“I was much more able to access that vitality and that passion and joy just through being alive. Not because anything incredible had happened, but just from being alive.”
In my early adulthood, I became really good at tolerating stress and distress—a skill that served me well at the time. But what if that excessive tolerance is now draining your vitality, joy, and life satisfaction?
We all have blind spots, that is the nature of being human, and in this episode I open up about my personal journey through perimenopause and midlife, sharing my own blind spots and how I came to see things with fresh eyes.
We explore the fine line between healthy distress tolerance and what I call “maladaptive tolerance,” where psychological endurance starts to hold you back.
We discuss the difference between resilience and chronic distress tolerance, and how it might be keeping you stuck, limiting your ability to make meaningful changes in your life.
We also examine where you might tolerate too much, missing opportunities for greater vitality and passion.
This episode is all about regulating your tolerance to distress and bringing it back into the zone of vitality.
Ready for an eye-opening conversation? Let’s dive into the episode, and let me know what you think! I’d love to hear if you have a similar experience.
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Please note: The content of this podcast does not substitute or constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider.
Full Episode Transcript
Meegan Care [00:00:00]:
Kia ora. Are you a woman navigating midlife, menopause and beyond? I’m Megan Kier, your midlife mentor and psychosynthesis counselor and coach. Join me as we dive deep into the heart of midlife, unraveling the complexities of menopause and exploring uncharted territories that lie beyond. Together, we’ll navigate through self doubt, bid farewell to people pleasing, conquer imposter syndrome, and tame those overwhelming feelings. It’s time to celebrate this vibrant second chapter of life, claiming your authentic confidence and courage along the way. Midlife is not a time to settle. It is a time to unleash your purpose, make an impact uniquely your own, all while prioritizing your well-being. So buckle buckle up for conversations that resonate with the essence of your midlife journey.
Meegan Care [00:00:49]:
Are you ready? Let’s begin. Something I really love about midlife and being postmenopausal is this capacity to keep growing and evolving through that whole next chapter of your life. So approach approaching perimenopause well, I think anyway, and doing the inner work means that this next chapter that’s coming up for you, that will be midlife, and then coming into postmenopause if you’re not already there, and then onwards through the years decades, can actually be the most empowered yet. And this week, I had quite a revelation around how much I tolerated in terms of challenging distressing symptoms when I was going through perimenopause. And I wanted to unpick that and create some distinctions around what is resilience, and what is bordering over into this kind of chronic distress tolerance. And underneath that might be a level of collapse or functional freeze. So some things going on in the nervous system where we feel okay, but actually what’s happening is that we’re frozen. So we’re gonna get into it in the podcast, and I’m really excited to share both my experience and what you can look out for for yourself.
Meegan Care [00:02:27]:
Because when this is at play, what it means is that we’re actually moving through life, but not at the level of vitality, and joy, and passion that we could be at. And of course, I want that for all of us in midlife. And just this week, we’re in week 5 of the midlife upgrade course, and some of the big changes that are coming through for women, I say this often, but they’re blowing me away. And one in particular, and I won’t give details, but it was said with such okayness, and this is just what’s happening. After all of these years, creating a big change in this wonderful woman’s personal circumstances, and I was reflecting on it after the call about how monumental this is. And how many of us suffer through this time in midlife. And we don’t create the change that, maybe underneath everything our heart longs for. And so I hope, my hope is that this podcast episode is going to help us look at where am I stuck? Where am I maybe in a functional freeze? Where is my what I’m calling resilience? Where might I be tolerating something that could be changed? And it’s subtle, but we’re intelligent human beings.
Meegan Care [00:04:10]:
Right? We can figure this out for ourselves, and I’m gonna give some pointers along the way. So, of course, it’s really important to be able to self soothe and self manage. And my learning around that came through when I had Crohn’s disease, so chronic inflammatory bowel disease, when I was in my twenties. I really learned how to take care of myself, to tolerate pain, to tolerate physical pain, mental, emotional, to tolerate some really horrible symptoms of Crohn’s disease. I had all the 9 yards, I had the fistulas, I had to wear an ostomy bag for a while. It was all go there. And I’m I don’t mean to say that lightly, but it happened, you know, 30 years ago. So a lot has been integrated since then, which is why it sounds quite like when I talk about it.
Meegan Care [00:05:09]:
It was a very very difficult time of my life. So I learned to tolerate difficulty really well, and I think that really served me in my life. And I also think it really served me in perimenopause. However, what can happen is that we can get so so good at tolerating distress, and very difficult circumstances, and challenges. That we might not notice when underneath the surface, there might be a level of collapse or resignation. And this was something that became clearer to me this week, when I started to reflect on the perimenopausal symptoms that I went through, where it really knocked my health around on a day to day basis. It wasn’t anything that was, like, diagnosable. Crohn’s disease didn’t flare up again or anything like that, but I had a lot of fatigue, I had some vertigo, I had some, a reemergence of social anxiety.
