Navigating Perimenopause with Power: Sleep, Self-Care & Speaking Up with Jessica Erlendson

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Are you a midlife woman? This episode is for you as you're feeling the change coming, and are experiencing all sorts of emotional and physical changes happening in your body. You're not alone.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Today. We're talking all things peri and postmenopause, Hi and welcome to the you world order, showcase podcast where we feature life, health, transformational coaches, and spiritual entrepreneurs stepping up to be the change that they seek in the world. I'm your host, Jill Hart, the coaches alchemist on a mission to help coaches and entrepreneurs amplify their voice, monetize their mission and get visible leveraging podcasts and the huge audience on the Gnostic TV network.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Today we are chatting with Jessica Van Remen. Sorry I was struggling with that. Your name for a moment. Jessica, is a menopause expert who incorporates Yoga and music into helping her clients navigate the changes we all go through as midlife. Women welcome to the show, Jessica

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Jessica Erlendson: Well, thanks for having me, Jill. It's great to be here

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So you ready for the big question

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Jessica Erlendson: Yes.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Now that I found it, what's the most significant thing in your opinion, as individuals, we can do to make an impact on how the world is going

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Jessica Erlendson: I really feel like we need to emphasize kindness and thinking about that in terms of kindness towards ourselves and self-care is really important. But I had another coach point out to me. You know self-care is not the same as loving yourself.

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Jessica Erlendson: Because you can go through the whole thing right like you can do a workout like I have to do my workout. I worked out this morning, or you can do a workout like I'm so grateful that I have the opportunity to come and do this workout, and I have a trainer that helps me to do the workout, so I don't sit around eating sandwiches.

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Jessica Erlendson: So loving yourself being kind, and then make sure that you just keep talking about whatever it is until someone says, Oh, you know what I think you got to go and talk to this person or this clinic or that psychologist to read this book, because there are people

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Jessica Erlendson: who are able to help you with whatever it is you're going through.

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Jessica Erlendson: And I think midlife especially, is an important self-discovery time of life

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Jessica Erlendson: where we're really getting to know ourselves in a way that maybe we haven't before.

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Jessica Erlendson: and we don't need to do that alone.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: As moms. I think that is like

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: so such a critical point in our lives. You know, we we get all excited about becoming moms, and then

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: then we lose ourselves for like 20 years or longer. And then then the kids grow up and they're ready to launch. But we're just now realizing, hey, who are we? And how did we get here?

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Jessica Erlendson: Yeah. And I was always, I'm an artist and a musician. So I was always working on projects, recording projects or writing stuff and working with other artists and putting on shows and putting out albums. And

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Jessica Erlendson: so I had a very active

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Jessica Erlendson: creative life on my own, regardless of my role as a mom to my children.

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Jessica Erlendson: But even so, I was just talking to somebody yesterday, and I was like, you know, the estrogen is the calming. Feel good. Make everybody happy, Hormone, and that's the one that makes sure that everybody has their meal before you even sit down. So by the time you sit down. The 1st kid, which is usually the smallest, is done, and they want to get up and leave the table, and you've only had 4 bites. So you get up and you help that person get up off the you know what I mean. Like you're not. You're really putting yourself

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Jessica Erlendson: last, and we're kind of wired to do that. And then, as the estrogen changes and and the Progesterone's dropping, and things are really upheaval in your own mood, or even how you can predict

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Jessica Erlendson: how you will feel, you know, like, when we have our regular cycle. I don't know about you, but I would be like, Okay, I know this week is going to be a tough week, because it's the week before the period comes, and in perimenopause we lose that completely. We have no idea what the hell's going on

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Go ahead whole. My home menstruation life

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: was epitomized by I never know when the hell it's coming, and I was

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: half the time not even prepared. I I couldn't.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It was never count the days

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: it was. It was always a mystery. And then they threw endometriosis in on top of it so that

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you know you could. You could just be in miserable pain

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Jessica Erlendson: Oh, yeah.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: For for days or weeks, and you can't really put it together with anything, because

