Day 33: Nourish Your New Normal

In this step, you build upon your discoveries by exploring a simple way to create more balance in your days, without needing to change your entire life, or retire somewhere exotic.

Your capacity to thrive during this time lies within your control. By the end of this step, you’ll know exactly how to go about it.

Your fourth step is Nourish Your New Normal. And it will be easier than you think!

Maintaining optimal health during menopause is about more than regular movement and good nutrition. It’s also about cultivating a state of fluid balance in your body, mind, spirit, relationships, and every other aspect of your life.

The question is, how do you maintain any sense of balance when your hormones, emotions and energy levels are constantly changing?

Is this even possible, and if so, why isn’t every menopausal woman doing it?

Let’s go down the path of nourishing your new normal.

Quantum scientists have proven that everything in our world is formed of energy, including you.

This means that whether you’re aware of it or not, your system constantly sends and receives energy signals, from everyone and everything around you.

Some days these energy exchanges fill you up and make you feel on top of the world. Other days, they sap your strength and totally deplete you.

This is because whenever you send out too much energy, or take too much negative energy back, the energy exchange impacts negatively on your physical and emotional state.

This information is powerful when it comes to nourishing your new normal. Especially when you embrace the Mind Garden perspective.

Your mind is like a fertile garden – it absorbs the messages it’s fed from everything and everyone around you. This plants seeds of thought that can grow and spread rapidly.

Left untended, your mind can create endless worry weeds, panic poppies and resentment roots, none of which do you any favours if left to run rampant.

If you’ve ever spent an entire day ruminating about a wrong someone’s done you, then got to the end of the day feeling exhausted, you’ve spent the whole day letting weeds fester in your mind garden.

As a result, you’ve effectively lost a day to your mind, and used up your own energy against you.

How much better would it feel if your mind was full of thoughts that uplift you?

How would it impact you if you could plant blossoming flowers of possibility and positivity instead? No matter how much you fight against your new normal?

The fact is, you can.

Like a diligent gardener, you do this by removing one weed at a time, then replacing it with new positive seeds instead.

Your mind will happily spend all day thinking, making judgements and drawing conclusions about you. You’ll never be able to stop this completely, but you can shift the balance so that you tend to your mind garden more wisely.

Like growing a tomato plant by training it to grow around a cane, you can train your brain to look for positive seeds, rather than focusing on negative weeds.

This works because your brain is highly adaptive, thanks to what scientists call neuroplasticity. New pathways, processes, skills and thought patterns are being constructed all the time by your brain, as it tries to find ways to save on energy.

When you use this to your advantage, and grow the type of seeds you’d love, you train your brain to look for more of them. As a result, your outlook on your journey improves. Minimal effort required.

The best way to start cultivating your mind garden, is to realise you can choose what you consume. Once you know this, you can start catching yourself in the act of feeding your mind negative fuel.

You’re in charge of your mind, not the other way round, so it’s up to you to start weeding out thoughts that stress you out.

Start noticing the effect that being around negative people, or thinking negative thoughts has on you. Then notice how nourished you feel when you’re around supportive people, or thinking positive thoughts instead.

Once you’ve identified what positively feeds you, become more diligent about what you consume and what mental seeds you plant. Start noticing how you nourish yourself each day – in all senses.

Once you’ve done this a few times, you’ll become a more diligent thought gardener.

Before long, you’ll be skilled at noticing what you feed your body AND your mind, so you can catch the negative weeds before they take root.

In short, you’ll become better at nourishing your new normal.

So how do we learn to do this mind-gardening?

What you focus on grows, so start intentionally growing thoughts and things that nourish you. To explore this further, try this short exercise.

First, take a few seconds to think about the one thing you’re proud of about how you’re managing menopause right now.

Next, think about why you feel proud of yourself, so you start cultivating positive feelings about yourself.

Noticing how this makes you feel, make a commitment to yourself to start each day thinking about 3 things you’re proud of yourself for. You can do this in the shower, when you’re brushing your teeth, or just after turning off your alarm.

If you tend to this practice daily, your ability to thrive during menopause will be hugely improved, as you sow positive seeds in your mind garden.

The impact of this might not be apparent immediately. But stick with it and you’ll soon notice how well you’re adapting to your new normal.