Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Now, have you ever driven somewhere and suddenly found yourself at your destination wondering how you got there? If you're anything like me and you do that same route over and over and then suddenly you always snap to or like if someone comes out in front of you or something different happens, you're like, ⁓ how did I get here?

That is because we are running on autopilot. The same thing happened in my classes. Now, in Pilates, there is a certain move where we're on our back and they take their arms pointing up to the ceiling and then they circle them. So I tell people, point your arms up to the ceiling. What do they do? They take their arms above their head. Because if you were in standing, that would be pointing up to the ceiling.

And that is like an automatic thing like, ⁓ arms to the ceiling, that's above our head. Actually, when we're lying down, it's not, would be pointing out from our chest would be up to the ceiling. Again, it's because our mind is automatically doing these things. It's like up to the ceiling, that's straight up above our head. Doesn't always work when the situation changes.

We often are on autopilot to save energy. We don't want to be consciously thinking about everything that we do. And also our mind has two different parts to it, our conscious mind and our subconscious. Now the conscious, that is our point of immediate focus. So it's the part that's listening to this podcast at this very moment. It can do a handful of things at once. However,

It's our subconscious that is doing all the behavioural patterns. It's doing all of those things in the background. It can do hundreds and hundreds of things at once. That is the bit that is our autopilot. It does all of those habits. It knows the route that we've been driving many, many times. It just gets on with it. The only time our conscious mind kind of kicks in is if something different happens. Say there's a car in front of us that suddenly stops or

there's a big tractor coming or something runs out into the road. Then we can't turn on our conscious mind to think, something different has happened. We need to now be aware and think how we're going to respond to it. But the rest of the time, we often use our autopilot. It just saves our energy. But in these situations, such as in Pilates, our autopilot

pointing our hands above our head, thinking that's to the ceiling when we're laying down. The situation has changed. And it's not necessarily the autopilot doing the right thing now. So for years, point your hands to the ceiling above the head. However, in a different situation, it's still doing the same. So this could also be happening in other areas of our life, not just when you're going to an exercise class and doing the wrong thing.

that's standard for a lot of my new people, that's fine. But if we think about patterns that have been going on for a long time in our subconscious, maybe they served us at the time. you come to see me as a control patient, which is a type of hypnosis without trance, then we talk about the patterns that have been established when we are younger. That's how we've learned to see the world.

But as we get older, actions that we took as a child no longer serve us as an adult. But that's the same as an adult. We might be in our 20s or teens and 20s and 30s. If we were tired, we would have an energy drink or a coffee. Maybe we'd reach for some sugar because that would just give us a quick uplift in energy and we can get on with the day. However,

That pattern may be continuing that you're now tired because you're perimenopausal and you can't sleep very well. You've got brain fog, you're fatigued, things aren't functioning quite as well as they should do. So you think, right, I'm going to have some coffee or I'm going to have some sugar. However, those things actually are detrimental to our hormones.

Yes, that may help perk you up a little, but it will actually worsen most other perimenopausal symptoms, particularly things like hot flushes, poor sleep, because it's a stimulant that is going to stop us from sleeping well. It can affect your bladder. So you make you go for wee more often. It might mean that you're more incontinent if you're getting bladder issues.

So even though we've been on autopilot, we come in, we're tired, we go grab something or have a coffee that may have served us, but actually now the situation has changed. Our hormones are different, our health, where we are in our life, our life situation has changed. Yet if we are continuing on that same autopilot, we are actually being detrimental to our health.

we are not helping ourselves by continuing them.

What we need to think instead is let's step off of that autopilot. Let's get our conscious mind involved and think what is the most logical step forward? What situation are we in? So if we're in a Pilates class, instead of thinking, ⁓ I automatically put my hands above my head when we're lying down, think actually, what position am I in?

where do my arms then need to go in order to point to the ceiling? Where is the ceiling? What are going to do with the arms? It just takes a minute to think about it. And then you're like, okay, brain switched on, we know what we're doing, we're in the right position. The same thing is with our health. So you might think all these habits that we've been doing for a long time, maybe it's more of a mental health thing. So maybe it's

anxiety. We've always been anxious about certain situations, but you've managed to cope with it over the years. But now our hormones are affected by that anxiety and our stress hormone levels and our adrenal glands. So their little glands that sit above the kidney, they actually produce a certain amount of our sex hormones. So our estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, but they also produce our stress hormones.

So if we're producing more of our stress hormones, we're going to produce less of our sex hormones, which will help with our wellbeing. So it means our perimenopausal symptoms are going to be worse because we're going to be producing less from our adrenal glands. So anything that's going to increase our stress levels is going to make our general wellbeing worse. So in the olden days, you may have been able to work

say 12 hours a day and do really stressful projects and not take any breaks at work. And we just went on autopilot while we're working, just crack on, crack on, crack on. And you may have coped with that. You may have had a few hours sleep and you'll find the next day we can keep going. But now our hormones and our body is different that we can't necessarily do that anymore. So think what patterns, what things are you doing in your life?

that you've done for a long time, that used to serve you, that used to improve your wellbeing at the time, whether that was short lived or whether it was just like pushing on, pushing through. Maybe it was that you just ate loads and then did loads of exercise and do hours and hours of it and you really try to burn it off. Whereas now that not necessarily going to help. actually when you think more about what we're doing with our diet, maybe we need to

adjust it so that it's healthier because that's going to support our health. Also, our weight may be higher because we're not sleeping and our hormones will be kind of holding on to all our fat cells because they produced a certain amount of estrogen. So if our hormones are low, will hold on to the body will hold on to anything that is going to produce any sort of estrogen. So it's going to be more difficult to lose the weight.

So whereas we used to eat what we want and then just exercise loads and our weight would remain steady and it wouldn't have any ill effect. Now we need to think about actually we need to eat a healthy diet that's going to support our hormone production. Yes, we want to do exercise. We've got to be careful about potentially injuring ourselves now. So we don't want to over train. We want to have lots of different kinds of cross training. So it's not all maybe running.

make sure that we are strengthening and we're working our balance as well. And then hopefully we'll able to maintain our weight, but also improve our wellbeing. So there's all sorts of areas in your life that you may be on autopilot. This is how it's always been. This is how you've managed in the past. However, I want you to take a look at is your situation the same?

Are you at the same stage of your life? Are you at the same stage of your perimenopausal or hormonal journey? Are you postmenopause? Do we need to think about our bone health and our tendon health when we are exercising, make sure we're doing the right thing? There will be something, I'm sure, that you have been doing for a long time that you got away with in the past or that served you in the past. ⁓

But could you make changes to make it better?

That's thing to think about this week.

I hope this episode has made you turn off that autopilot, take a bit more conscious control and see where you could make those small...

conscious shifts day to day to help with your menopausal journey. Until next time, take care. Bye bye.