396: Why Midlife Women Struggle with Consistency (and the Science to Fix It)

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Courtney Townley 0:01
If you’re a woman in midlife who feels like she is always starting over with health goals, routines and habits, well, science has some interesting reasons as for why that might be true. So in this episode of the Grace and Grit podcast, we are going to be exploring some of that science and hopefully giving you some strategies for showing up for yourself with more grace and ease and consistency.

Courtney Townley 0:22
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 into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:43
Hello, my friends and welcome to the Grace of Grit podcast. I am your host, Courtney Townley, and I am delighted that you’re here. In case you didn’t know, last week, I ignited a six part series to celebrate the launch of my new book that’s coming out on November 5. So this podcast series is called the consistency code diaries, the stories, the science and the strategies behind the book.

Courtney Townley 1:18
Last week, I dropped the first episode in this series, which was all about the origin story, why I felt so compelled to write this book, what it actually took for me to write the book, and a lot of other things. There were a lot of other things in that episode. You can listen to it to find out. But today I want to talk a little bit more about the science that supports the principles and the strategies inside the book, because, as you all know, there is a lot of shifting happening at midlife, and when we better understand those shifts, we can make it less personal, right?

Courtney Townley 1:58
It’s not that you have failed, it’s not that you aren’t capable, it’s that our chemistry is shifting, and that can make consistency especially challenging at midlife. So I want to unpack a little bit of science to help you understand that so you can hopefully start showing up for yourself with a little bit more ease, grace, and, of course, consistency. Before I get into the science, I committed to sharing a little bit of the book with you each week. And today, I thought I would open this episode by reading you the back of the book. So it’s kind of the summary of the book.

Courtney Townley 2:39
When you get this book in your hot little hands, which will be very soon, the first thing you’re going to see at the top of the book, at the back, is an endorsement that I got from Dr Mary Claire Haver. If you don’t know who Dr Mary Claire Haver is, you absolutely should know her. She is a very powerful advocate for midlife women’s health. She is a menopause specialist, and she has her own incredible books in the world. Probably one of the most notable is her New York Times bestseller called The New Menopause that came out last year. If you’ve never read it, I highly recommend it, but she was so incredibly generous with writing a beautiful endorsement for this book, and we pulled out one sentence from that endorsement for the back of the book. You can read the full endorsement inside the book, but the sentence on the back says a refreshingly compassionate science backed roadmap for leading yourself with ease, self trust and confidence in your health journey.

Courtney Townley 4:09
In The Consistency Code, wellness expert Courtney Townley offers a transformative approach to health designed specifically for women navigating the complex terrain of midlife,

Courtney Townley 5:00
Through a four part flexible framework of simple, adaptable practices. The Consistency Code delivers a method that helps you shift from burnout and body obsession to mindful alignment and ease.

Courtney Townley 5:18
I hope that gets you a little bit excited. I am so excited to get this book into your hands. I am so excited to have women, hopefully having conversations about this book, with their friends, with their colleagues, with their family members, because we need more conversations about the things in this book. And by the way, I wrote this book specifically for book clubs, because my high hope is that women will organize groups where they can have these discussions, and we give you a lot of resources for how to ignite those conversations.

Courtney Townley 5:54
Okay, let’s get into the science behind the methodology in this book. There are really kind of three systems within the human body. I want to touch on today, because all three of these systems, number one, are interconnected, so they all affect each other, as every system in the human body does, right? Everything is kind of integrated.

Courtney Townley 6:18
But also, I think understanding the shifts that are happening in these three systems specifically can help you give yourself a lot more grace and curiosity around the things that you’re rumbling with in your own health journey right now, or certainly with the challenges you face to show up with any degree of consistency. So the three systems, just to throw them out there from the outset, are, of course, the endocrine system, the hormonal system. There’s a lot of shifts happening at midlife in the hormonal system. There are also a lot of shifts happening in the nervous system.

Courtney Townley 6:57
And then, of course, we’re going to talk about the brain, because there’s a lot happening in the brain that many of you can testify to. I know I can my ability to focus, my ability to remember, my ability to make decisions, have definitely all been challenged a little bit at midlife because of the shifts that are happening in my brain. So let’s start with the endocrine system, again, the endocrine system being your hormonal system, there are a lot of hormones running through your body all the time throughout your life, and there are some pretty significant players that get wildly disrupted at midlife. Many of them you have heard of before, right?

