Fear Free Childbirth Podcast with Alexia Leachman

In today’s episode, I am joined by Heather to dive into her incredible journey from a fear-filled first birth to two positive and empowering experiences.

Heather shares her deep emotional work in overcoming the negative feelings from her traumatic first birth and the steps she took to prepare herself mentally and emotionally for her second pregnancy.

From therapy to Emotion Code, to Head Trash Clearance and hypnobirthing, Heather explores the various tools she used to transform her mindset and approach childbirth with a newfound sense of confidence.

Traumatic First Birth Experience:

Heather opens up about her initial birth experience, which left her feeling fearful and exhausted. She realised that her emotional baggage and negative energy had a significant impact on her birth. This realisation became the catalyst for her transformative journey towards healing and empowerment.

Emotional Work and Preparation for Second Birth:

Heather undertook various methods to prepare for her second birth, including therapy, Emotion Code, Head Trash Clearance, and hypnobirthing. By clearing trapped emotions and healing herself emotionally, she was able to let go of fear and create a positive birthing environment.

Tuning In and Connecting with Herself:

Throughout her pregnancy, Heather focused on self-care and cultivating her feminine energy. She discovered the power of connecting with her body through movements such as birth dance, a Middle Eastern practice that strengthens muscles and centres the mind. This allowed her to embrace her pregnancy and tap into her innate strength as a woman.

Mindset Shift and Empowering Second Birth:

Heather’s mindset shift played a crucial role in her second birth experience. She approached the process with confidence, uninhibited by fear, and embraced the sensations as a natural part of birth. She utilised the tools she had acquired and received invaluable support from her doula, ultimately delivering her baby in a positive and empowering way.

Postpartum Support and Integration:

Heather talks about the importance of postpartum support and she recognised that her healing journey continued beyond the birth. With the love and guidance of her husband and parents, she navigated the chaotic postpartum period, and was able to balance it along with moving house and doing renovations. Through out all this, she realised she wanted to help to empower women and helping them realise the beauty and potential of birth, just as she had experienced.

Heather’s inspiring journey is a wonderful tale that shows us quite plainly that with the right tools, support, and a positive mindset, it is possible to have a birth experience that is both beautiful and empowering.

Tune in to this episode and discover the techniques and mindset shifts that enabled Heather to go from a place of trauma and fear to being able to embrace the journey of birth with strength and empowerment.

Birth has the potential to be a transformative and life-changing experience, and by preparing emotionally and mentally, you can create the empowering birth experience you want.

During this episode, the following resources were mentioned:

1. Therapy: Heather sought the support of a therapist to work through the trauma of her first birth experience and prepare emotionally for her second birth. Therapy is a valuable resource for processing emotions, overcoming fears, and building a positive mindset for childbirth.

2. Emotion Code: Heather used the Emotion Code as a tool to release trapped emotions and create a more balanced emotional state. This resource helps individuals clear emotional baggage and negative energy, promoting a sense of well-being and empowerment during pregnancy and birth.

3. Head Trash Clearance: This is the DIY self-healing method I developed to overcome my tokophobia and that I share in both my books; Fearless Birthing and Clear Your Head Trash. I also have created plenty of self-healing products to help you on your healing journey which you can find in my Fear Free Childbirth shop and my Clear Your Head Trash shop.

4. Hypnobirthing: Heather adopted hypnobirthing techniques as part of her preparation for childbirth. Hypnobirthing involves practicing relaxation, visualisation, and self-hypnosis to reduce fear and anxiety, and promote a positive and calm birth experience.

5. Birth dance: Heather practiced birth dance, which involves using Middle Eastern moves to strengthen muscles and create a sense of grounding and connection with the body. This resource helped Heather stay active and centered during her pregnancy, promoting a positive mindset for birth.

6. Doula support: Heather hired a doula to provide continuous emotional and physical support during labor and birth. A doula is a valuable resource for offering guidance, comfort, and advocacy, enhancing the birthing person’s confidence and well-being.

7. Positive birth experiences podcast: Heather listened to a podcast that shared positive birth stories, which inspired and uplifted her mindset toward childbirth. Listening to positive birth experiences can be a valuable resource for shaping a positive mindset and building confidence for one’s own birth journey.

8. Birth course: Heather took a birth course during her second trimester to further educate herself on positive birth experiences. A birth course is a resource for learning about childbirth, coping techniques, and empowerment, providing valuable knowledge and preparation for the birthing person and their partner.

9. Lactation consultant: After giving birth, Heather received support from a lactation consultant to ensure successful breastfeeding. A lactation consultant is a valuable resource for providing guidance, troubleshooting breastfeeding challenges, and promoting a positive breastfeeding experience for the mother and baby.

Heather, originally from a small town in New York, ventured out to Utah for college. During a summer sales job in Texas, she crossed paths with her future husband, who was also pursuing his education. Both Heather and her husband are members of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and hold strong spiritual beliefs. Growing up in a culture that emphasized the importance of having a family, Heather had always been aware of the challenges of parenthood. However, as she embarked on her journey, she discovered how deeply these negative aspects had affected her mindset. She obtained a degree in food science and eventually settled in Salt Lake City, finding both a place to rent and a job in her field.

Heather is a life-long dancer and a university graduate with a Food Science degree. As a natural-birth mama and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, she strongly believes in God’s divine design of a woman’s journey.

During her first childbirth experience, Heather encountered physical smoothness but was emotionally traumatised. Despite taking a Hypnobirthing course, she realised the impact of unhealed emotional baggage on the birthing process. This realisation prompted her to embark on extensive research and emotional healing to prepare for a positive second birth.

Heather’s second birth proved to be an incredibly empowering and positive experience, transforming her life in profound ways. Inspired by her journey, she started sharing her insights with other women, witnessing their positive transformations as well.

Specialising in helping women navigate the various facets of womanhood, from monthly cycles to fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood, Heather focuses on moving beyond western cultural conditioning, releasing inhibiting emotions, and fostering a deep connection with their bodies. Her coaching approach combines thought-work with emotional healing and practical lifestyle support.

Covering a range of topics such as period pain, fertility, discomfort in pregnancy, positive birth preparation, fulfillment in motherhood, weight-loss journeys, chronic pain, and sexual healing, Heather’s unique coaching style draws from her diverse experiences at university, her involvement in dance and music, her knowledge of food and nutrition, her spirituality and meditation practices, and her use of emotional release tools, including Non Personal Awareness (NPA). Clients working with Heather find support, encouragement, and excitement in their personal journeys.

Be sure to check Heather’s Rising Woman brand and follow her inspirational journey on Instagram.

00:00 Heather’s traumatic birth experience and emotional recovery.

In this episode, I sit down with the inspirational Celeste to delve deep into her transformative journey of overcoming fears and phobias related to childbirth and pregnancy. Throughout the episode, Celeste candidly shares her profound and life-altering experiences, providing invaluable insights for anyone navigating similar challenges.

This episode is for you if you want to have a peep under the bonnet to better understand what it looks like EXACTLY to clear your head trash (tokophobia, anxiety or indeed anything else) using Head Trash Clearance.

We get down to brass tacks and leave no stone unturned.

At the heart of Celeste’s journey is her struggle with tokophobia, a deep-seated fear of childbirth and pregnancy that extended beyond the realm of motherhood, infiltrating her daily life and relationships.

What unfolds in this episode is her amazing journey of self-discovery, empowerment, and healing, as Celeste takes us through her journey of clearing the fears and anxieties that were contributing to her tokophobia and anxiety.

Through a very candid conversation, Celeste shares how she initially grappled with her fear, with symptoms ranging from anxiety attacks triggered by the mere thought of pregnancy to physical manifestations of tingling in her arms and legs, burping, and spontaneous crying during her shifting process.

Over the span of 6-7 transformative months, she experiences a significant shift, moving from a space of anxiety and fear to a newfound sense of peace and calm. Her journey of clearing head trash and addressing deep-seated fears takes her on a path of self-realization, lending her the clarity and insight needed to navigate her fears and emerge stronger on the other side.

It’s incredible to see where Celeste is today, and I hope that her journey inspires you on your healing journey.

The following resources were instrumental in Celeste’s journey of tackling her fears and phobias related to childbirth and pregnancy.

If you’re interested in learning more about these resources, you can find them through the Fear Free Childbirth podcast and on this website.

Celeste Rollins is from East Tennessee in the US. This past year, she put the dots together and learned her lifelong fears concerning pregnancy and childbirth translated to an actual phobia (Tokophobia). Not one to sit passively when introspective growth is needed, she sent herself on a quest for knowledge, answers, and solutions. Eventually her journey led her to Alexia Leachman’s podcasts, the Head Trash Clearance Method, and the Tokophobia Support Program — all of which were game changers for her.

00:00 “DIY solution to mental and emotional challenges.”

In today’s episode, I have a thought-provoking conversation with Elizabeth Tidwell, a menstrual cycle coach, as she shares her journey of healing and embracing the power of her menstrual cycle.

I wanted to talk about periods because even though they’re not front and centre of the pregnancy and birth experience – they are! We obsess over when they stop – are we pregnant??? – and then we obsess over when they start again. They are a HUGE part of this.

And, more importantly, I wanted to talk about them because I don’t think that we appreciate our periods much. There’s lots of negativity around them and so I wanted to flip the script and help you to LOVE your period and tap into their power.

Here are some of the things you can hear as part of this conversation:

Resolving Childhood Trauma:

Elizabeth opens up about her personal experience with childhood trauma and how it impacted her menstrual cycle. Through healing this trauma, she discovered that it had a profound effect not only on her cycle but on various aspects of her life. Elizabeth believes that addressing trauma is crucial to breaking free from negative cycles and embracing our menstrual cycles as sources of strength and wisdom.

Menarche Kits and Breaking the Cycle of Shame:

I love that Elizabeth has created menarche kits and creates resources for us to discuss periods with openly. Elizabeth emphasises the importance of releasing the shame and trauma surrounding puberty for the next generation. By providing education and support during this transformative phase, we can set the foundation for young girls to navigate their menstrual cycles with confidence and self-acceptance.

The Connection Between the Lunar Cycle and Menstrual Cycle:

Is this a myth? Maybe. We discuss the connection between the lunar cycle and the menstrual cycle. While there are different viewpoints on this connection, Elizabeth points out that light-sensitive hormones might have caused women to sync up with the moon cycle in the past. However, modern lifestyles with artificial light can disrupt hormonal rhythms. Despite the scientific explanation, Elizabeth emphasises the energetic significance of aligning with the moon cycle, giving it a sense of specialness.

Understanding Menstrual Cycle Awareness:

Elizabeth talks us through the concept of menstrual cycle awareness, which involves being conscious of the different phases of our cycle and how they impact our daily experiences. I struggle with this big time! Hormonal fluctuations throughout the cycle lead to varying emotions and reactions. Understanding this awareness can enhance communication, help avoid conflicts, and enable us to have a better understanding of our bodies. And for those entering perimenopause – very interesting!

Healing Trauma and Its Impact on Menstrual Health:

Trauma, whether big or small, can have a profound impact on our menstrual cycles. Elizabeth tells us how trauma can manifest in fears and phobias related to pregnancy and birth, body image issues, and fears of losing control. By healing from trauma, we can potentially resolve related physical and emotional issues, leading to a better relationship with our bodies and our cycles.

Fertility Awareness and Birth Control:

Elizabeth shares insights into fertility awareness and birth control. She suggests considering fertility biomarkers rather than relying solely on apps and algorithms. We know that stress and cortisol levels can impact fertility, so stressing about trying to conceive is probably going to hinder fertility. This is why she emphasises the importance of self-care during menstruation so that we can shift our we feel and honour our bodies.

I hope that listening to Elizabeth as she takes us on her transformative journey of embracing and loving her menstrual cycle can help you to learn to LOVE your periods. By addressing trauma, understanding our cycles, and cultivating self-awareness, we can unlock the immense power and wisdom that our bodies hold, and help our daughters to do the same.

Here are some additional resources mentioned during the podcast conversation:

1. Book: “Wild Power” – This book transformed Elizabeth’s perspective on periods and is recommended for anyone looking to embrace and love their menstrual cycle.

2. Club Red – This is Elizabeth’s company that offers period self-care subscription boxes, menarche kits, workshops, and menstrual cycle coaching. You can find more information on their website.

Elizabeth is a woman who, four years ago, left the religious community she grew up in due to the traumatic messaging she received about her identity and femininity. After giving birth to a baby girl, Elizabeth realised she wanted her daughter’s female experience to be different from the societal shame surrounding female bodies and menstruation. She overheard a friend recommending a book on menstrual cycles, which piqued her interest. Despite not having her period due to an IUD inserted by her OB after giving birth, Elizabeth started to notice that she was missing something natural in her life. Intrigued by the idea of living by cycles and being connected to nature, she began exploring this concept further.

Elizabeth Tidwell is a holistic menstrual cycle coach who helps women and menstruators learn vital body literacy and facilitates a deeper relationship between menstruators and their cycles, bodies, and whole selves. She is a graduate of Red School’s Menstruality Leadership Program and Lisa de Jong’s Menstrual Cycle Coaching & Facilitation Professional Training. As a former university educator, Elizabeth is passionate about bringing menstrual cycle awareness to both her local community through live events and the broader international community through individual client work, virtual workshops, and group coaching programs. She prioritizes nervous system regulation and personal agency, empowering her clients in a trauma-informed environment. She’s also a mom and the founder of My Club Red, a hormone-friendly period self-care subscription box designed to transform menstruators’ periods into a time of self-nurture, radical rest, and self-connecting ritual.

Connect with her:

02:53 Left religious community, questioned female identity, embraced cycles.

In this episode, we dive into a powerful and inspiring conversation with my guest, Steph Bennet, as she shares her experience of choosing to solo parent.

Steph’s story is a testament to the strength and resilience of women who navigate both career success and motherhood on their own terms. Join us as we explore the challenges, triumphs, and joys of Steph’s unique journey into motherhood.

