The Long Exhale - Hypnotherapy For Perimenopause

New-onset anxiety in your forties and fifties is one of the most common and least-discussed features of perimenopause. Fluctuating hormones interact with the stress system, and the result is a body that sometimes generates a fear response when there is nothing to fear. This recording isn’t going to argue with the anxiety. It’s going to let your body finish the response it’s stuck inside.

For aching joints, for headaches that didn’t used to come, for old injuries that have grown louder. For the general sense that your body has become more sensitive to pain than it used to be. This is real, and it has a mechanism. Oestrogen has anti-inflammatory and pain-modulating effects, and as it fluctuates, inflammation rises and pain signals are amplified. Hypnotherapy has one of the strongest...

Perimenopausal fatigue is partly hormonal and partly accumulated. Many of you have been running at full capacity for decades, and the body is asking, finally, for something it has been asking for quietly for a long time. It is asking for rest — real rest, which is not the same thing as sleep. In this session, we teach the body what real rest feels like. We use a long, slow exhale, and — gently — a...

For walking into rooms and forgetting why. For the word that won’t come. For reading the same paragraph three times. For the quiet, private worry that something is seriously wrong with your brain. Nothing is seriously wrong with your brain. Oestrogen is one of the most active modulators of brain function we have, and the brain is densely populated with oestrogen receptors — particularly in the hip...

For the days when everything is too loud, too close, too much. For the rage that doesn’t feel like you. For the moments when you’ve snapped at someone you love and you don’t quite know why. Perimenopausal irritability has a chemistry to it. Fluctuating oestrogen reduces the nervous system’s capacity for buffering, and the skin between you and the world thins. This is not a personality flaw. It’s a...

For the three a.m. wake-up. For the night you can’t fall asleep no matter how tired you are. For the hot, wired feeling that arrives between two and four in the morning and won’t leave. This is a guided hypnotherapy session for perimenopausal sleep disruption. We use a slow breathing pattern — the 4-7-8 technique, with a gentle breath hold — and we travel together to a walled garden at twilight, s...

If you’ve found this podcast, you’re somewhere in the long, often-unspoken stretch of years called perimenopause, and you’re looking for something that isn’t another supplement, another app, another thing to add to the list. This first episode is an introduction. We talk about what hypnotherapy actually is, what it isn’t, and why the evidence base for it is unusually strong for the symptoms of mid...