Dr Andrea Murphy

You know, I think it's such a common thing It's such a common misconception that women have when they're in their first pregnancy that there's so much thought put into and so much concern and worry around labour and what's labour going to be like and, you know, am I going to be able to have my birth plan go as expected? There's so much thought put into that one day.

And there's so little conversation and preparation that goes into that postpartum period.

And so many women find themselves really shocked at how difficult that period is.

What are some of the things that you're noticing in your patients, Andrea? Like what sparked this interest for you? Obviously your own experience, but I'm keen to hear more.

Yes, my own experience for sure.

And then what I see clinically as well in women who are giving birth over 35 is that they just they're basically they say to me, I'm just not coping as well as I could.

I just don't feel like I can handle things as I once could.

So they maybe report things like an increase in anxiety, trouble sleeping and just generally feeling overwhelmed and burnt out a lot easier than they did in their formative years.

And why do you think that's so different in women over 35?

I think it really leans on the fact that over 35, we start to see that shift of lower progesterone and just a lot more sort of stress being put on our adrenal glands.

So for women over 35, you know, that first sort of early stages of perimenopause, our progesterone starts to decline.

And so we might see a shift in mood.

We might notice cycles get a little bit shorter, periods get a little bit heavier.

But that sort of initial shift of progesterone and maybe even slightly low estrogen can definitely play a role.

And then when you put that on the context of postpartum, a lot of that's already part of the picture, especially after you give birth and you have that first huge hormonal drop in estrogen and progesterone to that of a menopausal woman.

And then we put on that, too, the fact that over 35...

We're in that seven-year cycle where those yang-ming channels are really declining and we're seeing that natural decline of yin and blood.

So that buffer and that nice little sort of filter that we had to the outside world is starting to thin a little bit.

Things feel a lot more raw and a lot more sharp and harder to recover from.

Yeah, that was definitely my experience as well.

Both of my children, I had them after I was 35, and, yeah, the recovery can be really quite brutal, and I see that in some of my patients.

And I wonder how much of the, you know, the 35-plus experience that symptom exacerbation that we're seeing, I mean, especially in my patient demographic, it might be different in your clinic, but so many of my patients who are having children in their late 30s and in their early 40s, they're career women.

You know, they've spent 10, 15 years building their career, often working, you know, quite long hours, working really hard, and they're coming into this pregnancy in already in a state of depletion and and i wonder how different it would be if you know if we were more often working with women who had lived a more moderate life, shall we say, that potentially they hadn't been, you know, that they hadn't been pursuing that corporate dream and the, you know, the modern woman and all of the trimmings that come with that.

Is that something that you're noticing? Do you have that? Is that the typical patient demographic for you in that over 35s?

Absolutely, absolutely.