37: You're More Stressed Than You Think (Even if Nothing is "Wrong")

You're More Stressed Than You Think, Even if Nothing is "Wrong".

If you’ve been telling yourself “I’m fine… nothing is really wrong,” but you have menopause symptoms, your energy is low, and life feels a little flat, this episode is for you.

In this solo episode, Jen breaks down one of the biggest misconceptions midlife women carry: that stress only counts when something big or dramatic is happening.

But the truth is, you could be sitting at your desk in a stress response without even realizing it, simply because it’s become your normal.

Jen explores how stress is not just caused by major life events like divorce or an ill parent who requires extra care, but by the daily patterns, thoughts, and coping strategies your nervous system has learned over time.

You’ll learn how the 4 core stress responses - fight, flight, freeze, and fawn -show up in everyday life in ways that look productive, responsible, and even successful… but are slowly draining your energy, disconnecting you from your body, and keeping you stuck.

If you’ve ever wondered why:

•  You feel tired even when life seems “fine” 
•  You can’t fully relax or switch off, especially in the middle of the night
•  You feel like you’re going through the motions instead of truly living 

…this episode will help you finally see what’s really going on beneath the surface.

In this episode, we cover:

•  Why you don’t need a crisis to be in a stress response 
•  How stress becomes “invisible” in midlife 
•  The connection between stress, cortisol, and hormonal symptoms 
•  Why your coping strategies might be keeping you stuck 
•  How your nervous system patterns shape how you experience your life 

This episode is for you if:

•  You feel off, exhausted, or disconnected, but can’t explain why 
•  You’re experiencing midlife symptoms that don’t seem to improve 
•  You feel like you’re on autopilot instead of fully present in your life 

Key Takeaway:
Stress isn’t just a matter of what’s happening in your life, it’s a matter of your nervous system has learned to respond to it.  And until those patterns change, the stress will keep coming back…no matter how many breaks you take.

Coming Next Week:
We’re taking this deeper and putting it into a clear framework so you can understand why your life might feel “blah,” why you feel like you’re on autopilot, and what’s actually keeping you from feeling fully present and alive.

Come to Peru with us if you want all the secrets to creating a life that truly lights you up! Details here.

Join us in Costa Rica, October 2026 for our Retreat: Soul-Aligned - Design Your Extraordinary Next Chapter! Click here for details.

Find us on instagram:

 @midlifewomenrising

@jenreimercoaching

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome. This is the Midlife Rising podcast. When I ask women in their 40s and 50s if they're stressed, the majority of them say, no, not really. Nothing major is going on. And then in the next breath, they'll say to me, but I'm exhausted. Or I don't feel like myself anymore. I just want to be myself. Or I'm feeling that menopause, memory stuff. And what they don't realize is that is stress. So the thing is, you don't need to be in a crisis to be in a stress response. Most women that we work with are living in a stress response all day long. So if I asked you now, are you stressed? And your first response is, no, maybe I'm a six out of 10, a 7 out of 10, chances are you're actually a 10 without even realizing it. So stick with me. We're going to dig into why this is and what is happening all day long in your body that is producing these stress responses that you don't even know about, that are causing menopause symptoms.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

You're a woman over 40 who spent your life being the one who holds it all together. But now your body's changing and your soul is done pretending everything is fine. Welcome to Midlife Rising. We're your hosts, Sherry and Jen, twin sisters and modern medicine women, here to help you rewire your stress response, balance your hormones, and reclaim your feminine power. Every episode is a rebellion against the rules you never agreed to and a return to yourself. Join us where Midlife isn't a crisis, it's a catalyst. Hello, it's Jen.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

