072: Is MENOPAUSE stealing your joy? Here's how to get it back

Menopause can feel like it's draining the joy right out of life. Mood swings, brain fog, low energy, and disrupted sleep can leave you feeling flat and disconnected from the things that once made you happy.

But here’s the good news... happiness isn’t gone forever, and you CAN get it back.

In this episode, we’re diving into:
 ✨ The science of happiness – What really determines our happiness levels? (Hint: It’s not just your circumstances!)

 🧠 How menopause impacts mood – The role of estrogen, serotonin, and dopamine in feeling good
 🔥 Inflammation, pain, and emotional resilience – How your body’s stress response could be affecting your happiness
 🌿 Practical ways to reclaim joy – Simple mindset shifts, lifestyle changes, and daily practices to bring more happiness into your life

Want more personalized support? 

Book a free 30-minute Clarity Call with me at carlykillen.com to untangle your thoughts and create a simple path forward in your menopause journey.

Thanks for listening to the Strong Bones Coach Podcast

If you'd like to get in touch to ask a question about today's episode or to find out how you can get support from my coaching, reach out on the following links:

hello@carlykillencoaching.com

https://www.instagram.com/thestrongbonescoach

Thanks for listening to The Strong Bones Coach Podcast!

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I can support you with coaching, here’s how to reach me:
📧 Email: hello@carlykillencoaching.com
📱 Instagram: @thestrongbonescoach

Do you crave unshakable confidence in your strength from midlife and beyond? Would you love to achieve your goals without sacrificing family time or self-care?

Ready to take your strength to the next level? Start building a stronger body and healthier bones with my Strong Bones Starter Kit—your step-by-step guide to safe and effective strength training at home.
👉 Click here to learn more and access today

🌟 Stay connected and inspired with daily wellness tips on Instagram @thestrongbonescoach.
🌟 For tailored advice or personal queries, email me at hello@carlykillencoaching.com.

Thank you for being here, and I look forward to supporting you on your journey to strength, health, and confidence! 💪🦴✨