Meegan Care [00:06:15]:
I had, migraines that would arrive at least once or twice a week. So there was a lot a lot to manage. And of course, you know this. I still had all of that midlife load going on of teenagers, of life, of business, of running a family, taking care of my family. And when I look back on how much I tolerated and for how long, I sort of had this moment where I thought to myself, you know what? I tolerated that a little too well. I made good around it, and I’m very good at making the best of a difficult situation. As I said, I learned to do that a lot through having Crohn’s disease, but also from early life trauma of family separation, various different kinds of traumas. And so I learned to cover over that, like plaster over the cracks, and many of us have learned to do that in our lives.
Meegan Care [00:07:21]:
Right? So this sort of functional freeze. So what that really means is that your nervous system is in a freeze state, at one level, but you’re still able to function in your life. And from the outside looking in, you’re functioning fairly well. So that was my that was my way of being. And I didn’t understand around freeze until it started to thaw within my nervous system. There were a few clues if something traumatic happened, if I saw something like a trauma, or a shock, or something that wasn’t to do with anyone that I knew. And they weren’t massive, But every now and then, my system would freeze, and I wouldn’t be able to help that person. I wouldn’t be able to go to assist.
Meegan Care [00:08:12]:
It’s not an uncommon experience. Or if I was in a difficult conversation with someone, there was some conflict that had come up or was up, I could reflect back and see that I went into a freeze state. And when I scratched beneath the surface, there was this sense that, or this knowing that actually, I was living my life with this aspect of my psyche that was in a frozen state. And that’s if you look up fight flight freeze, you can see the freeze function of the nervous system. So when fight and flight aren’t working the way we want them to work, or they’re not getting us out of danger, is a better way to say it, then the freeze state can come online. And it’s about saving our life. It’s about safety. It’s about security, getting us out of that difficult spot.
Meegan Care [00:09:04]:
And it felt good. Right? It felt good. I had this really lovely surface level of calm. And because I’ve meditated for so long, and this is one of the one of the sneaky threads around meditation, is that I learned to calm my nervous system on one level. And I remember a friend saying to me, and it said to me numerous times, Megan, you’re just so calm all the time. Yes, like at one level I was very calm, but if if you really connected in, there was something missing. And that something missing was that free state in my nervous system. And it wasn’t until I started to do the work at those layers, and unpacking free states, and the trauma that goes with it, is a long journey.
Meegan Care [00:09:58]:
And depending on your experiences, it can be longer for some of us than others. And that that’s okay. That’s part of life and therapy and becoming more and more empowered as a person. But as I started to unpack at that level, because prior I was functioning I was functioning well. Right? And I had that calm calm demeanor, but I had chronic fatigue for many years through Crohn’s disease, and then having children coming out of that. And I managed it really well. Can you hear? There’s, like, a pattern there. This distress tolerance.
Meegan Care [00:10:34]:
I was able to tolerate it all because I made do. I made good. But when I started unpacking that, I started to notice this vibrancy showing up. This, aliveness that hadn’t been there before, or had only been there when I fell in love or something really super exciting had happened. But as I started to unpack and and the freeze within my nervous system started to thaw, I was much more able to access that vitality and that passion and joy just through being alive. Not because anything incredible had happened, but just from being alive. So, on one level the calm was really serving me, but on another level there was an aspect of freeze within the calm. Which is probably why I was so drawn to meditation and so good at meditation, because I could channel what was inherently very natural to me at that stage, at the age of around 20, in that free state, that had been a significant coping mechanism in my life early on.
Meegan Care [00:11:45]:
And I was able to adapt that into a very still, calm, meditative state. And I was, I loved meditation. Meditation loved me. We went to some really deep states together. And I still love meditation, and meditation still loves me, but our relationship is very different now. That this freeze that was at that level deep in my nervous system has started to shift. So, I wanna bring this into our everyday functioning because your experience of freeze may be very, very different to mine, but you might have started to notice that you have also got a chronic distress tolerance going on beyond what is helpful for you, in a way that is limiting your vitality. Because tolerating distress is a very important psychological skill.
Meegan Care [00:12:47]:
Like, don’t get me wrong about that. It’s so so important. But when it leaks into areas of our life where potentially it would be healthier if we had more energy and could stimulate some change, but we’re so good at tolerating that we just leave everything as a status quo. That becomes unhealthy. Right. So, mark that, and then let’s bring in our experience of perimenopause and midlife. We’ve become so good at tolerating the crap, and making do, and being okay with how things are, making good. So, if I got really distressed or in a conflict with someone, I would go away and do all the working out in my head.
Meegan Care [00:13:36]:
Right? In myself. Does that sound familiar to you at all? And then, as that part of me that was really frozen, and I think about it as being frozen in time from those traumatic experience. And they can be traumas with big t’s or little t’s, you know, just normal life events. Mom forgetting to pick you up from school at the end of the day and you’re left there waiting. I would unpack it all and work it all out in my head, where actually, if we look at what’s really healthy is, yes. There is some working it all out in our head. There is some taking radical responsibility for our part in the conflict. But you can’t come back into connection with someone unless you’re actually talking to them and you’re actually connecting with them.