I am working on a solo episode today. And I'm really, I'm very passionate about this because it actually really bugs me that we have been taught that stress only counts if something big is happening. So what I mean by that is you got to be like in the midst of a divorce or an illness, loss and grief, like tremendous work pressure. If you're not going through that, then the assumption is no, I'm not stressed, or maybe I don't deserve to be stressed. I certainly was like this. I even I am even now, still. I've learned how to catch it now. And that's the difference, because then I can quickly get out of it. But even like I went through a separation a year, a little over a year ago, and I barely I had to really force myself to slow down and stop and allow myself to deal with that instead of trying to deal with everything else. We just push through because it's our norm. Stress is not about what's happening in your life. It's about how your nervous system is responding to your life. How it's responding to your thoughts, your emotions, your patterns, and the situations. And the problem is that it's become so normal to feel stress that most women that we talk to don't even know what it feels like to not be stressed. When I tell them that they can live a stress-free life, they they look at me and they go, what does that look like? And the possibility, it is very hard to describe because it's a feeling in your body, a feeling of freedom, a feeling of it's like a feeling of coming off autopilot and suddenly you're driving again, like a sports car. You feel motivated again, excited, instead of just this sort of meh, flatness. So that's what I'm gonna get into today, because what we see again and again is that women aren't stressed because their lives are particularly chaotic. They're stressed because of how they've learned to cope with their lives. And what I mean by that is we learn at a very young age how to cope. That's when we pick up our coping strategies, like how we operate in life, like perfectionism, for example. That is a coping strategy. And these coping strategies are actually very closely linked or directly linked with the stress responses. So you have probably heard about at least three of the main stress responses fight, flight, freeze. Many people haven't heard about the fawn stress response. So I am gonna walk you through those four, what they mean, and how they show up. Because they don't look dramatic. They look like productivity, I need to be responsible, success, I got stuff to do. Saying yes when you want to say no, it's really simple things. So let's start with fight, because this is the most commonly known one. So fight e equates with control and overfunctioning. So if you so what I want to say first, actually, is I used to think that I used only one of these responses in life. Like I tend to be a freezer, or at least that's what I thought at the time. And then I learned that I use actually all four of these stress responses. We all do. You might have one that you sort of default to in very in a lot of situations, but we use all four. So you but you might recognize yourself more in one over the others. So again, I'll start with fight. This is related to control and overfunctioning. We tend to think it's like anger and like literally fighting. But for most women, fight doesn't necessarily look like anger. It looks like control. So in terms of coping strategies, this is linked to perfectionism, firefighting, and like overworking, like when you can't switch off, especially at night, fixing everyone else's problems. So this is like classic firefighting at work. And this can show up as like work cultures where everybody is sort of in crisis mode all the time. But you could also be a firefighter or a fixer. Like, oh, I had a client one day who said to me, She's like, Yep, I'm the one who swoops in to save the day. Or you might, with your kids, when they come to you with a problem, you jump in before they've even had a chance to try to even try to solve it themselves. The other thing this looks like is like body hyper control. So you, if you tend to be a fighter, you're probably like high achiever, overfunctioning. You get up every day, you do your boot camp, you um you stick to a diet, you're a high performer at work. And what your nervous system is doing in the background is scanning for what's wrong and trying to fix it, making sure everything is perfect. And this, I talk about perfectionist, perfectionism all the time, is not necessarily detail-oriented. It looks like arbitrary standards. You might pride yourself in the quality of your work, which might not mean, it could mean triple-checking your spelling, but it might not be related to that. It might just be like the content of your work or how you show up at work, like always have always being organized. This was me. I was, I always looked organized from the outside. And the thing was, is that I was terrified of being caught in a mistake. So my body was always going, okay, what mistakes might have I made? What might I make? Make sure that I have every I dotted and T crossed and control everything so that nothing goes wrong. And that ends up being a pattern that is hardwired into your nervous system. It is overcomable. You can rewire your nervous system, but it takes conscious effort to rewire this pattern. And it it takes shifting the subconscious beliefs that are initiating this pattern. Because that's really what the driver is here. We all know that up to 90% of our behavior is automatic, right? So it's driven by our subconscious. It's driven by our nervous system, really, which is driven by our subconscious, by our emotions and our subconscious thoughts. Okay, that's fight. Flight can sometimes feel a little bit tricky to understand what flight looks like in real life. But in everyday life, we call this keep moving, because it is, it's not necessarily running away physically, although it can. You know, there's those people who like every every time things get tough, they leave the room, or if you know, a tough conversation is happening, they walk away. But it's more about running away from yourself. So this is busyness. You're always staying busy, can't sit still. Maybe you have a very active social life. And it's avoiding stillness, which