While there are plenty of web articles and videos
proclaiming the glories of being a woman over fifty, many of us belonging to
that demographic know that “glorious” is the last way we’d describe the years
following menopause. Most women experience some challenges for a certain period
of time; many experience many challenges, both physical and mental. And that’s
regardless of how healthy our lifestyle is.
I wrote this series to offer tips on how you might alleviate
those challenges, because I’ve gone through many and understand how miserable
this period of life can be. If you have not yet seen my other three articles in
the series, be sure to read over those, as well.
Click here to read the very first, and most important, tip.
Click here to read tips two through four.
Click here to read tips five, six and seven.
And remember that these articles are merely intended to
inform and encourage, not to prescribe treatment or make any guarantees.
Tip #8: Nourish
your emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs.
Periods of low mood will come, even if you’re not sensitive
to the atmospheric changes as I discussed in the previous article, and there’s
no better way to ameliorate the impact of those moods than to regularly engage
in practices to uplift your mind and spirit when you’re feeling well. Just as
you can decrease the chances of getting laid out by a virus by eating a healthy
diet and staying hydrated when you’re not sick, you can prevent a bad mood from
sending you into a downward spiral by nourishing the mental and spiritual side
of yourself when you’re in a good mood.
To that end, there are a variety of simple activities that
anyone can engage in. The most important is one you’ve heard a million times
before, but if you’re like a lot of women, you need to hear it a million and
one times for it to sink in:
**Take time for
yourself.
Unless you have full custody of grandchildren, or are a
foster parent, your children are either teenagers or adults. Take advantage of
that freedom. Don’t let your job usurp the time that you used to have to focus
on your children. In fifteen-minute or thirty-minute bites, carve out a total
of thirty to sixty minutes a day when you are doing something by yourself, with
no other goal other than to relax. Hobby time and meditation time are separate;
with this time, you drink a cup of hot tea and indulge in a novel. You light a
few candles, put on some relaxing music, and soak in a warm bath. You lie down
and take a nap. You put on some classical music and lie down. You take a slow
stroll around a park or flower garden. You sit outside, back to the sun, and
tune into the sounds of nature. You do some gentle stretches to the sound of
relaxing music.
When I say, “take time to yourself,” I exclude any
screen-related activity. They are stimulating, not relaxing, even if all you’re
doing is staring at a video of ducks swimming on a pond. If you’re thinking,
“But if I spend thirty minutes a day doing nothing, when will I have time to
scroll through social media? I won’t have as much time for my Netflix binge?”
Exactly. And you will be the less stressed and the happier
for it.
Following are other ideas on how to keep your soul and
spirit nourished. You will find nothing original there, but perhaps you will be
encouraged to begin a new activity or resume one that you’ve dropped simply by
seeing it.
**Practice awareness.
This relaxation exercise helps you to stay in the moment
more often when you’re going about your day. Some might call what I’m about to
describe, “meditation,” but as there are various ways of meditating, I believe
it more precise to name it as I have.
You start by sitting in a comfortable chair. Choose the
standard seated position, with both feet on the floor, so you don’t risk
becoming distracted with cramped muscles or developing pins and needles in your
feet. Then, with your eyes open, choose one thing in the room to focus on.
Study how it looks, its color, its texture, its size, any details that might
make it special or decorative or unique. If you’re close enough, you can touch
it or hold it and get a sense of how it feels. As you do this, you will have
random thoughts that probably have nothing to do with the object come up. When
they do, take a mental step away from them and double down on your focus.
After doing this for a minute or two, close your eyes and
focus on the non-visual sensations around you. You might focus on one of your
fingers, hands, or feet. Picture it with your mind’s eye, and try to remember
its details. Aside from that, think about what you can smell or hear in the
moment. Let the various sensations engulf you, and whenever a stray thought about either the past or the future (regret, fear, worry) pops up, mentally step away from
it and let it pass by.
Learning to be aware in every moment helps keep you
grounded, thus preventing anxiety and depression. It’s scientifically proven to
increase serotonin levels, producing feelings of happiness. Full disclosure:
I’m not anywhere near being aware every single moment. However, just getting in
the habit of doing so for a few minutes every hour has done a lot for my mental
well-being.
