There is a particular kind of exhausted that so many women in midlife know well. It’s not the tired that sleep fixes. It’s the tired that comes from running on autopilot for so long that you’ve stopped noticing what’s actually happening — inside your body, inside your days, inside yourself.
That’s where awareness comes in. Not awareness as a buzzword. Awareness as a practice. A daily, intentional choice to pause and actually look at what’s going on before reacting, before pushing through, before adding one more thing to the list.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
Think about Sarah. She’s 47, managing a full-time job, two teenagers, and a mother who recently moved nearby. She wakes up tired, drinks coffee to get going, powers through her day, and collapses at night — only to lie awake at 2 a.m. with her mind racing. When someone asks how she’s doing, she says “fine.”
Sarah isn’t lying. She genuinely doesn’t know how she’s doing. She’s moving too fast to notice. And that gap — between what’s happening and what we’re willing to see — is where so much unnecessary suffering lives.
The practice of awareness asks us to slow down long enough to check in. Not to judge what we find. Just to see it. How am I sleeping? How is my energy across the day, not just in the morning? What am I eating on the days I feel terrible? What situations consistently drain me? What am I tolerating that I’ve stopped even questioning?
Why This Is Especially Important Right Now
Perimenopause and menopause have a way of turning up the volume on everything your body has been quietly trying to tell you. Sleep changes. Energy shifts. Mood fluctuates. Brain fog moves in uninvited. For many women, these symptoms feel like they came out of nowhere — but often, the signals were there long before they became impossible to ignore.
Awareness doesn’t mean you have to have all the answers. It just means you stop pretending the question isn’t there. It means you start tracking — even loosely — what’s working and what isn’t. It means you take your own experience seriously enough to pay attention to it.
This month, we’re exploring four practices that can help you hold your ground when life is demanding, loud, and relentless. Awareness is where we start — because you cannot build something solid on a foundation you haven’t looked at.
This week: just notice. Not fix, not solve. Notice. What does your energy actually feel like at noon? At 4 p.m.? How do you feel after certain meals, certain conversations, certain nights of sleep? Start there. The data you gather from your own life is some of the most important information you’ll ever have.
The concepts in this month’s series are inspired by Courtney Townley’s book The Consistency Code — a practical, honest guide to building habits that actually hold. If this resonated with you, I highly recommend picking up a copy. It’s the kind of book you’ll return to again and again.