Discover 5 New Techniques to Improve Your Mind-Body Connection to Live Well After 50

As we’ve aged, advertising and marketing messages told women we could have it all. Unfortunately, as a result, we felt we needed to do it all.

Instead of empowering women, our society normalized simultaneously working tirelessly, raising kids, taking care of parents, juggling family schedules, keeping up the home perfectly, and being superwoman 24/7. 

For many of us, reaching 50 was the moment we asked if there was more to life, if we needed time for ourselves, or wondered if we had a purpose beyond family and work. It's not that we don't love our children, careers, or our families. We have a rumbling that there might be more for us individually in the next half of life. 

However, as women have more power than ever, we have found ourselves powerless to manage some of the messy transitions that brought us to midlife.

Transitions are different for each of us. We can all relate to significant milestones at this stage in our lives - kids leaving home, aging parents, job transitions, or divorce. The reality is that messy midlife transitions are a part of all of our lives. 

You’re not alone. We can use practical tips, tools, and techniques to rethink our rhythm for living well after 50 to understand better how to decouple our experiences, patterns, and beliefs from our approach to handling life stressors and tumultuous times. 

A group of Rumblings women came together virtually with Shelly Melroe, MS, AS, LMFT, owner of Rhythm for Living Therapy & Counseling, to learn how to resync our mind-body connections. We discussed finding compassion for our unbreakable habits, negative self-talk, and limiting beliefs we bring into midlife that may be preventing a healthy mind-body connection and authentic journey into midlife. 

We all have patterns and habits for reacting and dealing with difficult or uncomfortable situations. We may not realize that those patterns and habits stem from our beliefs about ourselves that we deeply imprinted from our life experiences. Some of these experiences can date back to when we were infants and impact how we assess a situation or interpersonal exchange and how safe we feel as adults. 

Most often, these patterns come out as automatic physical responses when we encounter an uncomfortable situation. That body sensation could be a dry tight throat, heart palpitations, a voice that cracks or raises, cold hands, a need to fidget, or even flushing of the neck or face. These emotions or feelings may build-up for some women until they eventually spill over in a fight or flight response. Others may completely shut down in an attempt to remove themselves from the situation, and it may lead eventually to an outburst. 

We've all experienced these body sensations, but what we may not know is we can recognize these body responses and use the energy differently, in a healthier way. Recognition will help us break the cycle and stop impulsively and unconsciously repeating the same patterns shaped by our beliefs and life experiences. 

Our beliefs aren't something we consciously choose.

Beliefs evolve from our upbringing and how people interacted with us. They are part of human development. We learn through our interactions with others. Our beliefs shape how we perceive our relative importance compared to others. We realized what was safe and what was most honest in the world. 

We rarely think of our beliefs, even when they impact our daily lives through negative self-talk. Talk that may include thoughts like, 'I can't go back to school.’ 'I'm not fit enough, or 'my skin isn't smooth enough. 'I don't deserve to go on that trip.’ 'I don't deserve that new sweater.’ These beliefs about who we are, especially those put on us by others, are insidious and subtle and the most damaging. They come out as second nature, with little thoughts creeping in the back of our minds as we go about our day – even when we believe ourselves to be very confident. And each time we repeat this pattern of negative self-talk, it further ingrains our beliefs and habits within us and adds layers on top of our emotions.

That voice inside our head seems to get louder and louder as we get older, along with a fear that we're admitting we need help or are not satisfied if we bring it up. Instead, we may need to recognize that perhaps we can't do it, don't have it all together, or are exhausted after all these years of appearing to juggle everything effortlessly.  And, that’s ok. These are the fundamental and often real messy life experiences. 

What can we do about the negative self-talk? Can we change it? Can we do something differently? Are we getting in our own way? 

There are many approaches to working with and modifying our beliefs to align with how we want to react, learn, and grow during our life transitions, who we want to be in midlife, and what we want to accomplish in our prime time. 

Once we recognize these limiting beliefs, we can name the emotions behind them and begin to tame and reframe them into a reaction that helps us achieve a more positive outcome. It requires going deep within ourselves to get in touch with the emotions we experience. Next, recognize what caused the emotion. By understanding where that emotion originated, we can try to reframe it. 