Steph made the decision to prioritise a career that allowed her to have control over her work without judgment. She is a strong advocate for not compromising but optimising her life to create a balanced and fear-free environment for herself and her daughter. As a managing director, Steph initially faced challenges in balancing work and parenting, but she gradually found strategies to create flexibility and adapt to hybrid and flexible working arrangements. Her story highlights the ongoing need for better support and understanding in the workplace for working mothers.

Here are some of the things we chatted about…

The Challenges of Being a Solo Parent: Steph’s journey began with a clear vision of becoming a mother, even if she couldn’t find a partner. She discusses her decision to explore single parenthood and the concerns she had about the physical and emotional aspects of raising a child on her own.

Choosing the Path of Insemination: Steph underwent tests at a fertility clinic and discovered that IVF was not suitable for her. She decided to pursue IUI, or intrauterine insemination, as an alternative. She shares her experience of choosing a sperm donor from an online catalog based on various factors, including health information and personality traits.

Balancing Work and Motherhood: Steph candidly discusses the challenges and rewards of being a working mother. She emphasises the importance of setting boundaries and not overworking, while also acknowledging the lack of respect and flexibility that many working parents face in the workplace.

French vs. British Parenting Styles: Steph and I compare parenting styles in France and the UK. They explore the benefits of allowing children to be independent and figure things out on their own, as well as the challenges of French school holidays for working parents.

The Journey of Conscious Parenting: Steph highlights the importance of allowing children to make their own decisions and learn from their own mistakes. She shares her desire to give her daughter the freedom to choose her own interests and create her own path in life.

Steph candidly addresses these key questions shaping her solo parenting journey:

Steph’s story of choosing to solo parent is an incredible testament to the power of following one’s dreams and embracing the possibilities of motherhood. Her journey highlights the need for increased support for working mothers in the workplace and challenges conventional norms surrounding parenting and work-life balance.

During this episode, the following resources were mentioned:

Stephanie is a marketing and social media consultant with twenty years of experience and has worked for some incredible brands during that time including Nespresso, Lavazza, Pernod Ricard, Google, Gatwick Airport, RSPCA, Harrods, Hotels.com, and Great Ormond Street Hospital. Now a freelance consultant she provides marketing and social media services, website development, produces podcasts, is a mentor, trainer and business development strategist. She’s also launched a parenting podcast, ‘For the Love of Kids’ to share her experiences and those of others; a passion project inspired by her pursuit of becoming a solo parent and raising a toddler. Steph is never one to shy away from following her instincts. She believes in never settling for anything less than butterflies and has found real purpose in working on the things that really matter to her in life.

In 2009, Steph, a woman in her late twenties, began to feel out of sorts and decided to visit the doctors. After undergoing blood tests and scans, she made an unexpected discovery – she had a low-grade, benign brain tumor. While her doctors assured her it could be monitored with regular scans, they cautioned her to be vigilant for major symptoms such as seizures. This revelation marked the starting point of Steph’s journey.

Connect with her: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniejanebennett/

00:31 Solo parenting: working mother’s journey and challenges.

Birth is a profound and transformative experience, but unfortunately, conflicts and disagreements within the birth space can sometimes overshadow the joy and empowerment that should be at the forefront.

In this episode of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast, Jenny Koslow, a perinatal educator with four decades of experience, sheds light on the issues of conflict and tension within the birth world.

Understanding the Birth Space:

Jenny begins by sharing her wealth of knowledge and stories gathered from birth workers around the globe. She highlights the conflicting views and struggles that exist between different professions within the birth world, such as midwives, lactation consultants, and doulas. These conflicts often arise from differing ideologies stemming from the biomedical and naturalistic sides of childbirth. From home births to highly medicalized hospital births, the spectrum of choices and opinions can be quite divisive.

The Influence of Birth Settings:

The conversation then delves into the impact of various birth settings. Jenny discusses how midwives typically handle vaginal births with minimal intervention, but the c-section rates in private clinics in many countries are unacceptably high. Public hospitals, where most people give birth, often face issues with support and the need for less judgment towards healthcare providers working in these systems. There is also a sense of resentment among professionals like midwives, obstetrical nurses, and doulas, especially in countries like Spain and other Latin American nations.

Examining the Roles of Birth Workers:

Jenny addresses the challenges within the doula movement, including the need for more professional training and regulation. While doulas carry immense emotional weight, they may not bear the same level of medical responsibility as healthcare providers. This discrepancy, coupled with differences in income and work dynamics, can sometimes lead to tension and dissatisfaction among birth workers.

Finding Common Ground:

Despite these conflicts, Jenny emphasises the importance of recognising the positive work being done by individuals in the system and avoiding generalisations. She highlights positive initiatives in different countries, demonstrating that change can come from a combination of different approaches rather than extreme views. The conversation explores the crucial need for effective communication, formation of personal relationships, and acknowledgement of the contributions made by individuals across the birth spectrum.

Promoting Unity in the Birth Space:

Positive changes often stem from top-down leadership but acknowledges that frontline caregivers need more support. The conversation explores the imbalances in authority, challenges faced by professionals within institutionalized childbirth, and the importance of respect and recognition. The episode also delves into the role of birth education, the impact of the internet on preparation, and the different priorities individuals have when it comes to their birthing experience.

Jenny tackles these burning questions:

By exploring the perspectives of various birth professionals and delving into the need for unity, better training, and improved communication, this episode serves as a catalyst for positive change in the birthing industry.

Jenny Kozlow is a highly experienced perinatal educator with a passion for traveling and listening to people’s stories. Over her 40-year career, she has accumulated hundreds of stories from birth workers such as OB GYNs, doulas, midwives, obstetrical nurses, and lactation consultants from various countries around the world. Jenny recognized the value of these stories in promoting better understanding and collaboration within the field.

She discovered that many stories centered around the lack of respect and feeling of invisibility experienced by the gestational family, and she aimed to address this imbalance. By sharing these stories, Jenny hopes to shed light on the perspectives of others and foster a more inclusive and collaborative approach in the birth community.

Connect with her:

02:40 Long working hours create stress, disrespect. Toxicity and conflict in medical environments. Need for collaboration to support families.

In this episode, I have an incredible story of transformation to share with you. My guest, Jessica, was once plagued with fear when it came to pregnancy and childbirth. However, she conquered her fears and had a positive birth experience that inspired her to make a bold career change.

Jessica talks about her journey from fear to becoming a midwife. It’s a remarkable turnaround that showcases the power of overcoming our deepest fears and embracing new paths in life.

But before we delve into Jessica’s inspiring story, I want to share with you a tale that highlights what can happen if we leave our pregnancy and birth fears unchecked.

Learn about the fears commonly faced by women during pregnancy, birth, and even those struggling with tokophobia. While some may assume these fears revolve around pain and tearing, they often stem from deeper conflicts and anxieties. These fears include the fear of losing control, feeling trapped or lacking choices, making the wrong decisions, and feeling weak or vulnerable.

These fears are not exclusive to pregnancy and birth. They can manifest in various areas of our lives, such as feeling out of control at home or work, or even a loss of control over our own bodies. It’s crucial to recognise and address these fears because they tend to permeate other aspects of our lives, affecting our overall well-being and hindering our personal growth.

To illustrate this point, I recount a powerful story of a radio show presenter who, like me, experienced tokophobia. Following the loss of her baby and her subsequent aversion to getting pregnant again, she discovered that this fear had affected multiple areas of her life without her realising it. Once she identified and faced her fear head-on, she realised how it had suppressed her ability to birth anything significant in her business and personal development. The transformation she experienced after releasing this fear was nothing short of astounding.

So, if you’re currently grappling with fears surrounding pregnancy, birth, or any other areas in life, listen closely to Jessica’s remarkable journey. Her story is a testament to the incredible power we possess within ourselves to rewrite our narratives and conquer our deepest fears. Get ready to be inspired, empowered, and discover a fearless mindset with Fear Free Childbirth.

In this episode, we delved into a wide array of thought-provoking questions with Jessica:

During the episode, the following resources were mentioned:

Jessica Mengel was fearful when she was facing pregnancy and birth. She conquered her fears and had a positive birth experience. This transformative experience motivated Jessica to change careers and become a midwife. Her passion for helping others navigate the fear surrounding childbirth led her to pursue a new path in supporting women during one of the most crucial periods of their lives. Jessica’s story showcases the power of overcoming fear and how it can lead to remarkable personal growth and professional transformation.

00:00:33 Jessica overcomes birth fears and becomes midwife.

In this episode, my special guest is Emma Moon, a cosmic fertility guide and a spirit baby medium.

Emma’s unique background includes a Bachelor of Science in nursing and expertise as an integrative health practitioner. She blends both science and spirituality in her work, supporting women through their fertility journey, pregnancy, and conscious birth. Emma’s approach involves connecting with the energy and spirit of her clients, helping them navigate emotional and spiritual blocks that may affect their fertility. Through a combination of nutrition, lifestyle changes, and intuitive guidance, she provides comprehensive support for women and couples.

In this episode, we delved into a wide array of thought-provoking questions with Emma.

These resources contribute to a holistic approach to fertility and pregnancy, incorporating both scientific and spiritual perspectives.

1. Integrative Health and Nutrition Program – The program Emma attended to specialise in women’s health and hormones.

2. Nutrition, lifestyle, herbs, and supplements – Strategies used by Emma to support fertility and overall health.

3.Energetic therapies – A component of Emma’s comprehensive fertility support.

4. Spirit Baby Medium – Emma’s ability to connect with and advocate for spirit babies.

5. Conscious Pregnancy – A concept discussed in the episode.

6. Conscious Conception – The idea of intentionally creating a pregnancy.

7. Conscious Birth – Approaching birth with awareness and intention.

8. Science and spirituality – The blending of scientific and spiritual perspectives in fertility support.

9. Energy system – The recognition of the body’s energetic aspect in fertility.

10. Fertility challenges – A term used instead of infertility to focus on the potential for healing.

11. Spirit team – Spiritual guides and helpers that support individuals.

12. Chakra systems – Energetic centres in the body that may affect fertility.

Meet Emma Moon, a passionate advocate and practitioner dedicated to holistic reproductive health and the magic of cosmic fertility. Emma’s unique approach blends science, intuition, and spirituality to provide comprehensive support for hormone balancing, conscious conception, fertility, and spirit baby journeys.

Emma Moon fosters a deep connection with your body, leveraging menstrual cycles for wellness. As a Spirit Baby Medium, she guides parents-to-be with fertility science and intuition. Her work empowers conscious conception and holistic reproductive wellness.

Connect with her: https://www.emma-moon.com/, https://www.instagram.com/cosmicallynourished/

00:00:32 Emma Moon is a cosmic fertility guide and spirit baby medium, supporting communication with babies during pregnancy.

Welcome back to Fear Free Childbirth! In today’s episode, I want to explore how we can measure healing progress when we’re undertaking personal development work, or healing. And in doing so I’d like to share a tool that I think can help you with this called the Map of Consciousness.

Have you ever invested time and energy into courses, therapy or retreats to bring about a change in how you feel, only to wonder if they’re really making a difference?

We all have, right?

Today, I want share a powerful tool that you can use to measure the effectiveness of these activities in overcoming fear, anxiety, and finding calm and peace.

Once I discovered this method of measuring healing progress I decided to revisit my own healing journey around overcoming tokophobia, and my pregnancy fears and anxieties; I wanted to see what it would tell me.

And it’s fascinating!

In today’s episode, we’ll explore the concept of consciousness and how understanding your own state of mind can give you clues as to where you are on your healing journey.

So, let’s dive in and learn how to measure the effectiveness of our healing work or therapeutic methods, and ultimately, achieve fear-free childbirth.

In this insightful podcast episode, I want to help you to embark on a journey of self-discovery and healing as we explore a series of thought-provoking questions;

These questions will guide our exploration into the realms of personal transformation, self-awareness, and the various tools and experiences that contribute to our individual healing journeys.

During the episode, the following resources were mentioned:

1. Courses or retreats focused on personal development and healing.

2. The Map of Consciousness tool, which measures an individual’s level of consciousness on a scale from 0 to 1000.

3. Kinesiology, a method used to test muscle response and identify weaknesses or strengths in relation to specific triggers or issues.

4. Tony Robbins events or programs, which are known for their motivational and self-improvement focus.

5. “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, a book that explores the importance of living in the present moment and letting go of negative thought patterns.

6. Inner work, fear clearance, and therapy as general concepts and approaches to healing and personal development.

00:00:29 Measuring healing work and fear release progress.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Dr. Lauren Cook, who will be diving into a topic that affects many parents in the modern era – anxiety in Gen Z.

Dr. Cook, a therapist and author, brings her expertise and insights from her book “Generation Anxiety,” which provides a guide for millennials and Gen Z to navigate an uncertain world.

We’ll be exploring how anxiety manifests in young people, particularly as they contemplate starting a family or becoming parents. Plus, we’ll discuss strategies for overcoming fear, managing anxiety, and finding empowerment in the midst of uncertainty.

During our conversation, we chat about the fears and anxieties surrounding starting a family and becoming parents, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about climate change. Lauren offers invaluable insights on how to tackle these challenges and find a sense of community and connection even in uncertain times.

If you’ve ever experienced anxiety, worried about starting a family, or simply want to gain a deeper understanding of Gen Z anxiety, this episode is a must-listen.

Get ready for an insightful and empowering conversation. Let’s dive in!

During the podcast, several resources and tools are mentioned to help with anxiety, mental health, and fear during pregnancy. Here are some of the resources that are discussed:

1. Music: creating a playlist of uplifting songs on your phone or using a music streaming platform like Spotify to have uplifting music readily available for easy access when feeling down.

2. “Empowered Acceptance”: explores acknowledging the difficult and scary realities of life, taking action, and finding ways to be part of the solution.

3. Therapy: holistic healing and therapy on an individual level to address mental health challenges.

4. Calm App: for guided mindfulness and mentions enjoying guided mindfulness with this app. They also suggest downloading the hypnobirthing app called Calm Birth.

5. Self-Care Kit: creating a self-care kit that engages all the senses. This may include items that can be touched for comfort, aromatherapy for relaxation (such as peppermint essential oil), sound machines or music, visual cues like family pictures or favorite quotes, and even taste-based items like peppermint candy or gum to help with anxiety.