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: by the time that's kind of waning off, that's when your period hits. So you're just like so grateful to have your period.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You've forgotten about this other pain that you were experiencing kind of pain, so

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: that that whole thing was just like I was so glad to hit menopause.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: even though, you know I call my mom up, and I was talking to her about it. And my mom was in her probably sixties at the time. And she's like.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, I was talking to your aunt, and we still get hot flashes. I'm like, Mom.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you're supposed to be encouraging me, not like making me feel like this is a death sentence. And so when people like you who are out there, you know, sharing what's what you can expect when you hit menopause. I think it's just the greatest thing since sliced bread

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Jessica Erlendson: It's a it's a weird role that I came upon kind of accidentally. I'm into yoga and meditation, and I did yoga teacher training. And then I went right into a Yoga therapy program at Mount Royal University, and I was really excited because we were going to take, you know, anatomy, physiology pathologies at the university level

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Jessica Erlendson: with the personal trainers and massage therapists. Right? So this is like real like, we're going to get into the nitty gritty. And there was one paragraph under menstruation that addressed menopause which literally said something along the lines of eventually you'll stop menstruating, and some women report troubling symptoms such as hot flashes.

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Jessica Erlendson: That was all. That's the education that I got at school.

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Jessica Erlendson: And I started helping other women with the Yoga therapy, which is, you know basically a care plan. So it doesn't matter what the diagnosis is. I'm working with their personal characteristics and their strengths and their traits and trying to help them to navigate whatever they're going through to get to a better place of understanding themselves and a healthier, happier person.

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Jessica Erlendson: And then I started having horrible perimenopause symptoms. And I started my little group. And I realized, man like, there's people don't want to talk about it, maybe publicly but privately.

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Jessica Erlendson: we need to talk about this, because the symptoms are so weird. Some of them are like really completely unexpected and very troubling, and can be scary, especially if you suddenly have, like a really big mood dip, and you've never really had that before.

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Jessica Erlendson: I was scared. I went to the doctor, and she was like, well, this is part of perimenopause, so I was lucky. A lot of people go to the doctor, and their doctor says, you know you're too young, or you know, it's just a natural part of aging, and they don't really address

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Jessica Erlendson: the holistic side of things. So that's something that I can do where I can help guide people and what they might want to try what they might want to ask for, how to talk to the doctor, to get what they want the comprehensive symptoms list. That's what that's for. They fill that out. And I've had people say this to me. I went to the doctor for a year, and every time I went I told him that I have chronic headache.

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Jessica Erlendson: and every time he just dismissed that until he saw it in writing that said, I have headache almost always with a note beside it that says, I, wake up with a headache every day.

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Jessica Erlendson: and then he was like, Oh, dude! We can't have that. You could have something really seriously wrong. So we're going to have a full workup and make sure that you don't have a brain tumor, and send you to the dentist and see if you have Tmj. And all of those things. You know it kind of unravels when you learn how to advocate for yourself.

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Jessica Erlendson: which is another thing that's very difficult for a lot of us to do, because we're trained to be like, okay, doctor, I'll just go home and cry

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, or they give you stuff, and they don't tell you what it's

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you should be using it. I've had doctors prescribe drugs to me

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: for like bowel issues, because I endometriosis just screws up everything inside your body. And I had it. I had it for like 20 years before they were able.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: they were able to even diagnose it. I mean, I've had so many weird diagnoses. But by the time they did diagnose it it was closing off my colon, and it had closed off my Fallopian tubes. I was totally sterile.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and and he was gonna just go in for a 30 min cleanup.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and 4 h later he was finally done

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Jessica Erlendson: Alright!

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It was just like, Oh, girl, you were such a mess! Because endometriosis causes lesions to grow around in inside your abdomen. And so it's a horribly weird thing. But

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I forgot where I was going with this. But it's just like you. You have to be able to to show them patterns of stuff because they don't have time, and they can't read your minds

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Jessica Erlendson: No, and they and they do have an idea like I was diagnosed with endometriosis in perimenopause. I personally think it was because my progesterone plummeted first, st

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Jessica Erlendson: and I had too much estrogen and estrogen feeds the endometriosis cells and spreads, and it grows, and I was very reluctant to do surgery. So I opted on a medication which was brilliant. By the way, I mean, I was really really happy with the medication that they gave me, and I'm still on it to this day, because it has, I believe, stopped it from regrowing.

