Stress and Menopause Connection: Why Everything Feels Bigger

Stress and menopause connection is real. When estrogen declines, your body has less buffer for pressure, which changes how cortisol, blood sugar, and inflammation behave.

In this episode of The Midlife Method™ with Cam Allen, you’ll learn why everything can feel bigger in midlife. From emotional reactions to belly fat, brain fog, night waking, and histamine reactions.

Cam explains:
• How estrogen used to buffer stress
• Why cortisol rises faster and settles slower after menopause
• The connection between blood sugar and insulin resistance
• Why belly fat increases after menopause
• What “total load” really means in the body
• Simple ways to reduce pressure without eliminating healthy stress

If you’ve been wondering what causes fatigue in menopause or why your body feels less tolerant lately, this episode explains what’s happening physiologically.

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Chapters:
00:00 Everyday Stressors Add Up
04:13 Surgical Menopause: Sudden Changes
08:00 Hormones, Fat, and Overtraining
10:56 Menopause: Symptoms and Signals
16:00 Breakthrough Coaching at Half Price
16:52 Share Your Next Goal

Transcript

0:00

Menopause changes how your body handles stress, and most women do not realize it until something small feels way bigger than it should. It looks like this. Imagine yourself standing in your kitchen, your dishwasher is half unloaded, and your phone dings. Ding! And someone has the nerve to ask, hey, what's for dinner? You can feel the heat rise in your chest, and you don't know if you're going to cry or snap. Hey there, I'm Cam Allen. Welcome back to The Midlife Method. We're going to talk about stress today. Nothing life or death happened in the kitchen scene, but something inside of you might have tipped. Do you know the story of the straw that broke the camel's back? It's really not about the last straw that broke the camel's back. It's about the entire load. It's about everything you have been carrying for the last 20 or so years. You see, estrogen used to buffer that load. And when you reach postmenopause, estrogen reaches its lowest level. Now, estrogen did not eliminate the load, but it certainly buffered the load. And when this estrogen declines, your life didn't suddenly get harder. However, the margin or the wiggle room definitely changes. You know, that same glass of wine now wrecks your sleep for a couple nights, or a workout leaves you sore for 4 days and you don't want to leave your couch. Or maybe it's that same disagreement that keeps looping in your chest and in your head way after the conversation ended. That's what it feels like to have a body with less wiggle room. Now, most women define stress as emotional overwhelm, being too busy, too much on the calendar. That definitely was my definition in my 30s and my 40s. But physiologically in your body, stress is anything that requires your body to adapt. The body does not care if the extra demand came from a fight with your spouse or from you skipping lunch or you doing another fasted workout. It really doesn't matter. And here's what it could look like in real life. Maybe you drink coffee on an empty stomach and that raises your cortisol because your mornings are chaotic and that's also stressful. Or maybe you grab something at 3 PM because literally you were busy all day and forgot to eat. Maybe you're scrolling late night on your phone because you're finally alone and it feels like, oh, I'm just going to scroll and be mindless for a minute. Or you wake up in the middle of the night for no reason and your to-do list is like in the front of your mind. It's really easy to tell yourself it's fine because none of those things in isolation feel very dramatic. However, when you stack it day after day, month after month, that's the total load your body feels. That's the straw that broke the camel's back. Let's talk about it from a hormonal point of view. Cortisol triggers more easily now, and it comes down slower than it used to. I wore a CGM once— this was a few years ago— just out of curiosity, always being an experiment of one. And I watched in real time my blood sugar spike after my dog Mav, who was a big dog with a big bark, who is now in heaven. Well, he was barking at me while I was working on my computer. And I spiked my glucose, not with food, just with angry, irritating thoughts. Just stress spiked my glucose. I have seen this happen over and over. Women thinking that I'll just fast longer, thinking that will quote unquote fix my midlife weight gain. Only to find that they're more wired, more anxious, they crash at night, and then their brain wakes them up in the middle of the night because there's not enough, enough nutrition to keep them sleeping throughout the night. Then you might notice brain fog, mid-sentence, and weird histamine reactions in the form of strange rashes that like appear out of nowhere. I had that when I was 50. Maybe you notice your jeans are fitting differently, even though your habits haven't really changed. And then our brain does this. Shame whispers, what is wrong with me? Hey, there's nothing wrong with you. The buffering system is different now that your estrogen is lower. When I went into surgical menopause, I— it happened overnight. So my experience was like, I had hormones one day, I didn't have hormones the next day. One week I could do a hard workout and recover and bounce back, or at least I thought I could. And then the next after surgery, there was no way I would end up on the couch with a bag of chips, feeling crummy, having no energy. I also noticed my midsection changed really quickly after my surgery. I noticed on days that I was more stressful, I literally was more bloated. So I learned that there was a connection between stressful thoughts and how my digestion worked and bloating in my belly. I also started reacting to foods that I had never reacted to before. Now, I could have chased every single symptom, and also there's over 35 symptoms of menopause. My experience was unique because I was like, had hormones, and then I didn't have hormones. Normally, most women go through like a 12-year, 10-year, uh, ovary retirement party is what I call it. And the symptoms are sneaky. They don't— they're not as obvious as my experience. But I can tell you that all these symptoms They're part of menopause. This wasn't about one workout or one meal or one supplement. It was actually a cumulative demand on meeting my new hormonal reality. So if you're somewhere in perimenopause, maybe you're in that year, and then finally you're postmenopause, it's really not in your imagination. Your hormones affect all of these things. And again, menopause has over 35 symptoms. I'm sure there's more than 35, but but it's not in your mind. That's what I want you to hear. So let's talk about belly fat without pretending it's just random, because one thing I definitely noticed post-menopause is my body composition, like my wiggle room, is way smaller thanks to estrogen. So let's talk about it from a hormonal point of view, like what is happening when cortisol stays elevated. That means your blood sugar could also stay high. That means your pancreas sends out something called insulin, and insulin's job is to lower the blood sugar. So blood sugar is elevated, body's like, hey, we got a problem. Pancreas sends out insulin. Insulin's job is to take the blood sugar and shuttle it to the cells. However, a lot of times the cells won't let that glucose in, and that means the blood sugar stays high. The body does not like that, sends out more insulin from the pancreas. To get the blood sugar back to an acceptable level. This happens over and over and over, and then something happens. We call it insulin resistance. Have you ever heard that? That means the insulin isn't working anymore. The insulin— the pancreas sends out the insulin, but it's resistant. It's not working. It's not able to take the glucose from the blood and lower the glucose and send it to the cells. The cells are like locking it out, if you will. And like 88% or more— I've seen a few stats in the 90s— of Americans have some degree of this insulin resistance. This is a huge issue. So we have high blood sugar for long periods of time. That causes inflammation in the body.

