Menopause & Mindfulness with Clarissa Christensen
In this episode, I'm joined by Clarissa Kristjansson, a menopause health coach and mindfulness practitioner. Menopause & Work. Clarissa worked in corporate roles for three decades and when she went through menopause her mental health suffered.
A self-described high-functioning anxiety sufferer, she had managed her job. Until menopause hit. Clarissa explained when she started to go through menopause she wasn't sleeping well, her anxiety was worse, and she no longer coped with things like she used to.
Summary
Growing up, Clarissa Christensen faced a series of challenges that cultivated a high-functioning anxiety within her—a reality that intensified dramatically with the onset of menopause. Our conversation with Clarissa unearths her transformative journey from a demanding corporate career to becoming a beacon of support for menopausal women around the globe.
As we venture deeper, we explore menopause not just as a period of turmoil but as a powerful opportunity for empowerment and self-redefinition. With Clarissa, we unpack the invisible struggles many women face, from the unpredictability of symptoms to the societal stigma that still shadows this natural life stage.
Highlights
(00:00) Menopause, Mindfulness, and Mental Health
(10:05) Empowerment Through Menopause
(16:52) Navigating Menopause Resources Availability
Transcript
00:00 - Sarah (Host)
Hello Adulting with ADHD fam. We're in a bit of a transition right now, closing out the episodes on hormones for now and entering a new series of episodes on trauma and ADHD. If there are other topics you'd love episodes on, please let me know by emailing me at contact at adultingwithadhdcom. And, as always, to access older episodes of the show, please visit patreoncom slash. Adulting with ADHD. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support and happy adulting. The adulting with ADHD podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. Please see a medical professional if you think you have ADHD or if you have questions about your current treatment. To support this podcast or to access the podcast archives, visit patreoncom. Slash. Adulting with ADHD. This is the adulting with ADHD podcast self empowerment for people with ADHD.
01:00 - Sarah (Host)
Today, I'm very excited to have with me Clarissa Christensen. How are you doing, clarissa? I'm great.
01:05 - Clarissa (Host)
Sarah and I'm really happy to be here on this podcast.
01:10 - Sarah (Host)
Excited. Thank you so much for being here. We were just talking before that. These two topics, menopause and mindfulness, are like so big right now for this podcast and everybody is just so hungry for all the information. So can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into this?
01:30 - Clarissa (Host)
Yeah, for sure. So I live in Sweden now. I'm from the UK you might be able to hear that a long time ago had a bit of traveling around the world and I used to work in a big corporate environment for 30 years and I went through menopause there and I had a difficult time with my own mental health which I'm sure we'll get into a fair bit in this conversation and so I quit and started to work in mental health and then realized all my clients were menopausal women and we doubled down so I became a menopause coach and doula a lot of working with holistic health and well-being and that's what I do now. So I work with women around the world who are struggling with menopause and I'm also an author and a host of a podcast as well called Thriving Through Menopause.
02:22 - Sarah (Host)
Wonderful Doulas fascinate me as well. We might have you back on for a doula episode. So you found yourself in the field of menopause coaching because you were going through challenges and menopause yourself.
02:35 - Clarissa (Host)
It was, yeah, really quite significant ones, which were, for me, predominantly mental health related. Yeah, and how did menopause affect your mental health? I probably now realize, many years down the road, that I was a anxiety sufferer, but I was very good at hiding it and I think that's related to I had a very difficult childhood that set me up to be what I would describe as a high functioning anxiety sufferer. I know psychotherapists and that's real. But you know, I was able to be quite capable, run a job, run a life, and then menopause kind of hit me. My hormones obviously impacted my ability to just manage the way I felt. So I didn't sleep very well, I was anxious about everything. It became bigger and bigger and bigger and things that I had coped well with I didn't cope so well with.
03:35
Now, suddenly I was double booked, triple booked, worrying all the time, and then I had two panic attacks. I had one in an airport, which was actually triggered by something that had happened when I was a child and the set there was a similar situation. It was really scary. They we were. We landed in Vietnam. I'll tell the story a little bit. We landed in Vietnam and we were flying onto our home in Sydney and they took all the people to one side and took our passports. And then everybody else got their passport back and my son and I didn't. And I just melted down because that was something similar that happened to my mom when we were little. I had a, really, and at the event my son was going. You know, you're hyperventilating, you're terrified. And then they handed my passports and there wasn't anything really an issue, but by that stage I thought I was going to be stuck here in Ho Chi Minh City, something terrible was going to happen. And then I had a panic attack at work and that really was the tipping point.