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Jessica Erlendson: But when she went in to do the surgery same kind of thing, I don't think it took her a lot longer than she thought, but she did say it was everywhere. It was through your whole abdominal cavity. So if you've been having abdominal pain.

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Jessica Erlendson: It was from the endometriosis. And then, once you heal from the surgery, you can expect to feel much better. And she was right, and I have felt much better. But getting even diagnosed with the endometriosis, took years. And a lot of this is not unusual. So if you have this temperament that you should just make an appointment with your doctor, and then they're going to listen to you, and it's all going to get worked out

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Jessica Erlendson: like, not necessarily. You may need to be going back again and again and asking for different specialists and and referrals. And it's quite the process to even get

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Jessica Erlendson: a proper diagnosis. But that's 1 of the ways that I can help as a coach, because I don't need a diagnosis. I can just work with your symptoms and start helping you to feel better like pretty much right away.

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Jessica Erlendson: and give you an idea of what maybe you might want to go for next, as far as medication goes, or not like I have people that don't want to do any medication, and you don't have to. There are lots of options. But I like I'm the middle way. You know. I'm really the middle way, and everything that I do like. I take some medications, and I take some of the supplement stuff. And I really work with the lifestyle, because that's the thing that I can control more than anything else.

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Jessica Erlendson: and I'm playing it by ear, like a musician waiting to see what happens, trying not to get too far in the future, because we don't know how it's going to work out. It's going to work out. However it does, and as long as I keep doing my end of things things do happen to.

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Jessica Erlendson: You know it all works out. It all comes out in the wash. But it's not gonna be like someone's gonna knock on your door and say, Are you okay?

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: This is us. We're knocking on your door, girl, are you okay?

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Jessica Erlendson: Are you okay? Because you can come and talk to me about it like? And then the other people in the group that I'm running the Cpms group on Facebook is filled with lovely people that really have a lot of knowledge and like to help just for the sake of helping and because honestly, when we help someone else, we feel a little bit better

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: For sure, for sure. So we need to definitely talk about the number one top complaint. Most people going through perimenopause and menopause, and that is sleep

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Jessica Erlendson: Yeah.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Because sleep affects everything in our lives. And suddenly we're not sleeping

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Jessica Erlendson: Yeah, and it can. That's 1 that was like what the heck cause. I've always been a pretty good sleeper.

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Jessica Erlendson: and it was for me. It was really like overnight, all of a sudden. I'm not having good sleeps, and I and that went on for a little while, and then I did all the sleep hygiene. I really got serious about looking into that.

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Jessica Erlendson: you know, so blackout curtains and a noise machine, and I wore earplugs for a while, and I experimented with, you know, have the same bedtime every day, and all of those things. But I still kept waking up, and now I know that it was the cortisol.

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Jessica Erlendson: and my idea is that this is what I think is happening. So the progesterone starts to dip. That's your feel good calming hormone. You have too much estrogen. So now we're not in balance anymore. And then the adrenal glands go. I know I'll just produce a bunch of stress hormone, and that'll make everything better somehow. And then you're just like walking on eggshells and like about to explode over any little thing because you're too stressed out.

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Jessica Erlendson: and we have a natural cortisol surge that's supposed to help us wake up sometime between 5 and 6 in the morning.

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Jessica Erlendson: and when you have too much already. It starts more at 3 or 4 in the morning, and you literally jolt awake like with a sense of doom that something horrible is about to happen. And it's not which is very disorienting, because there's nothing going on.

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Jessica Erlendson: And so that's why that's the 1st class that I designed was the 21 days to fix your sleep, because if you're not sleeping.

