The Moment You Realise Something Has to Shift

The Moment You Realise Something Has to Shift

Here Are Five Ways To Boost Your Resilience During Menopause

There’s a moment in a woman’s life that doesn’t arrive loudly. It is a felt sensation when she experiences her first period. It’s felt when that first (and last) contraction of her baby passes. And it is experienced again when the first period is skipped during perimenopause.

This final shift doesn’t announce itself with any certainty or clarity. In fact it is often quite the opposite. This time of a woman’s life is jam-packed with bodily dysfunction, questions, forgetfulness, brain fog, often pain and most certainly change.

This change arrives without invitation. Often, it has silently crept quietly arrived in the middle of your life and you find yourself questioning it’s presence like those old jeans in the back of your closet that haven’t fit your arse for years.

The shift brings about a subtle discomfort on all levels — physically, mentally and emotionally.
It feels like a fetus moving within your body, and it brings with it a growing restlessness.
Just like your first period, you dreaded when it would arrive and then became accustomed. You know this change will happen again.

Your body contains a knowing you can’t quite explain.

And suddenly, the life that once fit as you did all the things and juggled the balls in the air — it simply doesn’t function like that anymore. The shift is often hard and punches below the waistline. The shift strikes right where it can cause the most disruption within your inner world.

Those months of not bleeding or bleeding for weeks, or perhaps you’ve stopped sleeping or started hot flushes — the shift affects us all. Maybe your body has started the headaches that pain relief won’t touch.

This is the moment you realise — something has to move with the shift, and it doesn’t have to be your sanity.

For many women in the earlier adult years, oestrogen has quietly acted like a biological “social buffer” — enhancing empathy, smoothing emotional edges, and supporting the instinct to nurture, connect, and tend to the needs of others. Across the reproductive years, this can feel like a natural capacity to give, hold space, and prioritise relationships, often without conscious effort.

However, as oestrogen declines and brings the shift gifted by perimenopause and menopause, that hormonal buffering effect softens and then evaporates.

What often emerges is not a loss of care, but a recalibration of it.

The tolerance for over-giving diminishes, sometimes suddenly. The desire to constantly meet everyone else’s needs wanes, and a deeper, more discerning awareness begins to surface.

This shift of the declining nurture hormone can feel confronting, even induce guilt. This is especially true if your identity has been built around being the one who holds everything together for the family — and it is often the woman, the mother who holds this crown.

Know this, the shift of your identity is not a failure of who you were. It is your biology and your psyche inviting you to redefine nurturing in a way that finally includes yourself.

The shift forces you to become the priority in your life.

The matriarch’s resilience takes a hit on the biological front as her body literally rewires the oestrogen out of everything. And spiritually, her resilience waivers as she starts to question whether her body is failing her.

In order to maintain her resilience, the Queenager must remain connected to her inner truth, meaning, or essence. Beauty, this time of your life is less about “adapting” and more about remembering who you are when life strips everything (including your social mask) back.

Here Are Five Ways To Boost Your Resilience During Menopause

Here are five simple suggestions of how to embrace the shift in your life.

1. Inner Alignment

This is almost cheesy, but there is power in remaining connected to your values, soul, or purpose. If that too is changing, then ensure you are implementing strategies to remain present so that you can rapidly soothe your nervous system.

The key is remain focused on you, this is the zone of your control. Everything else is external and beyond you.

2. Become Present

Within our society, humans have become accustomed to avoiding being bored. We have appliances to simplify our life, yet we don’t bank the moments of stillness to recharge our batteries. We continue to do more.

The flow-on effect of always being busy is this — it becomes impossible to be enthusiastic about any one thing because we’ve trained our nervous systems to be hyper-focussed on everything.

This is often why the little blips in our lives throw us off balance — because we juggle too much all at once.

Because the hormonal shift brings changes to the way you view yourself, be prepared to embrace possible adversity as part of your natural growth and transformation. Start training yourself to pause and observe your thoughts and feelings — start loving what is by challenging garbage thoughts.

There’s so much power (and sanity) to be gained, when you can pause when you sense big feelings stir and realising the emotion is simply old thoughts and emotional sensations that need to be released. These emotional patterns were formed during your earlier years and are potentially no longer relevant in your adult life.

The shift brings about an invitation to question how you can make sense of these old, emotionally programmed behaviours and address them once and for all?

The shift is intense and continues for an extended period of time. It is never too early to begin addressing your emotional response to the outside world. The only time frame to create change is the present moment.