Overall, the podcast provides a range of resources and approaches to support those dealing with anxiety, fear, and emotional well-being during pregnancy and motherhood.

00:01:35 Lauren had a baby, discussing fear during pregnancy.

Meet Dr. Lauren Cook, a licensed Clinical Psychologist, company consultant, author, and speaker. With a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and her Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy, Dr. Lauren appears frequently in the media to provide commentary while also working with companies as well as individual adults, couples, families, and teens to help reduce anxiety and improve personal and professional outcomes.

You can connect with Dr. Lauren through TikTok, Instagram, her Brain Health Book Club, and through her podcast, The Boardroom Brain. Stay tuned for Dr. Lauren’s latest book, GENERATION ANXIETY—set to hit the shelves in September 2023.

Other Links:

Now, on today’s show, I’m going to be speaking to Dr. Lauren Cook, and we’re going to be speaking about gen z and anxiety. Anxiety is something that a lot of us struggle with, but I think that when it comes to millennials and gen z, they are considered to be two of the most anxious generations in history. And so I really wanted to sort of dive into the topic of anxiety with a real focus on how anxiety is being experienced by these generations, and particularly because they are the generations that are coming into parenthood. So for me, when it comes to contemplating parenthood, having a baby, and how anxiety might feed into your own fears around birth, this felt like a really important conversation to have. And Dr. Cook is bringing a book out imminently. It might already be out in your local bookstore called Generation Anxiety a Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying afloat in an uncertain world. So we’re going to be diving into that conversation.

Also, Lauren has just had a baby, so she’s just come out. She’s got a new squishy newborn that she is making friends with, getting to know. So we dive into some of that, too, because, of course, I’m always interested in how people’s pregnancies went and how their birth went. But before I dive into that conversation, I want to answer a question that I’ve had from a listener. So the question I’ve had is, how can you trust that you’ve conquered your fear enough to move forward with pregnancy? Now, this is a really good question, and I’m glad it’s been asked, because I’m more than happy to dive into this. So a good place to start would be how do you know when you’ve healed of something? Or how do you know when you have cleared the fear? And I’m going to be speaking specifically in regards to using head trash clearance, the technique that I developed, because that is where I have my knowledge, and that is also where I can give you concrete answers. So when you have cleared a fear using head trash clearance, the end result of that is you feel neutral. You’re in a state of neutrality about the thing pain, for example.

So let’s say you have a fear of pain. And this fear that you have of pain is every time you think of pain, you tense up, you get really anxious. Your body, your legs, tighten up together, you frown, you’ve got tension in your shoulders. All of these things come into play the minute you kind of think about pain, the idea of experiencing pain. And so that tells me that there’s a very visceral fear at play if these are your responses to pain and thinking about pain. Now, once you have cleared that fear of pain, and there could be many strands to this fear, so it might mean one clearance or it could mean several, it could be connected to some other themes for you. And that is unique to everybody. But once you have cleared it, the way that you know that it’s clear is that when you think about the idea of pain or experiencing pain, you think, oh well, okay, so what? I’ll deal with it, it’s going to be fine, I’ll be absolutely fine, whatever.

I can handle it, I can handle it. And it’s that state of not being bothered, not being, not caring about it, thinking, well, I’ll just take it my stride, I’ll handle it when it comes. That’s the position that you reach when a fear is no longer a fear, where you’re contemplating this thing and it’s like, okay, well, I’ll take it my stride. And that can be a really good sign where you simply just don’t care about the prospect of that thing anymore. It doesn’t kind of trigger you. It doesn’t bring up any anxiety in you. You just feel neutral. So whether you experience pain or not, it doesn’t really matter.

You’re still going to go through the thing and yada, yada, yada, that’s how that feels. So how does that feel then, with a different fear? Let me give you another example. So another really common fear that people have around birth is control, and the fear of losing control or not being in control. And so when somebody has a fear of not being in control or that the idea of losing control and that could be fear of losing control of their emotions, of their state of mind, but also of the situation or their bodily functions, that level of control that you might feel that you’re losing could affect different aspects of your being. So when you have overcome that fear, you reach a place where you think, well, okay, so I might lose control. Doesn’t matter, I’ll be fine, it’s okay, I don’t need to be in control. I might start crying in an uncontrollable mess, and that’s okay because I probably just need to express that and get out of my system. Or maybe if I’m thinking about birth and I think I might wheel over the floor or something, then, well, that’s okay, that happens.

It’s a normal bodily function. It’s not going to kill me, it’s fine. You just reach this place where you’re just not bothered. That’s how you know that this fear has cleared. So let’s take this forward then. When you, let’s say you’ve had a lot of fears that you’ve worked through and now you’re, am I ready for pregnancy? Then how do you know if you’re ready to move forward with pregnancy? Well, at that point, you can think, how would I feel right now if I saw a pregnancy test and it was confirmed that, yes, I was pregnant? How would that make me feel? And you might think, Actually, I’m okay with that situation now. Of course, it might be very different when it actually happens. The reality of it might strike very differently to the imagined version.

Okay. And that happens. But if in your mind you can contemplate that position and you’re like, actually, I feel quite neutral if I’m pregnant now, great, okay. And if I’m not pregnant, well, I will just keep trying. It’s that kind of it’s okay if I am, It’s okay if I’m not. That’s what this neutrality position is, where you are happy to go either way. You’re happy being pregnant or you’re happy not being pregnant.

Of course, there might be an overwhelming desire for pregnancy and you might be slightly disappointed, but that disappointment is not the same as, oh, thank God for that. Oh, my goodness, that would have been a nightmare. That’s not that is it? It’s a very different position or a different state of mind to think, okay, well, we’ll keep trying and see you next time. Fingers crossed for next time. That’s a calm, neutral response to the prospect of pregnancy compared to, oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness. Panic, panic, panic. Am I pregnant? Oh, my God. That kind of like tension, anxiety and overall sort of sense of panic coming on at the prospect of pregnancy.

Now, the thing that I do want to say is that obviously the decision to have children and move forward to pregnancy is a big decision. And so that may still be met with some apprehension and some nervous tension or excitement or something that gives you butterflies or a bit like, oh, my goodness, is this the right thing for me, that kind of thing. But that kind of apprehension is natural, is normal, and is not necessarily fear. And so it’s important to start to discern what you’re noticing, what you’re feeling, to see whether, is this what I’m feeling? Is this just a little bit of excitement with a little bit of fear thrown in? But actually it’s a natural level of fear. It’s a normal level of fear for somebody to be thinking or feeling going into such a big life change, because when we go through something that is new, that is quite significant, there’s always going to be a level of apprehension. If you start your first day at a new job, you’re going to be slightly worried, slightly apprehensive before you go in because it’s all unknown. Similar kind of feelings might show up when you’re contemplating pregnancy. Once you’ve got over all those fears, you’re like, oh, my God, this is going to be new and all of that, but that’s not the same as this visceral fear that you might have felt previously.

So it’s really to tune into how does that fear feel within you, in your body. And if you’ve managed to eliminate these strong physical sensations that crop up with the fear, whenever you want to connect to this idea of the fear or thinking about it, or the prospect of experiencing this thing that you fear, if you have lost those visceral reactions that kind of immediate trigger, then that’s a good sign. But also notice what’s going on in your mind and whether or not now you’re like, actually I can take it or leave it, actually I’m okay with this. I feel quite neutral and you feel calm and almost like the information is coming into your space, into your headspace, and it isn’t dragging in with it, loads of emotions with it. It’s coming in quite clean and content free in that respect. This idea of pain comes in, you’re like, well, of course I wouldn’t want to experience pain because that’s weird. But if I do experience, if I do experience pain, I’ll be fine because it won’t last long and I’ll get over it and I’ll move on. That’s a very different state of mind.

So I hope that that helps. For those of you that are wondering, what does it look like when you have conquered a fear? Okay, so I’m going to go back to today’s episode and a conversation with Dr. Lauren Cook. Now, as part of this conversation, we’re going to be diving into all manner of aspects of anxiety and we’re also going to touch on emetophobia, which I touched on a few weeks ago because Lauren also suffered from emetophobia, which is a fear of being sick. So this was a big deal for her in the lead up to her pregnancy, but I’ll let her talk all about it and tell us more about how her pregnancy journey was, but also spilling the beans on anxiety for the millennial and Gen Z generations. Enjoy. Hello Lauren, and welcome to the podcast.

Oh, Lexi, it’s so good to be with you. Thanks for having me.

That’s OK. We’re going to have such a great conversation. I know, because there are so many topics before we recorded that I said I really want to talk about this and I want to talk about this. The main meat of the conversation. I think today is really going to be around anxiety, and specifically around anxiety for Gen Z, because that is a huge topic that I really want to dive into as they are thinking about planning, think about having a family. But you’ve just become a mum three months old. You’ve got a three month old. So let’s just talk very briefly about your own journey, becoming a mum and your pregnancy journey.

Would you mind just sharing a little bit about that, Lauren?

Oh, absolutely. Well, it was so funny writing this book, generation Anxiety, kind of in a parallel timing with getting pregnant, being pregnant. I had so much anxiety around pregnancy and what that would all entail. When we were talking before we hit record, I’ve got a very fun phobia, emetophobia, which is a phobia of vomit, which as you can imagine with pregnancy is like prime exposure, right? Very anxious about that, but honestly had a really nice, healthy pregnancy, ended up having a little breech baby. So I am convinced that breech babies are more common than the literature says. It says like 1% to 3% of babies are breached. But I don’t know, four out of ten mommies in my Mommy and Me class we had breach babies, so ended up having a plan C section and really actually felt a lot of peace in that. In the end, it was still a very beautiful birth.

How he came into this world. Now I’ve got a three month old little Derek.

So let’s just talk about the vomit phobia briefly because I know this is a very, very common phobia. If not, sometimes I see it stuck at the top of the charts. In terms of one of the most common phobias, how did that manifest for you? Have you always had it?

Yeah, I write about this in the book, and oftentimes people who have this phobia, they have some kind of trauma around vomit, but not always. It might be a really embarrassing experience they had where they got sick or someone got sick on them. That disgust piece in the brain is so powerful, and that’s really what vomit is for a lot of people. It feels pretty disgusting. My mom had breast cancer when I was two years old and was very sick. Of course, I don’t consciously remember any of this, but I was throwing up a lot from chemotherapy. I was often physically removed from my house, I think, to kind of try to protect me from seeing her so sick. But I think that really led me to internalise that vomit was out of control, was sickness, was potentially even life threatening and death.

I’m really happy to say that my mom is healthy and well, and I saw her yesterday and she’s loving being a grandma. I think seeing her at least unconsciously as a little child, that really led to some very deep trauma for me. And I’ve always had this phobia of vomit ever since. And it’s been fascinating with the book coming out because I write a lot about emetophobia in the book. So many people have been coming out and saying that they too have this phobia.

Did you heal this phobia or do you still have it today?

It’s in between, and I say that’s true for all of anxiety. It’s rare that we ever make it go completely away. Will I ever be that person that’s out holding somebody’s hair back at a bar probably not, but I am able to withstand it. Where I was able to even get pregnant because my phobia was so bad. At one point, I felt like I would never be able to have kids because the idea of pregnancy and morning sickness scared me so bad, and kids throwing up, that scared me so bad. And if you don’t experience this phobia, I realised this can sound like, ridiculous. Someone could be hearing this and being like, get over it. But phobias are so instinctual and there’s such a deep rooted fear.

Logically, I could say, yeah, this is ridiculous. But on a biological level, I really felt endangered. So I did a lot of therapy. I did a lot of work to get to a place where I could be pregnant. I did, in fact, throw up during the pregnancy only once, but I got through it. A lot of exposure and response prevention therapy was really helpful for me. And my son has even thrown up on me since he’s been born, and I’ve been able to handle it. So I think that’s a big win.

You are totally winning it. You are totally nailing motherhood there. Brilliant. Brilliant. Let’s dive into anxiety, because obviously I would imagine that the fear of vomit as well as any other anxieties that you had, would have really contributed to the anxiety that you were feeling. Any fears around birth and thinking about pregnancy? Talk to me a little bit about how that anxiety was for you and how you manage that.

Well, like with all things with anxiety, we see the anticipatory anxiety is so much worse than the actual reality of it. The fear of what could happen was so much worse than what actually did happen, right? Like, when I did actually throw up, I remember saying to myself while it was happening, literally a mantra out loud, I’m okay, I’m okay. And after the fact, I was like, that wasn’t fun, but my world didn’t end. I didn’t die. It’s the same thing with panic, right? People have panic attacks, and they feel in the moment like they’re going to die, but no one has actually died of a panic attack. I try and remind myself of that and my clients of that, of, like, the fear of what could be is often so much worse than the reality of what is. And I tried to really remember that during the pregnancy. Like, I’m strong, I’m capable, I can live with anxiety.

My big thing is I don’t want anxiety to determine the outcome of my life. And if I didn’t have kids, knowing that that’s a value that I’ve had for myself, if I didn’t make that choice, I knew it would have been because I was avoiding anxiety, and that’s what I didn’t want to happen. It’s fine if you don’t have kids for other reasons, right? But I think it’s really important that we don’t let anxiety call the shots on our life.

Yeah, I totally agree. And that’s exactly what I say in terms of fear, don’t make that decision from a place of fear. Heal that so that you can make a decision about having kids from a place that is from a good place, from your heart, not from fear or anxiety. So I think that you can live with the decision like that in a way that you can’t. I think from anxiety or fear, it’s much more difficult as regret and guilt and then it suddenly becomes worse. Right? It just kind of becomes a situation that can be difficult for people to live with long term.

Oh, I was just going to say, like you mentioned that regret piece and that’s everything right there. We have to ask ourselves, when I end my life and I look back, will I have any regrets? And if the answer is yes, then we know that the anxiety is probably really getting in the way there.

Yeah, and absolutely no. I love that you picked that out. So your book is really about the Generation Z and how anxiety plays out for them. So I’m really interested in what does that look like and how is it different, maybe to the anxiety that maybe different generations are experiencing? I mean, is it completely different? Is it just a shade different? I don’t know. I’d love for you to shed some light on that.

