469 - Perimenopause Brain Fog & Fatigue? What Doctors Aren't Telling You

29:35It requires a level of support that you may not have in your life right now, but that you can form. And it's going to look different for all of us. So back to this question of alone time and questioning, I have been asking myself that. And what's been so cool has been like, wow, my answers are different. Things that I used to want to watch on television or the things that I used to be attracted to, or the things that I was so convinced were Marie, I am discovering day by day. I'm like, not anymore. I was like, wow, who's this? Like, where'd she come from? So it is this continual process of discovery for me.

30:15And the more alone time, I want more and more of it. Where I want to shift to now is I want to talk about how understanding and having the bravery to call out what is the wheels coming off, the breakdown, the feeling absolutely like all of you is crumbling and imploding and every part of life is just starting to disintegrate. I love that what you started to discover deeper in the research around the grandmother hypothesis, the power of the crone, because I feel like this starts to set the frame or philosophy that can be so helpful. And then we'll dive into the deeper bioneurological changes and the neurotransmitters that are changing.

31:00And I want to call out some specific experiences where I was like, wow, I am really losing it. But in your book, I realized brain science, chemistry. We're all just chemistry. We're just chemistry. Yes, we're all just chemistry. That's all we are. This is the thing too. And God bless Josh. This man, I'm like, whew, I don't know how I haven't broke him yet. Because it's like, I am legitimately not the same person that he's known for the past couple decades. And that's been destabilizing. Oh, and this is why it's really important that we open this conversation up with men, because they don't understand what we're going through, but they can't understand it till we understand it.

31:42And once we understand it and could put language to it, then it becomes easier to invite the men into the conversation. So what's interesting and what I discovered was that, and this, the grandmother hypothesis was one of my starting points because the grandmother hypothesis basically says that back in the hunter and gatherer days, when a woman stopped her cycle, she was moved to a different position within the culture, within the tribe. And that was a position of leadership. And when I went and I looked at that, this is literally, and I actually brought Kristen Hawks, who is the champion. She's an anthropologist and the champion of the grandmother hypothesis.

32:25I brought her onto my podcast. She lived with a tribe in Tanzania that still practices this today. And these grandmothers, and I'm not saying everybody has to be a grandmother, but these post-menopausal women get up at six o 'clock every morning as a pack, as a group with other post-menopausal women, and they go out for a seven-hour trek every single day to go and forage for food and bring it back to the tribe because the men are off getting a big animal kill. The men only come back with a kill 3 % of the time, which is one day out of 30. So it was the post-menopausal women that were able to feed the fertile women and the children to keep us alive.

33:10And the belief around the grandmother hypothesis is that actually we would not as a species have evolved if it wasn't for the post-menopausal women. It's amazing. It's really beautiful. And I will tell you this. First of all, I love that because it's purpose. And I remember reading, I was like, I've been leading for a long time. I'm going to let other people lead for a minute. But then I remember - differently. Yes, exactly. I will be different. And I'm also very mid-goo, which I know. You're mid-goo too. I'm mid-goo. So I'm giving myself permission to be mid-goo. And then also, let's talk about the power of the crone, because I loved your own commentary in your writing.

33:46I was like, power of the crone. Like, are you telling me I'm old? Not that there's something bad about old, but let's just be real. And you learned that crone actually means something else. Yeah. So I didn't want to just look at one thing I wanted. So I looked at a neuroscientist, an anthropologist, a feminist psychologist that we definitely need to talk about. And I looked at Clarissa Pinkola Estes' work on The Power of the Crown. A friend of mine had turned me on, you know, I think many of us read Women Who Run with the Wolves. But The Power of the Crone is about what happens at this phase of life.

34:23And my friend said, oh, you should read this book. And I was like, did you just call me old? Like, I'm not a crone. She goes, this was like in my early 50s. She said to me, Mindy, do you know what crone means? It means crown. You get to put your crown on now. And when I dove into Clarissa's work, she has something called the life-death-life cycle. And what I really believe between that and between the brain rewiring that we can talk about here in a moment and the grandmother hypothesis, I started to see that there is a definite purpose for menopause. And the purpose is to kill off the parts of you that you're exhausted with, to stop doing the things that you did to make everybody else tell you you were worthy or you were beautiful and to lay that all down and to start building a life that is yours, 100 % yours, where you tell your truth, where you stand up and protect yourself.