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Jessica Erlendson: you know you're irritable. You're angry. You're you're short tempered. Your brain fog gets so much worse. You just can't focus, and you have trouble explaining what's going on to anybody else. You can't tell them why you're not sleeping, because maybe you're having nightmares. Maybe you're not. I wasn't having nightmares. I was just suddenly awake

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And it's not like sort of awake like. Sometimes you can go through the rhythm and and you wake up a little bit.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and you recognize that you've woken up. But you just like drift back off this cortisol jolt is like.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Okay, now I'm awake. My eyes are open. And what the hell do I do now?

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I I may as well just get up, cause there is no way I'm going back to sleep

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Jessica Erlendson: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I mean, depending on the person like, one of the clients that I talked to when I 1st started doing. This was like.

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Jessica Erlendson: well, I get up and I run.

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Jessica Erlendson: And so I was like, Okay, well, think about it this way, our bodies, our biology is designed in a certain way. And so you've woken up with the stress hormone. So your body's in the reaction, like

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Jessica Erlendson: you've got a bear after you or tiger.

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Jessica Erlendson: And so your response is to go running on an empty stomach. You're just reinforcing that something is horribly wrong.

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Jessica Erlendson: you know, and I'm not saying, don't burn off nervous energy, but if it's sleepy time, we want to try and train the body to stay

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Jessica Erlendson: for sleepy time, even if you're not actually sleeping continue to rest. I tell people a lot it's just like, remember, when you had the little baby and the baby was wonderful, and you were with the baby all the time, but they didn't sleep, so when they did shut up for a minute, I mean when they were a little calm and peaceful.

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Jessica Erlendson: That's when you had your nap. That's when you had your rest. And it was enough. And it was okay. And you were able to cope. And it was fine.

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Jessica Erlendson: We kind of need to do the same sort of things for ourselves, and even if we're not actually sleeping, do the best that we can to calm and soothe and relax our body and our mind. That's why I'm a strong advocate for using mindfulness.

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Jessica Erlendson: because I will use that in the middle of the night. Now, if I wake up, and I also treat the stress every day. So I try to think of it like I want to stay around to 3.

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Jessica Erlendson: I want to stay around. I can't. I can't get back down to a 1 or a 2 that's not going to happen right now in my life, but I can maybe stay around a 3, so that when I have a surge I'm going up to a 6,

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Jessica Erlendson: not an 8 or a 10

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Jessica Erlendson: so, and that has worked really well. But it means that I need to do that self care from a place of loving kindness. And that's where the 21 days to fix your sleep is really handy, because it's only a half an hour. It's really easy. It's not exercise, it is, yoga, but it's not the kind of yoga you're thinking. It is because it's my kind of yoga which is modified gentle, calm. I'm trying to like. Encourage your body to get ready for sleep.

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Jessica Erlendson: and I've run several people through it now over the last couple of years, and they've all gone from not sleeping at all to like falling asleep before they're done.

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Jessica Erlendson: because the body starts to realize. Oh, we're getting ready for sleep now and and then, you know, the sleep will correct itself, and then something else will happen, and it'll go back to stress, and you just do it again like once you once you get in there and making that part of the Queens of Perimenopause. You can do the classes as much as you want to have someone who's been doing them on and off for the last year every time something goes wrong. But now she only has to do like 2 or 3 classes, and she's back to sleeping again.

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Jessica Erlendson: because the body and

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Nothing

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Jessica Erlendson: Programmed

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Nothing ever stays the same with our bodies, which is another thing, and I'm glad that you brought that up, because, as we age, we do continue to change.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And so what's working for you when you're 40 might not work for you when you're 50, might not work with you the same way when you're 55, and when you hit 60 and 65 and 70, it just, it's continually changing. So you have to be open and listening to your body, for you know you were saying you're taking certain medications now, and certain supplements. Well.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: in a few years you need to like.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Ask yourself. Are these still working for me? Do I need to change something up? You can't just like, say, Okay, I'm all done. I'm not a guy. I think guys do that sometimes, and it works for them because their bodies are really simple.

