If you're anything like me, somewhere in your forties you naturally start asking yourself a question: is the life I'm living now actually the life I want?
For men, that question tends to surface slowly — through work pressure, through a knee that complains on long runs, through the numbers on each year's health check. For many women in their forties, it arrives through a series of changes that are much harder to explain: sleep that suddenly falls apart, emotions that shift without warning, things you once handled easily that now feel overwhelming — sometimes even the sense that you are becoming someone you barely recognise.
Over the past few years — training, running Lanluis, learning how to look after my own body and brain — I've been quietly reminded by the women around me that the hardest part is often not the numbers on a medical report. It's that unexplainable heaviness lying in bed at night. And as someone who runs a wellness brand and listens to podcasts on every run, the more I listened and read, the more certain I became of one thing: if we sum up this entire stage of life as "hormones gone haywire" or "that's just menopause," we are being deeply unfair — and wasting one of the most valuable opportunities nature gives women.
Recently I listened to Dr Mindy Pelz on the Know Thyself podcast, in an episode called "Why Midlife Feels So Disorienting (And What It's Trying to Teach You)." A few of the ideas have been circling in my head ever since.
She says menopause is not the body breaking down, but a deliberate, directional rewiring of the brain. She talks about a stage in a woman's life she calls second innocence — a return to something more honest, closer to who you really are. And she brings in an idea from anthropology called the grandmother hypothesis, which explains why nature arranged for women to live so long after their childbearing years end.
After the episode finished, I kept running and kept thinking: if these ideas could be put into plain, everyday language for women in their forties and early fifties — would it help? Might there be a mother, a daughter, a wife somewhere who, simply by understanding what is happening inside her own head, blames herself a little less and treats herself a little more gently?
So this article is my attempt — as a father, a long-distance runner, and a husband still learning to be a good one — to sit down with you and work through it together. When you enter menopause, what is actually happening in your brain? And what might all this chaos be trying to teach you?
Entering midlife: steady on the surface, tilting underneath
Many women in their forties have lives that look, from the outside, remarkably stable. The children may be in secondary school or university. There are years of seniority at work. People look at you and see someone capable, impressive, the woman who can do it all.
But these past few years, something has started to feel off.
Perhaps sleep goes first. "Sleeping through the night" used to be the your norm; now it's a luxury. You wake easily, and once awake the mind will not switch off — tomorrow's meeting, your mother's test results, the children's homework, sometimes even a single sentence someone said ten years ago. Then the heart races, and sleep is gone.
Perhaps it's the emotions turning fragile. You always considered yourself the level-headed one, able to shrug things off. Now the same small thing can make you suddenly cry, suddenly furious — surprised, even, by the words coming out of your own mouth. It isn't that you've forgotten how to be understanding. It's that in that moment, you simply cannot hold it in any more.
Or perhaps it's that hollowness that's so hard to put into words. You look at the familiar face in the mirror and a voice suddenly asks: How many years do I actually have left? What do I want to do with them? If I keep living exactly like this, will I one day regret it?
Medically speaking, these emotional and cognitive changes really are linked to the hormonal fluctuations of menopause. Research shows that as oestrogen levels begin to swing and fall, a woman's brain undergoes observable structural change: grey matter volume temporarily decreases in certain regions, white matter connections and blood-flow patterns adjust — all of which can affect memory, attention and emotional regulation.
But understanding menopause purely as "decline" is a narrow and rather cruel way to see it. Mindy offers another image in the episode, and it has stayed with me. She says this stage is more like a major renovation. Imagine the home you've lived in for decades: cracks appearing in the walls, the pipes and wiring ageing — until one day the whole building goes in for large-scale refurbishment. For a while there is dust everywhere, furniture piled in corners, nothing where it should be, and you wonder why you ever agreed to the work. But if you can hold on through the chaos, the space that emerges is safer, more comfortable — and far better suited to the person you are now.
What the brain is doing during menopause is exactly this: tearing out the old wiring, and laying down new.
Second innocence: not childish — honest
In the episode, Mindy uses a beautiful phrase for the state a woman can enter after menopause: second innocence.
The first innocence belonged to you as a little girl — before homework, exams, office culture and other people's expectations had shaped you. Back then you knew exactly what you liked and what you didn't, and you said so: don't like it, boring, not doing it. The second innocence is what can surface after several decades of learning to be what everyone needed.