is essentially avoiding being with yourself. So it's avoiding your emotions, body signals. This can be as small as not going to the bathroom when you need to. So you stay at your desk and you know you have to go, but you got stuff to do. So you avoid it. And your body gets stressed because you're not listening to it. It also looks like, oh, this happened to me on the weekend. So I have a flight response. Um, I can't, I sometimes can't sit still. I am getting very good at it. I have been meditating for 15 years. But there are times when I just can't rest. And one of the biggest times is on the weekend when I have stuff to do around the house. So this was Sunday. I had the kitchen was still a mess. I needed to vacuum, I needed to clean. I also wanted to do a bit of work. There was so many things that I wanted to do. And I knew that I needed to just sit with a cup of coffee first and just rest and maybe read the paper. And I couldn't. I kept sitting down, and three minutes later, I'd get back up and do something. And I kept telling myself, so the first thing that I try to do is reframe it, like just to tell myself, it's okay, you can rest. I'm we're gonna get to that later. And that doesn't work if your nervous system is in a stress response. So there was nothing. I was alone in the house. There was nothing. There was no crisis that was telling me to do these things. It was an internal compulsion that was telling me to stay busy. And if you don't get all this stuff done, and if the house isn't perfect, you can't relax. You're not gonna be okay. So it's actually kind of a mixture of like, it's gotta be perfect and don't sit still, don't be with yourself. What I had to do was a somatic technique to calm my nervous system. So I use tapping. That's my preferred, it's called EFT tapping, it's emotional freedom technique where you tap on different points of your bodies. That is my preferred method of calming my nervous system. There are lots of them we use inside our programs. And this was just one of them. And once I tapped and let the feelings out, I voiced the fears, I was able to sit still. And for 45 minutes, I sat on my couch and enjoyed my coffee without having to get up and go do a little thing, put a laundry load in, go do something, and then come back and sit down. I sat there and enjoyed because it had nothing to do with my conscious thoughts. It was my underlying nervous system response that I was in. Okay, I'm gonna move on to the next one, which is freeze. What this looks like in your daily life is overthinking and also disconnection. So freezing doesn't look like doing nothing. It looks like and feels like being stuck in your head, overanalyzing. Sometimes you're thinking about like trying to make a decision, trying to solve a problem. It's ruminating. And this, the more you think and try to find a response in the data or in your in your mind when you're in a stress response, the less able you are to make it, to make that decision. So we talk about analysis paralysis that not only happens in the workplace when people are just like, oh, I used to work in this place. And my leaders could never make a decision. I was doing a lot of analysis. I had a team of analysts, and we were trying to make pricing decisions and all kinds of decisions, promotional, strategic decisions. And we'd go to a meeting and I'd bring them the analysis and say, here's my recommendation. And they'd be too afraid. And they'd say, go back and run more analysis. And I was working 12 hours a day and weekends because I was a people pleaser. And I would just say, Yes, okay, I'll go back and do the analysis. But that's analysis paralysis. That's what it looks like. Let's go do some more scenario planning. And for a lot of the women that we work with, it looks like trying to solve a problem, like ruminating. That's what it, that's the way they say it. I keep ruminating, I'm lying awake at night, thinking about a problem that I can't solve. This is like so decision fatigue, like if you come home from work and you can't even decide what to have for dinner, that's because you've been in a stress response all day. So now your body's just freezing and won't let you make a decision except to survive. And this can also look like disconnecting from the body. So again, it's ignoring symptoms. Um, you know, when you've got gut issues or just pushing through the hot flashes, you know you have low energy and you're not really aware of it. And an example of this is when you keep going. So, you know, when you're like working or you're in a groove and you're in a mode and you just keep going, and you know deep down that if you stop, you're gonna crash. So you don't stop because you don't want to crash because there's too much to do, and you just keep going. So you might not even be aware that your body like needs to crash, but so it's just those that ignoring. So you can't relax. You're actually just like almost numb, just forgetting, just shut down. And numbness feels, it just feels flat. It you it's almost like you can't experience the peaks and valleys of emotions. You don't experience a lot of joy or celebration, and you also don't experience a lot of sadness or maybe anger. That one sometimes comes out, but a lot of the negative, so-called negative emotions either. It's just this sort of flatness. Okay, I'm gonna move on to the last one, which is fawning. So a lot of people don't know about the fawn stress response. It's not talked about as much, maybe a little bit more now. And this is, I want to say all of these stress responses are natural. So they are not your fault for feeling these stress responses. We see them in nature. So, to explain fawn, if you have ever watched a dog in a fawn response, if it is with, let's say you've got a dog and there's an alpha male in the room, the dog will, it looks really cute actually. The dog will sort of bow its head. Sometimes it like turns its head and it bows its head and it allows the other dog to sniff. This is fawning. And the way it looks like for humans is people pleasing. And I would say fawning is the most socially rewarded stress response for women. We are told we need to serve everybody else. We're told to be kind and nice when we're little girls. We're taught to be considerate, especially