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Jessica Erlendson: Well, and we don't have the same hormonal, you know, dictatorship going on like our whole.

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Jessica Erlendson: we really are wired to be nurturing and caring and and self-sacrificing to a certain degree, and then at some point in life that just doesn't work anymore. And we have to really put ourselves 1st

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Jessica Erlendson: and deal with some backlash from that. If that's what happens and keep explaining why we're making the decisions that we're making like. I remember at 1 point I was so mad and so tired of taking care of everybody else that I made dinner, and I took my dinner upstairs, and I sat alone in my room with the door closed, and I ate my dinner. Now this is not like me.

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Jessica Erlendson: I'm I'm usually like, I want to have a good time. That's 1 of the things that makes me generally pleasant to be around. Because if you if you make a joke I'm I want to. I want to laugh, I want to enjoy myself.

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Jessica Erlendson: So my husband very wisely finished his dinner, and then came upstairs like he gave me some space

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Jessica Erlendson: and said, You know like that's not like you what's going on.

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Jessica Erlendson: And so I just told him, you know, like tired of just.

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Jessica Erlendson: I'm putting everybody else first.st And you guys are a bunch of jerks like you don't even notice you don't even know you're so used to me making dinner. You don't even notice that I made dinner.

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Jessica Erlendson: I just want some peace and quiet, and, you know, leave me alone.

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Jessica Erlendson: And he was like, Oh.

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Jessica Erlendson: okay, because I had never said that to him before I thought about it plenty of times, but I guess I had plenty of estrogen, so I was like, let's try and keep everybody happy and

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Jessica Erlendson: do what needs to be done, and and not worry about it too much, but that that was a tipping point for us as a couple where he started to realize, you know, some of the things like I put it to him this way, like, what are you bringing to the table?

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Jessica Erlendson: You're irritable, you're unreasonable. Sometimes you're very critical, you know. You work too much. You take it out on me because you're overtired.

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Jessica Erlendson: And so like, what is it that you are doing for

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Jessica Erlendson: me, because I'm putting up with this stuff and trying to navigate around your moods. And what's going on for you for work, making sure you have what you need, and everything is easy for you as much as I can.

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Jessica Erlendson: And that was a good question to ask him, because he started to be more like, you know.

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Jessica Erlendson: Maybe I maybe I should be doing a little bit more of this stuff at home if I can, and I started giving him options like, you can make dinner, or you can cook dinner. I'm not doing it today.

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Jessica Erlendson: Isn't that my prerogative? I'm a human being. Am I not like what is going on here? Why do I have no options? Well, everyone else has nothing but options. I know it's maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But that's how I felt

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's not, it's not. And menopause. We're going through menopause and or perimenopause, because menopause is the end of it. We're in menopause. And suddenly our husbands are shifting roles. Also, they're like my husband came home after being over the road for like 18 years, 28 years.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: 2025 years, 28 years, no, 28 years he drove as a truck driver for 28 years, so he was gone most of the time. He'd be home for 3 or 5 days, and I would wait on him hand and foot.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I didn't have to work, which you know he was doing that for me, so I felt great. But now he's home all the time. I can't live his life in my life, too. And he he had to like

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: he had to do some stuff because

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I can't do everything. And really you can get into the position where you're you're having to live their life and your life

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Jessica Erlendson: Hmm.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And it won't work it just.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: but being able to have conversations with him like I, I need you to to pick some things, and those are the things that you do for him. He takes the trash out, and it sounds like a really small thing. But God! It it is. It's huge in my world because I don't have to worry about the trash cans being emptied anywhere in the house. He just does it, and he takes the trash to the curve on Tuesdays, and he

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Jessica Erlendson: Deal. He's a great organizer, M.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: He doesn't. He likes things tidy, but he he'll let things go, for he's not really big on deep cleaning, which it's like

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I can go for a while, and then it's just like everything has got to be cleaned.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I assign him tasks, you know, like the garage really needs to be organized, or the basement really needs to be organized. Or please go through the bedroom and wipe everything down and organize all the stuff in the room.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: He's great job, and sometimes he buys me flowers. That's an example

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Jessica Erlendson: Of setting boundaries right. I think people have a confused idea in their mind about what a boundary is. They think of boundaries. I'm never going to talk to you again. A boundary is where you very clearly say to a person like when we bought this house. It's a big house. We're only 2 people. But this is like, what is it like? 3 bedroom house, basically, and a lot of floor space, a lot of carpet.