Lauren [00:17:19]:

Yeah, absolutely. And the book is written a millennial and a Gen Z guide because we are really seeing that anxiety does look different for millennials and Gen Z and I did a lot of research into why exactly that know, you look at something like the Generational Power Index and you ask people what has been defining generationally for you? Most generations, at least here in the United States, will tell you September 11 for us was like a Hallmark moment. But there’s been so many things since then, one thing after another. Climate change, gun violence. I mean, the UK just came out and said that the US. Is an unsafe place to travel to. Right? I mean, there’s just so much going on in our world with social media, the inundation of news, the war in Ukraine. You start to see people feeling helpless and hopeless.

And when you put those two things together, it’s a recipe for feeling anxious and left unchecked, a recipe for feeling depressed over time. So that’s why I felt like I’ve got to write this book right now. Because we are seeing anxiety go through the roof for folks. And people are either having an avoidance reaction of I just want to put my head in the sand and ignore everything because it’s too much, but then the problems continue or they’re almost over preparing and they’re not able to live in the present moment of their life because they may be engaging in all kinds of compulsive behaviours. My hope is that people, even given everything going on in the world, can still live life in alignment for them, even with that anxiety present.

And so when they are experiencing the anxiety, how does that play out in someone that is quite young, really? I know that mental health doesn’t discriminate by age, but I’m just wondering when I think about maybe I think I was a really hot mess, actually when I was young, and I was probably wrestling with loads of anxiety and I didn’t realise it. Okay, so maybe when I was that age, 1020 years ago that we were all maybe I was just surrounded by loads of anxious people and I wasn’t able to tell. Maybe it really is quite a big significantly different now, and there’s a larger proportion of people who are suffering from anxiety. And I think also because now we’re talking about mental health and now we’re okay to talk about our wounds and our parents and we’re going to therapy now. It’s kind of something where people are more willing to talk about. Maybe we’re just more aware of it. I don’t know. But I’m just interested in how this anxiety piece looks among that generation and how it kind of plays out in the culture among them and their peers.

Well, I think that’s a big part of the problem, is that we’re also seeing this loneliness epidemic happen, right? And I do think generationally, that’s a big difference. You look at what was happening during World War II, right? A lot of people will say, well, that time, how were people not more anxious then than now? That was a horrible time in history. But people had more community back then. People knew who their neighbours were. They were closer with their families. Now people tend to really live in way more isolation. They don’t know who their neighbours are. They don’t say hi to the person at the grocery store.

We don’t know who we can trust anymore. We’ve lost our ability to have meaningful relationships with people where we’re seeing social anxiety go through the roof, right? It’s kind of a joke. If a Gen Z gets a voicemail, that ‘s like prime ten, like an anxious reaction, right? So we’re losing our social muscles. This happens. We naturally see anxiety go up because we feel isolated and scared in the world. Who do I have to turn to for support? Who can I share this with? Yes, I can pay a therapist and talk about it with them. That’s great. But there’s also a sadness, right, that maybe I can’t talk to my friend about it or my parents about it.

People are spending so much more time on their phones than actual face to face connection. And our brains are literally starved neurologically for those deep connections. I think that’s a huge part of why these two generations, millennial and Gen Z, are more anxious than ever because they’re doing this alone.

And also now we’re hearing that AI is now going to be we’re going to get therapists, AI therapists. And you just think, hang on a minute, this is not going in the right direction at all. Because it’s that human connection that we crave, that we need as mums. Everybody listening to the show, I would imagine, is aware of this, but a baby needs to be held. If a baby is not held in its first few weeks, it will die. It needs that loving connection. That is a thing that we all humans need. Doesn’t stop when you stop being a baby, you continue to need that human connection.

And so this kind of stuck to the phone, only engaging through an app, only messaging through apps, not meeting up. Even when they do meet up, they’re all on their phones together. I just had all my family around and they were just sitting in the same room just on phones. You’re like, what are you doing? It’s really difficult. And then also I’m hearing colleagues and friends that are saying, when we have some young people starting, we’ve got to train them on how to answer a telephone, which, again, reinforces that sense of this difficulty with social connection. So where’s the starting point?

Well, we mentioned exposure and response therapy. And honestly, that’s the best treatment for something like this is to actually practise this. I’m a big behaviourist as a psychologist, it’s great to work on your mindset, but the brain has to behaviorally see that we’re capable of these things that make us uncomfortable. So, yes, leaving a voicemail on the phone right. Or asking a friend out to dinner or lunch and having a rule, we’re not going to pull our phones out. Right. The more we can have that eye contact, that face to face, and even talking to a stranger, right? I just read a study the other day that interacting with strangers is so good for our brain health. And actually those interactions tend to go way better than we expect they will.

But we just need to build more community. And if that’s even setting a goal of, like, today I’m going to smile at someone, or today I’m going to ask the Grocer how they’re doing, even though that makes me feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin. We start to have those corrective experiences to see, like, oh, either somebody was friendly back to me or maybe it was a neutral interaction, but going to get into a fight with someone when we’re kind and nice to someone, right? We have to practise these things more. And I think older generations can be a part of that too, by really asking young adults like, hey, how’s it going? What’s going on for you today? Right. And really trying to help pull Gen Z and Millennial out so that they’re engaging more. Because we know that mentorships across generations is huge, and that’s not really happening either.

And so how does this anxiety then feed into those that may be thinking about planning a family or thinking about becoming parents. Because you mentioned some things that are happening in society that are really kind of quite terrifying where you kind of spend too long thinking about them. And of course, we’ve all been through that collective traumatic experience that is COVID whether it’s lockdown the isolation that that brought on, but also that did in some areas foster some sense of community. I know in some areas in the UK, everyone was out clapping at night and they got to know their neighbours and they were chatting on the fence and there was a little bit of community that started kind of building up. Certainly where I was, we got to know our neighbours a lot more. So I think it’s a mixed bag. But for the most part, I think a lot of people felt the isolation, the disconnection from family, the fear of that whole situation that played out. But like you said, there’s the climate change narrative that a lot of women that I’m in contact with are saying, well, I don’t know if it’s right that I should bring a child into the world.

This is what’s making me think twice. Then you’ve got the community. We know that it takes a village to raise a family and there isn’t a village. So it’s hard work. People aren’t with their families anymore, they’ve moved away. So how does this anxiety in the work that you’ve done, how does that play out with those that are planning families or thinking about wanting a family?

Well, and that’s spot on. We see right now that about 40% of young adults are saying I don’t want to have kids because of the anxiety around things like climate change and things like that. And you hear of a lot of drinks, right? Double income, no kids. That’s kind of a name that we have here in the States for people who want to make that choice. I really come back to values here. What are your personal values? If a personal value is I want to bring someone into this world and teach them how to be a citizen that makes a difference. I want to help teach someone, learn how to grow, then if that’s a value for you, how can we help you reason with the anxiety that comes from that? And I often will say values induction is not about pain reduction. A lot of times we want to make choices because we don’t want to feel pain, we don’t want to feel uncomfortable.

There’s a lot of things about pregnancy, having a child that include pain, that include discomfort. And if we’re so set on just being comfortable all the time, why would anyone have kids, right? But are there things that come out of it that are so meaningful to you that you want to build this family that is going to hopefully help contribute to the. World, right, make things better, then I think that’s something we have to be willing to sit with that discomfort because there’s so much good that comes out of it. I think that’s something that’s really important for us to hold in the conversation of all of this. It’s not about reducing our pain, it’s about inducing the values there. It’s not an easy call, I totally want to acknowledge that. But at the same time, I think we need more people being a part of the solution than the problem.

I think the avoidance of discomfort. I grew up before phones. I’m giving away my age now, obviously. But I think now we’ve been very used to having immediate gratification, things being very easy. Smart apps, smartphones are smart. They are smart everywhere and really having this convenience I’m going to order it now and if it’s not here by 08:00 tonight, then I’m not ordering from them again. This idea is like I’ve now moved to rural France, so if I order off Amazon, I’m lucky to get it within four days. So the idea of getting it later that day, which was my old reality, is like so I’ve had a bit of a kind of wake up call on that.

But the sense of community and actually when there’s other things that are able to take hold and to be nurtured, which are meaningful connections and being within a natural environment, some of those things are really I’m really recognizing now how important they are for me. When I was disconnected from all of that, I kind of didn’t realise how much I was missing kind of thing. This convenience thing, we kind of if it’s too hard work, I’m not going to go into town because that’s a pain. I’m going to have to park the car and I’ll stand in a queue and if I’ve got what I want, I’m going to go to another one. Oh my goodness. All this drama, this hard work, it’s easy to do it without. We’re now kind of not even, can’t even handle hard work or an effort. And so even things that take effort, that isn’t really difficult per se.

It’s just time.

It’s so true. And we have more free time than we ever have historically before, but it doesn’t feel like that to people. We don’t want to be uncomfortable. So that constant like go, go, that unwillingness to sit in any kind of inconvenience is definitely impacting our brain on a neurological level. And I would argue it’s even affecting things like diagnosis rates of ADHD, an amazing book, Stolen, focused by Johann Hari, talks about as we’re seeing such a surge in social media and just this instantaneousness, yes, we’re having difficulty concentrating, but it’s being diagnosed as ADHD. When could it actually be that our environment is just so over stimulating and so.

Fast paced about an inability to stay with something a little bit longer? So some of them have moved to France now so their approach to films, for example, is a lot slower. They’ll really kind of labour the point to where western, Hollywood movies, that kind of thing, it’s like there’s no hanging about, and they won’t allow that. Now, working with 32nd, 22nd reels on Instagram, this is kind of like the TikTok generation where if it’s not funny within 15 seconds, they’re onto the next one, then yes, goodness. How can they sit and read a book or even kind of move past that period where something might feel uncomfortable to sit with discomfort long enough to kind make it through the points? When you have a moment that might feel a little bit discomfort, uncomfortable at first, where those of us that maybe have been used to that, you kind of realise that that’s only last the beginning of it. And then you sit with it and you kind of ride through that, and then you’re like, oh, no, actually, I’m okay. But if you can’t sit through that first bit, you shy away from it every time, and you never learn that actually you can handle discomfort. It’s fine. And actually, it’s nothing to be afraid of.

Actually, it makes you feel good. That’s where you get your confidence from sometimes is going through a lot of those uncomfortable experiences and knowing, hey, throw anything at me. I can deal with it. How can we teach people to kind of maybe live with discomfort, which I feel is maybe the early signs of anxiety developing. It’s the beginning of it, potentially. What do you think?

I think mindfulness is huge. I really do. We are losing this ability where I’ve even had clients, we’ll be a minute into a mindfulness session, and they will interrupt and say, this is too hard. It feels really hard to just sit with ourselves. And mindfulness is not about feeling relaxed. It’s actually about learning how to just be in our bodies. So anything that kind of requires you to sit with it, whether it’s going to an exercise class, right, where socially it might be kind of weird if 20 minutes in, you just walk out of the yoga studio, but where there’s some social scripts of like, okay, I got to hang in there with this. That’s teaching us how to really sustain our attention and stay with and in turn, learn how to sit with discomfort.

We’ve got to practise that. Even a little bit of a silly exercise, but a good way to harness this a little bit. Let’s say you have an itch on your face and you really want to scratch your nose. A lot of times we’ll just do it right away, right? But mindfulness would be, okay, can I sit with that discomfort of like, oh, I really want to. Itch my nose, but can I hold this? And that’s just a simple exercise that kind of elucidates the example of this, of learning how to sit in that discomfort and seeing that we can handle it.

And so what other things can they do? Because it sounds to me like really maybe to help this generation, maybe better cope is these little exercises like the one you’ve just shown us now that’s very simple and really easy to do. I know I’ve done that loads in just, in meetings at work where you’re like, oh, I can’t. Is it really something? Are you really asking them and saying to them, you’ve got to kind of take this on. This is for you to own and to kind of figure out and fix yourself. That feels like a really mean thing to say. But also you have got to take responsibility for your own mental health, your own emotional well being and notice when things are starting to unravel and take action. At one end, it’s me sounding super mean, like, well, you got to own your stuff and crack on and sort it out. Which obviously isn’t very empathetic and helpful.

But also there’s a part of that where you do need to just kind of throw a pair and just find the help. Go and find the resources, go and find a therapist, go and find the support, make some go and do the things. Where do you sit on that? Do I sound super mean here or Is it

I really like this idea. I write about this in the book called Empowered Acceptance and it’s really taking this both and approach. Like we have to accept and acknowledge the realities of this world, that life is really hard and scary. It’s not about gaslighting ourselves and saying like it’s not that bad. No, sometimes it is that bad and it does really feel hard accepting that, not avoiding that and being empowered too. Still taking action, right? Acceptance is not about apathy and just throwing our hands up and saying, well, I guess we’re all screwed, right? It’s saying, no, what can I do in my own life to take action? And what can I do to be a part of the solution? With climate change, for example, versus just standing on the sidelines, shaking my boots kind of thing, you have to be a part of the solution in that sense. On an individual level, I’m a huge advocate for holistic healing. Obviously, I’m a therapist, I’m a big fan of therapy.

But I really think we’ve got to look at so many forms of healing, whether it’s acupuncture, whether it’s nutrition and the food we put into our body. I mean, the research on the gut brain connection and how that impacts anxiety with the foods we’re eating, that’s something that we can take action with. So it’s really looking at a lot of different avenues and seeing what works well for each individual person and putting in the time to do that that’s well worth the effort instead of just checking the boxes on all the other things on our to-do list.

I think one of the holistic healing points are really important, I think. And I think when for some people going in the way I see it’s, like sometimes your mental health or emotional well being, let’s call that, that’s maybe the most pressing challenge that you’re facing. And so you could go in through the front door and deal with that head on, or you can maybe sneak in through the garden and maybe just do some exercise and maybe start running or doing something that’s going to build your physical strength. The nutrition, another back garden route where you can start doing things from the edges and then that builds up your overall health in other ways that then can give you the strength to then think, actually, I think I can tackle the front door now. Whereas without those things, maybe you kind of felt that was a bit too much. Whereas if you take the back door, you can still help the emotional well being through your nutrition, through the exercise, but it’s just doing it in a slightly roundabout way that’s still helpful.

