The following strategies can help us rewrite scripts that no longer serve us. They help us to see our emotions as healthy, safe and beneficial, making us more resilient to life’s inevitable ups and downs.
Learn how to normalise emotional experiences
According to midlife women’s advocacy group Noon, half of women over 50 have been impacted by five or more big life events: including divorce, bereavement, redundancy and their own health struggles.
Women in midlife can rightly feel overwhelmed, stressed and frustrated. Add in ever higher expectations about maintaining our bodies, minds and social lives, and it’s no wonder we feel things acutely. Acknowledging these realities helps us accept rather than judge our emotional experiences.
Understand the need that’s not being met when an emotion does show up
Emotions are ‘transmitters of information’ and according to coaches Zoe Hawkins and Jo Wheatley, they speak to unmet needs. In a time of change, our emotions can alert us to what matters, like needing to be seen, heard or validated.
As you start to listen to your emotions, be mindful. The first emotion you feel might be concealing what’s really behind it. Often sitting behind rage, for instance, can be grief, sadness or fear.
Learn to name your emotions
Many people can name just a handful of emotions, some iteration of mad, glad or sad, but Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in How Emotions Are Made that it is ‘emotional granularity’ – our ability to distinguish between different emotion concepts – that helps us better regulate our emotions. So ‘sad’ can be experienced variously as ‘agonised’, ‘neglected’, ‘powerless’ or ‘miserable’, each denoting a different flavour of an emotional experience that can help us better understand why we’re experiencing it, and in turn what we do with it.
Create a safe space in which to practice, release and explore your emotions
Find safe spaces to open up when you feel the pressure to close down; a trusted friend, peer group, a menopause café or an accredited emotions coaching practitioner. If you find that ideas of emotional safety and trauma arise, seek out a therapist.
Create an emotional goal
Where we may once in our earlier years have been consumed by the pursui