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Jessica Erlendson: And I said, I'm not cleaning that house. We were living previously in a 3 bedroom apartment, which was quite small. It was like kind of like a townhouse setup

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Jessica Erlendson: with 3 bedrooms on top and a living space on the bottom really easy to clean. I could clean that whole thing in like an hour and a half

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: This house is not the same thing. So I just clearly said to him, You know, I see that you want to, and it makes sense, and we should probably, you know, from a financial standpoint, get into this house. But I don't want to clean it, and I know that if we do this, I'm going to end up

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Jessica Erlendson: Resenting you and being the one doing all of the cleaning, because this is what have always happened. I was always just automatically doing the cleaning because it's unskilled labor. Right? That's the construction side of things. Unskilled. Labor is cleaning.

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Jessica Erlendson: And so he very creatively said, You know, I think what we could do is get a couple of people that we know that are doing some cleaning and have them come in every other week. So then you can do the kind of cleaning that you like to do, because I like to putter clean

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So I walk into a room, and I go. Oh, that's a little dirty, and then I clean off the counter there, and that's it, and I don't want to do more than that.

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Jessica Erlendson: But I like doing that kind of cleaning. I don't like pulling the whole thing out and doing the vacuuming in every corner, and all that. I don't enjoy that.

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Jessica Erlendson: And so that's a boundary.

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Jessica Erlendson: I'm not going to do it.

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Jessica Erlendson: You'll have to do it. He doesn't want to do it. He outsourced that

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: He kind of made

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Jessica Erlendson: You gotta make

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Same reason, you know I I can't do it all. I'm getting older, and you know I can.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I can keep up. We get. We have our maid come in once a month, which is enough for me in our house, because I'm pretty good at cleaning. It takes me a couple of hours.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and but I can't do the deep cleaning stuff

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Jessica Erlendson: But if you

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Have a maid coming in. Then they can do the surface stuff, and that gives you space to do the the, you know, clean the pictures or the

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: floorboards, or you know the light bulbs, or you know, just

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the things that just like accumulate. And you're just like.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: how is it ever gonna end

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Jessica Erlendson: Yeah, when you

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Jessica Erlendson: just don't have time, you just don't have time to do everything. And also, I think part of it is the mental load like we. We're really good at balancing all that when we have the hormones, the happy hormones are in there doing their thing percolating, so we can get pregnant again, and you know, when we lose that side of it, it's like, well, I just feel freaking overwhelmed. You know the whole. The table hasn't been, and I can't deal with it. It's like too much. So anything that you can do to take

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Jessica Erlendson: You know things that you can get the other people in the household to participate with you, to make sure that those things are taken off your plate like, I really look at it kind of like doing a reevaluation like, do I really need to do that or do? Is there a way that I can change? How I do that like one of my girlfriends was talking to me the other day, and she has a small child.

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Jessica Erlendson: and I offered to do some babysitting for her, and she said, Oh, I don't even know what I do. And I was like, like, this is a problem babe like.

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Jessica Erlendson: And she said, Yeah, you know what I could. I could just go and have coffee with a friend.

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Jessica Erlendson: or go to the bookstore and look at books, or do window shopping, or go see him? I was like, yeah, you can do whatever you want. But, as you know, sometimes those

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Jessica Erlendson: things that really fill our cup get completely dumped.