Courtney Townley 7:39
Progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, insulin, DHEA, like we could go on and on, there are a lot of shifts happening in the hormonal system at midlife now, some of those shifts are a decline. Some hormones are starting to what I always say, leave the party. They’re starting to depart. And other hormones are amplified because we don’t have other hormones in the amount that we used to have. And why does this matter? Well, it matters a lot, because the shifts in your hormonal system affect everything. They affect your energy. They affect your physiology, in terms of fat mass and muscle mass. They affect your mood, they affect your motivation, they affect your metabolism, they affect everything.

Courtney Townley 8:38
And so there is a very strong connection between hormonal fluctuations and challenges we face with showing up on the regular.

Courtney Townley 8:50
And I think it really boils down to the fact that when hormones are shifting a lot, when hormones are declining significantly, we have to honor that we do not have the same resource availability every day. We’re not going to have the same energy and the same focus and the same drive, right? We’re going to have days where we don’t sleep well, we have joint pain, we have more of an inability to focus than on other days. So how do we still show up in the face of those hormonal fluctuations? And let me give you some more real world examples of what those hormonal fluctuations might look like for you. So energy levels, I’ve already said, can vary dramatically day to day. So you might have planned to do a specific morning routine, but because you’ve been experiencing insomnia or sleep challenges for days on end, fatigue makes that almost impossible, right? Or maybe you’re experiencing.

Courtney Townley 10:00
More cognitive function changes. So you’ve been consistently kind of planning and putting forethought into your food for years, and then suddenly the brain fog makes even simple planning a little bit overwhelming or challenging, or very overwhelming and challenging. We have those mood regulation challenges.

Courtney Townley 10:22
So maintaining something like a meditation practice sounds brilliant in theory, but suddenly that can get really challenging when all of a sudden we have anxiety in higher doses than we’ve ever had in our life because of those hormonal shifts, we might be experiencing temperature dysregulation, so maybe just coming out of the summer months, some of you listening might have experienced that outdoor exercise or outdoor routines became a lot more difficult than they had been previously.

Courtney Townley 10:59
You might have different a different pain threshold, or you might have just new pain in your body, because, again, with hormones declining, we can certainly experience a lot of challenges with pain in the body. I know for me, like sites of old injury especially, can really flare up at this time in my life, and there’s we even experience things like digestive system changes so nutrition routines that used to work for us, like maybe even high protein, which we hear everywhere, right?

Courtney Townley 11:32
The value of protein and how important it is to eat so much of it, yada yada yada. I’m not arguing that fact, but I will tell you, I have worked with some women through the midlife years that were very sensitive to high protein diets. It just didn’t work for them in the way that they felt like it was supposed to work. So definitely, all of these things can be a reality for a woman, and a lot of traditional advice around consistency, doing the same thing over and over all the time, you just got to be more disciplined. Well, that doesn’t really work when you’re facing these kinds of hormonal shifts, because it isn’t just a psychological challenge, it’s a physiological challenge.

Courtney Townley 12:21
I would also say there’s kind of this emotional toll, or I would call it unnecessary labor that we endure when we’re trying to maintain these pre midlife patterns, or these pre midlife routines that we used to have, right so maybe you used to go to the gym at four o’clock in the morning or five o’clock five o’clock in the morning, and that was never a problem for you, but now all of a sudden, you find that getting up at that hour is really difficult, and your workouts just don’t feel as good.

Courtney Townley 12:54
So how does The Consistency Code really address the reality of all of this hormonal shifting at midlife? Well, it addresses it in many ways, but I would say that some of the key ways are, number one, we have to reduce unnecessary stress in our life because we aren’t as good at managing stress at midlife. And I’m not saying it’s because you don’t have skill sets. It’s literally because of the hormonal shift in your body. So as estrogen and progesterone start to depart, cortisol is not so easily tempered, because those two hormones, estrogen and progesterone, help to soften the effects of cortisol. But now we no longer have those hormones, or we don’t have them in the doses we once did, and so cortisol is making more of an impact in our system.

Courtney Townley 13:48
So we have to reduce unnecessary stress. We also have to lower or draw smaller circles of expectation, because, like I said, we don’t always have the same resource availability. So how can we draw smaller circles of expectation for ourselves in the day so we aren’t totally burnt out or face planting by the time the evening rolls around?

