Diva Tonight with Carlene Humphrey
Diva Tonight offers a unique blend of personal anecdotes, expert insights, and candid conversations with female Entrepreneurs from all over the USA and Canada. Diva Tonight provides a safe and supportive space for listeners to explore their relationships and personal growth.
This season's focus is on the women who are celebrating their 40 years of life, it is a female perspective on this next chapter. This season we discuss life, menopause and perimenopause and the relationships that affect us in various ways, with hopes of inspiring others to share their struggles- so that women will find the courage to ask for help so that they don't have to suffer in silence.
Diva Tonight with Carlene Humphrey
Designing Work Around Hormones with Alex Coble- Frakes
We invite Alex Koble-Frakes of The Agenda Period to rethink how we plan work, energy, and home life around the menstrual cycle and perimenopause. We share practical tools, clear language, and real stories that make tracking and advocacy feel doable, not awkward.
• aligning work tasks to the four phases
• perimenopause symptoms and brain changes
• period leave and humane workplace policies
• daily check-ins to reveal patterns
• moon mapping for irregular or absent cycles
• equity at home and renegotiating labor
• brain fog basics and relief strategies
• building habits that stick with small steps
• resources and where to find The Agenda Period
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I want to thank my Podcast Editor Sean McAndrew!
Thanks to Altered by Mom for sponsoring the music for the show
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Hi, I'm Carlene, and this is Diva. Tonight on this series of This is 40. We talk about love, relationships, and the challenges that women face in their lives. A lot of my guests are women, female entrepreneurs, and I'm excited. I have with me Alex Koble Friggs. She is the creator of the agenda, and she is helping other women organize their lives based on their cycles. You know, I I just have to say, this is so interesting what you've created, and you know, it's great. So how are you?
SPEAKER_03:Thank you. Yeah, I'm good. I am my period is supposed to arrive at any time, but I am in perimenopause, the early, like the months. I'm like in like month three of perimenopause. And so it's already, she's not coming when she's supposed to be coming. So who knows? It could be today, it could be in a week because it's it's all getting a little shifty over here at um the agenda period headquarters.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah. Oh my goodness, you are so open and honest. So yeah, I'm I'm on my period. I don't normally, you know, say that, but since you're sharing, we're sharing.
SPEAKER_03:We share. We there TMI for our team set stands for tell me immediately, right? Like there's nothing, there's nothing too much for the agenda period team. We're like, people message us about their discharge, and I'm like, cool, thank you for that visual that now lives in my head forever.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I don't know if I would give you my rap sheet, but uh let me just say it's been a rough cycle, but this is not about me, it's more about you and and what you've done with this app. So it's an app, you have the agenda and also the journal. And so what brought on this idea? Why did you start the agenda?
SPEAKER_03:It's a crazy story. So I have a business degree, so I went to a small business school and a private business school in Iowa, and then I was a Peace Corps volunteer. So I lived in Peru for two years. I kind of traveled around, did a lot of work with different nonprofits. I came, I came home and I couldn't find a job that I really liked because again, I wanted apparently to be the boss of something because I just kept getting advice with my supervisors. I was like, you guys are boring, lack innovation, creativity. Let me go do something for myself. Because I was actually the only thing they all had in common. So, like, I'm a total pain in the butt for all of my past, my past employers because I just wanted to bring the creative spark. So I started a health and wellness coaching company in 2018 because I had been working for other health companies as a side gig since 2015. And I felt like full into the world of coaching and health and hormonal health. And I had read a lot about hormonal health in college, and I hadn't really done much with it. So I started tracking my sales when I started my health coaching company, and I found that I had higher sales during the ovulation phase than any other phase of the cycle. And I was like, what is happening? This is not something we learned about in business school. So I did some research to see if there was anything else on out there in the market or anything talking about this topic. And I found a study of exotic dancers, and they split them into women who are on birth control and not on birth control. And the women who were not on birth control all made more money in tips during ovulation, up to 30% more than any other time in their their month. And all of the women who are on hormonal birth control saw no variation in their tips throughout the month. So it was this crazy, crazy study to me showing like some of the we're now the science is starting to get clear that women need to exercise differently and eat differently to support their phases, right? Cycle sinking, it's becoming really popular. And yet, still to this day, there aren't many people talking about it six years later about the world of work because it really impacts our mood when we have high levels of estrogen versus high levels of progesterone. That impacts our social skills, it impacts our speech patterns, it impacts how we understand and like even our sense of humor. Like if we think something's funny versus when we don't think it's funny. Like you could tell