I love that metaphor. That was so cool. I’m going to use that with clients. That’s beautiful.

Yeah. I think that can really help whether they haven’t got the emotional strength, because I think tackling anxiety does require you with the work I do around getting helping people to get rid of their phobias. With my approach, you have to eyeball the phobia, have to eyeball the fear. And that takes a lot of guts, though, to do that. A lot of people can’t, that’s too difficult for them to do. It is because of maybe the trauma, whatever they’ve gone through. And so to help those people still bring about a transformation, maybe the gentle approach is what works best for them because they can take it easier and this is where I use the back. But the garden approach where you can build up strength in other ways so that you can then come back to the Phobia and then deal with that once you’ve got more emotional strength within you to be able to deal with that totally well.

And I always love to have an anxiety hierarchy with clients and myself of where am I at in terms of how anxiety poking this is for me, I always say, and the research shows the sweet spot is like a four to six. So if you’re like at a four to six range, in terms of a scale of one to ten, that tells us like, okay, this is a good challenge, let’s go for it. But if it’s like a seven to ten for you of like, this is going to be too much for me to face this right now. We’ve got to honour that, right? It’s not always just about pushing through because sometimes that can retraumatize or make the anxiety worse for someone, actually.

And what about those that maybe are struggling with maybe kids, new kids, newborns are dealing with this kind of.

Anxiety, the existential anxiety, I think, around kids. I really feel that like a new anxiety for the first time of like what happens if something happens to my spouse or something like that, right? It can trigger all kinds of anxieties. I like to use what’s called the four DS. This is from one of my best professors, Dr. Henderson. So this is helpful for parents listening. Some cues that maybe the anxiety is next level and might benefit from some help is if you’re noticing any kind of distress where you yourself are like, I’m worried about how worried I am. This doesn’t seem like my normal pace.

And if there’s deviance from your norm right. If you’re noticing this isn’t normal for me or when I’m looking at my peer group and other parents, I’m not hearing them endorse the same level of worrying or checking behaviour. They’re not checking their infants multiple times in the night to see if they’re breathing okay. What could be going on there? There’s any kind of dysfunction if you’re not able to keep up with the things in your life, if you’re not able to go to the paediatrician appointment or maybe go to your exercise routine, right. Because you feel like I can’t keep up with my life. And lastly, if there’s any kind of danger and we have to normalise this last point, if you yourself are feeling unsafe, if you’re having thoughts of I just wish I wasn’t alive for this right now, or if I could just go to sleep and never wake up. Or if you’re feeling danger towards others, those are all signs that it would be good to get some support for those symptoms. And we got to normalise all of that because postpartum anxiety is actually more common than postpartum depression.

I think prenatal anxiety isn’t talked about enough as well because prenatal anxiety is huge and we hear a lot about postpartum depression, so we hear a lot about that. But I think those women that suffer extreme anxiety the minute they find out they’re pregnant, a lot of those women possibly have tokophobia and they don’t realise that tocophobia is a thing. No awareness of that. So they’re wrestling with these feelings that they literally don’t understand. And I know that I’ve got clients that suddenly their anxiety just goes off the chart the minute they’re pregnant. The minute baby comes out, everything’s back to normal again. That the carrying of a baby in their body is kind of the stuff that really just explodes the anxiety for them. Just talk a little bit about some prenatal anxiety with work that you do.

And I’m so glad that you bring that up because it definitely is not talked about enough and a lot of times people do get surprised by that experience. What’s hard is that in any other situation, pretty much you are consenting to the exposure, right? Like when I was doing my exposure therapy for emetophobia. I am choosing to look at pictures of videos of people vomiting. When you’re pregnant, you’re not necessarily choosing whether or not you want to have that exposure. It is happening to you. I remember being pregnant and saying it’s like I’ve gotten on a roller coaster and I can’t get off the ride. And that almost can really have feelings of claustrophobia for people, right. That sense of entrapment.

So that’s where that mindfulness piece is really key of the distress tolerance of like, I’m feeling uncomfortable in my body right now and that’s okay, it’s not fun, but let me sit through this and sit in this and bring in support too. Whether it’s your partner or someone else in your life, there’d be so many times where I would voice to my partner, I’m feeling kind of panicky right now. Can you sit by me? And I’d like to hold your hand kind of thing, right? And music is huge. I think music can really help us get into another headspace. When my son was born, I had a whole birth playlist and that really affected my mood. So lean into music or whatever engages you from a senses standpoint and that can help you too, when we’re starting to really get in our head with the anxiety.

Yeah, music is a game changer. Actually, I’m glad you mentioned it because it’s so simple and it’s something that we all have access to readily. Knowing which tunes can really lift you. I’ve got some good tunes, tunes that always get me going and that I love knowing what music that having all of that maybe stored on your phone or make yourself a spotify playlist where you’ve got them to hand really easily. I think it’s creating these little shortcuts so that when you are in a state like that, you can reach for stuff easily. And the one thing that I notice is that when I’m not in a good place, I’ve got loads of tools and things that I use, but when I’m not in place, I forget all of them. You’re in that state and you’re like after something like, oh my God, I could have done this and I could have done this and I’m like, why did I not do any of that? And I feel like I need to have a great big notice up. So it’s saying like, if you’re feeling crap today, do go through this list.

I’m just thinking of there any little really easy go to like the music, one you just shared.

We love to help people create like a self care kit and it engages all the senses. So what’s something you can touch? Whether it’s like a little fabric or something that feels nice for you? What’s something you can smell? Aromatherapy is huge and peppermint is especially a good one for anxiety and helps with nausea too. What can you hear? Whether it’s sound with music or a sound machine is really helpful. I love listening to mindfulness guided mindfulness with the Calm app and I believe maybe you’ll know better than I, but there’s a hypnobirthing app that got me through my pregnancy. So everybody should download it. I want to say it’s called Calm Birth. That is so, so good. And then your other senses, what am I forgetting? A sight? What is something visually that’s great for you? Whether it’s a picture of your family that you have in this box or maybe a quote that you like to read, taste. Whether it’s peppermint candy, a piece of gum, or sour candy helps with anxiety.

So have it all in a little box, your self care, soothing box. And that can be some nice things to turn to.

Yeah, but maybe not the bottle of wine for your taste because that might.

Not be a good.

I know a lot of new mothers do turn to that. I joke. But actually the glass of wine is and also drinking is such a certainly within British culture, it’s such an accepted if you suddenly announce that you’re not drinking anymore, you’ve got to deal with a lot of, kind of friction from people going, what are you doing? Why look at you not being fun anymore. This kind of like there’s a lot of culture around drinking, but also when you have that, there’s an association, a very powerful association, that when you take that first sip of wine, it just feels like you’re and when you’ve had kids screaming around all day. There is a huge thing with mums getting together, having wine, and then before they know it, they’re drinking wine every night and maybe husband’s away or he’s working late and they’re drinking half a bottle a night, maybe a bottle a night. And it can kind of escalate very rapidly, I think, with dealing with that new mum anxiety and the stress of navigating that journey. I don’t know. Do you want to talk to that?

No doubt about it. That is so true. And one thing that I think can be helpful in terms of deciding whether or not to drink, we see that alcohol is really inflammatory and really contributes to the increase of anxiety. If you even start to test it out of like, how do I feel the next day after I drink? A lot of people will tell you, I actually noticed a spike up in my anxiety. It creates this negative feedback loop. And the other piece too is we know that alcohol affects not just the first night of sleep, but the second night of sleep. And if you’re drinking every other day, your sleep cycle is never getting a chance to recalibrate. And sleep is a huge part of anxiety and depression as well.

That to me is like enough of a buy-in of like, oh yes, I don’t want that increase in anxiety any more than is already happening in my body. And if alcohol is something I can do to reduce fat by cutting back on the inflammation, then that’s something that I think can be good. And it’s nice to see, I’m seeing a lot more like a mocktail culture of more fun drinks that don’t have to have the alcohol in it. So we’re still getting the culture and community of drinking something together, but not having to have alcohol in it.

Yeah. So, yeah, cutting back on alcohol is really another little thing you can do to start reducing the anxiety that you’re feeling. Yes, I love that. I’m just going to recap. What I’ve remembered is you’ve got your self care kit, you’ve got your trying to sit through the discomfort moments, like the itchy nose thing. That was a really good one. Also choosing some tracks or things that you can sit on, like meditation, like mindfulness tracks, whatever’s going to work for you, do it for you. While we’re on tracks.

I really like mantras. I really got into an artist called David Permel and she’s got some really wonderful mantras. They’re often played at yoga classes. She’s got that kind of music going on. But just sitting with some of these, I found that because there was a vocal that I could hang on to and maybe learn, but because it was Sanskrit, I never really knew what they were, so but it was a really useful hook for my mind to just kind of follow it. And I found those very, very calming. And then what else have you mentioned? Self care kit.

I think that covers it. Well, maybe give acupuncture a try. But yeah, nutrition is really big for people. And you mentioned, now, there was a study that just came out of Australia that they found that exercise was more effective than therapy and psychiatric medication. So not great for my mean, obviously therapy is helpful, but exercise is huge. So I always think that’s a really good entry point for folks. If you can get out for a 20 minute walk, we see changes in the brain even at just that level. So it’s absolutely worth it.

Brilliant. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for sharing all your expertise on anxiety. Now, if people want to find out more about you, your book, where can they track you down? And also your socials. I mean, you’re prolific on lots of platforms, so tell us where we can find you.

Well, generation anxiety comes up. September 19 is the official day. I’m so excited because we have a special publisher with Watkins that’s doing specifically UK and the whole Commonwealth. You can get on Amazon or wherever you like to buy your books. You can follow along on Instagram and TikTok. I love doing a good mental health meme, and then I speak internationally with teams. So if your company really wants to bring this conversation about anxiety, please join us. I would love to be a part of that conversation with your group.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Lauren, for joining me on the Fear Free Childbirth podcast.

Thank you, Alexia. Be well.

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In today’s episode, we dive deep into the world of perimenopause and how it intersects with the postnatal period.

With so many women waiting until later in life to have children, this is an important topic for women to get their heads around.

To help us do that, I am joined by my guest, Linda Stephens, who brings her expertise and insights on women’s health to help you navigate this transitional stage in your life.

We explore the hormonal changes, physical symptoms, and emotional challenges that can arise during this time. Together, we discover how understanding and nurturing our bodies can lead to a graceful transition and a renewed sense of self.

Some of the key questions we explore include:

To help you make the most of this information, here’s a comprehensive list of resources mentioned in the podcast:

1. Fear Clearance Tracks

Audio tracks designed to reduce fears related to pregnancy and childbirth. These tracks address common fears such as fear of pregnancy, fear of childbirth, fear of losing control, fear of losing dignity, fear of change, and fear of uncertainty.

NEW TRACK NOW AVAILABLE: Fear of Pregnancy.

View all fear clearance tracks here

2. Birth Wound Healing Activation MP3:

This Healing Activation was created to help you to heal from the emotional wounds and traumas related to any birth experiences you’ve had. This would benefit those who have had difficult or traumatic birth experiences.

But because we’ve ALL had a birth experience: our own arrival into the world, then everyone would benefit from this wound healing track. Particularly those who suffer from Tokophobia, because often, the trauma that is at the root of their phobia is the trauma of their own birth.

This birth wound healing track also helps you to release ancestral trauma. If your mother or grandmother (or great grandmother) had a difficult birth, then you will be carrying the memories of those experiences and they could be affecting how you feel about pregnancy or birth.

3. Fear Free Childbirth Shop

Visit www.fearfreechildbirth.com to access these resources that aim to provide emotional support and healing for individuals facing anxieties and fears related to pregnancy, childbirth, and postnatal experiences.

4. Linda Stevens Wellbeing

Explore Linda’s offerings, including online courses, retreats, and workshops, to support your journey through perimenopause and women’s health.

The Bathroom Method Bootcamp: Access free exercises and guided meditations designed to strengthen your pelvic floor and enhance your overall well-being.

5. Dr. Mindy Pelz

She is an expert in women’s health and intermittent fasting. Her YouTube channel offers valuable insights and guidance on optimizing your health. https://www.youtube.com/@DrMindyPelz

Books by Dr. Mindy Pelz: “Fast This Way: Burn Fat, Heal Inflammation, and Eat Like the High-Performing Human You Were Meant to Be”, “The Menopause Reset: Restoring Balance and Well-Being Naturally”

6. Yoga Nidra

A guided relaxation practice that can help you achieve deep rest and balance your nervous system. You can find yoga nidra sessions online or through various meditation apps.

7. App for Tracking Your Cycle

Linda mentioned the Balance app which can provide insights into your unique rhythm. https://www.balance-menopause.com/balance-app/

8. Adrenal Care

Linda emphasizes the importance of adrenal care to manage stress and hormonal balance. Explore relaxation techniques, such as extended exhalation, low vibrational toning, and conscious rest, to support your adrenal glands.

9. Nutrition for Hormones

Dr. Mindy Pelz recommends exploring intermittent fasting and paying attention to the timing of your meals to support hormonal health. Focus on quality carbohydrates, good fats, and nutrient-dense foods.

10. Yoga and Movement

Engage in activities like yoga, walking in nature, and gentle exercises to promote physical and mental well-being. These practices can help you connect with your body and reduce stress.

Remember that your path to optimal health is unique, and it’s essential to listen to your body and intuition. These resources offer valuable guidance and support as you navigate perimenopause and embrace your feminine wisdom. Take a step towards greater well-being and empowerment by exploring these resources and incorporating them into your daily life.

00:00:01 “Fear Free Childbirth podcast helps navigate postnatal perimenopause. New fear clearance and wound healing tracks added.”

Meet Linda Stephens, the Women’s Wellbeing Warrior, dedicated to reawakening core strength in midlife women. With a belief that core health is true wealth, Linda empowers women through her expertise.

Discover Linda Stephens at www.lindastephenswellbeing.me. For a comprehensive peri-post menopause wellbeing resource, visit her at www.womenswellbeing.me. Don’t forget to check out her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/lindastephenswellbeing for valuable Women’s Wellbeing information and videos.

