Ep. 528 The Hidden Power of Menopause – How to Rewire Your Brain & Thrive After 40 with Dr. Mindy Pelz
- Cynthia Thurlow
- Dec 13, 2025
- 36 min read
Today, I am delighted to reconnect with my friend and colleague, Dr. Mindy Pelz, a New York Times bestselling author and a leading voice in women's health, hormones, and aging. She has written several books, with her most recent being Age Like A Girl. She also has a top-ranking podcast and YouTube channel.
In our conversation today, we’ll explain how you can reframe menopause as an evolutionary upgrade. We dive into the neurochemical shifts that occur in menopause, exploring Carol Gilligan's work, the purpose of menopause, the influence of the Gen X generation, and how trauma influences our perimenopause and menopause experiences. We unpack the role of oxytocin, clarify why clutter is problematic, and discuss the effects of environmental psychology. We also highlight the critical importance of bioindividuality at this stage of life, and Dr. Mindy shares the books she likes and recommends.
This discussion with Dr. Mindy is personal and deeply philosophical, inviting you to contemplate ideas that will continue to resonate with you long after it ends.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
How setting boundaries improves relationships and preserves energy in midlife
Why children transitioning to adulthood must be allowed to handle responsibilities
How parental over-involvement can hinder the independence of young adults
How the neurochemical shifts in perimenopause and menopause alter women’s emotional responses and priorities
The value of novelty and new experiences for supporting mental and emotional health
How clutter impacts stress levels, especially during hormonal changes
The benefits of creating calm environments to regulate the brain and emotional system
How downsizing can bring profound peace and freedom
Why solitude and personal space are essential for self-regulation in midlife
How menopause creates the need for recalibrating relationship boundaries
“Decluttering room by room helps you notice how you feel in different spaces.”
– Mindy Pelz
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Connect with Dr. Mindy Pelz
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over one million lives.
[00:00:29] Today I had the honor of reconnecting with friend and colleague Dr. Mindy Pelz. She is a New York Times bestselling author and a leading voice in the women's health, hormones and aging space. She's also the author of multiple books, most recently Age Like a Girl as well as a top ranked podcast and YouTube channel. Today we spoke about how to reframe menopause and viewing it as an evolutionary upgrade, the specific neurochemical shifts that occur in menopause, the work of Carol Gilligan and the purpose of menopause, the influence of the Gen X generation, how traumas influence our experience in perimenopause and menopause, the role of oxytocin, why clutter is so problematic and the impact of environmental psychology, specific books that Dr. Mindy recommends and likes and why bio individuality is so critically important at this time in our lives.
[00:01:29] This is an incredibly personal, deeply philosophical conversation with Dr. Mindy, one I'm sure you will want to listen to more than once.
[00:01:41] Well, Mindy, such a pleasure to reconnect with you. Obviously, I loved reading your new book. I felt like this is a book that is unique and different and I feel so grateful to be connecting with you this morning. You're joining us early from the West Coast.
Mindy Pelz: [00.01:58] Thank you.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.01:59] I would love to talk about how do we reframe menopause because I think in many instances, obviously our generation is not menopausing the way that our mother or grandmother's generations did. What are we doing differently and how can we frame this cultural physiologic experience and not do it from a place of lack, but a place of abundance.
Mindy Pelz: [00.02:27] Oh my God, I love this question. The first thing I think is really helpful is when we can look at the menopause conversation in a larger time period. And I know you've been working with hormones and metabolic health for a while and about 10 years ago in my clinic, I started seeing a pattern with all these women in their 40s coming in and it was everything from chronic injuries to weight gain, which of course, I got really into helping these women with weight gain.
[00:02:58] But the most interesting part for me was these women lived your typical perfect life. They had very supportive husbands, they had big houses and nice cars, and their kids were killing it at all the activities and going to all the right schools. These women would come in and be like, "I'm so depressed, I have no motivation, I want to kill myself." I started seeing that pattern.
[00:03:26] Ten years ago, I was like, “What is going on in menopause?” We were not talking about anything at that point. I ended up down this rabbit hole of research. We’ll fast forward to just as little as, like, three years ago, everybody started talking about it. And I say, we went from a cultural hush where it was like, in the ladies room, where we're like, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm in here, I'm having a hot flash," to sitting at the dinner table, sweating, owning the fact that we have a hot flash. But we've gone from a hush to chaos. One of my concerns right now in the menopausal conversation is that it's just a bunch of symptom management.
[00.04:07] What I started to see amongst my patients, myself, you and I were chatting about this when we started, was that there was something else happening in this transition that wasn't being talked about. The best way I can explain it is that women were waking up. We wake up through this process to the fact that we're tired of changing ourselves, betraying our authentic self to please everybody around us. I see it happening. I know you see it too, like the Do-Not-Care Club and the men that are coming out of the woodwork that are like, “My wife is transforming.” Melanie Sanders being like, "I don't care anymore," and millions of women agreeing with her.