04:38 - Sarah (Host)
Yeah, that was my tipping point at work too. Do you want to go into that a little bit, because I think a lot of people resonate with that?
04:47 - Clarissa (Host)
yeah, we sure, we sure do, and I think our anxiety shows up at work a lot and I had joined a new company and realized that I'd made a mistake. You know that one don't we know?
05:02
that, oh, this is, this is a terrible place to work, and I reported to him I was a senior manager, so you can realize that he was a very senior manager. By Friday, this guy hadn't spoken one word to me and I'm thinking, oh my god, he's heard something bad about me, there's something wrong. By this stage, my stories in my head were huge.
05:27
It was your fault, obviously which I was, you know, a terrible new employee they didn't like, or whatever it was, and I thought I'm going to go up to him, I'm going to say maybe he doesn't know, I'm in his team. So I'll do that and I think I'll tell him hey, I'm in your team. Shall we have a catch-up? Yeah, well, came out of separate lifts together into the office lobby they didn't go to plan.
05:53
I have no idea to this day what I said. No, no idea at all. You know I can laugh about it, no, but at the time it wasn't really it. It wasn't funny and it was like I was watching myself and I could barely breathe. And he looked at me and he said oh, maybe you shouldn't run up the stairs and take the lift next time. And then he just turned and walked into the office. I was like he turned out to be a bit of a. You know we won't say it's a polite company, but we know what we think. Yeah. And so for me, I thought I can't go on like this. I need this job because I'm a single mom and I've got to think about my son. He's only got two more years left at school. I need to resolve this. And that's really how mindfulness came into my life.
06:42 - Sarah (Host)
Oh, it's so relatable. So how does mindfulness help in this context?
06:49 - Clarissa (Host)
I think you know now I recognize how much a role stress and issues like anxiety and mild depression can really impact menopause. Mindfulness is really proven to be an effective tool for us to be able to manage those situations, because it first of all gives us a bit of a space. So when I, if I was having my panic attack, I would have been able to have stepped slightly back from that, stopped. Stepped slightly back from that, stopped, slowed down, been present, reversed some of that. So that is the first thing that it does. It gives us the opportunity to do that Be present, look at your thoughts and really regroup.
07:39
And I think when in menopause we're having hot flashes, we're having anxiety attacks, we are feeling overwhelmed. In so many ways. Mindfulness is a great first phase because we can all take a minute and breathe and just because the minute we do that, we go into the parasympathetic nervous system. So we are immediately a little bit more relaxed, we get a little flood of feel-good hormones and we're off that stress high where we're not really able to think straight or take control of our life, and so it really helps in that way, initially and then. For me, what mindfulness also does is it gives us the ability to actually accept where we were, I think, or where we are, I think. A lot of the time in menopause we go I don't want to be here, I want to be somewhere else, because it can be so tough for so many of us, you know, for a variety of reasons. And so mindfulness lets us be, it is okay, and if I have a bad day, I can actually be really kind and forgiving to myself and know that this will be over eventually.
09:02 - Sarah (Host)
Yeah, and while you were talking, I'm going to walk back a little bit. This might be a really basic question. But what is mindfulness? By definition, it's just being here.
09:13 - Clarissa (Host)
It is the ability to be here, to be present to your experience as it is, without judging it, and just saying this is how it is, and I think that it's a very gentle practice. I mean, it can be much more complicated, but that's the essence of, I'd say, modern mindfulness.
09:35 - Sarah (Host)
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10:01 - Sarah (Host)
That's BetterHelp H-E-L-P dot com slash ADHDhd adulting. Nice, yeah, I got. I agree with that totally. Wow, I'm just taking all that in because I just relate to it so much, especially the the desperation to be somewhere else, like the escape, the need to escape, and I I guess that's why so many of us struggle with escapism and numbing and that kind of stuff.
10:21 - Clarissa (Host)
It's um so easy to just want to bury all that yeah and I think we're used to a world of reaching out and having a quick fix. You know we used to go got a headache, take whatever it is you take in the country and advil and alvedon here in Sweden, whatever it is. But menopause is three years, five years, ten years. It's not all at the same level or the same symptoms the whole time. It's this continual unfolding of experiences, which can be at times nothing and at other times really tough. Then you might go and they're so varied.
11:05
No one can tell you what your menopause is going to be like and although there is more help out there now than there was, not every clinician you go to is very well versed. Not every employer is very sympathetic or even acknowledges that this can be an issue for you and, and sometimes your family are just going. Who is this mad, mad woman? You know that's coming to my house now and is and, and it brings a lot of issues that we might have been able like. I just cope with my anxiety and this being a podcast about adhd a number of women who are being diagnosed with as neurodivergent is unbelievable at this time and I think we probably walked around for years not recognizing that you have not been heard, and menopause brings it right out it really, really does.