Transcript

Carly: 0:37

Have you ever felt like happiness is slipping further away from you as you move through menopause? Maybe you're struggling with brain fog, sleep disturbances, or just feeling flat and unmotivated. If this is you, you are not alone. Welcome to the Strong Bones Coach Podcast. I'm your host, Kali Killen, and today we're diving into the science of happiness, why menopause might be making it harder to feel joy, and more importantly, how you can start getting it back. In this episode, we're going to explore how hormones like oestrogen, serotonin, and dopamine impact your mood. Why happiness isn't meant to be a constant state and what you can do right now to create more moments of joy in your daily life. So if you're ready to take back control of your happiness, feel more like yourself again. Let's get started. So what does menopause have to do with your happiness? Why does it feel harder? Does it? I'd love to know if this is your experience, so just let me know. But if you have found yourself feeling more irritable, anxious, or even emotionally flat, there is a good reason for this. The hormonal changes during menopause can directly impact your brain chemistry, affecting your neurotransmitters that regulate your mood and your well being. So, oestrogen plays a major role in all of this. We don't just have our oestrogen receptors in our ovaries, in our reproductive organs. Our whole body has receptors for oestrogen everywhere., All over our body, including our brain. And it plays a major factor in the production of serotonin and dopamine regulation. And these can be our feel good brain chemicals. So as we notice our oestrogen decline or fluctuate, It can bring with it mood swings, irritability, low motivation, can become really common. And then we have progesterone. This has a lovely calming effect on us. And as these levels drop, you may experience higher levels of stress, restlessness, and those disruptions to your sleep. All of this can impact your emotional well being, and yes, your happiness. And of course, we also have testosterone. Yes, women do make a good amount of testosterone, actually twice as much as oestrogen. And this can impact our energy and our motivation. So, although these may naturally decline with age, although we can go into all sorts of conversations about how natural this is, or whether it's nature versus nurture. But all of these things can contribute to a little bit more of a flat or a stuck feeling. And on top of all that, we have life, how it shifts as we enter middle part of our life, or perhaps the messy middle. Maybe you're juggling work, family, aging parents, or even questioning your own identity. It's no wonder happiness can feel a little more distant at this point of life. But the good news is Happiness is not something you either have or don't have, it's something you can cultivate. So let's look at what actually makes us happy. There is actually some science behind this. So we may often associate happiness with big life moments, but true happiness is built from small intentional choices we make daily. Those tiny little moments that light us up, they all culminate in that overall feeling that we call happiness. And here's the science to back it up. I found a fabulous paper that I really enjoyed, that really breaks down the components of happiness. It's called Pursuing Happiness, the Architecture of Sustainable Change. I'll leave the link to this in the show notes if you want to have a proper read of it. And this was written back in 2005. And what they did was they broke down the different aspects of happiness, where it comes from, and what we might expect for ourselves. And this is what they found. They found that 50 percent of our happiness is down to our genes. So some people have naturally higher baseline of happiness than others. So that's right, our happiness isn't meant to be even. We're not supposed to have happiness 100 percent all of the time. But some of us are genetically coded to be a little bit more happy at baseline than others. But don't worry, that still leaves another 50%. So have our life circumstances. And this accounts about 10 percent of our happiness, so perhaps not as much as you think. It's easy to think that if we had a bigger house, more money, more friends, that everything would be better and perhaps it would, but this study found that only 10 percent of our happiness can be attributed to our life circumstances. So yes, this can be our financial status, relationships, location, they all matter, but maybe a little bit less than what we think. This surprised me too when I found this, by the way. And then we have our intentional activities, our decisions, our choices, and that accounts for 40 percent of our happiness. So this is the way we think, act, engage with the world. It all has a big impact on our long term happiness. So why is this important? Well, because it means we have control over 40 percent of our happiness, even throughout challenging times, which is huge. And let's be real, happiness isn't meant to be constant, as I said before. So just like all of the other emotions, like sadness, frustration, excitement, happiness is an emotion that comes and goes. It's not realistic to expect ourselves to be happy all of the time, and trying to do so can actually create more stress. It can lead to us missing moments of happiness. And of course we have those life circumstances, those things that happen around us, to us, that do feel really challenging, and we're not trying to slap on the toxic positivity around these things. We don't expect you to smile through everything just because we want to make that choice. But speaking from my personal experience, there have been some really big challenging times in my life, and although I would never have wished for them, I absolutely would not have wished them on anybody else, throughout that real challenging period of life. I tended to notice more moments of happiness than ever before. And it wasn't like I was skipping round joyfully the whole time. I was still dealing with some really, really tough stuff. But it made those little happy moments all the more important. All the more pleasurable, all the more precious. And it's given me a whole new take, a whole new perspective on what happiness really is. And that's something I've carried with me since then, even though that challenging period is now over, it really did give me. An appreciation of how to notice these little happy moments, no matter what we have going on. And I wanted to share that with you, just so you can be aware. I'm not just talking about that toxic positivity or pretending things don't get hard sometimes. We can have both. So instead of chasing a permanent state of happiness, The real key here is creating more happy moments throughout your day. So let's get practical. I always like to offer practical tips within these episodes. So let's look at three ways you can harness more happiness in midlife. let's start with the first one. You can practice the art of noticing. As I said, happiness isn't always about the big life events. Often, it's hidden in small, fleeting moments. And the problem here is, we often rush through life, and we can miss them. Imagine yourself driving in the car at 70 miles an hour, or perhaps as a passenger, let's, uh, let's make this easier. And how much of the scenery can you notice at that speed? Can you notice the butterfly in a bush? Can you, can you really see the lampposts? Or is it all just whizzing by in a bit of a blur? Comparing that to getting stuck in a traffic jam. Yeah, not what we want really. When we slow down, perhaps you can see more of the scenery. As we drive slower, obviously we travel more slowly. You can see those details, perhaps you can see those individual leaves. You might see how the sun is bouncing off a spider web or something like that. Okay, perhaps isn't the best analogy, but I think you might be able to get what I mean from this so far. So here's something you can try, um, don't do this while driving by the way, but you can do this any other time of day. So perhaps you can pause and notice when something makes you smile. Perhaps you can just take that second to actively acknowledge it. Can you name it? can you actually state what it is that's brought you that joy? For example, really enjoying a cup of tea, actually saying to yourself, this cup of tea is exactly what I needed. Or, how beautiful is that sunset Naming, maybe vocalizing or sharing with somebody else can really support and help you here anchoring it in more into our conscious awareness. And the third thing you could try, with the art of noticing, perhaps you can breathe it in. Take one deep breath to absorb the moment before moving on. And this is something I often do with those I guide through breathworks or when I run my breathwork workshops. We always like to take that extra breath just to acknowledge any moments that come up in those sessions, whether they are something challenging or whether there is something truly beautiful. I always like to take a breath and just soak it in before we move on to our next thing. So give that a go. Secondly, how about we focus on movement and move in a way that feels good. Of course, exercise is about plenty of things. It's good for our strength and our fitness, but that's not all it's about. It can be one of the most powerful tools to boost your happiness. So when we move, we can increase our serotonin and our dopamine, these natural mood boosters. It can reduce your stress hormones like cortisol. And it can improve your sleep, which directly impacts your happiness. And it doesn't have to be intense, although if you are a runner, you might be familiar with the runner's high, but you don't have to be a runner to experience these things. So find what feels good to you, alongside what you need to do as well. So this can be strength training. This is great for your bone health, it's going to be highly satisfying as you feel a sense of lifting the weight, that sense of achievement when you realise you've got stronger and perhaps the happiness you feel when you're able to move freely as a result of your strength. We also have dancing, this is wonderful for fun, connection, really being connected to your body. And there's also walking in nature, one of my favourites, and this is really grounding for your energy. If you're feeling like you've got a buzzy head, if you've had a stressful morning, just getting out for a breath of fresh air and paying attention to nature is a great way to bring yourself back to where you belong, back down to the earth, before perhaps needing to go back and face the rat race again. And thirdly, perhaps you can reframe happiness as a practice, not a destination. So instead of waiting for happiness to happen to you, Think of it as a muscle you can strengthen. Can you practice gratitude? Perhaps jotting down three things that you're grateful for each day. You can try journaling, just reflecting on something that made you happy. And of course we have breathwork and mindfulness that can really help you to regulate your nervous system, making happiness easier to access. So a few final thoughts on reclaiming your joy in your menopause years. Happiness is not about denying your challenges or forcing yourself to be positive. It's about noticing and creating more moments of joy. Moments that make you feel alive and connected. So allow me to leave you with this. What's one small thing that brings you happiness? And how can you notice it more often this week? And if you need support creating this plan, working it in within your health, your strength, your self care, remember I do offer free clarity calls to help you get started. You can head over to carlykillen. com to book yours today, or just pop me over a message over on Instagram and the strong bones coach over on there. So I'm going to leave you there for today, wishing you health and happiness for the rest of this week. And until next time, stay strong and take care.