Sorry, didn’t mean to get quite so verbose on that
soul-spirit nourishment idea. Here are a few more.
- Make time to pray every day.
- Speak to a therapist; or, if that’s out of your budget,
speak to a friend who’s an empathetic listener a few times a month.
- Stay connected to the people who matter to you.
- Read inspirational books and blogs; watch inspirational
videos.
- Learn to cast down negative thoughts and replace them with
positive thoughts. See my free book, So Long, Stress! for more
detail.
- Avoid consuming the news, in every format. There’s a reason
that the apostle Paul commanded us to lead quiet lives and to mind our own business.
- Establish a calming morning routine to start the day.
Perhaps it’s a cup of herbal tea while you read edifying literature or listen
to classical music. Perhaps it’s a stroll around the block, during which you
practice awareness. Maybe you take a shower, write in your journal, and do some
gentle stretching. Unless you’re fostering young children, one of the benefits
of hitting age fifty is that you have a lot more flexibility as to how you
begin your day. Harness that flexibility to the benefit of your psychological
and spiritual life.
- Walk away from toxic relationships.
- Don’t allow yourself to be overstimulated. This might mean
saying “no” to some of your social invitations, or disciplining yourself to
stop watching horror flicks or reading psychological thrillers.
- Mentally repeat affirmations throughout the day.
The above list is far from comprehensive. Try some of those
ideas, and/or use them as a springboard to come up with your own methods that
will help you to keep a positive perspective on life.
Tip #9: Chat with other menopausal women.
It’s one thing to know about the various menopausal symptoms
and to get vague suggestions as to how to alleviate them. It’s another to
communicate with women who are experiencing the same thing you are.
Back when I was worrying over every new weird thing that
cropped up in my body, I learned to stop clicking on generic health sites.
Instead, I would add “menopause forums” into whatever term I was searching.
Within minutes, I would find that there have been women my age suffering much
more than I ever did (diet and supplements help, ladies!). More importantly, I
would stop feeling as though I were the only person on earth going through the
physical challenge.
Join a Facebook group for post-menopausal women. Or a
menopause thread on Reddit. Or an old-fashioned forum, if there’s one around
that’s still active. Subscribe to YouTube channels run by post-menopausal
women, and connect with the other women sharing their experiences in the
comment section. Besides the first and last tip in this series of articles for
improving your post-menopausal life, this is probably the one that will help
you the most.
Tip #10: Don’t beat yourself up.
Despite your best efforts, there will be days when you
indulge in unhealthy comfort food, binge on Hallmark romance movies, lounge
around in the house in your sweats or P.J.s feeling aimless, get upset over
nothing, sleep in for an ungodly amount of time – and this may last for days on
end.
But it won’t last forever, and when you finally pull out of
it, you will be tempted to beat yourself up over all the time you wasted, the regression
you made with your health goals, the spouting of hurtful words you didn’t
really mean, and so on.
Don’t.
In my experience, the latter years of perimenopause and the
early years of menopause can be the most challenging time of a woman’s life, and
is, at the very least, one of the most challenging times. Even with HRT, proper
diet, and stress-reduction rituals, you can’t always control what your body
does regarding hormone production and the aging process, and sometimes the best
you can do – and I mean this with all the gravity I can put into the written
word – is not take your own life.
Of course, if your mental state has sunken that low, you
should immediately seek help. But sometimes, just getting out of bed and going
through the necessary motions to survive the day is the best you can do. And
when that happens, laud yourself for having done the bare necessities, rather
than punish yourself for not having done more. Remind yourself that what you’re
experiencing now is only temporary. This, too, shall pass. And however cliché
it may sound, tomorrow is another day. A day to start fresh.
On those days when everything looks brighter and you feel
you’ve reached a summit, take advantage of it. Get something crossed off your
bucket list. Get ahead of yourself in your new online business. Reach out to a
friend or family member and make concrete plans to visit. Immerse yourself in
your hobbies.
Yes, life after fifty can be great. But not always. I hope
that, through this series, you now have tools that will help more days be
closer to great than otherwise would have been.
