You can listen to the full podcast episode using the embedded player above.

The Dragonfly Years: What Your Body Is Actually Doing in Midlife

Have you done the labs? Tried the supplements? Cleaned up your diet, prioritized sleep, cut the alcohol and still woken up some mornings feeling like a stranger in your own life?

I hear this constantly. Women who are doing everything right, or trying to, and still feel fundamentally off. Not sick enough to get a diagnosis. Not well enough to feel like themselves. Just... somewhere in between, treading water in a season that nobody adequately prepared them for.

Dr. Ellen Albertson, a psychologist and self-compassion researcher known as the Midlife Whisperer, calls it the nymph stage. And when she described it in our recent conversation on the Living Inspired Podcast, something clicked for me clinically that I want to share with you. You can listen to the full episode using the player above.

Your Operating System Is Updating

The dragonfly spends two to three years as a nymph, living in murky water, eating tadpoles, looking nothing like what it's becoming. It doesn't transform on a visible timeline. It lives in the mud and the churn, in the not-yet. And then one evening it climbs up a stalk of grass and, over a matter of hours, becomes something with 360-degree vision and a 97% predatory success rate.

Dr. Ellen uses this as her central metaphor for midlife. Perimenopause and menopause are not a malfunction. They are a system-wide recalibration and you're in the middle of it.

Here's what that actually means in the body. Estrogen receptors are distributed throughout the brain and body: in the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the gut lining, the cardiovascular system, the bones. When estrogen begins to fluctuate and decline, you're not just experiencing hot flashes. You're experiencing changes in memory consolidation, emotional regulation, digestive motility, sleep architecture, and inflammatory response — all at once. The woman who slept through anything now wakes at 3am with her heart racing and her mind already running through tomorrow's list. The woman who handled pressure with ease now finds herself reactive in ways that feel foreign to her. This is your physiology.

Not Everything Is Perimenopause

Here is where I want to be direct, because I think this point gets lost in most conversations about midlife health: we cannot put everything in the perimenopause bucket.

Yes, hormonal shifts are real and they matter. But dehydration is also real. Chronic stress is real. A gut microbiome that has been quietly struggling for years is real. A nervous system that has been in low-grade threat response for so long it's forgotten what regulated feels like. This is one of the most under addressed drivers of midlife symptoms I see in my practice.

When the nervous system is chronically activated, blood flow is redirected away from digestive organs. Cortisol stays elevated, which disrupts communication between the adrenals, thyroid, and ovaries. The microbiome shifts in ways that affect not just digestion but mood, cognition, and inflammation. These aren't parallel problems; they're interconnected. And they respond to intervention.

Dr. Ellen mentioned one client who was attributing everything to perimenopause. When they looked more closely, the picture included alcohol most evenings, sleep past midnight, almost no movement, and a diet heavy in processed food. Removing gluten for a few weeks and beginning to regulate her nervous system through movement changed how she felt significantly. Not because gluten is universally problematic, but because that one shift reduced her inflammatory load enough for her body to start functioning better.

Small hinges swing big doors. I say this to my clients all the time because I've watched it happen over and over. The goal isn't an overhaul. The goal is finding the one or two foundational things that are creating the most drag and addressing those first. When the basics are in place, hormones actually have a chance to do their job.

The Body That Kept Everyone Else Going

Many of the women I work with are not primarily struggling because of hormonal imbalance. They're struggling because they have been, for years or decades, the last person on their own list. And at some point, the body stops quietly accepting that arrangement.

Dr. Ellen shared that as estrogen declines, something shifts in a woman's capacity to keep overriding her own needs. Women who have spent decades in service of everyone around them start to feel, often for the first time, a clear and urgent sense of what about me? This isn't selfishness. It's biology catching up with a pattern that was never sustainable.

The guilt that surfaces when a high-achieving woman finally tries to take care of herself isn't random. It's conditioned. Many of us watched our mothers defer themselves into exhaustion. They were crying at the kitchen table, managing everyone's needs while quietly disappearing. We absorbed the message early that a woman's value lives in what she produces for others. And underneath the guilt, for a lot of women, is a fear that doesn't get spoken aloud: if I stop giving, I won't be needed. If I'm not needed, I won't be loved.

Sit with that belief, if you have it. Not to judge it, but to understand where it came from and how old it actually is. Because when a woman can locate that belief and recognize it as something she inherited rather than something that's true, the self-care stops feeling like indulgence and starts feeling like what it actually is: the foundation everything else is built on. You cannot pour from a depleted system. This is your physiology, not just some metaphor that you've heard for years and years.

What Self-Compassion Actually Does

Self-compassion tends to get filed under soft concepts in wellness conversations. The research says otherwise.

