can contribute to feelings of anxiety, and increased stress levels.

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And of course, there’s always this element of just our own individual genetics and personal history.

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Everyone experiences anxiety a little bit differently and in different dosages. And everybody’s factors that are playing into their anxiety are also a little different.

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So one woman might be experiencing anxiety because it’s very chemically based, her biochemistry is disrupted, her nervous system is dysregulated. And another woman might be experiencing anxiety because she’s constantly generating a landscape of thinking that is producing a lot of anxiety.

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So what are some solutions? Because there really are quite a few solutions. I’ll tell you first what the solution is not. The solution to anxiety is not just to tell yourself to stop feeling it or to tell someone else to stop feeling it.

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So ignoring it soldiering on bucking up right like that, that really isn’t a strategy.

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It’s just avoidance.

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And emotions do not like to be avoided.

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I mean, think about the last time you felt anxious and you try to avoid feeling anxious, you probably produced more anxiety for yourself.

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When we ignore emotion or when we resist emotion, resisting emotion is a lot of work. Resisting anxiety is a lot of work. I always think of trying to hold a beach ball underwater.

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When I think of resisting emotion, you can do it for a while. But it takes a lot of resources takes a lot of energy, a lot of mental bandwidth. And eventually, you’re gonna let go of that beach ball, and it’s gonna fly up and smack you in the face.

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You can react to anxiety. So when you feel anxiety, you can definitely react to it

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in ways that are not useful to you,

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and you can also feed it,

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you can feed your own anxiety. And I see this all the time, I see it in my own life. And I’ve definitely seen it through the coaching work that I do with my clients, where not only as a woman experiencing anxiety, but then she’s telling herself stories about her anxiety that is making her more anxious, I shouldn’t feel anxiety, there’s something wrong with me that I feel anxiety, anxiety is a problem, right? And on and on, it goes that we have anxiety about our anxiety.

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So those things are not helpful to us. But what is helpful is that number one, reminding yourself that there is often a chemical component involved in anxiety.

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So when I said earlier that emotions have Intel for you,

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some of that immotile might be about the state of your biochemistry

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might you need to change your lifestyle in a way that produces that helps you to manage your own thinking and produces less anxiety for you.

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Right?

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Might you need to change your the way that you’re trying to regulate your nervous system.

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So maybe you have a lot of self soothing strategies that are actually further disrupting your chemistry. So when you feel anxious you drink or you smoke weed, or you do I don’t know what you do, but we all have vices.

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And that’s not really solving the issue.

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It’s just temporarily numbing the issue.

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Then we have this whole world of pharmaceuticals.

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Right pharmaceuticals are absolutely

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some often warranted, with a lot of chemical disruption that is feeding anxiety.

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And especially at midlife, a couple things that come to mind, for me are definitely hormonal hormonal therapy. So specifically hormone replacement therapy.

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I will tell you that for me personally, that’s not an option.

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I have this very rare and chronic blood disorder that makes my blood very sticky.

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And so I’m already prone to blood clots.

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And

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estrogen has also been linked to blood clots. So it’s really not something that is recommended for people in my position.

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That may not obviously hormonal hormone replacement therapy is an option for a lot of women. I’m obviously not an endocrinologist, I would never give you advice on hormone replacement therapy. But I do just propose it as a solution for a lot of women who are experiencing anxiety from a chemical disruption.

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And we talk we’ve heard a lot about antidepressants. I mean, how many women in midlife, do you know who have been prescribed antidepressants?

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And while I do think antidepressants are probably over prescribed, in no way am I suggesting that they are insanely useful for certain people.

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And so that is something for you to discuss with your own physician. Because I think of antidepressants as a therapy, that if you are truly suffering on a biochemical level, and something like an antidepressant is going to help ease that suffering and help you to function in a way that expends less resources towards anxiety and depression. Why would you take why would you use it?

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Again, a conversation to be had with your physician but I did want to just kind of offer that as a piece of this conversation that for some people, when it is a chemical disruption, this is an option

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for me because I can’t do hormone replacement therapy.

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And I also feel like my anxiety does not warrant an antidepressant be

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Because I usually can get it under control. And it only lasts for a very short period of time for me a couple of days at the most. And it’s not like I feel it all day long. I feel it for a few hours in the morning, usually, you know, somewhere in the middle of the day. And I just noticed that it stays with me for a few days.

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So one thing that I have personally chosen to use, which has been really helpful are adaptogens.

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So adaptogens are non toxic plants,

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or herbs that help the body to adapt to physical, chemical and biological stressors.

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And they help to support the body’s natural ability to cope with stress. By promoting balance, and restoring homeostasis, which we all know the body loves so much, it loves to find its happy place.

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So adaptogens are things you may have heard of things like ginseng, ashwagandha, rhodiola, holy basil.

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Again, I definitely think if you go the adaptogen route, it is a worth a conversation with your naturopath with your physician, with somebody who can help you monitor

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the supplement.

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But I did just want to offer here that for me, it has been a true godsend to us at adaptogens to help manage my anxiety.

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And then one of the solutions that I think would be really

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crazy to neglect is managing our mind.

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Because I do find for myself, like I shared at the beginning of this Podcast today, not only do I experience anxiety, but then I can really easily start spinning out into a place of self doubt, because I’m experiencing anxiety. And that’s not because of my biochemistry, that’s because of my brain going wild with what I’m making my anxiety mean.