me the same joke every day, and in the Ludial phase, you might get smacked if you tell me that same joke again because I'd be like, You're gonna talk to me like that today? What? I don't think so. Read read the agenda. That is not that is not approved. That's not approved content for today, right? Like we know that women are four different people, and yet we can't really talk about it. We know this because, but women can't talk about it because then they get made fun of. You said at the beginning of this podcast you didn't even want to say you're on your period, because that'd be weird, right? Like we we grow up knowing that all of these things are that are kind of deeply identified with us being women are just going to be bad experiences. We learn that our periods suck, we learn that it's gonna be terrible to be pregnant, that postpartum is gonna be a real kick in the shorts, and then, oh look, now you get to work your way through menopause. Good luck being a woman sucks. And I just don't think it's supposed to be that way. And as the world has evolved and modernized, we've lost a lot of the ancient wisdom and the stuff that was passed down from generation to generation about how to live within these systems in a way that feels really good for our health because our body evolved on purpose to have a menstrual cycle. We're one of five species on the planet that has a period and one of five species on the planet that goes through menopause. Women, we are designed like this over for whatever reason, our ancestors and our genetics decided this was the best way to do it. And so, where women in the modern world get choked up is living anathetically to the way their body wants to work and the way their body does work. We are not little men. So that's kind of the winding way with how we got here. Just like wanting to help some people out, and it's just been kind of falling down the rabbit hole ever since.
SPEAKER_02:So you said a lot about you know your journey to here and now and just the product itself and how women's anatomy works and and just menopause, perimenopause, and even our hormone null changes. But I want to ask you was little Alex like, you know, the troublemaker in class? Was she like, you know?
SPEAKER_03:I was a total nerd. I was a 100% nerd in the best way. And I got my earliest, there weren't like entrepreneurs directly in my family, but what's interesting is my great-grandpa ran some bakeries apparently on the East Coast, like Pennsylvania, went to Wharton's School of Business, but that was way before, way before I was born. So a lot of my like my both on my mom's and dad's side, there's a lot of farming, like people who did farming, which in a way is its own small business, or right? Like having your own kind of plot of land and and selling things into the market. And then a lot of education. So my mom's a teacher, my grandma's a teacher, my grandpa's a teacher. So this weird intersection, actually, kind of between business and education. And I was a Girl Scout. So I don't know if you guys have that in Toronto, but sold cook hopped cookies on the street corner with my first entrepreneurial gig. So shout out, hashtag the Girl Girl Scouts on this episode, teaching young girls about entrepreneurship through boxes, cardboard boxes of cookies. So that was my good, Alex.
SPEAKER_01:They were good, you know. You know what? You're always like, I shouldn't be eating any cookies, but what?
SPEAKER_03:But their flavors are oh, but give me a give me a pack of thin mints that's been sat in a freezer for a month, and I'm just we'll go to town on the whole box.
SPEAKER_02:Oh my gosh, this is so great. I love it. Um, yeah, you're changing the narrative in a good way because I think it's like your background and who you are as a person has gotten you to this point in life, and it's amazing, right? Because, like you said, it's the the conversation that people don't want to have at work, and it's really hard. Like as a as a woman, I feel like a lot of women don't talk about it's like it's like the elephant in the room. Like, you know, like if you have to miss work because you're on your period or you're having all these symptoms, and like they're even though you can get those accommodations, it's still not easy. Like, I mean, they just changed it now. We're still a long way from understanding it in the workplace, I feel.
SPEAKER_03:We're so far. We're we're so, so, so far away from that because yeah, like it's something like 80% of women lose work or have presentedism or absenteeism from work during perimenopause because of symptomatic, a lack of symptomatic support. And even a lack of understanding that these things are tied to perimenopause. We're still so far from women understanding that because they don't even understand everything that's going on with their normal menstrual cycle. So that's it's hard to see the changes when they start to happen, right? And and even the medical community is starting to catch up, but now the most recent studies are showing, like, yeah, it's pretty common for women's hormones to start changing when they're around 34 or 35. And that doesn't mean you're going into menopause, it just means you're doing, I've been hearing it called cougar puberty. So it's like puberty in reverse, and then you're just like getting like hot because you're just caring about your own stuff now. You're not caring about everyone else as much. So a little cougar puberty, and I I love that. But people need to wake up because if 80% of people are missing work because of this, women are dropping out of the workforce during perimenopause when they can't get that symptomatic relief. And 70% of divorces initiated by women are anticipated to happen during perimenopause. So this is a global problem that everybody needs to be paying attention to that we still can't have the conversation about. So yeah, we've got a long way to go on that one.