And in general, think of it this way: 7:27

inflammation in the body is the root of all disease. I also like to think when you have elevated blood sugar for long periods of time, it's kind of like rusting from the inside out. It literally touches all of your metabolism and all the body systems— cardiovascular, all the things. And here's where the belly fat comes in. Insulin is a storage hormone, and it tells your body to store energy centrally. That means your belly. That tissue, that extra fat around your middle, is metabolically active. It's acting as a protection, but it's not what we want. And if you attack that visible storage with more restriction, being stricter about what you eat and fasting even more, or maybe you go back to your diet culture ways and you do more cardio, you're often increasing the very load, the straw that broke the camel's back, and you're putting more burden on your body. I have seen over and over again women train for a half marathon or a marathon and they end up softer. They have like less muscle mass. They are more inflamed. You can see it in their face and in their body, and they're exhausted. How in the world can that be? How in the world can you exercise at that level and be athletic and actually gain weight? That is what your hormones do. Your hormones protect you, and especially estrogen. More effort is not always the solution. The right amount of effort for you is the solution. And lowering the pressure is often the solution. That's how I see it, like pressure on the body. And I want to expand it to like the four bodies. Can I talk about this all the time? You have four bodies, your energetic body, your mental emotional body, which switch places, and that creates your physical body. And we have things going on in our four bodies that causes burden or pressure or the straw that broke the camel's back. So let me explain what it looks like in the 4 bodies. Now, this is not an exclusive list, but this will get your brain going. In the physical body, it looks like the woman who says she's tired all the time, but she's living on caffeine and protein bars. Yeah, I did that. Mentally, it might look like a woman who cannot rest, like her brain cannot stop because her identity is built on being the reliable one and taking care of everybody. That's like part of her identity, and therefore she just can't take a break. What about your emotional body? That looks like maybe resentment because you are busy taking care of everyone else and you've swallowed that pride or whatever, or the need to take care of yourself for 15 years. And now it's going to show up as irritability or something like that. Energetically, that looks like you say yes when you know you really want to say no. So it's kind of like a boundary thing. You say yes to everything and secretly on the inside you feel drained and you know you should have said no. You're like leaking energy, you're leaking your life power away. And when all of those things stack together, your nervous system never really gets a full break. It never gets reset. Menopause, this transition where you lose the estrogen, is making all the stuff that we did in our 30s and 40s visible. You see, estrogen kind of like buffered it all. And even though we were acting like jerks many times when we were younger, estrogen like, hey, I got you, keep going, it's okay. Menopause, when that estrogen reaches its lowest level, you notice it. Now, I mentioned earlier there's 35 known symptoms of menopause, and