Contact her at [email protected].

You’re listening to the Fear Free Childbirth podcast with me, Alexia Leachman. Let me help you to take the fear out of pregnancy, birth and beyond with a mix of real life stories and experts sharing their wisdom. I’ll also be sharing psychology insights to help you to cultivate a fearless mindset, be inspired and be empowered with Fear Free Childbirth . And now it’s time for the show. 

Hello and welcome back to the Fear Free Childbirth Podcast. My name is Alexa Leachman. Thank you so much for joining me today. On today’s show, we’re going to be talking about where postnatal meets the perimenopause with a lot of mums that are now having babies later in their life, some mums are facing the perimenopause while going through the postnatal period.

So today I’m being joined by Linda, who’s going to help us navigate this delicate stage in life so that you can better manage it and not be succumb to the cocktail of hormones that might be chucking themselves your way as you wrestle with a new baby.

But before I hand over to that, I just want to update you on a couple of things I added to the shop this week, the Fear Free Childbirth Shop. Now, as you know, I’m all about helping you to reduce the fear that you’re carrying around birth and pregnancy. And I’ve got quite a lot of fear clearance tracks in the Fear Free Childbirth store and I’ve been recording some new ones. So I just wanted to let you know about the new ones that have just been added. Now, for some reason, I don’t know how this even was a thing was possible, but I didn’t actually have a fear clearance track for a fear of pregnancy. But now I have. So now you can buy a fear of pregnancy fear clearance track, as well as a fear of childbirth fear clearance track. There are other ones in there also for common fears that women experience around birth and pregnancy, including fear of losing control, fear of losing your dignity, fear of change, fear of uncertainty. All those are already in there as well. And they would be very useful for you to listen to, to benefit from, if you want to let go of the fear. People are getting amazing results listening to these tracks and it can make a huge difference to how you’re feeling. Very, very quickly, I’ve just added fear of pregnancy, so just head over to fearfreechildbirth.com shop or store, that kind of thing, and then you will find the fear clearance audios in the shop.

And I’m also creating some wound healing tracks. So these are really about healing traumas and the emotional wounds that you’re carrying around things. And there is also now a birth wound healing. So for many people, this might mean that when they gave birth and it was difficult or traumatic or it has left an emotional trace of some sort for them, that whenever they think of that birth as a little bit of pang of sadness or guilt or something that’s just not pleasant. It doesn’t have to be a full blown traumatic experience. But if there’s any kind of wounding that you’re carrying on the topic of birth or the idea of birth, this will be ideal for you if you have suffered from a birth experience that wasn’t pleasant, that was difficult or traumatic. And maybe when you think of your earlier birth experiences, there’s a little tinge of sadness or something that’s not entirely pleasant comes up for you. Whether it’s a full blown, kind of really nightmare experience or whether it wasn’t a nightmare, but for some reason you just can’t shake there’s something that you can’t shake about that experience, then that wound healing will be perfect for you. Also, this is going to be perfect for those that suffer from tokophobia, because the thing about tokophobia and any phobia is that there’s usually a root trauma going on there that’s feeding the phobia. And for many that suffer from tokophobia, this root event, this root trauma could well be your own birth experience the time that you arrived in the world. So this birth wound healing is for you too. It’s really all encapsulating to capture any experiences of birth that you’ve had. And obviously we’ve all experienced birth because we’re all here and we’ve all come through from our mothers. So we all have a birth experience within us and memories of that and maybe some of the fears and anxieties that you’re experiencing are as a result of your own birth experience. So this birth wound healing really does capture your own experience of birth, any experiences that your mother may have had while she was carrying you or the memories that she had, because it also looks at ancestral trauma. And this is an element that we really can’t dismiss when it comes to traumas because they have such an impact on who we are today, because the very memories of ancestral trauma are baked within the fabric of our very being. So letting go of any wounding that you’re carrying around the idea of birth is going to really help you no matter what your situation is in terms of facing pregnancy and birth. If you’re planning for a family, even if you’ve not got pregnant yet, if there’s any tinge of fear or anxiety around birth, then maybe it’s to do with your own birth experience. So I would recommend this birth wound healing for anyone really that considers themselves anxious or fearful or scared or even worried about birth or pregnancy. This is going to be a good one for you. So just all you need to do is head over to the Fear Free Childbirth shop and it’s in the Wound Healing Activation section along with many, many other Wound Healing Activations for other things that are very, very common. A lot of childhood themes are in there. Lots of inner child themes. As you know, I’m all about you self healing, helping you to really heal your own fears and anxieties so that you can be empowered, feel confident and calm as you go into your birth experiences. That’s what I really, really want for you. So I’m always looking at ways that I can make that journey as easy for you and as simple for you so that you can own that experience. You can be in charge of your own mental health and emotional well being.

Back to today’s show, then. So today I’m chatting to Linda. You may recognise Linda, who’s been on the show before, and she talked all about yoga and how yoga can support you during your pregnancy and birth experiences, especially the yoga moves. And the way that yoga can support you in terms of helping you to train and get your body ready, but also how you can use it during labour. So you may recognise Linda, and if you want to dig out the old episode, I would urge you to go and do that, and I’ll put a link in the show notes for that. But we’re going to be talking today about that transitional journey from postnatal to perimenopause.

And the reason I really wanted to have this conversation is because this perimenopause can really start very early for some women, maybe late 30s, early 40s, but that’s also when many women are now choosing to have their babies because they’re leaving it later. So it could be that you are wrestling with early signs of perimenopause while you’re breastfeeding a newborn. And so the cocktail of hormones that’s going on, you could be feeling like you’re really being battered left, right and centre and not knowing how to handle all that. And that can be very unsettling, very overwhelming, very emotional. So Linda’s going to talk through that, how we can start to figure out what’s going on, and maybe even those of you that maybe have got toddlers now and maybe heading into your early 40s, maybe mid to late 40s, depending on when perimenopause hits for you. This is going to be useful for you too, as you navigate this important next stage in your life. This is a stage that I’m going through at the moment.

So I found this interview incredibly helpful and validating for some things that I’m also starting to try out in my life. So I think this is going to be a really important conversation. And even for those that maybe have a little bit long way off from perimenopause, listen to this, because this is coming your way. So you might as well start getting ready and thinking about it because there’s some really useful, timeless advice that Linda shares that goes beyond the perimenopausal phase in terms of just how to live a healthy life and have a healthy pregnancy. So let me just hand over to my chat with Linda. I hope you enjoy it.

Hello, Linda. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me, Alexia. It’s lovely to be back.

Now, for those eagle eyed well, not eagle eyed, but eagle eared among you. You might recognise Linda’s voice because we’ve spoken before on the podcast talking all about yoga and the moves that can help you to prepare for birth. But Linda also works with the whole gamut of well being for women. And so we’re going to dive into another really important part of the journey today that I think more and more women are really experiencing, and that is that postnatal to perimenopause phase where some women, because they’re birthing later, are diving from one straight into the other. Let’s just start with postnatal, first of all, and what’s happening with the hormones so that we can start to understand how this hormonal mix is correlating or how it bleeds. Not bleed. Bleeds. Isn’t that useful word I just picked that doesn’t bleed?

That’s the thing.

Straight into the perimenopause phase. What’s going on?

It’s kind of like a whole societal thing, isn’t it, where we are finding that women are having pregnancies later on in life. So it’s not unusual at all to be in your late 30s, even early 40s, when you’re having even your first baby. And the thing is, roughly on average, women will start to go into perimenopause between 35 and 38 years old. So perimenopause literally means you’re starting to have an ovulatory cycle. Your menstrual cycle isn’t actually around you, it’s not defined by your period. It’s defined by your ovulation in the middle of the cycle. And if your ovaries are not releasing an egg in the middle of that cycle, you’re not producing progesterone, which is our key chill out hormone. It’s the hormone that is anti anxiety. It helps us to sleep. It’s a smooth lining of the gut. So it’s incredibly important in about 400 different pathways in our body and our brain. So if we’re not producing progesterone in the second part of our cycle, we start to experience all sorts of issues which are very, very similar to what we are experiencing when we’ve just given birth and we’ve just birthed our placenta. And our progesterone level just absolutely plummets along with oestrogen levels. Early perimenopause, when we start to have those ovulatory cycles, progesterone is starting to drop away quite rapidly, more so than oestrogen. So we tend to see from about 38, we’re starting to have not every cycle, but quite often we’re starting to have those and ovulatory cycles. We’re starting to diminish in our production, our ovarian production of progesterone, from about 35 to about 50, we lose about 70% of that ovarian production of progesterone and about 45. So mid 40s, we start to diminish our production of oestrogen. And it’s a dysregulation. It’s when our oestrogen is a bit high in comparison to the progesterone. That’s when we are experiencing night sweats, brain fog, heart palpitations. Itchiness, dry eyes, dry mouth, pelvic floor issues. As you can see, it’s very, very similar to straight.

Boom.

We’ve had a baby going into that period where the progesterone is super low, oestrogen is low as well, maybe not quite as low as progesterone and baby blues. Unbelievable fatigue being wired, but tired, not being able to sleep when baby sleeps. And the problem is, women are going from losing that progesterone, having birthed their baby, losing that oestrogen, being very low on these key hormones. And it’s really important to understand that women are… our brains are oestrogen rich, male brains are testosterone rich. Our brains are oestrogen rich. So we need these key hormones to function well. And we’re going straight from this period of being very low in these key hormones straight into perimenopause. So it’s not like we’re going back up and reaching sort of mid 20s levels of our normal hormone production again. And our ovaries are going back into production, they’re not. We might have ended up getting pregnant, because what happens is, when our ovaries are starting to shut up shop, they’ll have big bursts of oestrogen. So it’s like one more baby, one more baby. So you might actually be very low in oestrogen, but suddenly you have these spikes like this, and it might be in that spike in one month where you are ovulating that you get pregnant, but then those hormones that start to crush down afterwards. So, of course, pregnancy, our body goes into hyperdrive and we produce a ton of progesterone. But once that’s all gone post pregnancy, and if we are in our early 40s or late 30s, you are a totally average, normal woman if you are then in perimenopause.

So you mentioned there’s a change in the cycle. What did you call it?

An ovulatory cycle simply means that you don’t produce an egg, that cycle. So you can still be having a period. I might be a little bit scantier, a little bit closer together, a little bit further apart, but to be honest, most of us of our generation don’t really track our periods like the younger girls do these days. You might not even notice that you’re not ovulating. And it might be just that you’re starting to really suffer with insomnia or you’re starting to find that you get really severe PMT, because, of course, PMT, our progesterone is so affiliated with our level, our mood levels. So if you’re already very low in progesterone right before your period, you’re going to be getting really snarky and bitchy and flying off the handle. People will, or a lot of women, experience much worse digestive issues. IBS issues get way worse because progesterone is incredibly important in the thumping action, if you like, of the intestines. It’s really important to know that if you are experiencing classic perimenopausal symptoms and you’ve got a new baby and potentially other slightly older children as well, and you feel like you’re going mad, it’s not you, it’s your hormones.

It’s all made for hormones.

But there’s an awful lot of things that we can do to help ourselves. And I would say it starts with education on what is actually going on with your body. And it really needs to graduate through a total paradigm shift on how we approach wellbeing. Women’s wellbeing, at this very crucial stage, and I would say from your late 30s through to post menopause, so 52, 53, 54 that decade or so is not a time to be pushing through, trying to do a marathon, trying to beat these fitness goals, et cetera, et cetera. It is really a time, and this is probably a bit controversial saying this, because we all want to know that we can do more, more and more. It’s time to stop up the leaky colander, yeah. Does that make sense? Or the leaky boat. It’s a time to really focus on adrenal care, because our adrenal glands take over the production, the key production of those hormones when our ovaries shut up. So, yeah, I’d like to talk a little bit more about that because I think that’s super, super important. And it’s a time of actually kind of stepping into the whole wise woman phase, which, yes, is hard when you’ve got little children around and you’re trying to look after a baby, et cetera. And a lot of women need to go through a grieving process, a letting go process of the younger them, and actually almost do as stepping in a metaphorical, stepping in of this new aspect of themselves. So it can be extraordinary transitional, an extraordinary transitional time. It can be an incredibly empowering time, but not if you listen to the media, which is totally focused on staying young and slim and basically looking like you’re 25 forever. It’s really got to be learning about what is going on with your body and embracing being a woman in midlife and how exciting actually it’s going to be in the second spring, they call it, after menopause. We enjoy that second spring when we actually nurture the body and the brain in this midpoint, this decade or so of huge transition, just as hormonally huge as going into puberty, just as huge.

You talk about raising self awareness, so does this awareness. Are you talking about educating yourself around this transition, around the impact of hormones, or about being more aware about where you are in your cycle and how you’re responding? And I think you’re going to say both, but what did you mean when you said you need to become more aware?

A lot of women will go from having a baby and they won’t necessarily start cycling again on a regular basis. Perimenopause and then they might end up having a few periods, but they might be quite scanty and quite all over the place. Yes, having an awareness of your cycle, cycle tracking is so powerful. It really is. And starting to track your symptoms as well. So starting to track when you have a migraine, when you are leaking, when you find that you’re getting stress, incontinence or urgency issues. Tracking when you have Insomnia, tracking when your skin gets really super, itchy because by tracking what’s going on. So just keeping a little journal and every evening maybe just jotting down what your energy levels are like, tracking how much water you’re drinking, how your body is responding to any kind of exercise and movement you’re doing. If you feel knackered or if you feel energised it is really empowering for you. Because when they say know thyself, you have to know thyself because we’re all very different. So my levels of natural progesterone from when I was in my twenty s and thirty s will be different from yours. Yeah. So what’s normal for me and if I went to go and do a blood test, is going to be very different from you. And the trouble is doing, to be honest, the trouble with doing blood tests in perimenopause is that literally, day to day, almost hour to hour, our hormones are all over the place. You might go and see what your hormone levels are doing by going and having a blood test. But when you’re there, if you just happen to be having a spike in your oestrogen, then you’re going to look like you’ve got regular levels of oestrogen. But it might be that later on that day your oestrogen levels are plummeting down. So it’s very difficult to have blood tests that will actually show what is going on with your hormones. Unless you are on HRT, that’s a different story. Then it’s more telling the doctor how your body is absorbing the hormone replacement therapy. But prior to that, it’s more about your symptoms. So there is this called the Green Climactic scale and doctors will get you to fill in a very, very detailed form which will show them via all of your symptoms, roughly where you probably are in your perimenopausal journey.

