Why So Many Women Lose Themselves in Midlife — and How to Find Your Way Back
Hi lovely people,
I'll be honest, I haven't been on top of my wellness in the way I'd like to lately. Summer holidays will do that — just got back from a lovely week in sunny Cornwall, and between the late nights, eating whatever was in front of me and moving less, my usual routine has fallen apart. This week is about getting back into it, so if you're in the same boat, here's what I always fall back on when motivation is nowhere to be found:
If I genuinely cannot face a full gym session, I just commit myself to 20 minutes. The first 20 minutes are always the hardest — but once you're in, you basically never feel like stopping, and more often than not the 20 minutes turns into something longer anyway.
On the food side — I don't go cold turkey straight back to normal eating either. After a week of holiday food, going from treats every day to suddenly perfect meals just sets you up to feel deprived and cave later. So I ease back in. The first few days might involve a bar of dark chocolate after dinner, just to keep the sugar cravings from spiralling into something worse.
And if the late nights have caught up with me and I'm trying to get back to an earlier bedtime, I'll take a melatonin for a few nights to help reset things. Not a long-term habit, just a little shift back to my normal routine.
Getting back into a routine after time off is often one of the harder parts of any break, and I think we don't talk about that enough. I'd love to know what helps you get back on track after a stretch off — let me know.
Emily x
Enjoying the beautiful coastline in Cornwall.
🧠 Your brain's immune cells shift after 50
Something measurable happens inside the brain around your fiftieth birthday: the immune cells that have guarded it since before you were born start to be replaced by a different, more inflammatory type. Scientists studying donated brain tissue from adults across seven decades found this gradual swap — in the hippocampus, the region central to memory and learning. The same research flagged signs of a weakening blood-brain barrier with age. This is early-stage science on postmortem tissue, not a clinical trial, but it's a meaningful clue in the long search to understand why ageing raises dementia risk so sharply.
🦠 How birth and feeding shape baby's gut
How a baby is born and whether they're breastfed are the two biggest early influences on their gut microbiome, according to a large Dutch birth cohort study published in Nature. Researchers tracked gut bacteria in 714 mother–infant pairs across multiple timepoints, finding that vaginal birth and breastfeeding were each independently linked to distinct bacterial communities in infants. Caesarean-born babies showed a markedly different microbial profile. Breastfeeding's influence appeared to fade once solid foods were introduced at around nine months. Crucially, the mother's gut microbiome during pregnancy didn't reliably predict what the baby's would look like at two weeks old — suggesting the infant gut follows its own, less predictable path. This is observational research, so causation can't be confirmed.
💊 Women taking estrogen therapy had fewer signs of Alzheimer's in their brains
A Stanford study of 21,462 women, published in Neurology, found that those who used estrogen-only hormone therapy had 35% lower odds of showing Alzheimer's hallmarks — amyloid plaques and tau tangles — at autopsy, and 39% lower odds of a dementia diagnosis during their lifetime. It's observational, and researchers stress this specifically applies to estrogen-only therapy, not combined estrogen-progestin, and to women who started treatment decades ago. Not yet a reason to change anyone's individual treatment plan, but an interesting piece of the puzzle for a disease which nearly two-thirds of all people diagnosed with are women.
🦠 COVID-19 can wake up dormant viruses hiding in your body — and one is linked to long Covid
A Nature study of over 1,100 hospitalised Covid patients found nearly half experienced reactivation of viruses like Epstein-Barr or cytomegalovirus, which most adults carry silently for life. The more severe the illness, the more likely reactivation was. Most notably, one lesser-known virus family was strongly linked to long-term Covid symptoms — offering one of the first real clues as to why some people simply don't recover. With no approved long Covid treatments yet, this could point toward new ones.