Meegan Care [00:14:21]:
And so, this is where, you know, we get so entangled in trying to work it out for ourselves and we the door starts to open to spiritual bypassing, which is a whole another topic. But, what I’m interested in is when we start to unfreeze, and we start to regulate. So it’s not necessarily lower, it’s regulating distress tolerance to so that it’s appropriate for healthy relationships, then we find ourselves getting unstuck really really quickly. And that’s the exciting piece. So if you notice that you’ve been really good at tolerating crap, and then we’ve got the hormonal shifts of perimenopause and menopause coming through. It’s like your physiology, your very physical being is partnering with nature, and they are saying no more. It is time for a change. It is time to learn about healthy boundaries, to express them, to learn more about assertive communication, to learn more about your needs and desires and boundaries.
Meegan Care [00:15:34]:
This is the joy of perimenopause. And so, it can really open the doorway to significant change. But we do have to look at that piece, where we might be tolerating, as a coping mechanism. And I would call that maladaptive tolerance. Right? Because tolerance is really important. Very important. But when we’re tolerating beyond the bounds of healthy for us, in our life, with others, within our business, within our workplace, then it becomes maladaptive. And so, this is what we want to pay attention to and rein in.
Meegan Care [00:16:13]:
So, I’ve got some ideas around this. So, the cost of maladaptive tolerance. First of all, if there’s an element of freeze in your nervous system that’s significant, it will be impacting your relationships, your financial health, your business, your career, your physical health. No doubt. And the other cost is, as I said, that you’re so good at tolerating, that you are putting up with too much for too long. You’re making do, making good, and you’re not calling in the help that you need. You’re trying to go it alone, you’re trying to maybe meditate your way out of it, you’re trying to spiritualize your way out of it. Whatever it is for you.
Meegan Care [00:16:53]:
You might not be practicing boundaries, or you automatically go to Fawn, which is another coping mechanism. Right? Where we try and smooth everything over, get people to like us, to come back into relationship, to make everyone happy. That’s a coping strategy from early life that comes from fight flight freeze, and then we add another one in fawn. So of course, we have less life satisfaction, we might notice that we are collapsing, so that could be emotionally, psychologically, it could be physically, we could be burning out. As we age, we may start to feel smaller in our lives and in our community. Less connected, less significant in that community kind of way. And then we find ourselves resigning to a life that we’re not passionate about. And because you’re so good at tolerating distress, you’re okay with that.
Meegan Care [00:17:56]:
But I’m not okay with that for you, and I want you to be not okay with that for you as well. Because there is so much more available for us, for you and for me. So here are some questions that you could journal about, that you could reflect on, that will help you understand, have you got any element of this maladaptive tolerance going on? And look, if you were raised a girl, raised a woman, then you probably do have an element of it because girls are raised to be good, to be compliant, to be kind, to be nice, to not stand up and speak up for themselves for the most part. Of course, I’m generalising, but around our age group, that was how we were mostly raised. So the questions go as follows. Where in my life was I, or am I good at tolerating very difficult circumstances? So this is just unpacking a little bit. And, you know, if you notice that for me, it was having Crohn’s disease. I became very good at navigating that, at tolerating that, and that was helpful.
Meegan Care [00:19:02]:
That was really helpful for me. So if you notice that for yourself, I want you to congratulate yourself. Like, truly pat yourself on the back because, distress tolerance and tolerating challenge and struggle is a skill that we need to learn as an adult. What we’re talking about is when we push the boundaries are pushed out too far on it. So that’s the first thing. You’re noticing that. And then the second question, where is this tolerance actually causing, or might it be causing, blind spots for what I could change in my life? To be able to access more vitality, more joy, and more passion. Where is this tolerance potentially causing blind spots around what I could change in my life? To be able to access more vitality, more joy, and more passion.
Meegan Care [00:19:57]:
And just write about that. Free write about that. You’re very welcome to send me a message. Sometimes women send emails of their, you know, what they got out of the podcast. I love hearing from you. And then lastly, journal on what is one small step, what is the one small step I am willing to take to start a chain reaction of change? Because it takes one step. Right? What is that one small step I’m willing to take to start a chain reaction of change? Because, my friend, you deserve to live your most passionate, vital, joy filled life, to co create with life, for your life to get richer and more fulfilling as each year goes by. I hope that has been really helpful for you.
Meegan Care [00:20:56]:
If what I’m saying is pulling on your heartstrings in any way, you’re probably going to be a really great fit for my course, which is the midlife upgrade course. I run, new rounds every 4 to 6 weeks. It’s all online. It’s modular based and also live, live Zoom coaching calls. And it is literally changing women’s lives. Alright, my friend. Have an amazing, amazing week. Let me know your reflections around chronic distress tolerance, functional freeze, all the buzzwords.
Meegan Care [00:21:33]:
Hey. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. Really appreciate you. Check out my course where we just go so much deeper than I can ever do on a podcast over an 8 week period. The Midlife Upgrade course is a blend of video and learning modules and weekly live calls, where you will discover a road map for psychological freedom in midlife. Check out all the details on my website. I really, really would love to have you join the course, medincare.co.nzforward/course.