Many of my friends in their forties have started saying things out loud that once stayed hidden. “I’ve realised I don’t actually enjoy having every meal revolve around the family. I simply thought that was what a good mother was supposed to do. ”Years ago, these thoughts might have been followed quickly by: “Still, you have to be practical.” Now, the questions are different. “Practicality aside, what is still mine?” “What do I want to keep for myself?” “Is the life I work so hard to maintain actually the life I want?” One friend even asked whether the face she sees in the mirror each morning still feels like her own.
To me, questions like these are the beginning of second innocence. It is not childishness, and it is not selfishness. It is a kind of honesty. After all those years of performing, enduring and adjusting, you discover that part of you — the curious, passionate girl who dared to say what she thought — has been there all along. You had simply filed her away, very systematically, in a drawer.
And from the brain's perspective, this is not wishful thinking. Research increasingly shows that after the temporary dip in grey matter and connectivity around menopause, the female brain undergoes a kind of compensatory rebuild: grey matter recovers in some regions, certain pathways become more efficient — as if the brain is learning to allocate its resources in a new way, with a different set of priorities for emotion and decision-making. Mindy would say the brain is preparing you for a new identity: from the version of you defined by what everyone needs from me, to the version defined by what I truly want to bring to the world.
The grandmother hypothesis: nature always intended you to have a second act
As a long-distance runner, there's an idea I've grown very fond of: the body is far cleverer than we give it credit for. We like to think we can override it with willpower, but if you run long enough, you will learn that the body often knows better than the mind what is sustainable — and what simply isn't.
When I first came across the grandmother hypothesis, I had one of those so that's why moments. The theory comes from evolutionary biology, and it begins with a curious observation: human women live a remarkably long time after they stop ovulating — something rare among mammals. So researchers proposed that this can't be a bug in the system. It looks far more like a deliberate piece of design.
Put simply, the grandmother hypothesis says that grandmothers play a vital role in the group. No longer tethered to infants of their own at the edge of survival, they have time and energy to spare — to care for grandchildren, pass on experience, anticipate danger, protect the family. Studies of certain communities have found that families with actively involved grandmothers see higher child survival rates, and the whole group gains a clearer edge.
In other words, nature never planned to discard women after menopause. It deliberately set aside a long stretch of life not centred on childbearing, so that women could continue to hold up their communities in a different form — through wisdom, emotional steadiness, and a wider field of vision.
Think about it. Seen through culture alone, we've grown used to telling a woman's life as "youth, marriage, children, ageing," with menopause as the signal that the full stop is near. Seen through nature's eyes, menopause looks more like a promotion: you move from frontline soldier to strategic adviser. You're no longer trading your body for survival — you're shaping the next generation through insight and presence.
Power over vs power within: what the anger and tears are really about
As a husband, I'll admit I was slow to learn the difference between her emotions and her state. If she suddenly became upset, my first instinct was to become defensive: Had I done something wrong? Was there a problem I was supposed to fix? But over these past few years, listening properly to these conversations about menopause, I've slowly come to understand something: very often, these apparently "unreasonable" emotions are the signal of boundaries waking up after years of being pressed down.
Mindy captures the shift with two phrases: power over and power within.
In the first half of life, what many women learn is power over — pressing down their own feelings, controlling how they come across, forcing down the discomfort — all to meet other people's expectations: the good employee, the good mother, the good wife. And to be fair, power over works, for a while. It lets you keep functioning under pressure; you may even be praised for how much you can take.
But come midlife — as the brain rewires, as the hormonal signals change, as decades of lived experience accumulate — you begin to find that power over simply won't carry you any further. What actually makes you feel steady, you discover, is not "I control myself to the point where no one can criticise me." It is "I know, from the inside out, what I am doing — and I'm willing to answer for it." That is power within.
In this transition, anger and tears often arrive together. The anger says: why have I been the only one swallowing all this unfairness for so many years? Why is it that every time I voice a different opinion, I'm told "you've changed" — "it's your menopause"? The tears are a kind of grief for the woman who kept folding herself into a smaller and smaller box — the one who always said "it's fine," "I'll do it." You suddenly see that she was you. And you begin to be willing to tell yourself: it doesn't have to be this way anymore.