35:28You don't need someone else to protect you. You protect it. And you are now a wise elder that has a skillset and a new brain that can actually lead a culture in a new way. And when I started to see that, I was like, this is not the menopause we're being taught. We have women that when they are depressed or they are rageful, we're telling them you didn't get the estrogen patch. Well, maybe we're rageful because we're tired of putting everybody else's needs ahead of our own and we've been shoving down our own inner truth. Maybe we're depressed because we've been doing the things that the patriarch told us will bring us happiness.

36:10And guess what? It's not bringing us happiness anymore. I don't know about you. The things that bring me happiness now is sitting on the couch with one of my favorite people and having deep conversations. I care more about that than what my YouTube channel, what numbers are happening on my YouTube channel. So there is a moment that we're not talking about. We are killing off the woman who did everything for everybody else. And a new version of her is emerging. And instead of freezing our faces with Botox and fillers and taking our gray hairs out of our head so that people don't see us old, what if we had a culture where women were doing what they were doing back in the primal days and we were looking at these women saying, lead us now.

36:58Now you have wisdom. You've rewired your brain. you're being authentically you, lead us and show us a different way. I quote Desmond Tutu, who's a big fan. I'm a big fan of his work. And he says, if we want peace in the world, we need to let the women lead. And when we look at the way aging is laid out for women, we are so scared of a wrinkle. We are so scared of the menopausal belly weight, which I understand is not fun and there's lots of ways to fix that. But what we need to start to do is see that there's a deeper calling for us to come back home to ourselves and to start to live life the way we want to live it.

37:42Let's be honest. Even the most passionate, driven people get stuck sometimes. We all have those moments when we lose steam and nothing seems to get done. That's why I made One Minute Motivators. These quick little audio coaching sessions will help you get re-energized and back in the game super fast. Grab the full collection now at marieforleo.com slash motivators, or you can just scan the QR code on your screen. You know what I love too is this, you called it, it's like the brain remodel. So I am a little bit addicted to renovation. So it's a part of me that I actually love. And I've done several home renovations.

38:23I'm in the middle of one now. And here's the thing that's interesting about it. Renovation projects are annoying. They're frustrating. They're super expensive. They take way longer than most of us want them to take. However, once they're done, my experience, you're like, oh my God, this is the best thing ever. And I usually have a little bit of amnesia, which is why I do it again. I'm like, how do I get myself into this again? But in terms of our brain remodel, which is what this is, I thought this was really interesting. Like this can take up to a decade and that it's a marathon and not a sprint.

39:00So I have to ask you this on this. How are you feeling about this? Because again, I mentioned this earlier. I've been a little bit skeptical where everyone's like, oh, there's this big upgrade. I'm like, but are you gaslighting me? Is it really an upgrade? And so I think it's true, but I just want to hear your take on this brain remodel. And then we can kind of go into what is actually happening. so that we can start to identify some of these really what can be and what has been for me alarming changes. And so we can understand the brain science and what we can kind of do to help ourselves navigate better through the remodel.

39:35Yeah. So I love calling it, looking at what's happening in the brain as a renovation. I think you, you, you labeled that really well. So something to know is that when we went through puberty and estrogen came in, she started to excite something in our brain called the corpus callosum. And the corpus callosum is a highway between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. And women have a bigger corpus callosum. So once estrogen came in, we started to have what they call a relational brain, meaning every single decision was made through the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. And so we brought everything we were doing was like based off of, is that okay for that person?

40:22Does that work here? And then we can also had our logical side, like I'm going to run a really killer business, but we brought both hemispheres and we were always thinking about everybody else in our decisions whether we're aware of it or not. When you go into menopause with the lack of estrogen, and even if you're taking a patch or a pill, you still have less estrogen than you had at 20. You stop going from a cross-referenced relational brain to more of a lateralized brain, where when you are making decisions, you're either sitting in your right hemisphere or you're sitting in your left hemisphere, but you're not operating from both.

41:06A little more like a man. So all of a sudden, the people pleasing, you don't care about it anymore. You literally are not neurochemically addicted to people pleasing anymore. So the remodel project is you are, your neurons in your brain, the neurons that are, that you needed to keep yourself hooked into the patriarchal desire of what a woman should be doing. Those neurons go away. And all of a sudden the neurons of independence and leadership and focus. Like one of the things I discovered is that women are supposed to get with this remodeling of the brain, women are supposed to get more focus, better cognition, more confidence, which is not what's happening.