The faster you can consciously become aware of your reactions, the faster you will regain balance in the present moment

3. Surrender & Trust

Oooh Queen this is a big one. The shift will bring the gift of teaching you to literally ‘let go’. You have no control over how your shift unfolds, so learning to release the need for control is the ultimate prize. Learning how to release any thing which no longer serves you and allows your life to unfold is gold.

4. Expansion Through Challenge

So often women get stuck in the physicality of the shift. Yet we all experience emotional changes when oestrogen declines. Oestrogen is the nurturing hormone and often formulates the mask of calm.

As oestrogen declines, our capacity to emotionally and mentally manage life is challeged. There’s a lag time between our neural pathways literally rewiring, and this creates the invitation for things that challenge us and cause breakdown, can be reframed to breakthroughs.

Where mainstream psychology asks a woman “How do you cope and recover?” Queen, your Spirit-self is challenging you with the question “Who are you becoming through this?”

5. Intermingle psychology and spirituality

The most useful understanding of resilience during your shift, sits between both perspectives of psychology and spirituality. This translates to psychology gives you individual tools and mechanisms to cope with the shift. Spirituality gives you queen, your meaning and direction.

When we pair our toolbox and intention, resilience isn’t about bouncing back — it’s the ability to regulate your nervous system, process your emotions, and stay connected to your deeper self while the shift reshapes you.

Psychology explains why resilience may feel harder as oestrogen declines and your nervous system rewires with the shift. Spirituality or connection to your higher self, normalises the experience as a threshold or identity transition.

So instead of continuing the old program statements like “I’m not coping like I used to”, try reframing to “I’m being asked to build a new kind of resilience — one that’s slower, deeper, and more aligned.”

What many women don’t realise — especially queenagers — is that this moment isn’t just psychological or spiritual.

It’s biological.

The shift isn’t a minor adjustment, it’s a full recalibration of your internal world. And since oestrogen plays a protective role in the nervous system, its decline can directly impact your resilience capacity.

So if you’ve been thinking “Why does everything feel harder than it used to?” invite some kindness into your inner world.

You’re not imagining the shift. Your body is simply changing.

Conclusion

Fellow Queen, remember you’re not done. Your best is yet to come. You’re just getting started! Be sure to make space to consolidate the wisdom held in your body so your shift is smooth and flows!

About Karen

Change Facilitator

Karen Humphries is a Mental Health Counsellor, Kinesiology Practitioner + Accredited Business Mentor, Wellbeing Coach, Meditation Facilitator,  Hypnotherapist, and Resource Therapist. Karen is also a published author. She is a self-confessed laughaholic.  She loves being of service to the world with her humorous and positive approach to life, encouraging people to ‘choose to change and bloom from within.’ 

Karen Humphries, Change Chick, Change Facilitator, Kinesiology, Wellness Coach, Australian Bush Flower Essences, LEAP Facilitator, Trauma, Public Speaker, Cancer Ambassador, Blooming From Within, Traralgon, Victoria, Gippsland

How To Rise After The Tough Times?

How To Rise After The Tough Times?

When Life Knocks You Down

There comes a moment in life, especially for the menopausal women …where everything you thought was stable… isn’t. Your relationship with yourself shifts as your body changes. Your biological evolution doesn’t pause there…your identity, you’ve invested a lifetime building, no longer fits.

Suddenly… you’re not just navigating life — you’re surviving it. The ebb and flow of declining oestrogen often feels brutal during the initial phases.

So what do you do when life (aka hormonal fluctuation) knocks you down?

Resilience isn’t about bouncing back quickly and continuing the race on the mouse wheel. It’s about staying present long enough to rebuild who you are becoming intentionally.

And here’s what most women don’t realise —honey, your ability to cope is not just emotional… it’s physiological.

Especially for queenagers — women moving through perimenopause and menopause — declining oestrogen directly impacts a queen’s:

  • Mood stability — been feeling fiery lately, or snapping at those you love?
  • Stress tolerance – has your patience has taken a vacation to Fiji?
  • Sleep quality — poor or interrupted sleep, especially with hot sweats or racing heart?
  • Nervous system regulation — feeling tired but wired?

So if you’ve been feeling less resilient than you used to… it’s not just in your head. It’s in your biology.

Resilience gets talked about a lot, but psychology and spirituality are actually pointing to two different — yet complementary — ways of understanding it.

In the field of Psychology, resilience is typically defined as: “The capacity to adapt successfully to adversity, stress, or trauma.”