[00.04:52] There is a neurochemical shift that happens that frees you and It wakes you up from all the ways you've betrayed yourself. This is what I tried to bring forward in Age Like a Girl. As women in our culture, we've been taught, "You are good, you are selfless if you look a certain way, if you weigh a certain number, if you perform for the culture in a certain way." We've become just performative people who don't know our own rootedness. I think what happens in menopause is we really need to start to talk about the opportunity to let all of that behavior go.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.05:34] I think it's so important because I reflect on the fact In April of 2026, I will have left traditional allopathic medicine. That'll be 10 years and I reflect on how did I function as a Nurse Practitioner for this very large Cardiology group. I was very well liked. I was a really strong clinician, but one of the reasons why I was so liked was I was so agreeable.
Mindy Pelz: [00:05:59] Right.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.05:59] I almost want to vomit. Like, “How did I get along with these very strong male personalities? Because I was so much of a people pleaser.” Now I cannot fathom, cannot fathom being that agreeable.
Mindy Pelz: [00.06:15] But think about it, you had to leave a job. What happens when that happens in a marriage? What happens when you tell your kids, like, “Buck it up. Now you need to take care of yourself now.” I think what you said is so powerful because we were trained to be agreeable. We were trained that we would be loved if we pleased everybody around us. Then, we're all doing that our whole lives. Then one day we wake up and we're like, "You know what, that is exhausting."
[00:06:47] I was actually watching a quote this morning from an interview with Brene Brown, and she was saying that belonging in our culture has been built around fitting in. But fitting in requires you betray yourself and that's what I hear in the statement.
[00.07:04] It's like-- I don't know about you, but I also had a moment of just like, “I can't do this anymore.” On the other side of declaring that to myself was, “What do you want to do?” When I started to ask myself that question, like, “How do I want to create this life? What do I want to do outside of my practice, outside of my raising kids, outside of my marriage? Like, what does Mindy want to do? How does she want to show up?” Cynthia, I came up empty. Literally, my therapist asked me one day. She said, "You get to create anything you want right now. What do you want to create? What do you want?" I came back the next session. I said, "Nobody ever asked me that. Nobody asked me what Mindy wanted and I don't have answer for you."
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.07:48] So much of our identity is tied up in our relationships with our children, our friends, our parents, our significant others. We're on the precipice where my oldest is in college, my youngest is a high school senior, he's applying to college and I looked at my husband the other day, and I said, "This is the first Halloween in 20 years we've had no one home." One's in college, one was in New York visiting one of his best friends. I said, "Is this a sense of what life will be like in less than a year." I was reflecting on the fact that my husband does a lot more golfing. Like, that's become his thing that he likes to do. He does it-- Sometimes he does it with our younger son. Sometimes he does it by himself.
[00:08:29] But I started to reflect on, like, “What are the things I want to be learning, doing differently in the time when I have that-- whether you call it the open door or the empty nest”. But I think for so many of us listening, whether someone is a parent or not, we go through this transformative experience as physiologically we have waxing and waning hormones that I feel like we start to question everything.
[00.08:55] I think that relationships with family members, relationships with friends, really getting clear about who you want to be around and who you don't. I feel like I have such a strong sense of boundaries now that good and bad, it upsets some people and not others, but it's like I can't not say no.
Mindy Pelz: [00.09:15] Right. Right.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.09:16] That nagging intuition that says, "Nope, you don't want to do that, you don't want to do that."
Mindy Pelz: [00.09:21] Can I just say one thing on that? I think that comes not just from time of life, but I think that is part of the neurochemical shift. I think that, like, I was explaining this concept of Age Like a Girl to a friend a couple years ago, and she said, "Oh, yeah, we behave like that because we're all drugged on estrogen." [Cynthia laughs] I was like, "Oh my God, I never thought about that." Like, estrogen really does make you. When you look at it through a neurochemical lens and you look at all the neurochemicals that are coming with it, it really makes you a professional people pleaser.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:09:56] Oh, yeah.
Mindy Pelz: [00.09:56] It really organizes the brain in a way that we become good stewards of a patriarchal society. When I hear you tell that story and I think it's so important, so many women tell that story, it's like when estrogen goes and the neurochemical shift happens, there is something in us that just says, "I can't do this anymore." One of the things that got me doing this book was a quote that 45-- the ages of 45 to 55 is the most common decade for a woman to kill herself.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.10:27] I read that. That's disturbing and distressing. I don't even think I was aware of that, Mindy, to be completely transparent. How many women, when I'm doing a podcast or speaking or just interacting with people, will say to me, "Oh, I was put on--" how my older patients, they were put on benzodiazepines instead of-- or antidepressants or anti-anxiety agents. I'm not suggesting that there might not be a time and a place for that. I don't want anyone to feel ashamed, but in many instances, it's a reflection of these profound shifts in estrogen and progesterone. All of a sudden, the waxing and waning hormones influence how we perceive the world and ourselves.
Mindy Pelz: [00.11:08] That's right. Yeah, and it's interesting because I think that when we talk about the symptoms of menopause, like depression and anxiety, which this book was really built around the brain symptoms that a lot of women experience, why aren't we saying-- instead of saying depression and anxiety might be that “You're not on HRT or you didn't get the right doctor or you didn't get the right patch or pellet or cream.” All great parts of the conversation.
[00:11:36] I'm not saying we throw that out. You still should be thinking about those things. But what if we take the conversation a little deeper with things like those symptoms and say “To me, depression was what parts of my life did I build that don't bring me joy anymore and I'd like to let go of.”
