Professor Joyce Harper: Menopause, Fertility & Finding Joy After 50

Yes, I've just finished writing my second book in a series of three.

This is called Your Joyful Years, and it's about life post-menopause, trying to rewrite the very negative narrative that we have created about female aging.

Well, about aging for everybody, but especially my books about female aging.

It is true, isn't it, that for a lot of women, when they hit perimenopause and then menopause, they start to feel almost like they're declining, that everything is ending.

And that is a really hard place to be for anybody, right? And I know that your passion is to, you know, educate women to realise that actually it's the start of a new beginning and it is, you know, a powerful new beginning.

Why do you think it is that we have that negative narrative and that so many women sort of feel like that once their body starts to change and their hormones start to change?

I think historically it's been totally a natural progression as, as we age, people have many people have shrunk into themselves.

They've stopped doing many of the things that they enjoy.

And historically that they sort of shrunk from society as well.

But I think we're in a really exciting time of our lives now where there's an alternative and that alternative is to expand and to grow.

And I look on the menopause as a wake-up call for women.

And I feel a bit sad that men don't have one in a way.

I'm not undermining the difficulty and the really tricky time that many, many women can have going through it.

It certainly can be... very negative for many, many women.

But it's also a wake up call for us to think about how we want to live the next 20 or 30 years of our lives.

Do we want to start really making sure that we are looking after all of our pillars of health and enjoying our life to the full? Or do we just want to park all of that and go to a gradual decline? So I want to certainly give women the permission and the tools in their toolkit to go with the former and to really expand and to hopefully live the most happiest and most authentic time of their life they ever have.

Do you think many women get to that point and feel that sort of depression almost for many women and anxiety and like everything is sort of ending for them as they knew it because there's so many issues around the education of perimenopause and menopause and a lack of understanding and so many women not being diagnosed early enough?

Yeah, you've said the right word there, education.

So that's absolutely my biggest passion, always has been, that we need to educate women about all stages of their health.

And specifically around perimenopause and menopause, chances are that women have had no education at all.

And what's happening now is they're getting education off social media, which can lead to more problems because it is the wild west of menopause out there.

And there's a lot of misinformation there.

So I think it's really important that we have evidence-based accurate information to help women understand what could happen to them.

Every woman's menopause is going to be totally individual to them, but they can have those tools, understand what might be happening, think about ways that they could really prepare their body and their mind and hopefully help them through that transition.

and then hopefully come out the other end.