It’s not just “bouncing back.” Modern research (especially within Positive Psychology) recognises that having resilience as a dynamic process that you create over time. Resilience is not a fixed trait, and it’s not something you are born with. This means that your resilience:

  • Can change over time
  • Is influenced by biology, environment, and behaviour (both environmental and inherited)
  • Involves both recovery and growth

Let’s dig a little deeper …

Before I throw you strategies to boost your resilience, let’s identify the key psychological components that are impacted when your resilience shifts. Oestrogen plays a massive role physically, mentally and emotionally.

As your oestrogen levels begin to decline the following are affected:

  • Emotional Regulation — Your ability to experience stress without becoming overwhelmed.
  • Cognitive Flexibility — remain mentally clear to reframing challenges rather than deep diving into them and getting stuck
  • Social Connection — being able to emotionally build or maintain support systems to significantly buffer stress
  • Biological Capacity — maintaining a regulated nervous system, getting quality sleep, and balancing hormones all play a role.

So from a psychological lens, when your biology shifts and down-regulates estrogen, your baseline resilience capacity will temporarily shift too. Until there those neuro-biological programs have been rewritten, you’re in a liminal space. The change isn’t permanent, but it does mean your resilience will require more intentional support.

Here Are Five Strategies To Rebuild Resilience After Tough Times

  1. Allow Yourself To Feel, Don’t Suppress

Hey Queen, when was the last time you gifted yourself permission to simply feel what you’re feeling, and then let it go? When you hang onto emotional baggage, your body has to store it. The reality is if you can process your emotions, you can then release them.

2. Regulate Before You Reflect

Before you rush to analyse the tough moment in time, be sure to regulate your nervous sytem firt. When we are stressed, our ability to neurologically ‘see’ our reality is limited. This is because your brain is rapidly in search of the sabre tooth tiger, the threat.

When you return to a parasympathetic state of rest and digest, you will naturally have more clarity and use different parts of your brain to process how the world is functioning.

3. Simplify Your Life

It sounds obvious doesn’t it? But your mirror neurons will mimick the energy of the space around you. Your resilience will grow in clean space that is not clogged or chaotic.

4. Rebuild Self-Trust

So often I work with clients and remind them of the importance of self care. Do yourself a little favour, and make a daily commitment to yourself. Keep those small promises to yourself daily. Make it super simple like pausing when you feel the tough times hit you and just take a slow deep breath.

5. Support Your Biology

You can’t underestimate the power of a good night’s sleep. Lubricate all your neural pathways with good hydration. Nourish your energy levels with a varied, nutritious diet. Utilise somatic breathwork to shake your sillies out — I’m talking about garbage thoughts. Your body will express gratitude for not having to hold big feelings.

Nourishment of your gut and your nervous system should be non-negotiable.

Conclusion

Queen, you are not broken. Your perimenopause / menopause phase is that time of your life when you know that you are being rebuilt. You are clearing out your response to the tough times you’ve encountered in your life.

So please remember this, that sometimes what feels like a breakdown is actually your becoming.

About Karen

Change Facilitator

Karen Humphries is a Mental Health Counsellor, Kinesiology Practitioner + Accredited Business Mentor, Wellbeing Coach, Meditation Facilitator,  Hypnotherapist, and Resource Therapist. Karen is also a published author. She is a self-confessed laughaholic.  She loves being of service to the world with her humorous and positive approach to life, encouraging people to ‘choose to change and bloom from within.’ 

Karen Humphries, Change Chick, Change Facilitator, Kinesiology, Wellness Coach, Australian Bush Flower Essences, LEAP Facilitator, Trauma, Public Speaker, Cancer Ambassador, Blooming From Within, Traralgon, Victoria, Gippsland

5 Foundations Of Resilience

5 Foundations Of Resilience

What are the five foundations of resilience?

 

What is resilience? It’s defined as “our ability to bounce back from the stress of life”. Stress is a funny word. Most people don’t recognise that whilst we need some stress, like the alarm going off in the morning, any sustained stress is actually not great for our body or wellbeing.

Stress is defined as “a state of mental or emotional strain from an adverse or demanding situation”. Furthermore, the definition is further categorised that when in a prolonged state of stress, can cause imbalance and influence our ability to cope with life.

Resilience (or our ability to bounce back) therefore, requires a strong foundation and comprises five components: self-awareness, mindfulness, self-care, positive relationships and purpose. Resilience is not a skill we’re born with, it’s something we have to learn.