[00.11:54] Anxiety, you and I were talking about the podcast circuit when you try to sell a-- put a book out there. Anxiety, what if anxiety is because you're not excited about your future? What if rage-- What if rage is that you're upset because of all the different ways you had to betray yourself to be loved by this culture? Like, to me, that's the next evolution of the menopause conversation.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.12:18] Well, I think it's certainly a conversation I'm sure you've had with Sara Gottfried. I have as well or Sarah Zahl as she's going back to her maiden name. I think menopause and perimenopause is more than just replenishing hormones. For so many of us, it's dealing with our stuff. I feel like if you don't deal with your stuff in your teens, 20s or 30s, it will avail itself in your 40s, 50s, or beyond, and I jokingly say that I will probably be in some form of therapy for the rest of my life because there's always something else to deal with. I think for many women it's giving themselves permission to do the internal work.
[00.12:57] Maybe they've been distracted for so many years because their kids were small or they were finishing graduate school or whatever it was that they were doing, that the expectations of things that we put on women societally. Then all of a sudden, they have a little bit of quietness or a little bit of solitude, and they're like, "Oh my gosh. Everything I was building isn't what I want to do." Like, I remember when I left traditional allopathic medicine, my father said to me, "What are you doing?"
Mindy Pelz: [00.13:24] Oh my gosh.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.13:25] Like, "What are you doing?" I said, "Trust me, I know that this is the right decision for me." But how many other women listening, whether it's leaving a marriage or leaving a partnership or moving or changing jobs or whatever it is, or maybe it's just as simple as getting clarity about what they're willing to accept or no longer accept within their lives. There's a really interesting discussion in the book talking about the work of Carol Gilligan.
Mindy Pelz: [00.13:52] Yes, thank you.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.13:53] The silencing of female voices. You mentioned earlier how women get molded into selfless caregivers, but I'd love to learn more. When you were utilizing this in the book, I was not familiar with her work, so I kind of went down a little bit of a rabbit hole. Talk to us about what Carol's work demonstrated and how that influenced you, adding this into the book to kind of provide additional support around some of these key big themes within the book that are so applicable to our conversation.
Mindy Pelz: [00.14:22] Thank you. I'm so happy you pulled that part out, because it's really one that I-- If there was one thing I could get across in the book, it's Carol Gilligan's work. So, one of the things I wanted to do was answer the question, what's the purpose of menopause? Like, I'm sure you've had this conversation and talk about it in your own book, that we should not fall asleep to the fact that we live, if we're lucky, 40% of our life without a reproductive system.
Like, why is that? Nothing in the body is done by mistake. I wanted to answer that from a lot of different lenses. I did the anthropological lens, I did the neuroscience lens, but then when I found Carol Gilligan's work, I looked at the societal lens. For your listeners, what's really important to know about Carol's work is that in the 1980s, which is when I was in high school, this is like my gener-- It was like she was studying you and I, right? In the 1980s, what she did is try to see the impact of messaging on a teenage girl's brain, of societal messaging, and so she interviewed boys and girls at 9, 11, and 13.
[00:15:34] Let's use food as an example. At 9, when she interviewed boys and girls and asked them what they wanted to eat, they tell you exactly, "I want this." They knew definitively. At 11, the boys still knew definitively what he wanted, and he spoke up for what he wanted. The girl wavered a little bit. By the time she hit 13, the boy would say, "This is what I want to eat." The girl would say, "I don't know. What do you want to eat?" Something happened in that hormonal transition.
[00:16:06] Now, that wasn't Carol's work, was what did society do to women, to girls, that made her stop speaking up for what she wanted. I looked at her work through this, like, through Lisa Mosconi's work, where all of a sudden, when estrogen comes in, the corpus callosum gets activated, which is the highway between the right and left brain and the corpus callosum is bigger in girls than boys. All of a sudden, girls are bringing their right and their left hemispheres to every decision. The right is creativity. It's emotional connection and regulation. The left is logical.
[00.16:47] So, everything we do starts to become decisions made through relation. Like, how do I take care, like you did. At work, how do I please everybody so I can be successful and I can be loved? Part of that is how your brain was designed. But Carol's work says you were also trained to be selfless. I'll be really transparent. When I read her work, I wept because I was like, “That was me.” I was raised by a 50s house mom, June Cleaver. For those of you that watched Leave It to Beaver, my mom was June Cleaver who has taught my sister and I to be proper girls and I was a tomboy.
[00:17:32] I wanted to wear-- I wanted to play sports with boys. I wanted to wear-- I didn't want to wear dresses. I just wanted to go out every afternoon and play in my neighborhood, baseball with the other kids. My mom would tell me, as I got more into my teen years, she would say, "You need to be more feminine." One day, I was in seventh grade, I decided I liked this boy. I'll tell you. His name was Chris Williams and he was the cutest little kid. I decided I had a crush on him and he didn't like me back. I went to my mom, and I was like, "Okay, teach me how to be feminine."
[00:18:08] And the conditioning started in the seventh grade. I started as my hormones came in, I went to my mom and said, "Teach me how a woman operates in this culture." Another thing she taught me, which was interesting and also destructive. We're a very open family, so we talk about this. But I'll never forget that when I had my child, my first child, I told my mom, "Oh my God, I feel I'm so in love with this child. I feel like I understand how marriages start to fall apart, because all I can think about is my kid." My mom said, "Just remember, the most important thing you can do for your child is have a healthy relationship with your husband."