here are some of them: 11:13

night waking between 2 and 4 AM in the morning, feeling really wired at night, but like completely flat during the day, like why you're tired. I know personally, when I feel that I need to dial it back on the stress. You may notice digestion changes, joint stiffness that was never there before, maybe allergies ramping up. For me, I had these weird rashes on my face, like 6 months after my hysterectomy, a waistline that feels unfamiliar, and you're like, can I button my pants? Or maybe your stomach feels flat in the morning, but by the end of the day, it looks like you're expecting a baby. Those are not betrayals. Those are kind of like the dashboard lights on your car. Now you have a choice. Can you just put a piece of duct tape underneath it and like just cover up the check engine light and keep going? Because many women do that, or they go back to the what used to work when they were 30 and 40. And again, you had estrogen, like hiding what was really happening and under the, under the engine, if you will. Or you can open the hood and like really check in what's going on. Now, I want you to hear me, the work here is not about eliminating stress. In fact, there's something called healthy stress, right? When you lift weights, you are stressing your muscles, they grow back bigger and stronger when you give them rest and proper nutrition. Or I love getting in the sauna. And when I first started getting in the sauna in 2020, it was too stressful. I would set it for, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes. And many times I had to get out before then. And the, the self-talk was like, oh, you're failing. Oh, you should be able to stay in there. No, I learned to like, let that go. That wasn't realistic. I wasn't ready for it. Now I can stay in there 25 minutes. I do it after I work out and I'm good. So I've built up my healthy tolerance to that kind of stress. Now, if I get in the sauna, I've done a workout, lifted weights, got in the sauna, and I've only had coffee with collagen, it feels different. I can feel what that extra stress feels like. And we're— that's the unhealthy stress. That is not what we want. I'm not a fan of fasted workouts if you know me at all. So eliminating the stress is not the game. That's not realistic. However, it is reducing the unnecessary demand on your body while increasing your capability to handle stress. So here are some simple ways to get going. It may

look like this: 13:43

eating protein at breakfast instead of just having coffee, like I just explained. I love surrounding my workouts with protein. It's part of the plan. So I'm using my muscles, I'm causing little micro tears in my muscles, and then I'm surrounding my workouts with protein to help rebuild those muscles bigger and stronger. Maybe it's lifting weights twice a week is enough because it gives you more recovery instead of doing a daily grind. In fact, if you are feeling really stressed out, I encourage you to do lifting without a clock with more rest and give away your cardio for a minute. If you lift heavy for you weights, you are gonna get the cardio benefits. You're gonna feel breathless and your heart's gonna thank you. After all, your heart is actually a muscle. Maybe it's going to bed 30 minutes earlier instead of scrolling. Back in my— if I think back in my journey in 2020, that was the first thing I did. I'm like, I got to figure out my sleep. So sleeping was one of my main priorities. I felt better when I slept. I could make better decisions in the kitchen about food. I would have energy to actually do a workout. My mood was better when I slept. So that was my first thing. Maybe it's having an uncomfortable conversation around a boundary that, you know, you need to have. And then you have the conversation and you're like, I, I did that for me. I'm protecting my energy. It's nothing dramatic, but very precise. So instead of asking, what is wrong with me? Because that is not a helpful question. Maybe you can start asking, where is this pressure coming from? What would be the easiest thing to take that burden away from my body so I don't become the camel, the straw that broke the camel's back? That question alone can absolutely change everything. Menopause is really not a collapse. It's just like an awakening, if you will. It's an exposure. All the things that you've been doing that really weren't serving you, now's the time to clean it up. And when you start to see stress as a total load instead of like a personal failure, you stop attacking yourself and you start adjusting your life to give yourself more grace, more energy, more kindness, more love. If you are interested in one-on-one coaching and you're tired of doing this alone, I am so excited because I'm going to be offering my signature breakthrough process, which is a $2,400 investment. However, I'm going to do that process with the first few people at half of the regular investment, so it's only going to be $1,200 to do this full 6-step process with me, where you're gonna go feeling like, I don't even know who my— who I am or what my body is doing to clearing out the anything that's in your way. It's going to be like cutting the strings to a parachute. You've been dragging this parachute. You've been walking around creating all this resistance that you didn't even know you had. I'm super excited about it. There's a link below to apply. So tell me in the comments, what's one thing that you know is pushing on your body that you can change easily this week? Let's crowdsource it. Drop it in the comments and tell me that one thing that you're going to work on. Maybe it's protein at breakfast, or maybe it's going to bed half hour earlier. Thanks for being here. I can't wait to see you next week.