We Added 30 Years to Women’s Lives. Now What?

Last week I sat on a panel after a screening of The M Factor documentary. The room was full of women learning about peri menopause, hormones, and the many ways women’s health has been historically overlooked, minimized, or politely patted on the head and told to “drink more water.” You could feel the energy in the room as the film ended. It was that very specific kind of collective realization where everyone is thinking the same thing at the same time: Wait… so we’re not all just losing our minds individually?

Because for a long time that has been the quiet story many women carry. Something feels off. Your body changes. Your energy shifts. Your mood does things you didn’t authorize. And somewhere along the way you start wondering if maybe you’re just… bad at adulthood now. Then you watch a documentary like this and realize the issue might not be personal failure. It might be that half the population has been navigating a major biological transition with the level of medical guidance usually reserved for assembling IKEA furniture without instructions.

During the film, one of the cardiologists said something that lodged itself in my mind and hasn’t left:

“There are seven days in the week and SOMEDAY isn’t one of them.”

Now when you first hear that, it sounds like something someone stitched onto a throw pillow during a very productive crafting phase. But the more you think about it, the more you realize how many things in life are living in that magical category called someday.

Someday we’ll take our health seriously.
Someday we’ll deal with the exhaustion.
Someday we’ll ask the doctor the questions we’ve been mentally rehearsing but somehow forget the second we sit down in the exam room.

Someday is incredibly useful because it lets us acknowledge that something matters without actually doing anything about it yet. It’s like putting a problem in emotional storage. The intention may exist, but the action remains theoretical … but to be fair to all of us, the nervous system is very supportive of this strategy.

I spend a lot of time teaching about the nervous system, and one thing tends to surprise people. The brain isn’t wired for growth, it’s wired for safety. And safety usually means familiarity. So even when something in our lives is clearly draining us, the brain still whispers, “Yes, but we understand this situation.” It turns out humans are remarkably good at adapting to circumstances that are not actually working, simply because we’ve gotten very efficient at navigating them. Familiar doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be calm. It doesn’t even have to be particularly functional. It just has to be known. Your brain will absolutely choose familiar chaos over unfamiliar improvement because at least it understands the rules of the chaos.

So when something requires stepping into the unknown, the nervous system gets a little suspicious. Your brain basically becomes that cautious friend who says, “This is not ideal. But it is predictable. And predictable has never humiliated us.” The devil we know …. which is how “someday” becomes the compromise. We acknowledge the issue, we feel temporarily responsible about it, and then we promptly move it to the mental shelf labeled later.

But during the panel discussion after the film, we talked about something that adds another layer to this pattern. For decades, women’s health has been categorically overlooked and under-researched. When a system consistently treats something as unimportant, people eventually internalize that message. Women have learned to ignore their health because historically, the system ignored it first.

So we push through fatigue. We dismiss symptoms. We downplay stress. We manage careers, children, aging parents, households, relationships, and the invisible mental load that somehow multiplies every year. Meanwhile our own bodies slowly move to the bottom of the priority list. And here’s where things get even more interesting.

About a hundred years ago, the average life expectancy in Canada for women was in the high fifties. Today, women are living into their mid-eighties. In previous generations, menopause often happened closer to the later stage and end of life. Now it’s more like the halfway point.

We’ve basically added thirty extra years to women’s lives and collectively gone, “Good luck with that, figure it out.” And those extra decades are not exactly relaxing spa retreats. Women today are having children later, building careers, supporting aging parents, running households, and carrying the emotional logistics of entire families. It’s not unusual for someone to be navigating postpartum recovery while entering perimenopause and still showing up to work like everything is perfectly fine. So yes, it makes sense that “someday” becomes the coping strategy. Someday we’ll figure it out. Someday we’ll look into it. Someday we’ll prioritize ourselves.

But eventually the body starts sending stronger signals. Sleep changes. Energy drops. Stress tolerance shrinks. The strategies that worked ten or fifteen years ago suddenly stop working quite as well. And that’s usually the moment when “someday” starts losing credibility. Because women are not just living a few years past menopause anymore. They are living decades beyond it. These are not the closing chapters of life. They are the middle chapters, and they deserve a lot more attention than the vague plan of dealing with things eventually.

The good news is that taking a step does not mean you have to dramatically reinvent your life overnight. Real change rarely works that way. Most of the time it begins with small, quiet decisions. Booking the appointment you’ve been putting off. Asking the question you’ve been hesitating to ask. Learning something new about your body and realizing you are not imagining things.

This is also where mental health support can play an important role. Not because therapy or counselling is the single solution to everything happening in a woman’s body, but because it is one supportive piece of the larger picture. Just like hydration, nourishing meals, strength training, hormone therapy for some women, sleep, and nervous system regulation, psychological support can help women make sense of what they are experiencing. It offers a place to talk about the stress load many women are carrying, the identity shifts that often accompany this stage of life, and the emotional impact of navigating a body that suddenly feels unfamiliar.

Interestingly, midlife also brings a shift many women recognize immediately. The list of things we are willing to tolerate gets shorter. The energy we once spent accommodating everyone else begins to get redirected. Some might call it hormonal, but many women recognize it as something else entirely: the moment in life when our tolerance for nonsense dramatically declines and our clarity about what actually matters becomes much stronger. For many women, this transition is not just challenging. It can also be deeply empowering.

Mental health support does not solve every piece of that transition, but it can offer a supportive space to process it. To talk about the changes, the pressures, the expectations, and the possibilities that come with this stage of life. It is not the entire answer, but it can be an important part of helping women move through this transition with more understanding, resilience, and self-compassion.

Because the truth is, there really are seven days in the week. And the life we hope to live someday only begins the day we decide our well-being matters now.

About the Author

Lea Morrison is a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor (RTC) based in Kelowna, BC, and works with clients across Canada. She’s the founder and Program Developer of Mind Your Heart Academy, and author of trauma-informed resources on healing and post-traumatic growth. Lea blends counselling, somatic and energetic healing, and nervous system education to support recovery and connection - both in-person and online.