[00:18:53] And so, I started performing in all these ways. Every woman has a story like that where we had one way of being and we’re taught by people and mentors, "That's not acceptable. You need to behave, you need to look a certain way, you need to act a certain way, and then we love you. We don't love you when you speak up. We don't love you when you don't look a certain way for the culture." And so, we just completely become conditioned to that.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.19:23] Well, I think I reflect back, and as I was reading your book, I was thinking about my own trajectory and information that I received from my family, especially my parents growing up, and when was I praised and validated?
Mindy Pelz: [00.19:36] Yeah, good question.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.19:37] When was I praised and validated throughout my adult lifetime? I think about how heavy is the head that holds the crown for each one of us. The things that you get reinforced, like, "Oh, this is good when you look this way or you do it this way or you perform this way." Somehow, I think that menopause allows us to come back to our true, authentic selves if we're willing to listen. I think that for so many of us, it's a time that the Do-Not-Care club, which I think is so fantastic-- I was reflecting on, I think it was Ashley Judd was in a bathing suit and doing all sorts of things with her wet hair and just being silly.
[00.20:19] I was like, how many women are pushing back against the messaging that we have received our entire lives about how we're expected to look, behave, and show up in our personal lives? Maybe younger generations don't feel as much pressure. Like, I sometimes think about that. My boys obviously are 20 and 18, but I think about the young women that I meet that they're friends with or they have dated. I'm like, “I wonder if this generation will not feel as much pressure as Gen X did.”
Mindy Pelz: [00.20:53] Yeah. I think we're breaking the mold. I really do. I think Gen X is breaking the silence and we're the first generation to do that. I think books like ours, and I don't mean this in an egoic way, are informing the younger generation. A lot of the menopause authors that I've had on my podcast are talking about how the millennials are super-receptive to their books. They're saying, "Hey, how do we get ahead of this? How do we--"
[00:21:22] I think you're right. I think they're definitely-- By the time my daughter comes through menopause, the conversation will look very different. I think this is really important because when you think about the amount of women, like right now we have a billion women in menopause. If you think about what if every woman going through menopause was taught, "This is your moment now. This is where you get to do for you. This is where all the ways that you-- all the responsibility and the have-to's that you started to take on as became a burden. This is where you get to let go of all that and you get to reinvent yourself and you get to finally do life on your terms." And I think If I look 20 years ahead, if that's the messaging, like, this is where my women's empowerment just goes crazy.
[00.22:13] Because if we stand up and speak our truth and the culture stops trying to take our rights away and stops trying to tell us how to be a certain way, we start to see, like, women showing up in a very unique leadership role which is leading a world. I have a quote that I love, I put in the book that Desmond Tutu said, which is, "We need-- It's time for us to let the women lead and because we lead in a very different way." This isn't about, like women becoming political heroes, but I do think this menopause is an opportunity for us to finally reflect back to ourselves what we really want to do and what finally like step out of that have-to culture.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.23:03] If there's a woman listening that is feeling frightened or scared or feeling like the possibility of-- is truly endless. Like, the options that are available to us in middle life are truly endless. Where do you generally recommend in terms of mindset or internal work? Do you have favorite resources or things that you like to work through? I mean, I know that we'll get to strategies as we continue the conversation. But if someone is feeling hesitant, frightened, scared, which is normal, it is completely normal. Especially when you don't know what's going on with your body, which is a whole-- For many people, that is absolutely how they feel as they are navigating this time in their lives.
Mindy Pelz: [00.23:49] Yeah. First, I always go to books. I'm a book slut. [Cynthia laughs] I read ’em, I write ‘em. They're all over my house. I think there are a lot of great books out there where we need to educate ourselves. Look at the trending menopause books. I just want to say when you go into those, one of the parts of the conversation I'm really hoping that we evolve into is that these are all options.
[00:24:16] Like, yes, we want to start lifting weights, but do we need to be spending 10 hours a week in the gym? Like, for me, I've recently figured out that I don't like being in a gym. I don't want to-- I need to do something that gives me muscle strength that's out in nature. I recently took up surfing.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:24:38] I love it.
Mindy Pelz [00:24:38] I'm living in Santa Cruz now, and so--. I looked at, okay, the have-to is I need to lift weights, but I don't like going to the gym. So, how do I find that for myself? That would be the first thing is these books, let's use them as fertile ground to customize a lifestyle that works for you. Second thing I want to say is that and you said it earlier, and I think we need to really bring this forward. I'm going to be really transparent. When the neurochemical armor is what I call it starts to come down, a lot of the traumas that you haven't dealt with are going to show up and you're going to need a good therapist.
[00.25:16] I put in the book how do you find a therapist? Who do you want on your team? How do you find a good OB? Like, I tried to map that out. But for me, I'll tell you a story that I think hopefully will free a lot of women. It's freeing me to tell it. One of the things that I hadn't really fully realized is that I was actually raped in college and I didn't realize this until the neurochemical armor came down.