SPEAKER_02:So since we're talking about that, what do you feel would be a solution, like the starting point?
SPEAKER_03:I think federally mandated period leave would be amazing. I mean, we don't even have maternity leave in the United States. So again, I think that is kind of like the first frontier to be protected, is there's not like a good federal program with a minimum amount of days like you guys have in Canada. So the US is pretty far behind on that. But period leave, we have to get over because like the pushback that we always hear is that, well, it's not fair then. But we're we're not looking at everyone getting the same thing, we're looking at everyone getting what they need. So just because your workplace policy offers you eye insurance, it doesn't mean everyone gets a pair of glasses, right? Because not everyone needs a pair of glasses, but they still offer it to people. And so I think that this kind of leave should be the same way. I think it should be over and above typical sickness. And then beyond that, like kind of looking at that's free period leave is kind of what I call like the bottom of the stream problem, right? Like people keep falling in stream and we keep fishing them out of the river. Like, hey, that would be kind of a good band-aid solution for people having extreme period pain. We really need to trace up the river and find out why everyone keeps having period pain, because period pain is not actually normal. Our menstrual cycle is a, it's super duper common. Most women on the planet are probably experiencing high levels of pain, but that's not actually how our body is supposed to deal with this event. Menstruation should not be extremely, extremely, extremely painful. The issue is that there are not enough women getting that hormonal health support. And then our period is our report card, our period if it has a lot of clots, if it's super heavy in pain, if we have a lot of breast tenderness, if we have a lot of cravings, if we have intense mood swings. Each of those pieces of data lets us know something internally that is needing additional support. But women were never taught to decode their own internal system to even know what these things are trying to tell them in the first place.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I feel like we have to start from the beginning with like what menopause is, how it actually works before we even break down the agenda. Do you think that's important before even understanding how your hormones change, or do most people understand how your period works?
SPEAKER_03:I would say most people don't understand how your period works. So let's let's jump in there. So we actually have four phases of the cycle, and this is from the Red School in the UK, but I love their way to talk about it. So a lot of women I talk with don't even know this. So your period starts the day one of bleeding. That's day one of your new cycle. And so a cycle goes from day one of your period all the way to day one of your next period, and you count all the days in between, right? And so this gets real counting of days gets really important in perimenopause because they say the average menstrual cycle lasts typically can be healthy for about 25 to 35 days, is a pretty healthy range. And what you want to know for yourself specifically, what is your average day? So if you normally have your period on day 27, but it comes two days earlier, so day 25, or two days later on day 29, that's still within a clinical range of normal. So if it's kind of that five-day window, so like the day you expect it and a couple days on either side. But when it starts getting three days early or five days late, you're like, oh, something's shifting. There's something shifting. That is like another clue to my body. So we get start over here on day one of your period, and this is your inner winter time. So think about what you need in Toronto in the winter. You might need some warming, some hearty, some hibernation, right? You may want to like wrap yourself up. Spiritually, this is they a lot of indigenous cultures have talked about this as the point of heightened intuition for women and even indigenous cultures, like in Hawaii, they made sweat lodges and temples for men to go into to try to emulate what we could do on our menstrual cycle. They recognize that our body is the temple because on your period, there's that opening kind of the portal between life and death. So that happens on your period. And so you want to think of how do you support yourself there? Your hormones are at their lowest point and then they start to come up. The next phase is the follicular phase. So this is our inner spring time. So this is when we get that energy, you start to feel that energy rushing back into your body. That's because estrogen is kicking up. Then we have our ovulation time, which is our inner summer time. So this is hot, sexy, potent. Good time to ask for a raise, good time to ask your husband for something expensive. It's harder to say no to you during this time, good time to do your photo shoots. If you can, I love doing branded photo shoots during this time or anything because I'm just gonna be feeling myself, and that is the time you want to be in front of the camera. And then the luteal phase is the analyzing and organizing. So this is our inner autumn time. So think of the harvesting time, right? Like you've gone through this whole creative process, and now is time to pick the fruit and make things organized again. So that's what we should be experiencing more or less on a monthly basis, starting from monarchy, which is our first period, which tends to happen between 10 to 12, all the way through when we start to hit perimenopause. And so again, that's at time. A lot of people think about it as menopause, but menopause is just a one-day event. Menopause is a day when you haven't had a period for an entire calendar year. You have like a one-day celebration, you're like, hey, this is my menopause day. And then the next day, you're now post-menopausal. And everything that happens in between your normal kind of predictable cyclical pattern and that one day of menopause is called perimenopause. And so sometimes people have their cycles get way shorter together, and then sometimes they get way longer apart from each other, and it can just be wonky. And there's over 150 known symptoms directly connected to the hormonal changes in perimenopause. And over 50% of the changes that happen happen in the brain, not even in the sex hormones and sex organs.