if you've come from a religious background. And so we grow up to be constantly looking around to see what other people are feeling, what they're doing, what they want. And actually, even more so for women, this is kind of reinforced by the estrogen that has been running in your system for so many years. And it's a good thing. Like estrogen, when we hit puberty and estrogen starts flowing more strongly through our system, it tells the body or it tells our brain to start considering what other people need. It's a nurturing hormone and it tells us to serve and nurture and care for others. But then we have this patriarchal, socially conditioned messaging that tells us that we need to please everybody and serve everybody, not just care for the people who really need us, but to be kind to everybody and always be. So for me, this looked like constantly monitoring everybody else's emotions and saying yes when I really want to see say no. To the point for the women that are almost every single woman in our of our clients feels this. They say yes when they want to say no, and they don't actually even know what they want anymore. They've been so used to checking what everybody else needs and assuming that they come at the bottom of the priority list that they don't even know what they want. In fact, just this week, one of my clients, she's been saying this for months, all they want to do is care for my mother who's sick. And we were doing um a one-on-one session where I do a I practice a type of hypnosis. So I was speaking directly to her subconscious, and I asked her, Do you really want to be caring for your mother? And she had tears in her eyes. She said, No. She wanted to just love and spend time with her mother, but she didn't want to be caring for her. Here's another one. When you, when somebody asks you to do something that you don't want to do, but you don't feel you can say no, your body, your nervous system goes into like just this. It's like glitch, it's like a tightening up. I wish I wish you could see me. I'm like squeezing my hands. Because it's almost like for me, it almost feels like my stomach tightens up, but I'm it's not even that. It's more subtle than that. And that's when your body is going into a fond response. When all those subconscious patterns are saying, no, you can't say no, no, you're gonna upset them, I don't want to conflict, um, be kind, you're a bad person if you say no, you're gonna feel guilty. So all of these thoughts are linked with this response. You could even, this could even look like losing yourself in relationships, like where you don't, you're so used to doing what your children want. Again, you don't know what you want anymore. So you're not calm. You might come across as calm, but what you're doing is managing, monitoring. It's more, it's more monitoring. Managing is more the control of a fight response. You are monitoring everyone else. What your nervous system is saying is, I'll be okay as long as everybody else is okay. So those are the four fight, flight, freeze, fun. And just tying it back to your symptoms. When women come to us and they say, like, I just want my energy back, I just want to sleep better. I want to feel like myself again. Those, yes, those are all menopause symptoms, but they are also directly tied with what happens when your body lives in a stress response long term. It hits in midlife because you no longer have sex hormones to buffer your stress responses. That's one of the functions of estrogen and progesterone. They buffer your stress response. So they kind of keep the peaks of the stress response a little bit lower. And suddenly, when those hormones aren't so prevalent in your system, in your body, the stress response gets higher. You get burnt out more easily, you get, you don't, you feel less energy, and all the symptoms, cortisol, is also directly related to menopause symptoms. So you feel even worse symptoms. This is one of the biggest reasons. So I want to tie this back to what we're working on right now. We are working, we have something new that's launching soon. And it's a retreat. And my insight from the stress response is one of the biggest reasons. Like so many women that we see, they just keep saying, Well, I'm just gonna go on vacation. I just need to get through this project, and then I'm gonna relax. So they take a couple weeks off, they go on vacation, and the vacation works for a little bit, takes them three or four days to relax because it takes that long to calm your body from the stress response. And then it's like a hot tub experience or a massage experience where you feel great while it's happening and maybe for the next couple of days. But then when you get back to the real world, you fall back into the same stress responses because they are automatic. They are ways that your body has been coping through your entire life. You leave your life, you go on vacation, your nervous system comes down a notch, you feel like yourself again, and then you come back to the same patterns, same responses, same wiring. Because the problem has never been your life or the situation. It's the way your nervous system learned to live inside your life and to respond to your life. So these patterns are learned. But the good news is that they're not permanent, they can be unlearned, but you can't fix what you can't see. So if you've been thinking, yeah, I'm not that stressed, I invite you to just consider that you might actually be more stressed than you realize. Because we've been just taught this. Stress is just normal. So notice which one that you are and where you saw yourself in this. Because the first step is awareness. And then keep with us, stay with us, because next week we have mapped these patterns out in a way that is going to help you see yourself so clearly and know what phase you are at in terms of repatterning your nervous system, how to get to a repatterning, and then how we can help you do that. Because we've got a retreat coming up that is going to be so good. We have intentionally created content that is going to have you shifting your nervous system in nine days so that you can come back and show up entirely differently in your life. So I can't wait for next week when we are going to reveal more about this retreat.