Courtney Townley 14:30
And we talk a lot about the concept in the book of structured flexibility. If you’re a longtime podcast listener here, you’ve heard me talk about that a lot, but structured flexibility, in essence, is your ability to still self honor every day, even though your resource availability isn’t always the same. So we have to be flexible in our approach. So let’s touch a little bit on the nervous system. I would say that most.

Courtney Townley 14:59
Women I encounter and work with are rolling into perimenopause and or even menopause, with an already wildly dysregulated nervous system.

Courtney Townley 15:13
And so, of course, having a dysregulated nervous system is going to make it really hard to again, temper cortisol, right to to help soften the cortisol effect in the body, which cortisol is a wonderful thing. It’s a very it motivates us. It wakes us up, it drives us but too much of it over a long period of time is very detrimental to your anatomy. It starts to break things down if there’s too much in your system for too long. So a lot of us are rolling into midlife with a lot of unprocessed trauma, a lot of mounting stress, a lot of a lack of stress management techniques. And the nervous system really is meant to work kind of in an oscillating pattern, right?

Courtney Townley 15:18
We’re supposed to be able to have periods of stress, engagement, focus, work effort, and then we’re supposed to be able to have periods of rest and recovery throughout the day, throughout the year, throughout our lifetime. But again, that isn’t how most of us live. Most of us live in that state of hyperdrive, where we always have our foot on the gas pedal, and then that can bring up just so many challenges, because when we’re in a state of hyperdrive, we can’t do our best thinking, we don’t problem solve, we don’t plan well. We’re less focused, and it creates a lot of havoc in our biology. So a couple things that I think are important to note is that at midlife, because of our changing hormonal landscape, which I just spoke to, we can actually have experiences in the nervous system where we don’t respond to stress, we don’t have as much resilience, we aren’t as good as recovery as we once were.

Courtney Townley 17:58
So estrogen is a huge player in all of those things. It help us. It helps us to contend with stress. It helps us with recovery. It helps us us with resistance or not resistance, resilience. So when we don’t have the estrogen, all of those things are going to be challenged. And furthermore, the HPA access, which a lot of you may be familiar with, if you’re not, it’s the it’s basically a system that is activated in periods of stress, which involve the hypothalamus, the Pituitary and the adrenals, and that system, when it’s in harmony, It works beautifully well to help manage stress, but again, with declining estrogen, that system gets a little bit challenged, which means it’s very difficult to regulate cortisol and get cortisol to return to base levels after you have been activated by stress.

Courtney Townley 18:57
So with all of that in mind, I think it’s important to remember that because your nervous system is changing at midlife, it challenges it challenges our capacity to handle multiple demands. I want to say that again, with nervous system changes, or nervous system dysregulation at midlife, these things affect a woman’s capacity to handle multiple demands. And I want to point out here, capability and capacity are not the same thing. Capability is that you are a very capable woman, I have no doubt you are very capable of learning new things, doing hard things. You have a lot of evidence of that in your life, but because of hormonal fluctuations and because of nervous system dysregulation at midlife, you. Don’t always have the capacity to handle multiple demands, and we don’t really honor that in our culture, right? We just kind of expect ourselves to keep forging ahead in the way that we always have, with little to no regard for how these systems are shifting and challenging our capacity.

Courtney Townley 20:25
In The Consistency Code, in the book, I definitely challenge you to get radically honest about your true resource availability. So given the realities of your life right now, which include, how well are you sleeping? How much total stress are you? Are you carrying? What are your responsibilities and obligations? We have to get radically honest about the resources we have on board so we aren’t further dysregulating ourselves, and we aren’t self soothing with things that hurt us rather than help us. And man, we’re awesome at this. We’re awesome at reaching for quick things that make us feel better, temporarily, alcohol, food, specifically sugar, maybe sometimes salt, shopping, videos, social media, right? All of those things we grab, those things to help us self soothe.

Courtney Townley 21:31
Unfortunately, all of those things in high doses have a very negative consequence to our health and even our happiness. So how do we self soothe in ways that nourish us? That is part of what I talk about in this book. I also talk about practical nervous system regulation techniques that support consistency. How do we organize our day in a way that respects our nervous system? How do we make decisions that don’t overwhelm our brain, so we don’t overly stress the nervous system, these kinds of things. And one thing I definitely also present in the book that I think is really helpful is it’s important for you to acknowledge what dysregulation looks like for you, or I just use the word misalignment, when you are misaligned in your body, in your life. How does that show up for you?

