Tamsen Fadal was 47 and anchoring the evening news when the first hot flash hit.
She got off the set and lay down on the bathroom floor. No one had prepared her well for any of this. The answer, when it finally came, was a short note from her doctor in her patient portal with four words: “In menopause, any questions?”
Tamsen Fadal is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, executive producer of the PBS documentary The M Factor and The M Factor 2, and New York Times bestselling author of How to Menopause. She spent thirty years in television news before turning to the thing nobody had explained to her.
Tamsen and Mike get into what menopause actually is, how its symptoms can resemble anxiety or depression, and what changed after the 2002 hormone study.
This is a conversation for men as much as for women. Every man is a partner, colleague, son, or father to someone moving through this. Tamsen’s line is that men don’t have to go through it, but they do have to understand it.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
- What menopause actually is, and how perimenopause differs
- Why the symptoms are so often read as anxiety or depression
- Why Tamsen would start this conversation at 40, not 50
- What the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative study did to a generation of women
- How to raise it with a partner, a teammate, or an employee without making it awkward
- What menopause symptoms cost the workplace, and why that number gets attention
- Why Tamsen puts sleep first, and food second
- Building confidence and identity, not just managing symptoms
Tamsen calls what comes after menopause “the next 30.” Her point is to decide what you want those years to look like, and start building toward them now.
Enjoy the conversation.
“…I felt so much more powerful, not because I had solved menopause, but because I understood that I was now on a track to fixing some of these things that were going on…” — Tamsen Fadal
Resources + Links
Tamsen Fadal’s Website: tamsenfadal.com
Tamsen Fadal’s Books: How to Menopause: Take Charge of Your Health, Reclaim Your Life, and Feel Even Better than Before, The New Single, Why Hasn’t He Proposed?, Why Hasn’t He Called?
Tamsen Fadal’s Documentaries: The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause and The (M) Factor 2: Before the Pause, both on PBS
Tamsen Fadal’s Podcast: The Tamsen Show
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