SPEAKER_02:So when you say they happen in the brain, meaning what? Like you're talking about like symptoms like brain fog or like depression, like a there's a lot of symptoms that come with perimenopausing. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:Anxiety. Well, also, like that if we look at what those main hormones do, estrogen really supports the brain. It can support the brain in long-term memory formation, it can support the brain in serotonin and dopamine uptake and regulation. And so we can feel a lot happier when we have estrogen. So if all those feel-good hormones start to tank out, we can have a lot of those mental impacts pop up as a result of that.
SPEAKER_00:Diva tonight, glamour for your ears. This is 40, a female perspective.
SPEAKER_02:With your experience with monitoring this, what have you noticed? Do women have like in their 40s, especially? Like from what I've read with your breakdown of the cycle, it's like, what do you think women struggle with the most in their 40s with time and energy?
SPEAKER_03:I think that women don't recognize the gravity to which they're impacted by their menstrual cycle. And so they just feel like they're going crazy when they're in their 40s. They feel like they're like, my body isn't my own anymore. I wanted to lose weight and I can't lose weight. I can't remember anything. My kids are driving me crazy. My husband's got to go because like they're now showing 70% of divorce initiated by women happens during perimenopause. Because what's really going on when we there's another way to kind of look at the hormones from your period through ovulation, we have our body wants to get pregnant. So we have very pro-self, pro-social hormones. Like we're we say yes to everybody, we're much more jovial, we're like taking the kids to the park, we're like kissing our husband on the cheek, right? Like we're very excited. And then from your after ovulation through the next period starting, you have pro-self hormones because your body's trying to protect a potential pregnancy. So as we go through period menopause, we have less, we have more time in between periods. So we have more time in the pro-self orientation of our hormonal pattern. Meaning if things are not working for us, like that man, that job, whatever the arrangement is, we were will, we were more prone to remove things that are no longer working for us because of what our brain is doing and how it interacts with these hormones.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. And do you think that's like a solution though? I think I mean, like there's been the whole movement now with this is 40, you know, and there's the whole craze. Um, I think they're there, like it's it's kind of like a takeover right now. But do you feel like we're acting more on emotional suffering versus like mental, meaning like when you're of sound mind and body, like when everything is good, you make better decisions. But if you're just basing it off of the emotional side of things, like your hormones being out of why brain fog, everything like that, like that you're mentioning.
SPEAKER_03:I think it's a yes and especially for this generation that's currently kind of kicking off the menopause divorce movement, because I think that men and women in these partnerships have not understood each other for a very long time. And because of that, and the way that women are socialized and and we know globally are doing 65 to 75% of unpaid labor in the household. I think we're we're reaching a boiling point in history where women are like, yo, I also contribute and have a paycheck. Like, what do you mean you want me to do everything at home? Like what? Like if both parties are having a full-time job, women should not be doing 65 to 75% of the unpaid labor in their households because that should also be in terms of a partnership. And so I believe that women are coming into clarity right now, but that divorcing everyone is not really the solution. The solution is men and women understanding and then renegotiating a more equitable split of labor at home. But I think where it gets tricky for both men and for women, because of that, like I was explaining, pro-social, pro-self-orientation that does happen biologically. Sometimes it's easy for a woman the first half of the month to run around and clean up after everybody and not feel bad about it, right? It's easy for that part of ourselves to be like, okay, no big deal. Then the resentment builds during the second half. And so women have got to also be honest, which takes them understanding what's going on. If women can't explain it to themselves, how can they explain it to their husband?