It begins with hanging onto your thought and remembering, whatever you are experiencing or whatever your self-judgment, maybe it got there naturally and honestly from your life experiences. Thoughts can stem from wounds dating back to childhood. You may have developed protective mechanisms in situations to help you feel safe. You do have the ability to heal these old wounds. The desired outcome is to resync your emotions with your thinking and with your body and integrate them. 

Resyncing emotions allows us to reframe our beliefs, patterns, and habits. We can find the space to be secure in managing messy transitions in a way that opens up possibilities to grow, learn, and take advantage of opportunities that come our way in our personal and professional lives. Midlife gives us a chance to reimagine and reignite who we are and what we want from this life. Each of us has a story, and it may shape us, but we can separate ourselves and our sense of who we are from it. Our stories and our history do not define us. 

Below are some of the skills that we can work on to help us navigate a new way of harnessing the power of a healthy mind/body connection. Start with small changes to find an untapped spaciousness to open our emotional circuits and walk into the authentic power within each of us.

• Recognize your emotions: Learn how to reconnect with your body and accept your current habits and beliefs by examining your emotions. Be aware of the feeling. What are the physical clues you have happening in your body and your sensations? What are you aware of or thinking? What state are you in during the moment? When you begin to recognize these emotions, you can start to engage with yourself. You can also begin to connect with others very naturally. Become more open. You can start this by journaling your emotions and patterned responses and the energy you noticed as you became aware of that pattern. 

• Name your emotions: Get up close and personal with your current rhythm - learn how to go into an empowered and healthy emotional state more naturally. Learn to name the emotions you're feeling. Try to connect to the emotional side of yourself. Begin to name those emotions as you're experiencing them or when you're holding them back. Be graceful with yourself and acknowledge that there is no benefit to judgment. You're experiencing that emotional state because it's something important to you. 

• Experience your emotions: Feel the rhythm with your emotions. Bring awareness to your emotions and thoughts so that you can change the limiting beliefs and habits that may be holding you back. Learn to tame the emotions by allowing yourself to experience them. Begin to understand if you tend to go into a hyperarousal state or if you tend to shut down in uncomfortable situations. What are the thoughts (beliefs), movements (habits), body sensations, and emotions you feel? Do you take a position of blaming others, or do you feel sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, disappointment, frustration, or vulnerability? 

  Eventually, you'll be able to harness that energy more positively if you can avoid the natural fight or flight tendency (e.g., avoiding what you’re feeling). Start with a PAUSE where you allow yourself to sit with or even step into the emotions. Doing this is difficult, but it gives you space to move away from autopilot so you can change your existing beliefs and habits by integrating the information you're receiving into your thinking and decision-making. 

• Reframe your response aligned with your values. By sitting with your emotions, you’ll experience an inner fire on the other side. By learning to tap into this empowered state, you’ll experience courage, compassion, and clarity with your emotions as your energy source. New energy allows you to reframe your response because you created space for yourself. When you are predominantly in your empowerment state, courage, compassion, and clarity will come naturally. Your emotions become the guide for your passions, desires, and values. You can begin to tap into this empowered state with a meditation or mindfulness practice that includes a body and emotion scan. It means we don't fight, flee, or shut down but show up to the experience in different ways. We can be more curious if that reflects who we are or if we get pulled into it because of our story. It becomes a place to start connecting emotionally to examine the type of energy that occurs when you recognize you could feel safe in the rhythm of the situation.

• Enjoy a new rhythm for living. By having an integrated daily rhythm, you create a complete integration with your mind and body. You have a new daily rhythm for living that is more aware, with different behaviors, positive thoughts, and more integrated. You begin to accept current habits and beliefs and even start to use them to tap into an empowered state of courage, compassion, and clarity with your emotions as your energy source. When you’re intentional with your feelings, rather than acting out of impulse, you create a more natural, healthy, and connected state for yourself. You can have harmony in your differences with others and even use those differences for growth. 

Coming into midlife is our chance to learn and consciously decide where we want to go next in our lives, how we want to grow, and how we show up for ourselves and those who matter most to us. Midlife is an opportunity to embrace our inner selves, become more integrated, and live well.

Let’s take advantage of our capacity to move through messy midlife transitions, let go of old ways of being, and reignite our journey to flourish after 50.