41:53So, but our brains are geared more towards a lateralized brain where we can sit and connect and then we can drop that and we can come over and focus on a business task, But we don't bring both of them together for every decision. Interesting. So when you're saying that's not what's happening, is it that in the remodel? Because it was like, I will say for me, my ability to focus, which used to be like, I have ADHD. So that's, I've always been like, like that. However, for, I think it's for things that I no longer have a tolerance for. So this might be a little bit of a clue, you know, things where I'm not interested anymore.

42:29I'm like, can't focus, can't do it, can't sit there. But if there's something I'm interested in and I'm genuinely passionate about, I could probably go for hours. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah. Because our focus gets even better because of the lateralized plane. Now, the remodel, let's go back to what you're experiencing when you remodel a house. You're in the goo. It's messy. So if you're, you know, hearing this and you're like, I don't feel my brain doing that. What I wanted to bring forward in that is this is why it's like a remodel project. The brain is pruning away neurons that you no longer need so that you can create new neurons that are going to serve you in the next phase of your life.

43:12And this was Lisa Moscone's work. She talks about three times in a woman's life that the brain remodels itself. And it does that so it could prepare a woman because we're so brilliantly designed, I want to point out, it can prepare a woman for the next phase of her life. So in puberty, a teenager, when her hormones comes in, the neurons that kept her attached to mom and dad, those neurons go away and new independent neurons show up because with a period comes the possibility of pregnancy. So she needs to detach from needing a caregiver and become her own caregiver. So with the influx of hormones, the brain knows to change itself to prepare itself for that possibility.

43:58Women who are pregnant, when the hormones drop after the baby is born, the brain prunes away the neurons that told you where your keys were, that told you where your task list was, what to do, so that you could build new neurons to become highly instinctual and intuitive because your baby doesn't talk. And so you need to be able to read the clues of your baby. So the brain repatterns itself to be able to match the next job at hand. In menopause, you are not meant to people-please anymore. You are not meant to do everything for everybody else and get your worth outside of you because the brain is remodeling itself and those neurons that kept you addicted to people-pleasing, they're out.

44:46They're going away. And the new neurons that are forming are ones that let you build life on your terms. Look at the gray divorce is so popular right now. It's like everywhere. Yes. All I see in that is a woman all of a sudden said, wait a second, I want to do it this way. And her husband was, or if it's the same sex, you know, spouse basically is like, we haven't been doing it that way. Yeah. They're going on separate paths. They're like, Like, oh, this is no longer what we want to do together. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a terrible thing. Yes. Right. And you're, you know, we were talking this morning about the conversation I had with my publisher this morning with two weeks out from the book.

45:32I'm like, I will do it this way. I won't do it this way anymore. Now that's a post-menopausal brain that has clarity for, I know what I'm doing now is living a life for me. I'm not living a life for children. I'm not living a life for book sales. I'm not living a life for revenue coming in for my business. I'm every day living a life that I feels authentic to me. And that's how we're designed. So when we look at women killing themselves, when we look at divorces that are happening, what's happening is that woman's waking up. Yeah. And everybody relied on her to be a certain way, but her brain doesn't work like that anymore.

46:16She's meant, she's geared to lead her church, lead a community, lead her friends. She's meant to lead in a new way. Yes. And part of leadership, and I know you've done a ton on this, the most important part of leadership is that you know how to lead yourself first. Right? Yes, 100%. And it can be so disorienting. So disorienting. And if, again, so for many of us, I'm so curious about the brain. I've always been wanting to take care of it. And I want to talk about what happens once this estrogen starts to decline. Again, doesn't matter if you are in your late 30s, you're in your 40s, you're in your 50s, everyone has a different timeline.

47:07And it doesn't matter whether you own a patch or you're not on the, you know, you're eating all the right foods, all that stuff. So this was interesting for me. So when estrogen starts to decline, dopamine drops. So if anyone's feeling like, oh my God, why don't I care about anything? Why don't I have the drive that I used to drive? It's also, if I'm understanding what you wrote correctly, it's also can drive cravings. Like if you're wanting more sweets. If you're feeling like, I need a little bit more wine. I need a little bit more comfort foods and also a sense of emotional flatness. That was the thing where I was like, I've always known myself to be, at least previous me, right?