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And so taking radical responsibility for the way we are looking at the stressors in our life, being very careful that we don’t produce more anxiety about our anxiety with the stories we’re telling ourselves.

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And of course, to me the answer to this is really a beautiful answer to this is self coaching. Learning how to parent your brain in a way that helps you to really take radical responsibility for the anxiety you are producing with your thoughts.

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And this is of course, the a lot of the work that I do in my coaching business is teaching women how to manage the thinking that is generating unnecessary suffering for them emotionally.

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So I want to talk you through a few steps that I have found helpful and that a lot of my clients have found helpful over the years when they are experiencing anxiety. The first thing is to number one, acknowledge it.

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All emotions are messengers. And all messengers need to be acknowledged, if you want the message.

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You need to listen to the messenger.

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So I always call this naming and noticing. It’s just saying, wow, like I’m noticing this response in my body today, my heart’s kind of beating fast, and I’m feeling a little scattered. And you know, I’m having trouble focusing. And I’m definitely noticing this tendency to drift towards self doubt. To me, those are all indicators that anxiety has arrived.

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So I just named notice it. Oh, anxiety is here today. Anxiety to set it to show up? I don’t judge it. I try. I mean, sometimes I do. But I really do try to do the work of just naming and noticing with no additional storyline.

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But I will ask it questions.

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Right. So I let anxiety come in. I acknowledge her. And then I just asked her. I wonder why you’re here. Why are you here?

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Why am I feeling anxious? Is there a true threat in my midst? Which honestly for me 99% of the time? No, there is not.

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So if there’s not an actual threat in my midst,

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why else might anxiety be here?

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Well, you know, Courtney, you’re getting really close to your cycle. So this could be very chemically oriented. Okay, that makes sense.

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And you know, you have been thinking a lot

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about stress at work, or problems that you haven’t yet solved.

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So maybe you need to take some accountability,

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for reducing stress in those areas,

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for really making some conscious choices about how you’re going to think about those areas, so you’re not generating more stress and more anxiety.

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And just again, taking responsibility where you can, I can’t take radical responsibility for my hormones shifting, they’re going to shift. I’m 46 years old, like it’s par for the course.

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But I can help my body out in the ways that I know how to.

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And so one of the things for me is like, I really have to be mindful of my caffeine consumption.

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Because caffeine, first of all, is it’s very strong love of mine.

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And it feeds anxiety when I’m in a space of anxiety.

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So that is something I can absolutely reduce, I can absolutely manage my thinking,

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I can absolutely try to rework my schedule,

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those three days prior to my cycle, not in epic ways. But I can make a few tweaks here and there to just allow more space.

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More decompression, more nervous system regulation.

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Because I know my system is going to be in hyperdrive. At that time. I can also remind myself that I’m safe. There’s no real threats here, Courtney.

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Right, you’re not under attack, you’re not going to die.

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And that sounds silly. But that reminder is very settling to the nervous system.

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And then a big theme that I’ve been talking about with my community over this past month, my paid community Rumble & Rise, is really organizing our life in a way that helps to honor

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episodes of anxiety. Like for me, and again, I realized maybe not everybody can do this, because for a lot of you anxiety is very unexpected, it shows up out of the blue, there is no predictability to it.

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And then there are other people in the camp of

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again, being in midlife, knowing it’s part of a hormonal cycle, having a little bit of predictability to when it shows up.

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And for me, like I said earlier, one of the big shifts I’m making is in just looking at my schedule a few days out from the start of my cycle.

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To honor that my body needs more self soothing at that time, it needs more decompression, it needs less stress, I have more work to do in my brain, in terms of managing my thinking.

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So I create space for that.

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So again, just to kind of recap those steps, acknowledge the anxiety name and notice it

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inquire, why is it here? What message does it have for you?

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Are you under threat?

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Is something disrupted in your chemistry?

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Are you letting your brain go wild with all kinds of thoughts that are producing anxiety.

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Step three, take responsibility where you can which is not in all places.

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But take responsibility where you can and organize. And part of that is organizing your life

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in a way, when possible

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to help nurture and soothe and process your anxiety. Because I think that’s it’s so stressful when we feel anxiety and then we have no time to work through it. Or we have no time to give it what it’s asking for. We have no time to apply skill sets that might help us to lessen it.

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So again, I don’t think it needs to be epic periods of time, but pollinating your day with a few breaks

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to be with your anxiety in a way that helps you to move it through.

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So I don’t know who needed to hear this. I felt compelled to talk about this today. Because again for me right now there’s a very strong

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On correlation between moving through my midlife transition and experiencing anxiety, but I also feel that anxiety is such a big topic. In and of itself, I mean, menopause aside, and mid life aside, anxiety is a human emotion that deserves time and attention and, and thought and consideration just like any other emotion.

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So I will be wildly curious in the spaces in places where I am after the production of this episode to hear from you about your experiences with anxiety and what is working for you. And how do you greet your anxiety in a way that prevents unnecessary suffering.

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I hope it was helpful. I hope there’s a takeaway in here. I hope you take excellent care of yourself in the coming week and I will talk to you again very soon. Take care.

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Thank you for listening to the Grace & Grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.