[00:25:45] The story is that it was my senior year in college and I was at a bar and I was drunk and I went home with a frat boy and I was raped in his room in his frat house. I escaped running through the frat house half naked. And, I don’t know exactly, there's a loss of memory of exactly what happened in the moment of rape. Another lovely man took me home. I never told the story because I was drunk and I thought it was my fault. Like, was I not an idiot that I went home with a frat boy drunk? Like, where was my sensibility? I never told somebody that story until the neurochemical armor came down and I remembered the whole goddamn thing. It came back to me and the brain does that. I've learned that the brain, when you rest--
[00:26:37] I think this is an important one that we really want to bring forward. When you start to slow down, the brain says, "It's safe enough to show you this now." Luckily, I have an incredible mental health team that has been supporting me through that, but I couldn't have done that on my own when those flashbacks and that memory came out. Do you know, Cynthia, that I've told this story to so many close friends, including my sister and I get two responses from close friends, my sister, and a lot of women. Is "You never told us that. I can't believe that." and "That happened to me." There are so many women. They're like, "Yep, that happened to me. I just thought it was normal. I just thought it was my fault."
[00:27:22] So much physical and emotional damage, and that's going to show up in menopause. So, when I look at the suicide rates, when I look at the divorce rates that are initiated by women, I think we need to say what wounds are you now given the opportunity to heal? Outside of the books, we really need a mental health team to support us through this.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.27:45] Thank you for sharing your story. I agree with you that the things that have been unearthed in menopause. I just recently had a conversation with my husband and said, I remember this episode of sexual abuse as a child. I remember this episode of sexual inappropriate behavior as a teenager from a family friend, and my husband, who knows all of these individuals, said, "Oh my God, I had no idea. How can I help?"
[00:28:10] To your point, it's important that we normalize these discussions that we identify for women that our brains are designed to protect us and in some instances, we dissociate during those circumstances and it's not until we are in a very, very safe place that we're able to relive those memories hopefully in the context of working with a practitioner who can help us navigate how to process these memories and move forward, but I think for so many women, there has been shame, secrecy, silence, where women just don't feel comfortable talking about these events that have happened during the course of our lifetime. So, thank you for sharing that.
Mindy Pelz: [00.28:56] Yeah, and thank you. I think this is what we need to do, is normalize it. Like, I'm sitting here thinking, like-- I even hope the women listening to this, it frees you. Like, go to this podcast episode and tell your story or go to our socials and tell your story. I actually ran-- I had this discovery, and then as soon as I remembered the whole incident, I happened to be at a gathering with Julie Gottman the next, like, two days after that. I said to her, I told her the story and I'm like, "It's showing up in my marriage, and I really need to heal this. How do you heal it?" She said, "The first thing you do is you talk about it. You can’t-- Shame lives in silence."
[00.29:39] I just want to pause and say, if women are listening to this and that's them, that is the normal part of menopause that is not being discussed. All of a sudden, these injustices that have been happening to us start to, like, hit our brain in a new way. This is why we need to come together as women and support each other through this and you might need professional help. Don't think of that as a weakness. Don't be scared if all of a sudden, a memory comes back to you, because, like you said, we disassociate and how many of us did this happen to?
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.30:15] Probably far more than we realize. I think that’s one of the things that I reflect on, and certainly, you've worked with thousands of women. I've worked with thousands of women. The stories that come out when people feel like they are being seen and heard in a way that is unique to them and also unencumbered, like, maybe this is the time in their lives. They have the mental ability to wrap their heads around things that have happened because they're not so focused on raising little people or the horrible commutes that some of us have dealt with throughout our lifetime or dealing with a new relationship. It's like suddenly you have the ability to focus in on yourself and healing yourself at different times.
[00.30:59] You talk in the book about the girl gang, and I think that this was particularly interesting. You put together, whether it's neurotransmitters or hormones that influence things like memory and mood. I think one thing that would be helpful to identify is when we're talking about mood in particular. I think many of us think, “Oh, yes, progesterone is anti-anxiety, but there's so much more to our moods than just progesterone's influence. Let's talk about oxytocin, because this is one of these hormones that I think many people think of it just as a bonding hormone. There's so much more to it than that.
Mindy Pelz: [00.31:38] Yeah, yeah. I'm so happy, oxytocin. You asked me this question. Oxytocin's my favorite part of this conversation. The first thing that I brought forward with estrogen's girl gang is that I think we need to talk about the fact that you're not just losing sex hormones, that these sex hormones actually stimulated a whole array of neurochemicals and then some things that aren't neurochemicals.
[00:32:04] I think of it like estrogen, specifically estradiol is like the popular girl. Remember the popular girl in high school? Like, she would sit down at her spot at lunch, and then all her little posse of girls would come and sit down next to her and she was the leader of the pack. When she would get up and leave, it was like, "Come on, ladies, let's go." And then, all of her little gang would go with her, her girl gang. Estrogen has the same effect with a lot of neurochemicals and I map them all out. There's about 12. There's probably more, but I highlighted 12 of them and oxytocin is one of ‘em. This is really fascinating to me because do you know that when we're cycling, we got our highest natural boost of oxytocin two days before we ovulate.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.32:55] It makes sense. It makes us want sex. Right?