47:44Super big hearted, super warm. And I am that way still to a certain degree, but not nearly as much. And there have been times where I was like, wow, am I cold hearted? Like it's been a little bit scary. But then when I read this about dopamine, I was like, oh, this makes sense. So a lot of women listening right now can feel like they're losing their edge. Can you talk us through what's actually happening biochemically, the big missing chemical of dopamine? And if there's anything that we can do to help us navigate this time, like, do we want to boost it? Just walk us through what that's Yeah. So the interesting thing about estrogen that I found along my research is that she doesn't act alone.

48:26Like, you know, she's the diva of all hormones for sure. But let's think about Beyonce. Like Beyonce doesn't get on a stage by herself and be that spectacular. She's got a group of people. And so that's what estrogen also has a group of neurochemicals. So whenever estrogen kicks in, she brought one of the chemicals she brought was dopamine. And so dopamine is your motivation. Dopamine is the thing that gets you the drive, gets you up and out of bed to go do something. But when estrogen leaves, dopamine goes with her. I think of it like, do you remember in high school when the popular girl sat at the lunch table and she had all her little posse of girls around her?

49:09And then she was like, come on, ladies, let's go.

49:14That's what estrogen does. She's like, I'm out. Dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, oxytocin, all these members of the girl gang, you are all on your own now. Now that part is really important because these neurochemicals were used to being led by estrogen and all of a sudden you're flat, you're depressed, you can't remember. When oxytocin is one of the girl gang, all of a sudden you don't feel like connecting with people anymore. You can't even - People, ew. Like, no. Right. Like, you just are like, I mean, I even noticed it with my children. It was like, I've been dealing with you all for 20 years.

49:54Like, you can handle this on your own. You're fine. You're good. You're fine. Exactly. But it was like shocking to not have that motherly nurturing instinct with them anymore. That's because oxytocin went down. So the big part I wanted to bring forward in part two about Estrogen's Girl Gang is one, I wanted women to understand the motivation, the lack of motivation isn't because you are lazy. And the sadness you might be feeling could be because you're just low in serotonin and you need a little more, but it doesn't mean you go rushing out to get an antidepressant. and you're not losing your memory, you just all of a sudden acetylcholine started to become at jeopardy and you didn't have the neurochemical that helps you reach into the hippocampus where the memories are stored to pull out old memories.

50:46So what's really cool is you get to do your own lifestyle tricks to bring these neurochemicals back. So for example, dopamine. Dopamine loves novelty. Well, what happens when we get to this phase? We're like eating the same foods, living in the same house, driving the same way, wearing the same clothes. If you want to get excited again, change your routine, change the way you look, get a new haircut, start a new sport. I'll tell you what I did just four months ago. I'm living in Santa Cruz and I started learning how to surf. Yes. I was like, I know. I was like, why can't, of course I can learn to do that now.

51:28And now I'm like, next year, I'm keep thinking of all the new things I want to learn. I'm like, I always wanted to be a really good artist. I was like, well, why don't I take a class? Oh, you can take it with me. I paint. Let's, we're going to do this. In fact, I think we'll take, well, let's take ourselves to Italy to do it. Why not? Okay. But that's even better. That's my point is that routine and, and, and grinding it in the same way. Can't do it. Can't do it because dopamine left when estrogen left. And so you've got to kind of coerce dopamine back. Yes. And that doesn't mean you go on your phone more.

52:04It means you go and start to put yourself in new environments that feel novel, that kind of wake you up and get that dopamine going again. Serotonin is not a hard one to get. You have serotonin receptor sites in your eyes so that when you see the midday light, your brilliant brain actually turns light into serotonin. I don't know. Do we get out and go for a walk in the middle of the day without our sunglasses on to be able to get the receptors in our eyes to be stimulated so it can turn into serotonin? we acetylcholine this is i found this from from the uh grandmother hypothesis one of the ways we stimulate acetylcholine is by storytelling well i don't know if you have this experience but my mom likes to tell the same story over and over and over again and acts like we never heard it do you have a mom like that no my dad because there's other issues but yes yeah absolutely But once I understood that going back into the memory bank to actually tell an old memory stimulates this acetylcholine, I started asking my parents different questions when they would tell the same story.

