“Why Do I Feel Less Resilient?”
Dr. Cherise welcomes viewers, asks where they're tuning in from, and introduces the week's focus: why menopause can feel like reduced resilience. She briefly explains the scope (perimenopause to postmenopause) and orients listeners to the session.
She explains that menopause doesn't necessarily reduce resilience but increases the body's resource needs, making ordinary stressors harder to absorb. Examples include disrupted sleep, temperature regulation, mood, cognition, and how added midlife demands can reduce available margin.
Dr. Cherise uses a 10-unit capacity model to illustrate how sleep disruption, hot flashes, work, and family responsibilities quickly consume available capacity. She emphasizes that a lower stress threshold is not a moral failing and reframes 'threshold' versus 'character'.
She challenges the idea of toughness as resilience and encourages recognizing when we overrode needs previously. Practical steps include resting earlier, asking for help, adjusting timelines, setting boundaries, and being gentle with oneself; she also acknowledges when medical or mental-health support is needed.
She asks viewers to reflect on where they interpret capacity changes as character flaws, reminds them to seek professional care if needed, and shares how to submit questions or contact her before closing the session.
What's up, Kyrosphere? Hello, hello. Welcome to Thursday evening where we get together and talk all about the menopause mind. You know, we start these things different ways. One, let me know where you are in the world because it's really great to remind ourselves that we're not alone and that people all across the country and the world are navigating some of the same things, you can also rate your week on a scale of 1 to 10. One, it's been a rough week, been a really rough week. Or 10, all things considered, you have done as well as you possibly can with everything that you've been given.
You may notice something different about me. I have entered the world of glasses and, you know, I'm not gonna lie, it's an adjustment, but it's part of getting older, hormones. COVID, honestly, I think my eyes have been more on the computer in the last five years and it's probably been on my entire life. But that's not what we're here to talk about. This is your first time with me. I'm Dr. Cherise Johnson. I'm a licensed clinical mental health therapist and a mindfulness practitioner. But most importantly, I am a human.
I'm a human that is a part of the cadre family, and I absolutely believe that there are many ways to be well. So you are welcome in this space, however you are and however you're feeling. For today's focus, I want us to just kind of hone in on the question, like, why do I feel less resilient? I will often have this conversation with different women all across the spectrum of perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause. I'll use menopause as a generic term, but I'm really covering everything from perimenopause to postmenopause.
And a lot of times people don't realize that you don't actually enter menopause until the first day that you've gone a full year without having your cycle. So in case you're wondering where you are, that'll help anchor that. But we often feel like it's a season where we are less resilient. And it's not necessarily true that you are less resilient, but what we do find is during this season, your body is requiring more resources to do what it used to absorb quietly. So I will often tell women like what can be really difficult for us is that when we hit that menopause season, We can't get away with things the way that we used to.
If we eat too far outside of what our body needs, there's a cost. If we don't get enough sleep, there's a cost. If we don't manage our stress, there's a cost. And there's always been a cost, but this is a season where your body is like, we have a lot going on. Your brain is like, we have a lot going on. And we need different resources for you to continue to show up in where you are. All right? Here's where we are today. And I want you to think about this for yourself. Maybe you're in a situation where you used to feel like you used to be able to handle a lot.
But now when you go through a stressful week, you feel like people are getting on your nerves. Or if you have a few nights of bad sleep or a packed schedule or something unexpected, you may not have liked it, but you can recover. And now noise bothers you. People chewing bothers you. Changing plans can completely throw you off and it can be really frustrating. So I want to challenge the premise around resilience. What if you haven't lost your resilience? What if the amount of available capacity that you have to access it is what has changed?
All right, here's something I want you to consider. Please put in the chat whether you're listening in the moment or listening on replay. Have you noticed that things you used to recover from quickly now seem to stay with you longer? If that's you, can just be like, yes, it's me or not really. What are you noticing about how you are managing things and how you're able to recover from things? Okay, here's one thing that's really worth knowing. Resilience and capacity are not the same thing. So during the menopause transition, fluctuations can interact with the systems that are involved in sleep, in temperature regulation, in mood, in cognition, and the stress response.
That's a lot, right, happening all at the same time. And so then if you add just ordinary midlife demands and the nervous system may have less room for additional stress, that's going to change things. So imagine that you used to wake up with 10 available units of capacity at one point in your life. And life took six, and you still have 4 units of margin. Now maybe disrupted sleep already takes 2 or hot flashes takes one or brain fog takes one or work takes 3. Family responsibilities take two. So we haven't even gotten to the unexpected problem yet and you're already at 9 and then somebody sends a text.