Mindy Pelz: [00.32:58] Right. Like it's built into us so that we keep the species going. Like, we better make sure that this woman wants to bond because an egg is [Cynthia giggles] coming out and now the egg's coming out, and we need to make sure she has sex so she can reproduce. It's so fascinating to me. Also, the thing about oxytocin that I don't think a lot of women understand, I didn't understand it until I researched it. We have more oxytocin receptor sites in our amygdala than men do. There was a very famous researcher, her name is Shelly Taylor, that back in like-- this is like the early 2000s, this is a recent discovery. She found out that women have another stress response that we go to because of the density of oxytocin receptor sites in our amygdala and It's called the tend and befriend stress response. I think every woman knows this.
[00:33:53] So, when we're stressed, what do we do? We connect. We get with other women, we verbally process. So, this oxytocin system that we've been relying on or maybe that we have been manipulated by changes as estrogen starts to decline. All of a sudden, we don't get oxytocin in the same way. We have to go search for oxytocin in deep ways. This is why we may see our friend group change.
[00:34:24] Because all of a sudden, I'm not interested in retail therapy and getting drunk on ladies’ nights out, which maybe my 40-year-old self did. I'm more interested in sitting on the couch like processing a friend's trauma and going deep into a conversation, that gives me more of a neurochemical stimulation.
[00.34:45] I think this is a big problem with relationships and thank God my husband knows this. But, like, I'm not interested in the shallow conversations and where I might have told you I was interested in your favorite soccer team and what they were doing. I really don't care. [Cynthia giggles] I'm more interested in going back to your little boy wound and I want to talk about how that shows up in our marriage. Like, we are seeking depth of connection with humans and the shallow connections no longer work for us.
[00:35:18] Even, I don't know if you've noticed this with your boys. I even connect to my kids very differently. Like where they could have called me and I would have dropped everything for them. They're 25 and 23 now. I'm like, “No, I don't think I want to do that anymore. I think they're adults now, they can go ahead and handle that.” That is an oxytocin system changing, the way we relate to people is very different. I'm curious if you've noticed that.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.35:46] Yeah, well, it has definitely been more friendship related because I reflect back on the mommy drinking culture of my 30s and early 40s and how I really have zero interest in that. But, also like superficial anything.
Mindy Pelz: [00.36:02] Yes.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.36:03] If I'm-- I live in the south and if people want to have a very polite conversation, I'm all for it. But superficial relationships in general are visceral now or someone who wants to just pick my brain for business stuff.
Mindy Pelz: [00.36:16] Oh my God.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.36:18] Nope. I don't allow anybody to just pick my brain. Nope. We don't work like that. I think it's definitely created greater boundaries and greater awareness, but I agree with you that as my children have gotten older, it's like figuring out like you are technically legally both adults. You're not financially independent of us, but you are technically legally adults and most things I let them handle. It's like, “You're 20 years old, you're at college, you have an apartment with some friends, you've got issues with parking. Your dad and I will step in if you've done 15 other things and nothing works. But now is the time to be responsible for yourself.”
[00.36:55] And I sometimes, I don't know if you felt this way when your kids were in college, but I'm sometimes humored by the parents groups for the university where 90% of it's very reasonable things that people are asking, but some of them, I'm like, "You are still helicoptering your kids. I don't have the bandwidth to do that.”
Mindy Pelz: [00.37:13] I saw a statistic that was like 50% of parents of Gen Z’ers still-- will actually come in and talk to their kid's boss. I'm like, ”What?” If they have a boss and they have a-- they're adulting, that's the relationship between them and the boss. 50% of Gen Z’er parents are trying to still manipulate the relationship of their children.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.37:42] I don't have that bandwidth. I don't have that bandwidth. [crosstalk]
Mindy Pelz: [00.37:43] I know, I don't have that bandwidth either.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.37:45] I'll give you an example. My 18-year-old flew up to see his best friend in New York and with all of the government shutdown, TSA things, there's all these ground delays. So, his non-direct flight got canceled on Friday. He was very upset. We got him booked on another flight because he has never had to do this. But explaining to him when he was coming back, I said, "You need to be prepared that you may have ground strikes in New York City where you have to fly through." Sure enough, 5 o’clock in the morning, our phone rings and he's at the airport. We were like, "Go to the ticket counter and talk to them about what happened and have them rebook." He was like, "Will you stay on the phone?"
[00.38:21] I was like, "Sure, stay on the phone." I listened to him introduce himself, explain his circumstances, got himself rebooked, got on that flight to New York, New York to where we live. He came home and he was like, "I can't believe you let me do that all by myself."
Mindy Pelz: [00:38:36] Amazing.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:38:36] I said, “You're 18 years old. As you told me when you turned 18, you have two independent adults." I was like, "You're sort of adulting because you're still living at home."
Mindy Pelz: [00.38:44] You're practicing it. [laughs]
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.38:46] Right. But I think for so many of us, the minutiae, the day-to-day minutiae that we used to worry about when they were toddlers, preschool kids, elementary, middle school, I don't have the bandwidth for it, nor do I want to. I'm like, "You pack yourself if you don't bring warm enough clothes and you're in Buffalo, New York, that's on you. You're just going to be cold." [giggles]
Mindy Pelz: [00.39:07] What I want to point out about that story and I think what is really important for women to know is “Yes, that would seem like he's 18, but also you don't have the neurochemicals to care at that level anymore.” [Cynthia laughs] That's the normalizing of this. I had a very similar experience with my daughter where I was like, “I don't want to spend my afternoon solving this problem for her.” Then I realized, “Oh yeah, because it doesn't give me the same high that it gave me 10 years ago because I don't have the same neurochemicals.”