53:24I'd be like, you know, you've told me that before. What about this part of the story to try to get them to exercise releasing acetylcholine? So what I did with the girl gang is I was like, there are things we can do every single day to bring these neurochemicals back into our brain. We are not a victim of this once you understand the whole neurochemical landscape. Yeah. And I love that. And just for everyone, again, get your hands, get your paws on this book immediately. Like every woman needs to read this and men because there's so much science and so many different things. It's like a grab bag of you can be able to choose what you want and what really works for you.

54:03I want to talk about something else that was really validating for me was about noise sensitivity. So I'm here in New York City. I've lived in New York City most of my adult life. I love New York. I'm not going anywhere. I spend more time out of New York now because from an energetic nervous system perspective, I need a lot of resetting. But this started happening a few years ago and it was so strange for me where my level of audio sensitivity has gone off the charts where things that never used to bother me, I'm like, if I hear that sound one more time, like things are going to burn. Do you know what I mean?

54:36People are going to be singed. It's like Medusa, you will turn into ashes and just crumble. So what is it neurologically that's happening? Because I feel like that was in there. Is it tied to GABA? Yep. Yeah. It's part of it is we don't have enough GABA, you know, so because, you know, estrogen and progesterone stimulates GABA. So when those two start to decline, we don't, we don't have enough to calm us. But you know, with you can do breathing exercises and tricks to bring GABA back again, I map that out. But to your point, this is one that I haven't talked about. And I think is really interesting in my research, I found that a woman's nervous system becomes highly sensitive as she goes through menopause.

55:20And I actually have a theory on this. If we go back to the grandmother hypothesis, the protective men, and I know this sounds really, you know, sexist, but the men were off trying to get an animal kill. And so who was protecting the pregnant woman, the nursing woman, and the little children? That was the grandmother. And in that protection, she had to have a highly sensitive nervous system to be able to tell if there was a threat, like a tiger, that was coming to get the women and the children that she was protecting. So I actually think we are meant to be more intuitive. We are meant to, our nervous system is more sensitive.

56:06Like, I don't know if you've experienced this, but I can walk into a room now and be like, nope, this isn't right for me. A hundred percent. I can meet a person right off the bat. And I don't even want to have another word with that person past hello. There's some vibe there. I have become so sensitive and I found something called environmental psychology, where there actually is science showing that our environment has a tremendous impact on our nervous system. And for me, one of those things was my own home was that home where every kid hung out at. I loved that until I went through menopause.

56:49Yes. Then I was like, I can't take the mess. I can't take the noise. Why do I have grown men sleeping on my couch? Like, what is going on here? I'm laughing because literally I have outgrown so many parts of my previous life that I'm like, what? Like it's a WTF all over the place. Yeah. And the craving of more space, the needing of it. And I actually, I said this to Josh. It's so funny that you're saying this. It was maybe like a month or so ago. I said, Jim, I said, I need to put this on notice. Like this needs to go on the record that there are X, Y, and Z things that literally my nervous system, like I will crumble.

57:27It will – like this is not going to be able to last much longer. And I've started making moves and I'm like, oh my God, this is not me just being crazy or whatever. It was like I can feel. And I also think to build on your grandmother hypothesis, you know, one of the things that I've been really spending a lot of time thinking about and feeling into is I was like the intuition and consciousness upgrade that feels like it's happening right now for me personally. Yeah. It's like, oh, all of these new capabilities and awarenesses are being developed in this remodel. That's right. And that extra sensitivity and that extra level of wisdom and awareness feels really new and really important and like it needs to be protected.

58:13It needs to be sacred. It needs me to care for it in a way that I – previously it was like caring for the business, caring for everyone else, caring for a mission, blah, blah, blah. a lot. It's like, again, all that's been beautiful and great, but it's like done with that mission accomplished. It's off to here now. So, so thank you for, for saying that. Can I say one thing on that? I call them baby neurons. I started to think, okay, if the old grumpy neurons or the old people pleasing neurons or the old neurons that told me that I was worthy when I looked a certain way, when I was a certain size, if I achieved a certain thing, yeah, those neurons are going away.