12:01 - Sarah (Host)
It's an interesting time to be neurodivergent and menopausal at the same time, especially right now, because everything is crazy anyway, but you're going crazy and that's well. That actually is a good segue into the next question Is it possible for menopause to be a positive experience? What are, what can you get out of being menopausal?
12:26 - Clarissa (Host)
it all sounds so bad if we only think about the symptoms. But but the good side is that we get opportunities to reframe our lives. That's one of the big things. I would say that sometimes the fact that we change so much we're not gonna if we have children and I recognize there are lots of people that are childless, so that's not necessarily the be all and end all. But if that happens to be for you a chance to say, well, now it's my turn, and that's what menopause starts to say, because suddenly we're not going to have a family anymore like that, we, our brains, are not as caring believe it or not that once you are not producing an egg each month and you're amovulatory, a lot of that caring mechanism gets switched off, which is inborn in us as women. We can't help that. That's part of our. But suddenly we're like, actually I'm first here for a while and I'm not going to do things.
13:29
So we get stronger in our relationships, we can ask more for what we want and we gain a certain kind of what is it feistier? As we go through it and beyond it, we start to stand up and we've got a tremendous amount of experience and wisdom that we can tap into. So I think it is a positive experience because of those things and I think if we are seeing women doing amazing stuff now in their 50s and 60s, so we're beginning to build some role models which are not the ones our mothers had. So we have great role models now women who can start businesses, do podcasts, write books, stand up for their community, and there's an opportunity for us to do the same. I'm not sure it's so big in the sort of corporate sector, but so many women are taking the chance to leave and do something different with their lives, so I think it's hugely empowering.
14:28 - Sarah (Host)
Wow, that is such a better outlook. I can't wait for that tearing mechanism to summer down a little because it has been hyperdrive and hard to do anything else. So looking forward to that. But wow, I think it's almost like anything Back to the parenthood there's so much awful and amazing mixed together. It sounds like menopause is similar to that, like wow yeah, I'd say that.
14:54 - Clarissa (Host)
I mean, I would never say to anybody hey, your symptoms are a walk in the park. Of course not. Every woman has the worst.
15:00
Yeah, I'm the portion of women who will have a difficult time and there are lots of factors surrounding that can be related to their upbringing, can be related to their current health on many levels, and then there's someone who kind of breezed through it. But most of us will have experiences that we'd rather not have in some way and we can come through that. And for many women it is five years. It can be tough and it's tougher for those that it's longer.
15:38 - Sarah (Host)
And it appears to me that talking about it is where a lot of our power comes from.
15:41 - Clarissa (Host)
It sounds like that's kind of been the missing piece. Oh, absolutely, I think that the shame and the stigma that's still out there is what's holding women back and we're you know, if we can't talk about it, we feel like I should disappear and be invisible. Then things don't change and it's a natural biological process. We are not able to escape it or, as some people go around, saying, you can reverse it, no, you can't. It's there, but there is help available. There's help from psychological help. There is hormone therapy. If you're a candidate and that's what you want to do, and I think that's important. It's a choice and there are lots of things we can do, like mindfulness and use, nutrition and exercise. We can be empowered. We can be in control of what our experience is like.
16:33 - Sarah (Host)
That is uplifting on a day like today. I don't know when this goes live, but right now Omicron is just racing through, at least here in the States. I don't know about where you're at but yeah, so that's a very uplifting take and that's wonderful. So if somebody wanted to keep up with you and learn more about how to navigate this, where can they find you and the programs?
16:59 - Clarissa (Host)
I do tune into my podcast. We have an episode every week.
17:14
And a lot about holistic health particularly, so I have a lot of really great practitioners who talk and people tell their story as well, which is very connecting for you If you can hear another woman talk about her experience and how she got through it. So that's called thriving through menopause. Every tuesday, you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts, and I have some books as well that people can read. I've got a book called the mindful menopause, so if mindfulness is your thing, then the mindful menopause on amazon. And I have a new book coming out on the 8th of March, which is a collection of 11 women and a man's story on the experiences of menopause and how positive it can be.
18:06 - Sarah (Host)
Oh, that's exciting. I can't wait to hear more about that. Clarissa, thank you so much for being here today, and I hope we get to talk again. I do.
18:17 - Clarissa (Host)
Sarah, thank you so much for having me.