From the nervous system's point of view, the emotional centres genuinely are more sensitive during this period. Oestrogen fluctuations alter the interplay between the amygdala, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, so you respond more strongly to stress and to unfairness. This is not you doing it on purpose. It is a side effect of a system update.
But if you can see these bursts of emotions as part of your boundaries being reborn — rather than evidence that you've "become difficult" — you can begin to treat them more gently. After an outburst, there's no need to rush into self-blame. Try asking instead: in that moment, what actually hurt? Was it the words themselves — or the feeling of not being seen? That question, in itself, is training in power within.
Loneliness, grief and the empty stretch: the integration time your brain needs
Another part of the episode that moved me was the conversation about loneliness and grief. Many midlife women describe feeling profoundly alone — but it isn't the loneliness of having no one around. It's the feeling that no one really sees me. You can be surrounded by family and colleagues all year round and still know, deep down, that what most people see is the role you play, not the person you are.
And so much happens at once in these years. The children grow up and no longer need you at every step. Your parents' health may begin to falter, pulling at you with a different kind of duty. Your marriage may have drifted into something flat, even distant — everyone busy with their own lives, no longer exploring each other the way you once did. Your days are full of people and tasks, and inside, it keeps getting quieter.
The old survival script tells you to fill the gap, fast: take on more work — or numb it with the phone, the gifts, the shopping. But what the brain actually needs at this point is space. It needs time to digest everything the past few decades have held, to sort through what still fits the person you are now, and what can finally be set down.
I sometimes picture the menopausal brain as an engineer defragmenting a hard drive. It isn't acting on a whim. It has noticed that the system is clogged with duplicate files and expired programmes, the disk is nearly full, everything is running slower — so it stops, and takes the time to clear things out. And the clearing is uncomfortable. Old photographs surface without warning. Old wounds ache again. Old anger, old disappointments, old dreams all float up together. You may ask yourself: why am I only thinking about this now? But it isn't only now. It's finally.
If we can learn to treat this stretch of loneliness and grief as the integration time the brain needs — rather than proof that you're "not strong enough" — a great deal changes. You can begin giving yourself some room. Ten minutes a day with every screen off, simply sitting, breathing, writing down the three strongest feelings of the day. Small practices, but they tell the brain something important: I'm willing to help you sort through this. I won't force you to keep running without a pause.
Making the renovation go a little more smoothly: sleep, food, and tools for body and mind
One of the deepest lessons running has taught me is that recovery matters more than training. Train hard every day without proper sleep, nourishment and rest, and sooner or later you get injured — or lose the love of running altogether. The brain's midlife renovation works the same way. You cannot control when the work will be finished. But you can give the builders better conditions, so the project doesn't turn into a disaster.
Sleep is probably the first key. Study after study shows that menopausal hormone swings affect sleep quality — falling asleep and staying asleep in particular — and that brain fog and mood swings feed on poor sleep in both directions. For many women in their forties this is genuinely hard, because you carry the most roles: work by day, family by night, your own rest squeezed into whatever is left. But if this article persuades you to make one small decision for yourself, let it be this: treat sleep as a priority, not as whatever time remains once everything else is done.
In practice, that means a sleep time as consistent as you can manage. An hour before bed, let the body know the shift is ending — lights lower, stimulating conversations paused, a set of nightwear you genuinely love wearing. Perhaps a simple evening ritual: a warm drink, some gentle stretching, a scent that makes you feel safe. Details like these may sound like mere indulgence. But for a woman whose brain is mid-renovation, they are safety signals — the brain slowly learning that night-time is allowed to be soft, that it doesn't need to stand guard until morning.
Food and steady blood sugar are the other key. The medical picture is increasingly clear that sharp blood-sugar swings worsen brain fog, fatigue and mood instability — and menopause itself tends to affect insulin sensitivity, making the problem more visible. Mindy often talks about intermittent fasting and anti-inflammatory eating for women at different stages of life, but her point is never that everyone should copy one "perfect" diet. It's an invitation to notice: what do you eat that leaves your head clear? What do you eat that leaves you wanting only to sleep?