[00:39:41] I think and I don't know about your listeners, but like if you're-- A lot of my friends were stay-at-home moms and this transition as they neurochemically shifted actually did two things for them. They had to rearrange their marriage because their marriage wasn't working for them anymore, and some of them had to leave marriages because they couldn't get a deeper experience with their spouse there, and they stopped trying to do everything for their children. But that also was something that made them feel worthy.
[00:40:16] We're back at this Carol Gilligan thing where we're so trained to do everything for everybody else and the reason that you could pull-- happily sit on your couch in your warm cozy house and not solve your son's problem, it was good parenting for sure. But it also was because neurochemically you didn't care anymore. I think this is what we need to bring to the causal conversation is “That is normal. That is normal.” Your neurochemicals and oxytocin is this big one, all of a sudden you're seeking oxytocin differently.
[00.40:52] Not only do your relationships need to be deep, you also need a relationship with yourself that's going to give you oxytocin. You also might need to go out into nature. You can get oxytocin out in nature. In the book, I give a whole list of places you can go get oxytocin. But if you don't go seek it in new ways, then we end up with the blahs. We end up with the, "I don't feel-- I feel alone." Like, those are moments when we aren't training women. That part of your system changed. So, you're going to need to have new relationships and you're going to need to go seek oxytocin on your own.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.41:32] I think you bring up such a good point, because I don't think I've had anyone on the podcast put that all together in that way. Normalizing what our menopausal experience is and providing opportunities to find novelty. Because really, what our brains are always looking for is novelty. What is something new that we can learn or do, or as you astutely stated, now I'm learning to surf, which I think is amazing. You're outside nature. You're learning something new. You're building stronger muscles. It's like a multifactorial. We love in medicine to say it's multifactorial. There's multiple reasons why this all comes together.
Mindy Pelz: [00.42:10] Exactly.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.42:11] Now, one thing in the book that stood out to me as someone who is a minimalist in general, like, when I look at my house minus my bookshelves, which are exploding, because you and I understand all the books [Dr. Pelz laughs] we receive for our podcast,-
Mindy Pelz: [00:42:24] Oh yeah, there's that.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:42:25] -talk about clutter. I thought this was interesting. There was a theme about clutter being problematic. I always thought of clutter from my perspective of, like, messy brain, therefore clutter. But I think for a lot of people, clutter can be like a trauma response. There can be many reasons why clutter accumulates. Why is clutter problematic from your perspective?
Mindy Pelz: [00.42:47] Yeah. It's such a good question. First, people have to know that there's something called environmental psychology and that actually our living place, the environments we put ourselves in, actually has an impact on our brains. And I think as we're going through this massive neurochemical shift, all of a sudden, what might have been a messy house before and we didn't care about it, all of sudden spikes our cortisol and there's a lot of research coming out about how women are more easily-- Our cortisol goes higher in a messy house than a man. And if you combine that with the chaos that's already going on in our brain, and this is how I explained it to my husband and son when it hit me, is that I used to be okay with people in my house all the time.
[00.43:39] We were that house where all the kids felt safe they could come to, but that also meant that there was a lot of mess. My son, during the pandemic, decided that he wanted to cook all the time. Turns out now he's a professional chef, so that was a good thing. I would wake up every morning to a dirty kitchen. Now, when I was drugged on estrogen, that didn't bother me as much. [Cynthia giggles] But once estrogen went away and I was in deep into my perimenopausal years, waking up to a dirty kitchen sent me through the roof. So, I had to sit both my husband and son down and say, "I understand that I used to be okay with messes in the house. And now I'm going to tell you it is putting me over the top because there is so much chaos in my mind that the chaos in my environment is amplifying that."
[00:44:35] This took a long time for them to understand, but eventually they came on board and I think it's an important part of the book, which is, if you want to calm the brain, how do you calm your environment? The more chaotic visually your environment is, the more chaotic your brain is going to be and that's what I mapped out in that part of the chapter is like, we can't just look at this as relationships or a hormone problem. It's also our environment and where we're putting ourselves. We need to keep putting ourselves into calm environments to calm the system.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.45:14] Well, I love this because during the pandemic, we literally made a decision. We put our house on the market, sold it in one day, and moved to another part of the state.
Mindy Pelz: [00:45:24] Wow.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:45:25] It was a massive downsize. Now all my friends who have empty nests, I'm like, "Guys, you don't understand. Like, it is so amazing to just be around less stuff."
Mindy Pelz: [00.45:35] Ahh. So good.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.45:36] And I said, “It is so freeing.” Yet, I think it took us like, two years to get rid of all because it was like, we wanted to be thoughtful. We sold some things, we donated some things, trying to acquiesce. But this house is peaceful. Like, I walk in, there's a lot of light, there's a lot of white. That's what works for me at this stage of my life. But there's not a lot of clutter. That's because for me, it's just this visual overwhelm. I used to always ask my friend of mine who's a developmental psychologist. I was like, "I think I'm on the spectrum."