Courtney Townley 22:31
I know for me, it shows up as reactivity. I get very reactive in everything, in the way that I talk, in the way that I think, in the way that I self soothe, and of course, I create a lot more problems because of that, reactivity, improving health and happiness requires proactive choice, not reactivity, right? Reactivity is what got us here. Reactivity is usually a lot of those behaviors that are harming us, not always. We’ve got some we’ve got some reactive patterns that are also helping us, but we really want to stay in a place of proactive choice. Okay, let’s quickly touch on brain changes. At midlife, there’s a lot of cognitive shifts happening in the brain at midlife, around executive function, memory processing, our ability to focus.

Courtney Townley 23:30
So as someone listening, especially if you’re a midlife woman, you are probably very familiar with brain fog, maybe even memory lapses. I know I am like name recall, thinking of things that used to be like so easy, like top of mind, easy recall stuff is more challenging now, and that, again, can be directly correlated to changes in estrogen, because estrogen has an effect on working memory and information recall. So because we aren’t thinking necessarily as clearly as we’re traveling through the midlife years, it’s even more important that we plan and organize and pre decide where we can so we remove some cognitive load. I would also say that shifts in the brain right with hormonal shifts happening, we have a diminished multitasking capacity.

Courtney Townley 24:28
I already spoke to that with the nervous system, but in terms of the brain, the brain becomes less efficient at handling multiple cognitive demands simultaneously. We aren’t so good at multitasking. Now, I was never good at multitasking. I think a lot of humans delude themselves into believing that they’re good at multitasking, but at midlife, we really are not in the best position to multitask. And so in the consistency code, I really challenge you to. Amplify the measures you are using to improve your health and happiness, again, to offset some of that cognitive load. So simplicity is absolutely a midlife woman’s friend. And then the other thing that you’re probably going to experience at midlife, again, this is something I’m in the midst of right now is just your ability to keep attention and focus right like I find I’m so easily distracted at this stage of my life, more so than I even was in my younger years, it’s harder for me to sometimes focus for longer periods of time, and so again, when it comes to strategies I’m going to use for self-care, self honoring, kindness, Grace. Looks like less is more.

Courtney Townley 25:49
You know, I used to go to the gym for 90 minutes at a time. Now I’m like 30 to 45 minutes tops, and we are good some days 20 minutes because that’s all I have for the ability to focus, and that’s okay, I still get a lot done. I would much rather have a very focused and effective 20 minute workout than a 90 minute, very distracted, sloppy workout. The 20 minute workout, I would argue, is going to be more effective too if I’m focused so just honoring like are the strategies and methods that you’re using to improve your health, honoring the challenges your brain is facing at this stage of your life. Let me I’m just looking at my notes really quick to see if there’s anything else I want to mention on that. Want to mention on that. Yeah, I think that’s good.

Courtney Townley 26:45
Okay, so all this to say your hormonal system, your nervous system and your brain are all going through a lot of shifts at midlife and are experiencing a lot of challenges due to chemistry shifting and also due to the demands of your life. Admit at midlife. So the way that we go about self-care, if we want to be consistent, needs to honor all of that shifting. How do we do that? Well read The Consistency Code. That’s how you do that, because it’s all in there.

Courtney Townley 27:28
All right, my friends, if you want to find out more about the book, all you have to do is head on over to the theconsistencycode.com and you can get on the wait list. We’re launching November 5, we will send out, of course, emails to everybody who is on that list. But if you follow me on social media and you listen to the podcast and all the other things that we offer, you are going to hear about the book launch.

Courtney Townley 27:52
So if you enjoyed this episode, stick around, because next week we’re going to be talking a little bit more about the strategies in the book and why the way that I kind of organized this book is unique, and I think especially unique and needed for the midlife woman. So come back next week if you want to hear more.

Courtney Townley 28:14
Thank you so much for being here today. And like I said, theconsistencycode.com is where you can find out all the goodness that is coming down the pipeline for the book. Thanks so much for being here today, and I hope to see you again next week. Take care.

Courtney Townley 28:33
Thank you for listening to the grace and 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.