How well do you actually understand your own body?
For many women, the answer is probably: not as well as we should.
We might have learned the basics of periods and reproduction at school, but understanding our menstrual cycles, recognising changes in our hormones, knowing what’s normal for our own bodies, and feeling confident enough to ask questions when something doesn’t feel right? That’s a different story.
In my conversation with Katrina Christian, we explored the idea of body literacy — and why it matters both for women navigating perimenopause and for the girls we’re raising.
When perimenopause gets our attention
For many of us, midlife is when our bodies suddenly become much harder to ignore.
Sleep changes. Cycles become unpredictable. Our moods can feel different. Anxiety can appear from nowhere. We may experience rage, exhaustion, brain fog or a sense that we’re simply not responding to life in the way we used to.
And because so many women were never taught what happens to our hormones during perimenopause, these changes can be confusing and sometimes frightening.
But Katrina’s work raises a bigger question: what if we understood our bodies before something went wrong?
Body literacy is about becoming familiar with our own patterns and recognising the information our bodies are giving us. Rather than only paying attention when symptoms become impossible to ignore, we can develop a relationship with our bodies throughout our lives.
What is your body trying to tell you?
One of the interesting threads in our conversation was the relationship between hormonal changes, the nervous system and the things we’ve been carrying for years.
Perimenopause can sometimes feel as though someone has turned up the volume.
Things we previously tolerated become harder to tolerate. Our capacity to push through may change. Emotions that were easier to suppress can suddenly demand our attention.
That doesn’t mean every difficult feeling in midlife can be explained by hormones. But understanding what’s happening physiologically gives us more information to work with — and can help us distinguish between something that needs medical attention, something happening within our changing hormonal landscape, and something in our lives that may genuinely need to change.
Raising a generation of body-literate girls
This was perhaps the part of our conversation that interested me most.
What would be different if girls grew up understanding their bodies in a way many of us didn’t?
Instead of menstruation being something embarrassing or inconvenient, what if girls understood their entire cycle?
What if they learned to notice their own patterns of energy, mood and physical changes?
What if they knew what was normal for them — and felt confident speaking up when something wasn’t?
Body literacy isn’t about making girls hypervigilant about every sensation. It’s about giving them knowledge and language.
And perhaps that knowledge creates something else too: self-trust.
Changing the conversation across generations
There’s something particularly powerful about having this conversation in midlife.
We can’t go back and give ourselves the education we didn’t receive as girls. But we can learn about our bodies now.
And we can change what gets passed on.
We can talk more openly about periods, hormones, perimenopause and menopause. We can encourage girls to ask questions. We can teach them that understanding their bodies is simply part of understanding themselves.
Perhaps body literacy is something women should never have had to rediscover in midlife.
But it’s certainly not too late to learn.
Listen to my full conversation with Katrina Christian on The Midlife Rebel Podcast.
AI generated from the original podcast transcript.