58:53Yeah. Which is the disorientation for overachieving women. Yes. Is really real in that moment. But then these new baby neurons. And so I used to think of them like little babies. And when I walked into an environment and they're like, we don't like it here. I'm like, okay, okay. I hear you. I hear you. And so I really started looking at like, I started looking at people I hang out with. Yes. I looked at TV shows I was watching, books I was reading, what I was scrolling on social media. And I kept asking myself, do you want your baby neurons to take on those beliefs? I love that. I'm like, no, I really started to think of like, I had a neuron nursery going on.

59:39It's so fun. First of all, we could talk about so much more, but I'm going to say this. And again, I read a lot of books, y 'all. Y 'all know this is part of what I do for a living. And I only have people on the show that I love, believe in, think have something amazing to offer. And Mindy, like, this is why I wanted to do this so bad. Just so you guys know, Mindy and I were like, we really wanted to do this in person, but between both of our travel, we just, we couldn't make it happen. And I was like, I don't care. I want to do it virtually. Like I need women to get this book, especially when it launches because we're here in the holiday season when this is coming out.

1:00:12And I'm like, you know, if you have time on a plane or you can just steal away or you can be on a couch just reading for a little bit. Get this on your reading list because if it's anything like me, like when I was in a hotel room by myself, literally, Mindy, I need to say this to you, like I reread some parts just because you were like the voice that I've needed because I was like, God, I felt like a crazy person. And I'm fine being a crazy person. I've been a crazy person my whole life, but this has been a whole new flavor that I was like, I am very unfamiliar with who this is. I have a couple more questions before we wrap up and let you go.

1:00:46So if you could go back to the woman you were during breakdown, right, when the wheels were coming off, what would you tell her now? Well, she did exactly what she needed to do. And what I would tell her is you're the most important person in your life. Do whatever you need to do to get your feet back on the ground. and really take amazing care of you. Like, I don't know if you've ever heard of that havening where you hug yourself and you sort of rub your arms. Like, I started a routine where every night I would put on soft music and soft lights and I would have a date with myself. Yeah. And I would just start to like hug myself and be like, I love you.

1:01:37I'm here for you. And you get to do it your way now. And that continual is like a pep talk I gave myself every single day. So that, that I, I think the biggest thing I didn't see, right? Like the weeks after the fire, the brain was doing, oh my God, our life is over. Oh my God, I can't even function within my marriage anymore. And what I started to really do is bet on myself. and I go back to the, I'm not okay, but I will get myself okay, became my guiding light. And every day I just looked at it as an opportunity to come back home to me. I also surrounded myself with some amazing women that one of the things they did, greatest thing, these were women that were five, 10 years older than me that had been through the process.

1:02:31And there were some key phrases that they said to me. And one of them that really hit was a friend said, Mindy, this is your initiation. I can't tell you what to do, but what I can do is stand next to you and shine a light on your next step. And I can walk that next step with you, but you need to decide how you're going to initiate yourself into this new version of you. I love that. I love that so much. And I think I always get so grateful. I'm so happy to have friends. I count you as one of them. And folks in my life who are, you know, decades younger than me and decades older than me and in the same realm because it's like we need to talk with each other.

1:03:13We need to share that. And, you know, part of what's driven so much of my career is anytime I learn anything that I find to be enlightening, useful, helpful in any sense, I'm like, oh my God, you know, from Jersey. It's like, if I find the best gelato, I'm going to scream about it from a rooftop. You know, it's the best pizza. It's like, oh my God, I got to tell everyone. And that's why I really wanted to have this conversation. So another question for you is for the women listening right now who find themselves feeling flat or overwhelmed or just totally unlike themselves, what do you feel is one thing they could do today that would help?

1:03:50Hmm. The first thing is get to know yourself. It's time to get to know yourself and decide how you want to show up in life. And so when you go, I think one of the things we do is we outsource happiness. And so everything we're doing is looking outside of us for the answers. And menopause is the moment you get to look inside for the answers. That's where the answers are now. They're not outside. But what a lot of women do is that like me, they just go blank because they've never looked inside and really asked themselves, what is it that I want? How do I want to live? How do I want to show up? That's the opportunity.

1:04:31That's the gift of menopause is that's when you say, hey, I'm really, you know, I can't do the gaslighting. Well, getting to know yourself is not easy. Yes. Especially getting this new version, right? It's like the cancer might be new and they might be surprising and they might be disorienting and it might be like nothing you have ever recognized in yourself before. And I would say from my end that you don't have to rush any decisions. That's actually been a super saver for me. You know, there's a part of my personality that is so action-oriented and so like, let's get this done and let's make that happen.

