How women can thrive in midlife

Women in midlife should "embrace" it and see it as a positive time of transition, health journalist and author Niki Bezzant says.

She's talked to hundreds of women in New Zealand who face their 40s and 50s trying to live up to standards of beauty and achievement that are impossible to meet.

The result is a new book The Everything Guide: Hormones, health and happiness in menopause, midlife and beyond.

The whole notion of anti-ageing needing to change, Bezzant said.

"It's reframing ageing, I suppose, and thinking about it not as this decline or this ending, but as a transition, just like the other transitions in our lives for all humans, actually.

"Women in particular have a lot of transitions throughout their lives, and thinking about getting older as something that we should embrace. And that can be really powerful, rather than something that we should try and fight.

"Because we are conditioned, generations of women have been conditioned to believe that getting older is a bad thing. And that looking older, in particular, is terrible."

Women shouldn't compare themselves to anyone, Bezzant said, not even their younger versions.

"How we used to be once upon a time, or our perception of how we used to be when we were younger. Or this comparison to ourselves, this future version of ourselves that we're always striving to achieve.

"We spend a lot of our time and energy as women trying to aspire to this other self that's just around the corner - after we do a 12-week programme, or a fast, or we get fit, whatever it is to change our appearance."

Midlife for women was a time when everything seemed to hit at once, she said.

"It's super dense time of life. Because if you think about it, when we're in our 40s and 50s, we are at the height of our career very often, we have still got kids at home with us that we're caring for, we may well also have parents who are ageing, needing a bit more care, we've got all the commitments, the relationships, the community, all the things going on in our life.

"And then you throw in the hormonal turbulence of perimenopause and menopause, on top of all that, and it's just a whole huge storm of stuff going on. It's really difficult and turbulent time."

Although a turbulent time, it needn't be seen in the negative, she said.

"It's thinking of it as a transition. As I say in the book, it can be an opportunity to think about how we actually want this next half of our life, probably that we're going to spend post menopause, how we want that to be, and that can be hugely empowering and just thinking of it as a time of gaining rather than a time of loss."

Alcohol v exercise

Self-acceptance was a powerful first step, she said.

"Practice a little bit of acceptance and kindness towards ourselves and towards our bodies now, as they are today, the now body I talk about, and I think that's really powerful. You've got to be able to practice some love towards yourself before you can really care for yourself."

And there were tangible things woman can do to help, she said - avoid that end-of-day wine, for example.

"Alcohol is not our friend, especially as we get older, and that goes for men as well, but for women in particular, with the hormonal turbulence of menopause, alcohol just ramps everything up, ramps up all the symptoms that we might have, and just tends to make everything worse."

A relaxing habit in the evening can become an embedded, problem, she said.

"If you're in the habit of having a glass of wine every day, for example, or one while you're making dinner, another one with dinner, maybe another one after dinner, you get into that habit.

"It can just be a case of changing the situation, not having it in the fridge, it's just changing the circuit that goes from you coming home, opening the fridge pouring a glass of wine."

And don't forget to move, she said.

"We know from tons of research around not only ageing, but mental health, if you exercise for no other reason than doing it to help your brain feel better, to help your mood, that's a huge, huge benefit."

Incorporate strength training into your exercise regime, she said.

"Doing some weight training, ideally quite heavy weights if you can, or building up to quite heavy weights. That's got so many benefits for not only body composition, but also for your bones, for your brain, for your heart, for your cognition.

"It can reduce the risk of dementia, which is the thing that women are much more likely to suffer from the men."