And what a time in the history of the world to learn these skills!

According to the creators of the WorkLife App, there are five pillars of resilience which include:

  • self awareness
  • mindfulness
  • self care
  • positive relationships
  • purpose.

One of the things I am constantly coaching clients, is that we are responsible for the lessons we embrace on our journey called life. Our humanness, all those experiences, are often messy.

Having a sense of self-awareness is empowering. It keeps you in the present moment, which is on the only time reference where change happens.

When exploring self awareness we commence with focussing on our ability to be conscious (present moment). It takes a lot of courage to acknowledge your stuff (what triggers you).

Self awareness includes your courage, willingness, motivation and intention to be aware so that you can change and navigate the path of life. Having an awareness of self allows you to understand how those around us perceive us.

When we are self-aware, and present we can choose to react or simply observe situations around us. This gifts us the space to then be compassionate and potentially consider what others around us are experiencing or hypothesize reasons for their actions.

Having a consistent self care practice that incorporates mindfulness enables you to practice your ability to be fully present, aware of where you are, what you are doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what is going on around you.

Berkley University defines mindfulness as “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens”.

Therefore every time you acknowledge you’re stressed (this is the art of mindfulness) you can gift yourself the choice to actively become self aware to the experience you are having, and what is required to resolve the discomfort of what you are experiencing.

Self-care is the practice of implementing positive action(s) that improve or maintain your wellbeing and health. This practice looks and feels different for everyone – and so it should since we’re all uniquely different.

It is up to you to distinguish how you’re feeling and what self care strategy you need in the present moment that will create an intentional positive effort.

I recommend radical self care for everyone. This means try a bunch of different activities, so that you have a variety of strategies to support you when feeling tired, triggered, low or just in a funk.

The next criteria to solidify the foundation of your resilience is positive relationships. This starts with the relationship you have with yourself, and how well you are prepared to acknowledge what you need and when.

It additionally extends to creating and maintaining healthy relationships with people in your life – those people who we exchange love, care, and respect with.

Knowing your why or purpose. This fundamental understanding of why we are here in this life enables you to create a supportive mindset and attitude towards yourself and others. Your sense of purpose is the key to feeling that you belong or serve something bigger than yourself.

In his book, The Giant Within, Tony Robbins elaborates on this sense of significance and loving connection as two of the required human needs. Our sense of purpose is founded on your faith, your family values, or simply perhaps where you work or volunteer your time and energy.

Utilising these foundational tools takes practice. Let me explain why.

Creating a new skill and mastering it’s effect takes time. It’s often important to stick with a new skill so that you can discern how well it works for you when you’re feeling calm, and then gain an understanding of how it will benefit you when stressed.

An activity like meditation is beneficial in the moment when you’re calm, but really useful if you are consistently undertaking short span practice on a daily basis – then it’s like topping up your zen tank.

Self-care should looks different for everyone. It is the practice of taking action to maintain or improve our health. It is up to us to make an intentional effort to practice self-care.

Conclusion

Learning and maintaining these foundational skills takes practice – to know what skill works best for you and when to use the tool. Using these five foundations of resilience can provide you with the gift of reframing your thinking so you see yourself and the world around you in new ways.

Sometimes, capturing a different view of your reality is all you need to step out of drama and back into the present time frame.

Prioritising foundation resilience upskilling is a radical and fabulous holistic approach to manage the stress in your daily life as well as your overall well-being in the long term.

Want to read more like this?

This is My Roarsigned copies of my first published book can be purchased from this website.

5 Questions to Identify What is Enough – Click here

5 Tips to Focus on What Really Matters – Click here

Self Reflection – A little Look Withinclick here

8 Hot Tips How To Journal – click here

How To Stop Making Excuses & Start Living Your Best LifeClick here

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About Karen

Change Facilitator

Karen Humphries is a Kinesiology Practitioner, Health & Business Coach, LEAP & TBM & NES Practitioner, Intuitive Meditation Facilitator, Virtual Gastric Band Hypnosis Practitioner – she is a Change Facilitator!

Karen is a self-confessed laughaholic.  She loves being of service to the world with her humorous and positive approach to life, encouraging people to ‘choose to change and bloom from within.’ 

Karen Humphries, Change Chick, Change Facilitator, Kinesiology, Wellness Coach, Australian Bush Flower Essences, LEAP Facilitator, Trauma, Public Speaker, Cancer Ambassador, Blooming From Within, Traralgon, Victoria, Gippsland