Why Your Body Feels Unfamiliar in Menopause
===
[00:00:00] If your body feels unfamiliar in ways that you can't quite explain, well, this conversation is definitely for you. Now, one of the most common things that women say to me is that they don't recognize their bodies anymore, and not because something dramatic happened overnight, and not because one obvious symptom occurred, but simply because.
Things don't respond the way that they used to. Sleep doesn't feel restorative. Energy feels unpredictable. Emotions feel closer to the surface, and the body feels less capable. And when that happens, well, it can shake your confidence quietly. And this isn't usually the moment when women immediately think of menopause.
Instead, you tend to think that something else is wrong and that moment can begin with self-doubt. Women start questioning themselves. Am I doing something wrong? Am I not managing stress well enough? Am I just not as resilient as I used to be? And what makes this experience so unsettling is [00:01:00] that it often lacks a clear explanation.
Nothing feels dramatic enough to justify concern, but nothing feels normal enough to just ignore. So women live in that uncomfortable middle space trying to adapt to a body that feels unfamiliar without understanding why. And I wanna start by saying this. Feeling unfamiliar in your body during this stage of life is not a failure.
It's not a lack of discipline, and it's not a sign that you're losing control either. It's usually a sign that your body is responding to hormonal changes that affect multiple systems at once, and when multiple systems shift at the same time, the result can feel disorienting. And here's what many women don't realize.
Menopause rarely changes one thing at a time. It changes how a number of systems communicate with each other. Hormones act like messengers, and they help to coordinate signals between the brain, the nervous system, your muscles, your joints, digestion, [00:02:00] and your mood. And when those hormone levels fluctuate or decline, well, communication becomes way less efficient.
The body is still working. But it's working differently and that difference is often what women experience as unfamiliar. For example, a woman may notice that exercise no longer feels energizing. Instead, she feels depleted instead of refreshed. Another woman may notice the stress she used to tolerate.
Now feels overwhelming. Noise feels louder, time pressure feels heavier. Another may notice that her emotional responses surprise her. She feels more reactive, more sensitive, and more easily drained. Now, individually, these changes can seem unrelated. Together, though they point to a body that is recalibrating.
The problem is that most women were never taught to expect this. You were taught to expect a few hot flashes, maybe some mood swings, and maybe even some sleep changes. You were not taught [00:03:00] that menopause can affect how safe you feel in your body. And when the body feels unfamiliar, the mind often tries to regain control by analyzing every sensation.
Women start monitoring yourselves closely. You notice every ache, every shift in your mood, every moment of fatigue, and without context. Well, that hyper-awareness can increase anxiety instead of clarity, and this is where the experience often becomes more emotional. Not just physical, because when your body feels unpredictable, you find it harder to trust it.
You stop trusting your energy, your memory, and your emotional responses, and that can feel deeply unsettling, especially for women who spent their entire lives being capable, reliable, and high function. Now I wanna take a moment to normalize something. It's very common for women in this transition to grieve their former sense of ease.
Not because you wanna go backwards, right? But [00:04:00] because you miss feeling at home in your own body. That grief rarely gets talked about, though. Instead, women are told to just push through it, to adapt quietly, to not make a big deal of it. But ignoring that emotional layer doesn't make it go away.
Understanding what's happening though, it helps to restore a sense of agency because when you understand why your body feels unfamiliar, it becomes way less threatening. And here's another important reframe. Your body is not betraying you. It is responding to change, and responding to change takes energy.
And during menopause, the body is constantly adjusting to new hormone levels. The nervous system is recalibrating, the brain is adapting to a different neurotransmitter activity. Your muscles and joints are responding to changes in tissue support, and your gut is responding to altered motility and sensitivity and all of that requires [00:05:00] adaptation and adapting can actually feel uncomfortable before it feels stable.
And this is why women often say that you feel off without being able to point to one specific issue. The unfamiliarity actually comes from the accumulation of subtle shifts. And another important point, many women assume that unfamiliar sensations mean that something is wrong, but unfamiliar does not automatically mean dangerous.
It just means different and different deserves understanding, not dismissal. And this doesn't mean that you ignore symptoms, it simply means that you approach them with curiosity. Instead of fear, so instead of asking what's wrong with me, try asking what has changed? What feels harder than it used to?
What feels predictable? What's no longer responding the way it used to? See those questions help you identify [00:06:00] patterns, and patterns are far more informative than isolated symptoms. For example, if sleep quality declines, energy often follows, when energy declines, motivation can suffer. When motivation suffers, confidence can dip.
And then suddenly a woman feels unlike herself even though no single symptom explain the whole picture. And that unfamiliarity can easily be misinterpreted as something psychological or personal, but it's often physical. And this is where education becomes grounding when women understand that their experience has a biological basis, something important shifts.
You stop blaming yourself. You stop pushing through in ways that create more exhaustion. You pay attention to what your body needs now, not what it needed 10 years ago. That shift is powerful because menopause is not about losing yourself. It's about learning how your body is working now, and that [00:07:00] requires different expectations.
Different pacing, different forms of support. And that does not mean less capable ladies. It just means different conditions for thriving. And if your body feels unfamiliar right now, I want you to know you're not alone in that experience and you are not imagining it. Many women describe this stage as living in a body that speaks a slightly different language.
The goal here is not to force it to speak the old language. The goal is to learn how to listen differently to the language is speaking now, and that starts with understanding what belongs to this transition and what deserves further evaluation. Not everything is menopause, and menopause does not explain everything either.
But when women lack a framework, they often assume everything is their fault. And that is what I want to interrupt right now because clarity restores trust and trust is what will allow you to move [00:08:00] forward with confidence. And if you want a place where you can look up what you are experiencing and you can see it explained clearly without judgment or fear, well that's exactly why the book exists.
It's been out since January 12th, which would've been my mom's 84th birthday, by the way. And like many of you, my mom struggled through many of those changes, and her experience was a huge inspiration for writing the book. And it was designed so that you can meet your body where it is now, not where it used to be, not where you think it should be, but where it actually is.
And when you meet your body with understanding instead of resistance, you start to feel like you can navigate the unfamiliar, and that is where steadiness begins. And to get your copy of decoding the 80 symptoms and side effects of menopause, click the link in the [00:09:00] bio.