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Jessica Erlendson: and then we end up depleted by the time we get into perimenopause, and we're kind of at an uphill battle, because we have to explain to everybody else. You know what we can and can't do, especially I say this to people all the time. It's kind of like when you have a chronic illness like fibromyalgia, or chronic pain or chronic fatigue. You look amazing. You don't look any different. You're gorgeous. Everybody loves you, and so they don't notice that you're not

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Jessica Erlendson: right quite well like you really can't do the same things. You can't drive yourself in the same way. Which means you have to be the one to explain, you know. Look! I haven't slept, and on the thing of sleep with my husband. He really didn't get it. I kept trying to tell him like how tired I was before I figured out how to help myself with the sleep.

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Jessica Erlendson: and then the 1st night he had a bad night, I said, that's how I feel every day.

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Jessica Erlendson: That's how I feel constantly, because I have maybe one or 2 good nights of sleep in a week. And suddenly, like months of me trying to explain this to him and getting nowhere, he was like, oh.

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Jessica Erlendson: that's not good

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's not

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Jessica. This has been a great conversation. So let's tell everybody where they can get in touch with you, because you have a variety of places, and also talk a little bit about the list of perimenopause symptoms that, and how they can get that

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Jessica Erlendson: Yeah. So there's a link. You can click to get the the symptoms list. And then you confirm your email. And that puts you on my newsletter, and I send out a very occasional newsletter. I really only do that if I have a thing to announce like when I have a speaker coming, or you know something like that that people might want to make sure that they know.

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Jessica Erlendson: And then that's good to take to your doctor. You can also monitor how you're doing. If you add in a supplement or a medication, or take something out like if you decide to take out sugar, and then you could redo the test in 3 weeks and see if it made a difference. I've started the Queens of Perimenopause on Patreon. That's pretty exciting, and I'm taking all of the best free stuff off of Facebook and putting it into the Patreon membership.

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Jessica Erlendson: It's a way more organized and easy to find. What you're looking for in there and then all of my classes and workshops, and like I did office hours on Monday, and everything will be available there in the Patreon group. There's the Canadian Perrymann website

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Jessica Erlendson: Canadianperry meadow.com. And there I share blogs. And you know, if there's something going on like when we have another event. We'll do a fall conference in

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Jessica Erlendson: Calgary and online across Canada. And you know, we're, I'm expanding more like we're letting people in from other places because I went international with a book last year.

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Jessica Erlendson: And I'm I'm writing another book right now on perimenopause. So that will be coming out sometime this year, I hope. And

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Jessica Erlendson: then I just started a sub stack. So I've been sharing on there and loving substack because I'm a writer, and I'm writing a lot, and I'm putting out a poetry book, and I have a lot of songs and stuff, and it's really easy to link everything on substack. So you can see what's going on.

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Jessica Erlendson: And for Facebook, you know, if you find me on Facebook, you can just send me a message. I'm on there as Jessica Murnaray, and there's a Canadian Perry Meno Page on there as well.

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Jessica Erlendson: I'm pretty responsive about stuff. I won't coach you for free, though. So if you just wanna just wanna ask me questions. But I will do a free 15 min call.

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Jessica Erlendson: If someone wants to talk to someone in the know, and they just really don't know where to turn or what steps they might want to take. And I actually really love doing those calls. I've done over a hundred now in the last year and a half, and I feel like I've really gotten to know the people that are in my group which is crazy, busy. It just started like exploding again. So the the growth curve is doing this. And we're like 11,400, something, almost 500 people.

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Jessica Erlendson: So hopefully, I've helped most of them.

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Jessica Erlendson: if not all of them. That's kind of my. My goal really is just to

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Jessica Erlendson: be that light in the world that you wish you could see from other people

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Awesome. I really appreciate you joining us today, Jessica, and for the listeners.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you would like to get the perimenopause checklist, please be sure to visit the canadian@perimeno.com

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: website and thank you for tuning in with us today, if you have a podcast or you're interested in starting one to get your message in front of our huge and active audience. Be sure to reach out to us at jill@gnostictv.com. We love to help spiritual entrepreneurs and coaches, amplify their voice and monetize their mission and offer a variety of ways to do this on the Gnostic TV network platform.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: join us for our next episode, as we share what others are doing to raise the global frequency. And remember, change begins with you. You have all the power to change the world, start today and get visible