The text isn't necessarily bigger, but The amount of margin you have left to manage it is smaller. So here's what I want you to keep in mind. Threshold is not character. A lower threshold for stress does not automatically mean I am weak, I know. It does not mean I am becoming emotionally unstable. It doesn't mean that you can't handle life anymore or that you need to toughen up. But what it might mean is that you may need to understand what's consuming your available capacity. Because a lot of times we are running through life and we're navigating things 1,000,000 mph and not always paying attention to like that is draining my capacity in a way that isn't necessarily helpful.
So I don't want us to measure resilience by how much we can tolerate before we collapse. I want us to measure it by how well we recognize that we need to help ourselves and return to a really healthy baseline. And here's the part we don't talk about. Some of us weren't actually resilient at all. We were highly practiced at overriding our needs. We just got away with it, but we weren't actually resilient. We called it resilience because we were able to keep going, but sometimes we were exhausted and kept going or overwhelmed and kept going or angry and kept going or disconnected and kept going.
Sometimes we needed help and kept going and those are not markers of resilience that loses its capacity over time and will really pull us in to burnout. So a lot of times we get into this season of menopause and we actually don't have really healthy strategies for supporting ourselves because our only strategy before was just to keep going until everybody else's needs were met and not to meet ours until we absolutely have to. But what we can do that's different is stop abandoning ourselves in the name of resilience, right?
It means being okay with, I need a quieter evening or I can't add another thing this week. I need more sleep than I used to. This relationship or this job is costing too much emotionally. Saying I need help, who's out there that's still struggling with asking? and receiving help, I'm going to be honest with myself or with all of you and out myself. I still struggle with that. I am great at giving help. I am still working on receiving help. I know I need it, you know, but I'm still working on receiving it.
So it's okay for us to all be working on something. Here's the thing. There are also going to be times that you genuinely do have a reduced amount of resilience because something medically is going on, something is navigating, you're navigating something with your mental health. So if you are in a season where you're noticing you're depressed or you're anxious or having some severe sleep disruption or menopausal, perimenopausal symptoms are so challenging. Thank you, Mel. I'm glad I'm not the only person that's still working on it.
Talk with a provider. I cannot stress enough the importance of not suffering in silence, going to the menopause society, finding a local provider that specializes in menopause if you're not getting the answers that you need from your primary care. All right, here's a question for you to sit with. You can decide if you answer this in the chat or if you reflect on this on your own later. Where am I interpreting a change in capacity a failure of character? That's a big question. Where are you interpreting a change in capacity as a failure of character?
So where have you kind of been looking at like I can't keep up with things the way I used to and you're internalizing that as not being enough or something's wrong? Maybe you've been calling yourself lazy? or too sensitive or irritable. Maybe you're feeling unmitivated. I'm gonna, again, I'm gonna be honest. I had that moment recently where I just had a lot to do. And I do. I feel like 5, 6, seven years ago, I would have just plowed through it. There would have been a cost. And now I find myself in a season where I'm like, I can't.
I know my threshold and I know that if I supersede that threshold, that there will be days of recovery that will be required. And so that is forcing me to have different parameters. It's forcing me to change the expectations that I have of myself. It is forcing me to give myself more time to complete things. And I'm having to be okay with, I know I said I was going to get that to you on Monday. I'm going to ask for your grace and let's move that until Wednesday because sometimes you just don't have it in you.
Okay? Resilience doesn't have to mean that we can take on more. Sometimes resilience sounds like I noticed sooner, I rested earlier, I asked for help. I changed the plan, I stopped overriding myself, or you recovered without shaming yourself for needing that recovery. All right. So as you move through the week and really think about kind of where you are in your journey with your body, with your brain, because menopause is a full body neurobiological experience, I just want you to really work on how you're talking to yourself and really recognizing that capacity and resilience are two different things.
If you feel like you're hitting a moment and your capacity just isn't there, it is okay. All is not lost. Pivot. make an adjustment, move things around, give yourself what you need, and then trust that your body will recover, your brain will reboot, and you will restore some of that capacity so that you can keep going. But most of all, please be gentle with yourself during this season and then come back so we can keep the conversation going. I have a whole slew of questions that different people have given me around the menopause mind.
com. Have A phenomenal night, and I'll see you soon.