Dr. Ellen spent years studying self-compassion alongside Kristin Neff, the psychologist who pioneered the field, with a specific focus on body image in midlife women. Her findings: practicing self-compassion reduced body dissatisfaction, body shame, and appearance-based self-worth significantly compared to control groups and improved body appreciation. Not slightly. Significantly. For women navigating a body that looks and feels different than it did a decade ago, that's a meaningful clinical outcome.

There are three elements of self-compassion according to Dr. Ellen. The first is self-kindness: shifting the tone of your inner voice from critical to something closer to what you'd offer a friend in the same situation. The second is common humanity: the recognition that struggle, imperfection, and change are not personal failures but universal human experiences. The third, and most clinically relevant, is mindfulness: the ability to notice when you're struggling without either suppressing the feeling or being consumed by it.

That third element is where the physiological impact happens. When you can pause, identify what you're feeling, and ask what do I need right now? you interrupt the automatic pattern of pushing through. And pushing through as a default stress response is one of the most reliable ways to keep the nervous system dysregulated. Depression, Dr. Ellen noted, has the highest rates of any demographic group among midlife women, not because midlife women are weak, but because stuffing emotions down is, over time, physiologically costly. Self-compassion works in the opposite direction. It creates the capacity to hold difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them, which over time increases the capacity to feel joy.

"Self-compassion is actually a muscle. The more you practice talking to yourself like a good friend, the more your relationship with yourself changes." — Dr. Ellen Albertson

Destination Vibration and the Future Self

Dr. Ellen introduced a concept in our conversation that I want to pass along because it has a practical application that goes beyond mindset work: destination vibration.

The idea is this. When you're in the middle of perimenopause, hormonally fluctuating, emotionally stretched, not yet at the place of clarity that comes on the other side, you can use visualization and felt-sense memory to access the physiological state of feeling well, even before you fully arrive there. Think of a time in your life when you felt genuinely good. Not perfect. Just aligned, energized, like yourself. Get into the physical memory of that state. What did your body feel like? Where did you feel ease?

This isn't wishful thinking. Visualization activates many of the same neural pathways as lived experience. When Dr. Ellen was going through COVID isolation, she visualized herself dancing, something that for her represents full-body alignment, and could feel the physiological shift it created. The body responds to what the mind rehearses. This is neuroscience, not woo. And for women who are deep in the nymph stage, unable to feel the dragonfly yet, this is a way of orienting toward it without bypassing the reality of where they are right now.

Where to Begin

Dr. Ellen offered a practical framework I use a version of myself: take a piece of paper and draw five columns: body, mind, heart, spirit, relationships. In each column, write down the ways you'd like to care for yourself, or already do. Keep this list somewhere visible. When you notice you're struggling, go to the list before you plow forward. Ask which column is most depleted right now. Start there.

From the body: whole foods, adequate protein, less processed food, movement that feels supportive rather than punishing, consistent sleep, and genuine hydration. More women than you'd think are running their entire hormonal and nervous system on chronic dehydration and not connecting it to how they feel.

From the mind: notice your thoughts without being governed by them. Rumination, Dr. Ellen noted, has a direct relationship with depression. The mind circles trying to solve a problem and instead sinks deeper into the mud. Gratitude as a redirect, mindfulness as a pause, movement in nature as a nervous system reset. These suggestions change what your brain attends to.

From the heart: find a container for your emotions. Coaching, therapy, journaling, self-compassion practice, whichever fits your life. The goal isn't to feel good all the time. The goal is to stop treating difficult emotions as threats and start treating them as information.

Choose one thing. One column. One small hinge. That's where it starts.

There will be seasons that feel like mud. There will be mornings that feel like flight. You are not lost in the water. You are becoming. Breathe in. Breathe out. The river of life flows.

Practical Takeaways

One new understanding: The symptoms of perimenopause don't exist in isolation. They're amplified by everything the body has been quietly compensating for. Addressing the basics (nervous system regulation, sleep, nutrition, hydration) gives your hormones a chance to actually function.

One clear next step: Make your five-column self-care list today, body, mind, heart, spirit, relationships, and put it somewhere you'll see it when you're struggling.

One shift to experiment with: The next time you notice yourself pushing through instead of pausing, stop. Ask out loud: what do I need right now? Then answer it honestly, even if the answer is just a glass of water and five minutes outside.

Lots of love,

Rachel

Resources Mentioned

• Dr. Ellen Albertson — themidlifewhisper.com

• Instagram: @the_midlife_whisper

• Book: Rock Your Midlife by Dr. Ellen Albertson

• The No Complaining Rule by Jon Gordon

• Rachel Carta — RachelCartaRN.com | Instagram: @peaceandperimenopause

Rachel's Free Resources:

Mood Swings? Get the 5 minute audio to calm them now. https://rachelcartarn.com/sos

Do you want to understand more of what's changing in your body in midlife and get a few simple tools to feel better now? Get the free guide: The Real Reason You Still Feel Off.

Ready to Talk: Book a Clarity & Relief Session here.