It’s January, and our Australian summer is in full swing. Everyone else is complaining about the heat, and you’re thinking: “Amateurs.”
Because you’ve got your own internal furnace running 24/7, and it doesn’t care about the thermostat, the season, or whether you’re in an important meeting, shopping, or dressed up. Hot flashes don’t wait for convenient moments. They arrive when they arrive, often at 2 am, or during your daughter’s school concert, or while you’re trying to have a serious conversation.
Welcome to menopause in summer. Where the external temperature meets your internal recalibration, and nobody wins the thermostat war.
This cultural story needs updating
Menopause is considered an annoying, unpredictable and inconvenient problem. You are in a declining phase, deficient and falling apart, drying up (after all of that heat, no wonder), and well past your prime.
That story deserves to be binned.
Menopause is a recalibration, and your body is shifting its hormonal balance because it’s meant to. This is an upgrade, not a breakdown, even when it feels like your temperature regulation system has gone rogue. Very rogue.
What is actually happening
Your body is transitioning out of its reproductive years and into a different kind of power. Your nervous system and endocrine system are reorganising their metabolic processes, and this is what causes those hot flushes or flashes, the night sweats, and the chaotic temperature spikes. Thoroughly uncomfortable and completely natural. The womanly price of change.
An Australian summer is turning up the temperature for you, so let’s see what can help when you’re feeling 10x hotter than usual.
Summer strategies
Let’s be practical. You can reframe menopause as empowering recalibration and still need strategies for managing summer heat combined with internal heat.
- Dress in layers, even when it seems ridiculous in 35-degree weather. You need the ability to shed quickly when a hot flush hits.
- Cold water, always, keep it nearby. Drink it. Splash it on your wrists and neck. Stand in front of the open fridge. No judgment.
- Night sweats preparation, cotton sheets, fans, and towels within reach. Accept that 3 am sheet changes might be part of your life for a while.
- Movement in the morning or evening, not during the peak heat if you can avoid it. Your body’s already working hard enough.
- Give yourself permission to be uncomfortable, no need to pretend you’re fine when you’re literally dripping with sweat in an air-conditioned room.
Extracting value from this transition
Once you get through the intensity of this transition (and you will), menopause offers something valuable: clarity. Freedom from monthly cycles. Less concern about what other people think. A kind of power that comes from having moved through a major life transition and survived. A voice to speak out and no longer be the accommodating one.
This is the Shifting Bloom, the last of the four pillars of womanhood. Not the end of vitality, but a different kind of flowering.
Your body knows what it’s doing, even when it feels chaotic. The hot flashes will settle. The night sweats will ease. The new temperature will become your normal temperature.
Working with the shift
If you’re in this transition and finding it overwhelming, the physical symptoms, the emotional complexity, the identity shift, there’s support available. I work with women through this stage, helping you understand what’s happening in your body, why the recalibration feels so intense, and how to work with it rather than against it.
This is about supporting your body through a natural transition with understanding, practical tools, and a reframe that honours change. You’re not declining. You’re recalibrating to a new temperature.