Yeah. And I know that there are lots of apps out there that enable you to do this. I just wonder if you’ve got any recommendations, any apps that you really like or that really work and help you because it’s all very well tracking the symptoms or what I’d really want from an app is, oh, you’ve got this. That means it’s this hormone, like to translate that information meaningful rather than just you just go, oh right, I’m just, I get really angry on it, whatever it is, to kind of turn into something useful. Are there any apps that help?

Balance app is very good. So the balance app was developed by Newson Health. It’s kind of like the initial one, the first one, and it’s great. I would recommend the Balance app to just to track your cycles and things and just getting to know a little bit. I mean, you can just go and look on, I mean, I’ve got lots of articles on what these hormones do. It’s just important to know that progesterone, it’s your mood regulating, calming chill hormone. So if you’re feeling like you’re going to kill somebody or you’re going to throw a chair through the window, or you find yourself just screaming at the kids and then going, oh, my God, where did that monster erupt from? Then it’s probably that you are low on progesterone and we really need to look at caring for your adrenal glands. So your adrenal glands can be producing the progesterone that your ovaries are no longer producing. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Whereas oestrogen is our focus, it’s our drive, it’s our energy, it’s our get up and go. It’s the elastic in our skin, it’s the ability to respond to a bit of impact and not wear your pants or the detrusor muscles of the bladder to not be inappropriately spasming and making you have urgent continents. Oestrogen does so many, it keeps the heart pliable. It’s an essential hormone to keep our bones growing. It’s absolutely essential for our brain. So if you’re suffering more from issues around dryness, depletion, itchiness of the skin, dryness and  itchiness of the eyes and mouth. Yes. Inability to sleep as well, then it might be that oestrogen is the main problem. I’m just going to caveat that by saying progesterone and oestrogen, they work like the sisters that fight, but essentially they fundamentally need each other. So they work well when they are in balance. When we are premenopausal, so not peri, but pre. So when we’re just ovulating every month beautifully, then we’ve got very high levels of oestrogen and pretty high levels of progesterone. And they just, we are changing constantly, but they’re pretty balanced. And then we go into if we’ve had a baby, we go into this postnatal period and they both plummet down, but especially progesterone. And it’s the differential, this is the tricky bit. It’s the differential between oestrogen and progesterone. So if they’re not nice and balanced and close together, if one’s up high and one’s down low and it’s normally oestrogen that’s higher and progesterone that’s lower, that’s normally the case. It’s that differential which causes most of the symptoms that women will recognise as being perimenopausal. So this is what happens when we go into early perimenopause. I’m going to say postnatal is, say late 30s, early 40s. Give us another year or so and we’re in perimenopause. Perimenopause, the progesterone drops down first and around about 45, roughly, sometimes 43, 44. That’s when the oestrogen starts to go, one more baby. No, one more baby. No, one more baby. And when the oestrogen is high and the progesterone is low, it’s those days, but it’s that time which is really difficult. So one of the things that women who are especially those experiencing real mood issues, depression in a postnatal stage and who are in maybe late 30s, early 40s, going to the GP, it would be worth talking about perimenopausal issues and maybe supplementing progesterone. So these days we can get body identical progesterone. It is exactly the same molecular structure as the progesterone that we produce ourselves from our ovaries or adrenal glands. It’s not a progestogen, so it’s not the same as what’s in the pill or in the coil, which is a progestogen. It’s a synthetic version. So progesterone, it’s supplied in the UK as a product called Utrogestan. It’s micronised means basically, it’s bashed into tiny, tiny, tiny little pieces, little capsule, and it can be taken orally or intra, vaginally, up the vagina, and that can supplement, it can bring up your levels of natural your natural levels of progesterone, so that there isn’t such a differential between the oestrogen and the progesterone. That is going to help with mood disorders, anxiety, heart palpitations, insomnia, depressive feelings, because we’re actually working at the hormonal level. Whereas an antidepressant, it can help. It can help, but it’s not actually a long term solution, if you like. So really important to work with a GP who understands women’s health and has been kind of recently trained in women’s health and understanding that it’s highly likely if you’re an older mum, that you are going straight into perimenopause.

So to recap, it’s really about tracking your symptoms. It’s really about really upping that self awareness so that you’re able to discern. Because I’m just here, when you think about depression or anxiety, there’s life that creates that kind of stuff as well. So how do you discern that the thing that you’re feeling is a hormonal led situation versus a you’ve actually just got healing to do and stuff like that? How do you figure that out right? 

This is what I assume is the paradigm shift. And I like to say my kind of motto is being in control of letting go of being in control.

Which is the birth thing. Right. That’s a whole birth thing anyway. Yeah.

To be honest, if you’re going to be, later on in life having a baby, it’s likely not necessarily, but it’s likely that you have had a career. You are having a career, you’re a busy woman, you’re used to juggling all the balls. Likely that you’re somebody who’s used to being in control and getting things done, and then you’ve been busy, busy, busy. And then it’s like and you know what? I think I would like to have a child as well. In my experience, and including myself here, when you have, and we’ll say, A type personalities, even though that’s bollocks, isn’t it? But if you’re used to being in control of a situation, suddenly you might be the CEO of a big company and suddenly you’re in a situation. We’ve got this little scrap of a little person who shows you very dramatically that you have no control. Actually, that was a total illusion. It can be such a shattering of the ego. And when you’re dealing with that kind of shattering of the ego and you’re also deeply sleep deprived it can lead to a full on breakdown of who you think that you are in this life. That’s why if I could just talk to every woman going into perimenopause and just say girlfriend, this is not a time to smash the glass ceilings and to push through you have nothing to prove. This is the time to deeply and holistically revere your female form. Be thankful that you have managed your body. This extraordinary the trillions and trillions of cells, the condensed energy that makes up this physical manifestation that you’re inhabiting in this lifetime has created a human being. Now that’s huge. To expect yourself to also then be running your business and potentially looking after other children and older parents and running your social media account and doing all the WhatsApp groups with school and having all of these tabs open and your adrenal glands, which have not changed how they operate. Neither have your ovaries for 300,000 years. They don’t know about all of this stuff. They just see it as stress. Stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress. You’ve got so much stress going on girlfriend right now that the adrenal glands are going we have to keep on pushing out cortisol and adrenaline and cortisol and adrenaline and cortisol and adrenaline and we are in this totally revved never turning off state. Totally, totally revved and the trouble is there’s this thing called pregnant alone steel so your adrenal glands once the ovaries start to shut up shop so once they start to diminish their production fair enough. They’ve been popping out those eggs month after month for decades and they are now slowing down. They don’t have as many eggs to pop out anymore so they’re starting to shut up shop. Your adrenal glands need to be nourished and looked after and revered. And instead the adrenals, the pregnenolone, which is the master hormone, if you like, that the adrenal glands produce that pregnant alone either goes to creating progesterone and oestrogen testosterone. Or if you’re it’s going to keep pushing out cortisol and adrenaline instead, and you’re not going to get that really essential oestrogen and progesterone. So not only have your ovaries shut up shot but your adrenal glands are not taking over the job like they should be. So it’s more for us. It’s more for us because we are still being hoodwinked by society to think that we should be little men and have a baby and we should be men in a skirt who are able to work at a level constantly and not understand that what we are doing is we are going into adrenal revving and fatigue. So we have a tiny bit of testosterone that we produce in the middle of our cycle if we ovulate about a 10th of the testosterone that men produce. Men produce testosterone every 15 minutes consistently up until about. 70. And that’s what gives them the ability to constantly go get up at 09:00 and go to work and work through till six or whatever and be whereas with a woman, we have this extraordinary flux through a normal cycle, which is completely shafted once we get to perimenopause. But through a normal cycle, once you’ve just had your period and your oestrogen is soaring, most women for those first couple of weeks before ovulation, they’re like, on it. We can get 200% done in those times. We can get all the stuff done. We’re very sharp here and then we ovulate, and then we go into this progesterone time of being as we’re going towards our periods. And that’s not the time to be pushing through, especially right before your period. That’s the time where we can be creative, we can come up with extraordinary out of the box solutions to things, but it is not the time to be trying to be really articulate in meetings and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. By understanding your cycle and the general cycle, understanding what these key hormones allow us to do, understanding our extraordinarily unique female hormonal makeup and actually shifting into I’m not going to keep being that pushing forward woman who basically tries to be a small man because that’s what society has asked of us. And instead of insisting all of us need to do it together, we’ve got to all help each other out, insisting that rewrite the playing field, we create a new playing field for women’s bodies and our brains. And this transition time, this decade, if we don’t get it right, the rest of our life is going to be hard. If we do get it right, we can enjoy that second spring. That’s when we can change the world, that’s when we can really make a huge difference. Because our hormones, yes, they’re lower, but they go back into balance again.

And it sounds to me like actually you need to be. Whether or not you’re in your late 30s, early 40s, tracking your cycle and being aware of these hormones and how they impact you is something that all women, the minute they start bleeding, should start that process, because it just raises their own level of self awareness and how they need to change and adapt and flux with their cycle. If you start preparing for birth two months before birth, you’ve left it too late. You need to start thinking about it before you’re pregnant. You need to start planning for pregnancy before you’re pregnant. You need to start planning for this before it happens because suddenly you’re learning. You’re having to do a huge steep learning curve while getting stressed and the hormones are battering you because they’re now out of balance. And you’re like, oh. Whereas if you start in your 20s doing this, then by the time it’s coming around, you’re like, oh, yeah, no, this hormone is out of whack. I know what’s going on here and you can get the heads up, whereas otherwise you’re chasing your tail. That’s the sense I’m getting with what you’re saying.

I think it’s changing quite dramatically. I look at my 18 year old daughter and I’ve got an eleven year old daughter as well. The conversations around women’s health, I mean, obviously this is what I teach, so they hear about this all the time. My daughter tracks her cycle automatically, so do all her friends. It’s just something they do. Whereas I know I’m 51 now and I remember when I first started my circles, I was deeply embarrassed. I mean, I literally put my hands in my ears and was like, no, I wouldn’t listen to anything that my mum tried to tell me. I was so set on basically diminishing and suppressing anything feminine about me because I wanted to work in advertising and it was a man’s world and I needed to be as masculine as possible and just forget about that diminishing kind of woman’s stuff. Whereas I think this generation, the new generation coming through, are way more open to, and so are men, obviously, as well, the beauty of being a woman. And I think unfortunately, we’re having to play catch up and the women just a decade behind me are also having to play catch up. It’s crazy. There’s only in the last couple of years, and I mean literally since me too, in 2018, that there has been funding for research on the female brain in the life stage, as opposed to just assuming we are little men.

I mean, that’s mind blowing, isn’t it?

And so much information has only been coming out now. I mean, it’s just the fact that vaginal oestrogen has only just come out on prescription here in the UK, so not on prescription where you can get it over the counter here in the UK in the last few means, this is something that almost all women will really, really benefit from. It’s not systemic, it does not go into the bloodstream, it just works on the localised area. But the difference it makes for women who are suffering with stress, incontinence or urgency or urgent continents, who’ve got prolapse organs, who have got scar tissue from an episiotomy or tearing, which is becoming hard to deal with once we start to lose our ovarian oestrogen. Many, many women, I’d say 80% plus women start to deal with pelvic floor dysfunction. Now to get some oestrogen back into the area. Intruder vaginally around the vulva and around the sphincter muscles can make a life changing difference. It can literally mean the difference between a woman not leaving her house and having a fully functional life. And yet it’s only just now comes something that you don’t have to try and get. And most GPS didn’t even know that they could prescribe it or didn’t even know what it did until now. We’re starting to get specialist training for GPS in medical school but it only got mandated last year. It’s a cutting edge topic. It shouldn’t be embarrassingly terrible, but it is. I’ve just jotted down a couple of things that I think that I’d love. Midlife woman. I’m going to say midlife woman for when you’re in your late 30s, early 40s, you kind of midlife should be on your radar. One adrenal care. Yeah. So adrenal care focuses completely away from getting skinny again, looking a certain way and focusing on adrenal care. Your adrenal glands are your primary focus. Adrenal care means what I was talking about before, getting away from being in the rev state where we’re pushing out the cortisol adrenaline and getting into a state where we go into the parasympathetic nervous system. So when we’re in that rev state, it’s the sympathetic nervous system and we have mastery over it’s called the autonomic nervous system, but actually we have mastery over it. We can go into that parasympathetic nervous system and that’s when our adrenals are able to go and start to produce the calming progesterone and they need oestrogen.

The adrenals can’t produce both. They’re either on an adrenaline mission or they’re on the other hormone mission. So you need to make sure that you are nurturing them because they can’t do both. Is that right?