Mindy Pelz: [00.46:08] Yeah, I've thought the same thing about myself. Not you, but me.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.46:12] No, I was like, "I think I'm on this--" I've always felt that way because a lot of--, like, I couldn't shop for hours and hours, and if I have to-- if I have analysis paralysis, visually, it's just really overwhelming. I said, “There's something about this house. We struck the right balance.” So, if there are people listening, sometimes just decluttering or getting rid of things you don't need can be profoundly powerful. As you astutely stated, as we're losing estrogen, we are losing our ability to acquiesce to other people's chaos.
Mindy Pelz: [00.46:44] That was so well said. I was thinking that another book that everybody should read is The Body Keeps the Score. Because what I started to do is realize that when I walked into certain rooms in my house that I had a body anxiety. I literally had like a-- like, my body felt viscerally uncomfortable. Then I would start to say, “What is going on in this room that isn't working for me?” One of the things I started doing, and it was right as we're coming out of the pandemic, is decluttering room by room by room. I would say the first thing is notice how you feel in different rooms and what needs to change in that room so you can feel comfortable there.
[00.47:30] The other thing, and I talk about this in the book, and I'm again curious to your thoughts on this is I started really requiring more solitude. This was something. I recently brought Jillian Turecki onto my podcast. She's amazing. I really wanted to talk about how do we save marriages during this time. We are really having a conversation right now about the gray divorce, and women are like, “What do I need you for?” There's a lot of really interesting conversations.
[00:48:02] But knowing this neurochemical shift, I really want to know, how do we start to save marriages during this time? Because I don't feel like we're talking about that enough and one of the things she said is that women start to individuate at this time of life.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.48:18] Individuate, that's a new word. Individuate.
Mindy Pelz: [00.48:21] That's the way she said it's like you become more individualized, let's call it that way, that you don't want to be always together with somebody. Whereas like if you think about our 20-year-old self, we're taught, go find somebody because you need somebody to do life with. That was the cultural messaging. Then we got into like menopause and all of a sudden, we're like, “We don't necessarily want to do life with somebody.” This was the discussion we had.
[00:48:51] And so, I think this ties into the clutter because I started realizing I needed more rooms in my house that nobody went into, like only my room. Then I could control that and that became the room I could actually come to.
[00:49:06] I tell the story in the book. We were living in LA where the fires happened and we had to move because our neighborhood burned. And so, when we came here to Santa Cruz, I told my husband that the only requirement I had of the house we got in Santa Cruz is I needed a separate house. [Cynthia laughs] I needed another place that I could go. Now I know everybody can't afford that, but we got a house with a little-- I call it my C shed. It's a little ADU attached to the house where I can go and I can just be with myself. I say this and I think we can-- Doesn't matter your socioeconomic background-- you need to go find places to be alone because in the alone you can feel your own energy.
[00.49:57] Then when you go back into relationships, you go back into different environments, you can feel the anxiety hitting you. Again, full transparency. I'm hopping on a plane tomorrow and I'm going to Miami and New York for interviews. “Oh my gosh, do I want to leave my little safe little environment here in Santa Cruz and be out in the chaos of the flights right now and be in the different environments that overstimulate me and exhaust me?” I'm going to do it for the book launch. But then I already have next week. When I come back I'm like, "Clear my calendar and give me free time to come back to knowing myself." I now understand that I start to burn out. I start to go into anxiety and depression when I don't have a moment or a place that I can find myself again.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.50:54] Well, I think it speaks to being authentic. I always call it the rubber band. Like I'm an introvert. The rubber band gets pulled and pulled and pulled. If I don't allow myself to have time by myself, which is--
Mindy Pelz: [00:51:07] Beautiful.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:51:09] I think that I've known that about myself for a long time, but as I'm buffering up with you getting ready for this book launch, I was like, it might be when I travel, I may need to schedule a massage. I may need to find some way to decompress, go to the ocean, do something if I'm out in LA. But I think for everyone listening, there are salient things that they can take away. You could just walk in the forest. You could go for a walk with your dogs. I have three, which makes me sound crazy, but we're out in walking the dogs [Dr. Pelz laughs] multiple times a day but that connection to nature is so critically important.
Mindy Pelz: [00.51:44] Yes. Agreed.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.51:45] I so love this conversation, Mindy. I think that of all your books, this is definitively my favorite that I have read of yours.
Mindy Pelz: [00.51:53] Thank you.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.51:53] Please let listeners know how to connect with you outside of this podcast. Obviously, they know you. They're a listener to this podcast. But how can they get access to your work and your new book Age Like a Girl.
Mindy Pelz: [00.52:04] Thank you. Thank you for that. I take that with an in-- like to receive that compliment from you means a lot because I admire your work. I admire your book. I'm excited for your book to come out into the world. It too is a conversation that needs to be had. You can go-- you can pretty much go anywhere that books are sold to get the book. I do always try to give a plug that if you have time. Keep in mind that the independent bookstores are owned not by corporations. They're owned by families that need our support. So, if you can go to an independent bookstore or go to bookshop.org to get the book, that's amazing. My YouTube is my passion project. I'm still doing videos. I'm going live there. There's a lot happening on that, so you can come find me there. We have a website agelikeagirlbook.com where depending on when you're listening to this, there'll be some bonuses and fun things. So, I'm everywhere. I really enjoyed this conversation too. Thank you for going into it with me.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00.53:03] Absolutely. Always a pleasure.
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