I love that attitude, because it respects the differences between bodies — and respects the brain as something that feels, not just a CPU to be driven harder. You can start somewhere very concrete: watch how you feel two hours after breakfast. Try halving the refined sugar and white starch, adding more protein and good fats, and see after a week or two whether your focus and mood feel steadier. If your body suits it — and with professional guidance — you might try a gentle fasting window: dinner a little earlier, breakfast a little later, giving the body more time for repair.
Beyond sleep and food, more and more women are talking about tools for the body and mind together. Mindy mentions breathwork, and trauma therapies such as EMDR — ways of helping the brain loosen its grip on pathways where it has been stuck for years, and open new connections. The reminder in all of this is simple: emotions are not the enemy, and the body's memories are not baggage. They are the raw material of wisdom.
You don't need to take up every advanced tool at once. Often, a regular breathing practice, a therapist or coach who truly listens, or a circle of friends who never measure you by whether you've done enough — that alone can mean your brain doesn't have to go through this transition lonely.
Redefining yourself: no longer proving you exist by being needed
Writing this, I keep thinking of the customers and friends I've come to know through the Lanluis community. When they share their stories, certain sentences come up again and again: "I don't know what's left of me besides looking after people." "It feels like if I stop, I'll fall apart." "I'm terrified of the day my children no longer need me — who will I even be then?" If any of that sounds familiar, I want to say something gently: you are not alone. And these feelings, in themselves, are already telling you something — you are turning a corner.
Before menopause, our culture is exceptionally good at training women to be useful. The more you do and the more you sacrifice, the more you are praised as selfless. But as the brain begins its rewiring — as the voice of second innocence grows louder, as the evolutionary script of the grandmother hypothesis takes the stage — you may find yourself asking, for the first time: if one day no one needed me to play any role at all, who could I still be?
It's a frightening question, because it reaches down to the foundations of identity. But it is also a beautiful one, because it opens a space you may never have considered: the chance to live, for once, out of curiosity, out of passion, out of what you want to leave in the world. You can begin rearranging your time — shifting some portion of your energy from responding to other people's needs to cultivating your own aliveness.
It might be an interest you loved when you were young and gave up long ago. Or simply something you've always wanted to try but never felt entitled to. When you begin making even a little room for these things, your brain slowly learns something new: life is not just an endless list of duties. It can be one choice after another.
This is why I so much prefer upgrade to decline as a word for the menopausal brain. The science tells us this period really does involve deep structural and functional change. And Mindy — along with many others who walk alongside women through it — reminds us that the change carries an invitation: to stop outsourcing your worth to anyone else, and to begin feeling that power within.
A letter to a brain under renovation
If you've read this far, perhaps you are in the middle of it yourself — or someone you love is. So as Johnathan — someone still learning, every day, how to be a slightly healthier person, a husband and a son who listens better — let me say just a few things.
First: you are not broken. The confusion, the exhaustion, the moods, the brain fog, the broken sleep — none of it means you are weak, and none of it means you've stopped being capable. Your brain is carrying out an enormous piece of restructuring, one with real biological foundations and the whole weight of your decades of life folded into it. That is why it costs so much energy. That is why it turns everything over.
Second: you are not alone. You may not see many people around you talking about this, but across the world, more and more women are choosing to treat menopause as a stage of life that deserves understanding and respect — not a punchline, not a "difficult phase" to be waved away. When someone like Mindy weaves science, anthropology and the stories together, it is so that you know: you are part of a much larger story. Your experience has context, and it has meaning.
And last: this truly can be the most powerful chapter of your life. When second innocence makes you honest again; when the grandmother hypothesis reminds you that nature has been counting on your presence in exactly these years; when the rewiring prunes away the pathways that no longer fit you; when power within slowly outgrows power over — you may find you can stand inside your own life in a way you never have before.
You can keep looking at menopause through fear: what if I end up worth nothing? Or you can try walking through this renovation with curiosity and respect: if this really is the upgrade nature intended for me — how do I want to use it?
If this article has made that small flicker of curiosity a little brighter, or added even a little to the gentleness you show yourself, it will have been worth writing. Because long-term health was never only about blood pressure, blood sugar and what your heart and lungs can do. It's about waking each morning and asking, how do I still want to live? — and having the courage, slowly, to live the answer.
Johnathan