Yeah. So it’s a bit more nuanced than that, but let’s just keep that. So things like extending your exhalation with low vibrational toning. So basically humming or singing, anything that is extending that exhalation is toning your vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve goes from the brain, it goes down through all of the organs of the body. It does not ever get activated if we are breathing, shallow breathing or mouth breathing. It gets activated when we extend the exhalation. When you’re sitting around the fire 300,000 years ago and you’ve done your kill and you’re safe and you’re in your tribe and you’re digesting your food, you’re going to be slow breathing. Yeah, like a baby slow breathing. Elephants slow breathe. Tortoises slow breathe. They live forever. Monkeys breathe really fast and that’s why they don’t live very long. But when you are running from the sabre tooth tiger, when you are fighting, when you are in modern life, when you have got all the tabs open, metaphorically and literally, that’s when we’re in that sympathetic system and we don’t extend our exhalation. We’re fast breathing. So slowing down your breathing rate, learning how to breathe properly, learning how to diaphragmatically breathe, if you know you’re a chest breather, if you know you’re a mouth breather, if you know that you’re habitually. Head forward, like go, go, shoulders rounded. Then sort out your posture. Sort out your breathing. Slow your breathing down. Use the buzzy bee breath. Use the if you got a new baby, use your calm the baby calm yourself. Honestly. That’s the key. It’s really easy. That is the key to getting yourself into that parasympathetic nervous system. Yoga nidra, which is in yoga. Yoga sleep yoga. Nidra means taking yourself for 20 minutes, naps, where you have a guided relaxation, taking you into a deep state of rest, into that parasympathetic nervous system and then bringing you back up again. So you’re not going into sleep, it’s called conscious rest. So you are consciously taking yourself into a state where you are deeply replenishing, deeply replenishing at a cellular level and then coming back up. That is so nourishing for the Adrenals. So especially as a new mum, as you know, bub goes to sleep, you might need to do a little bit of movement. And you know we are animals at the end of the day, so if we’ve got adrenaline pumping through us, we need to release it, literally, shake it out like an animal does. So you might need to do a bit of yoga, a bit of dancing, a bit of just literally shaking. Get out for a walk in nature. If you’ve got someone else to mind the baby for a bit, something that will just release the adrenaline and then resting restorative in a pose just 20 minutes or legs up the wall and extending that exhalation, going into that conscious rest. It doesn’t take much. It does not take much and it’s one of those things, the more you practise it, the easier it is. It’s cumulative. So literally, the more you practise the restorative relaxation response, the faster you can go down into it. Two is nutrition for hormones. So basically you got to start looking at intermittent fasting for women. There’s a lady called Dr. Mindy Pelz who’s an American clinical nutritionist and she talks in great detail about intermittent fasting for women’s health. So our hormonal profile, so basically not snacking late and eating breakfast early, but giving your gut a chance to rest overnight to get the gut biome working as well as possible, because of course our gut biome is so correlated with the oestrogen that we’re producing and progesterone that we’re producing as well. So giving your gut a chance to rest overnight and then when you are eating progesterone, needs quality carbohydrates to be produced. So we need quality carbohydrates. Like I always say, quinol, but I know it’s, other people say quinoa, sweet potato. So good quality carbohydrates. If you’re going to have carbohydrates, it’s not fish and chips, it’s good quality carbohydrates. And then oestrogen actually thrives in a low insulin environment. So making sure you have really good quality protein and we should be having about 30 grams of protein per meal, that’s quite a lot. It’s like a big slab of salmon. Really good quality, good fats. So, you know, before I was talking about the pregnant alone. The Adrenals produce the pregnant lone. So that precursor hormone that will either then produce cortisol or progesterone. And oestrogen, pregnant alone is created by cholesterol. So you need to be having good fats like eggs and salmon and avocados and tons of olive oil in order to create the pregnant alone, that’s going to help you create those hormones. So nutrient dense, good fats, lots of good fiber. So the other thing to know is that if we’re constipated constipation is the number one driver of incontinence issues of bladder incontinence, but it’s also issues we get late in trial 40s. If you’re constipated, we tend to then reabsorb oestrogen, use it and then lose it. We need to be able to detoxify it by pooing it out. And if we’re not, it can be reabsorbed. And then we can find that that differential between the oestrogen and the progesterone gets worse and worse and worse and worse, and symptoms get worse and worse and worse and worse. Getting enough good fibre in the diet in order to make sure that a cup of linseed in the morning with water, very helpful. So number three is do less to do more. So it is the opposite of what we have been taught. If you’re finding yourself that you do have enough energy to and you’re suddenly like, wow, I need to lose this baby weight, which I would say, please just park that. It took nine months to create this baby. Give yourself two years at least in order to lose that weight. It’s much more important that you focus on building your health. But because of the whole Adrenal thing, because of the pushing out of a cortisol, when you’re pushing out cortisol, you have insulin spikes, and it’s those insulin spikes when you’re becoming insulin resistance, which is putting that band of fat around the midsection, which a lot of perimenopause women experience. By doing that conscious rest thing that I’ve just been talking about, by gifting yourself times where your Adrenals are calming down, you’re going to find that you’re going to lose weight doing that way more than in the hour you’ve got off each week. You go, right, I’m going to hit the gym or I’m going to go on a five or ten k run or I’m going to go to a hit class. And then on top of already stressed Adrenals, you’re putting what you think should be exercise, relaxation, but it’s not. It’s actually quite stressful and it’s just pushing up those levels of cortisol even more, pushing up the insulin even more.

So what about like a walk in nature, for example? That’s still going to be good for you, but that’s not going to be stressful or hardcore, but it’s also not conscious resting. But I’m just wondering because you’re not sort of lying on the floor.

Especially if as you’re walking, you’re actually in your senses. You’re looking at the leaves as you pass them. You’re absorbing the colour, you’re smelling the earth, you’re seeing the trees. You’re being absolutely in the senses. That’s incredibly enlivening and deeply replenishing, deeply restful. So, yes, walking in nature, getting out in nature, doing yoga outside, I reckon I’m stronger now in my 50s than I probably ever have even when I was a gym bunny. I mean, yoga can be deeply restorative, but it can be incredibly strengthening, bone enhancing, muscle enhancing yoga and isometric pilates and be very consciously regulating your breath. So you are calming your adrenals breathing beautifully and you’re doing extraordinarily powerful stuff. So I only ever do about ten minutes a day, that’s it. And then I walk out in nature. But I reckon that being smart about it just working smarter, not harder, that’s the key.

So you basically don’t want to break out into a sweat is what I’m hearing.

Look, no, that’s not true. That’s not true. But in an ideal world, if you are doing a fitness thing, if you’re not sleeping 6 hours a night, your baby is still waking up regularly for feeds and stuff, it’s not the time to be doing stuff that’s going to stress your adrenals. But if you’re a bit further down the track, if you’ve already built up your good Pelvic floor and deep core strength again and you can cope with intra abdominal pressure downwards, then by adding in intermittent exercise where for like 20 seconds on, you’re spiking your heart rate up and then you’re taking your heart rate right down. So you’re going sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system so I’ve developed this thing called Half a hit. So it’s basically a 30 minutes blast class. And that’s what we do. We do cross patterning for the brain, lots of balance work, bring the heart rate right up with exercises and then drop it right down into deep stretches, slowing the breath and then going back up to breath where we’re activating deep core muscles and then down again. And it is good to do little short bursts of exercise as long as it’s followed with adrenal calming. Does that make sense?

Yes.

So what I want to be doing is going for an hour run on the treadmill. That’s the worst thing you could do. Don’t do that.

I’ve had some friends say that she started training for a marathon. I think she’s like early forties and she put on a ton of weight when she started training for the marathon. So that’s the kind of response that you’re talking about, which is that stress and the body’s like what the hell’s going on? I need to protect myself.

I’ve got a group of mums that I run with sometimes and it’s really interesting. The more the midlife ones are running, the more of a box their physical shape looks like, the more they’re losing their waist and the more weight they’re putting on actually, overall. And that’s the thing, understand that our hormones at this stage of our life is totally different. What worked when you’re in your twenties and thirties, the whole eating less calories in order to lose weight, that does not work. Now, if you’re not feeding those key hormones with good fats. We need a lot of good fats in order to create those hormones. We really need way more good fats in the diet. Like I said before, not fish and chips. We’re talking about avocados, your salmons, your olive oil is brilliant put on everything. If we’re not doing that satiating ourselves, then we’re going to be spiking insulin. And you might be in calorie deficit, but you’re going to put on weight as soon as you eat anything. Your body’s got to go. It’s a total rewiring. It’s a total paradigm shift on woman’s health and fitness. And it’s got to be, I believe it’s got to be an acceptance process. And yoga is called santosha. Santosha literally means sitting with what is now, like being in total acceptance of what is now. Not wishing for something else, not yearning for the past, not projecting into what you would like the future to be, but sitting at what is right now. And that acceptance that Santosha is the key ingredient to change. Because once you sit with this is the body, this is the brain, now what can I do to enhance the way my body wants to operate is naturally wanting to operate. And it’s not trying to be a little man. It’s not revering, revering your womanhood. Exactly.

And all those things you’ve described, like, I’m going through this phase where the things that used to work don’t work anymore. And so I’ve started intermittent fasting, so really extending that fasting window as much as I can, doing those walks in nature. Dr. Mindy Pelts, I think she’s got a really good book out called Fast Like a Girl. She’s got a really great YouTube channel for anybody who wants to learn more about all of this, which is really great. But all these things that used to work for me just don’t work. And it’s taken a lot of me just going hang on a know, tracking everything a lot more closely and doing the calorie deficit, doing more exercise. I was like, hang on a minute. Normally this would like my weight would be dropping off right now, and it’s not. So yeah, I’ve been incorporating some of these things that you’ve been describing. It’s a suck it and see thing. You’ve got to kind of try that. Oh, that’s not working. Try that. Okay. And it’s this constant, pivoting, shifting learning, because what might work for somebody else isn’t necessarily going to work for me. So I’m now tracking everything like crazy and just learning. But I think that acceptance piece is really important because, yeah, it’s like, okay, I am not going to get back into those genes. They’re not even pre baby genes. I’m changing as a woman, and that’s okay. And accepting that rather than trying to be ten years behind me in my life, it’s like I have evolved, I’m different. That’s been an inner work piece, not a physical, not a diet, not running, whatever it is that’s been, okay, this is who I am. That’s, I think, a huge part of that process. Because when you can accept yourself for who you are, then you’re just happier with the way you are. So you’re not trying to do all this stuff. You can just think, okay, I’ve got a really busy time right now, and what I should do is go and go crazy and do the go go, but no, I’m not. I’m going to go for a walk in nature.

Which I am going to achieve, by the rule, on my to do list. But actually, I need this. And that’s where I’m getting my insights, my intuition, my shortcuts come in, my inspiration. For that, I’m very grateful. And yet it’s required a huge step change in how I manage my life. So, yeah, listening to you saying all this stuff, I can resonate it all resonates with me. And I’m definitely still on that learning journey. And I think I should start tracking some of this stuff sooner, actually. But that’s why I want to encourage listeners to really start familiarising themselves with their cycle sooner, making friends with their cycle. Not kind of thinking, oh my God, it’s my period. Oh, my God, just go like, I’m going to be out for a week now, just leave me alone. It’s accepting that this is an important part of your womanhood.

I heard this expression years ago and it just has stayed with me. “There is freedom in surrender.” Yes, that surrender. So in yoga, there’s a word called Ishvara pranidhana, which I love to say, and it literally means if we set where we want to go, roughly, we have this idea of how we want to feel in ourselves. And we make conscious choices to take ourselves along that path, knowing that sometimes the path might zigzag all over the place. But we’re making conscious choices and we’re doing daily practices, daily things that are going to help us move towards that vision that we have of ourselves. So it might be starting the day with hot water, doing five squats after we’ve been to the loo, trying to tune in to do a 15 minutes yoga nidra once a day, or in CBT, whatever it is. We’ve chosen our things, we’re doing our things, getting out into nature walking, but ultimately, it’s not with grasping onto a certain outcome, getting back into those skinny jeans or whatever it is, it’s not then I’ll be happy. It’s going with an open palm and kind of giving over to something that’s bigger than ourselves, something that is that collective consciousness, the co-creation with the universe, the Mother Nature, God, whatever you want to call. In yoga, we say the little self and the big self. Our connection with all that is in Ishvara pranidhana, is that ability, which I feel is so feminine, of giving over with an open hand grace, having the grace to not be holding and controlling everything. And that’s why it gets back to that being in control, of letting go, of being in control and control the controllables. Control what you choose to do for movement. Control the people that you choose to be around. If people are toxic and they make you feel exhausted, spend more time with people that bring, you know what you do when Baba does go down for sleep, do you actually need to do all the tidying up then? Do you need to necessarily do those emails right now? Do you need to be doing your website right now or could you go for the first 20 minutes? I’m going to go into a yoga nidra. I’m going to do a deep rest. It’s a paradigm shift and it’s huge because we have been conditioned from birth, most of us, that our busyness equals our worthiness, to take off that hat and consciously set it aside and sit with the fact that you essentially, as a woman, are enough, just as you are, and that you’re more than enough. And if you’ve just had a baby, you literally create a human being. You are perpetuating the human race. That’s more than enough.

Is there anything more that needs to be said, Linda? I don’t know. I think you said it all.

Apart from the fact that I’ve got thebathroombootcamp.com which is free. And if you want to just get into little bits of exercise, little bits of movement, which can be very helpful for your posture and your pelvic floor, then grab that, because those exercises do work. I’ve got a nice guided meditation. It’s not a yoga nidra, it’s just a nice guided meditation for women who are postnatal and in that perimenopause phase, who just focused around the centre of our being, around the pelvis. And this is a nice way to relax. So if you like, I can send you the link to have a listen.

And where can people find you, Linda, if they want to track you down and go, I love what she’s saying. I love her. Where is she? Where are you?

I’m all over the place. So I’ve got my umbrella website, which is lindastephens with a ph. lindastephenswellbeing.com. So there you can go through to I’ve got womenswellbeing.me, which is where I teach online. And I’ve got a huge plethora of information and interviews with health professionals and all of my different yoga classes and things in womenswellbeing.me. And I’ve also linked through to yogamums.net, which is for birth training and postnatal recovery courses and the like. I run retreats, wellbeing retreats and workshops. So most of the stuff is all linked through Linda Stevens well being.

Wonderful. Well, you’re going to send me all the links, so I’m going to have all the links in the podcast, show notes and links of your meditation. We can also let people know that I’m sure they’re going to want to track that down as well. So thank you, Linda, for joining me on the podcast. It’s been brilliant. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. It’s always such a pleasure.

You’ve been listening to the Fear Free Childbirth podcast with me, Alexia Leachman. Fear Free Childbirth is the online destination for women seeking to take the fear out of pregnancy, birth and beyond with fear clearance, meditations, self healing products and courses, professional training and specialist programs for overcoming tokophobia. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, then check out the Fear Free Childbirth Mamaship. It’s a bit like Netflix where you can binge on a boatload. More Fear Free Childbirth content to inspire you on the journey to motherhood and beyond. More interviews, more birth stories? More expert wisdom? Visit fearfreechildbirth.com to find out more.