🦠 When gut microbes run low on fibre, they may start eating your gut lining instead
New research from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, found that when gut bacteria don't get enough dietary fibre, they can start consuming proteins from the mucus lining that protects your gut — producing compounds linked to worse outcomes in kidney disease and cancer patients. Fibre suppressed this process, while a lesser-known category the researchers call "Prif" — indigestible plant proteins found in wholegrains, legumes and vegetables — helped microbes produce the beneficial compounds instead. Another reason a varied, plant-rich diet does more for your gut than fibre supplements alone.
Today's issue is supported by Vagus Nerve Stimulator, SONA
Today's newsletter is supported by SONA, an AI-powered vagus nerve stimulator that sits comfortably inside your ear. Earlier this year I had SONA's founder, Jane Ollis, on the podcast for a proper deep dive into the nervous system — one of my favourite conversations on the show, and well worth a listen if you haven't already. The device itself targets the auricular branch of the vagus nerve via the ear and adapts its stimulation in real time to your body, rather than using a fixed setting — built by a genuinely brilliant team of neuroscientists, astrophysicists, researchers and engineers.
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Wearing the SONA in the podcast studio!
Why So Many Women Lose Themselves in Midlife — and How to Find Your Way Back
There's a particular way women tend to lose themselves. It’s more often caused by a hundred small adjustments over many years that each feel reasonable enough on their own, until one day you look up and can't quite remember who you were before you started making them.
I think about this a lot in the context of women in midlife, because it's often when everything converges at once. The sandwich generation. Women are having children later than any previous generation — with plenty of women having children well into their late 30s and early 40s. Which means the exhaustion of raising young children is increasingly landing at exactly the same time as perimenopause, a hormonal transition that already disrupts sleep, mood and energy on its own, and is now doubled up with sleepless nights, school runs and a body that doesn't recover the way it used to. Add ageing parents needing more support, a career often at its most demanding point, and a culture that still expects women to hold most of this well and without complaint, and it becomes fairly easy to see how a woman can spend years running on empty and abandoning themselves.
I spoke to Women’s Health & fitness coach Rajni Singh on the podcast this week, and her story is an extreme version of exactly this pattern. She described it as adjustments slowly becoming compromises. "That's when you start losing a small part of you, a small part of your true version." Postpartum depression and undiagnosed PCOS were compounding everything underneath in her case, along with osteopenia, herniated discs and vertigo, all of which had been building for years before anyone connected the dots. It took 15 years, a suicide attempt and hospital admission for her to understand what was happening.
The way back, in Rajni's case and in the wider research on this stage of life, tends not to be dramatic either. A shift in priorities, and a return to some of the things that made her who she was before all the adjustments started. Movement had always been part of that for Rajni, long before it became something with a clinical purpose. Enough protein through the day to stabilise blood sugar and energy. Resistance training worked in wherever the week allows, which improves insulin sensitivity and bone density independently of weight loss, and matters heading into perimenopause when both insulin resistance and bone loss tend to speed up. Five minutes of breathwork, or a short meditation. One thing a week that's purely for you. And actually talking to friends properly, rather than the surface-level catch-up most of us default to when we're stressed or busy.
Rajni talks about midlife as a new chapter rather than a decline, one that can genuinely be exciting once you start treating your body and life as something worth investing in again.
You can hear my full conversation with Rajni wherever you get your podcasts.
This feature is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult your own doctor before making changes to your health.
How a Miss GB Contestant Transformed Her Health & Depression at 40 Without Extreme Diets
About this episode:
In this episode of The Health Review I sit down with Rajni Singh — qualified nutritionist, women's health and fitness coach, Miss Great Britain finalist and founder of a coaching practice that has helped thousands of women rebuild their health, their strength and their sense of self.
Rajni's own story is one of the most moving I've encountered. Having moved from Punjab to the UK at 21, married and spent years putting everyone else first, she found herself navigating PCOS, depression and chronic pain simultaneously — all while keeping up the appearance of holding everything together. Her mental health took a dark turn. But eventually, she began a health and fitness journey in her 40s and then completely transformed her body, her mindset and her life — competing in Miss Great Britain as the only South Asian contestant and building a coaching business that now reaches thousands of women around the world.