1:05:13And I'm grateful. I don't think that part will ever go away, but I've saved myself from not making rash decisions. And when there's especially a new part of my personality or a new part of that answering of the question, what do I want? When it feels pretty radical or when it feels really different that I don't have to action on it, just to be honest, to sit with it, be with it over a little bit of time to see if it sticks. That question, just so in full transparency, I asked it multiple times a day for a month with no answer. And I was like, well, I used to eat at this time. I dress this way.

1:05:57Like, it's all the micro questions. It's not the big things. But once I nailed the micro things, the things I do every single day, then I started to get some momentum as to, oh, okay, I like it this way. Even work now, I've gone to the big things, you know, like how much work do I want to do? You know, like that's a real question I keep. And in what way do I want to do it? Like full transparency, I'm pretty tired with social media and all the highlight reels that everybody puts out. Like, I don't want to be a part of that. I want to be in a room with women going deep and talking about their own life journey and how they reinvented themselves.

1:06:38I'm way more interested in that than putting up a reel and having everybody go, you're amazing. I don't really care what everybody thinks of me anymore. Truth, truth, truth, truth. No, well, obviously, you know, I'm going to be texting you being like, so about our art classes in Italy. That's right. Okay, sign me up. But so, okay, so this is a good point because I think you would resonate with this. Yeah. The 45-year-old Mindy or the 35-year-old Mindy would have said, I love that, Marie, but I got to work. But the 56-year-old Mindy is like, let's get that on the calendar first for next year. Yes.

1:07:19So that we make that a priority. And this is what I really think women are doing in this journey is they're starting to reprioritize themselves. But they're sort of at a loss of how to do that. Yes. Which is why they're leaving marriages. they're leaving careers, they're in the disorientation, is because we don't have a culture that asks women, how do you want to be? We have a culture that says, you should be this way. And so from an early childhood, we've been told, be this, don't be that. And I think a lot about when we have, when a girl goes through puberty and all of a sudden starts pushing her family away, which is very, very common, we give her grace.

1:08:07We go, oh yeah, okay, she's going through puberty, she's getting more independent. But we don't do the same for menopausal women. We don't go, oh, she's just shedding old identities and she's just becoming a different person. Instead, we are saying, oh my God, all these women are leaving their marriages and all these women are all of a sudden doing a new behavior and we don't understand what that is. So we better put a patch on them, give them some antidepressants so they don't show up in their truest, most authentic self. Because what the world doesn't want is a bunch, a billion women, over a billion women are in menopause right now.

1:08:47Imagine if we all spoke our truth. We'd be living in a very different world. Amen, sister. I love you. Thank you so much. Thank you for writing this book. Thank you for sharing so honestly. I know especially, you know, for those of us who do things and you are leading companies or communities or you have any kind of public presence, oftentimes, again, it's been cultural conditioning that'd be like, no, I'm okay. I'm fine. I get everything under control. And it's like, no. That's why it's just – it's because it's bullshit. It's just – it's not true. So thank you for this book. For everyone listening, thank you for spending your time with us today.

1:09:24Again, there is so much science. There are so many practical tools. there is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful things that are actionable, simple. So many of it, it's free. So many of the things that you can do to support yourself is free. But this conversation was so healing. So Mindy, thank you for being with us. I really, I love you and I appreciate you. Yeah. Thank you. And again, I think each one of us that takes the mask off and puts it down and says, I'm not okay, but I'm going to be okay. Yes. Like that's the key part. I think each one of us that says that we free hundreds of women. And I really have a vision of like what a world would be like if menopause was this refinement and this ability for a woman to finally do it on her terms.

1:10:13And if what would happen if the whole culture cheered her on? What would that experience be like? starts right now. Exactly. It starts right now. Can I be honest with you? You are too nice and it's costing you money because every time you say yes to someone's quick question or tiny favor, you're saying no to that one big project that'll get you the income you want. Watch this free 12 minute class and I'm going to show you how to double your productivity and escape the three toxic lies that keep most nice people stuck. Go to marieforleo.com slash free class or scan the QR code on screen right now.