SPEAKER_02:No, that's that's another thing. It's kind of feels like it's it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And I have to say that it is hard when people don't understand. Because for me, like I, yeah, I'm 41 and I I my symptoms are related to something else. It's not perimenopause. I went to my doctor and like the same symptoms I have, which are related to perimenopause, have to do with the fact that I have fibroids, which, you know, is another common thing that a lot of women deal with, but the symptoms are similar to perimenopause, like the brain fog and like hormone changes and like as they say, all the things that come with it. And so, like, I asked my doctor, I'm like, is it is it perimenopause? And she's like, No, it's those are related to fibroid. And so it is challenging. Even when you are, you know, you get a doctor's note from work and you explain the situation when you don't have people who understand it, it just makes it so much harder, right?
SPEAKER_03:So, yeah, it's it's almost impossible. It's like we don't, we all kind of are tiptoeing around the fact that we know something is going on, that like women are not the same all the time, but because we can't have a real conversation about it, everyone just feels a little uncomfortable slash left out in the dark, I think.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, but so I mean, that aside, how does the agenda help us avoid that constant feeling of being stretched thin? You know what I mean? Like obviously tracking how you are, I guess, is the starting point to helping yourself, right?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So what we have both in the planner and on the app is what, so when I first saw the the idea in my own data, saw see seeing myself making more money at different times, I didn't know how I wanted to deliver that information to people. So I was actually in a meditation and this idea came into, it was like my big magic moment from Elizabeth Gilbert. Like this idea, I felt it like come into my brain and it was like a planner for your period, plan with your period. And I was like, what? And I thought it was like an instruction to go buy the object, like go buy the journal. And I looked everywhere online and I could not find it. And so I got scared. And then I finally started working on it in 2019, and we did a beta test with a hundred women in business, and so we had them go through their month. We had like an like a theoretical orientation where like we recommend this stuff at these different times, and then they a hundred different people gave us feedback, and that created the content for like a bunch of different types of women and different ages and kind of getting to the root at what activities felt easier to do in each phase. So in the planner, we actually show you how to do that, and in our free app, we actually show people like we give recommendations on what business activities you should work on or what self-care activities you should be working on for whatever phase that you're in. And so that is really how we we work with people. We let them know, hey, you're just different hormonally right now. So letting them know what is your benefit because we're so used to talking about these different women say all the time, I got one good week a month. That's it. All the rest of the week suck. I'll all I get is one good week. And so what we really try to show our users is that every single phase has different gifts and different skill sets. And the reason you feel out of whack is because you're not aligning them together. So when you start connecting the pieces and put them in the right order, it's a lot easier to get your work done. You actually get more done while having less effort put in.
SPEAKER_02:And what does that look like though? Like if you're saying like to that woman that was like, I only have one good work, one good week a month, and the rest suck, right?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. When we start to have people track, they can then identify this the patterns. Because I think a lot of people, if they're having an experience in their period, then that doesn't come up for a whole nother month. So then it's hard to remember that it's actually something that's cyclical, that there is a a pattern and an orientation to it. Once you find out what the pattern is, aka the symptom or the problem or the issue that you're having, then you can apply there's so much really good literature on how to reduce cramps, on what vitamins you need to reduce menstrual migraines, on hormonal acne. And you need to know what symptoms you're actually experiencing in order to know what you need to adjust. And because the events happen just far enough from each other in time, people don't connect the dots like, oh, this is something that happens to me every month. They just think, oh, it just kind of sucks to be me. So tracking illuminates self-self-awareness and that self-understanding. And once we understand and have pinpointed the problem, then we can actually address it with symptomatic relief.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's that's the thing, you know, finding the solution to the problem. Like, you know, there are things like vitamin D, vitamin D from what I've learned, and vitamin E, and implementing all that into your daily routine. So I think that that is often a challenge too, right? So, but when it comes to cycles, so you talk about cycles and like can you break down for women who may feel disconnected from their own rhythms? Like, how do I figure this out?
SPEAKER_03:Like, like today I feel like you have like if you have no idea where you're at, or yeah, just tell me more. Yeah, yeah. So something that we talk about in the app and that we have in our planner is working with the moon phases. So if women feel really disconnected or their cycles irregular, maybe they don't know, they don't know where they're at, they're in perimenopause, they're pregnant, they're postmenopausal, whatever. The only thing on the planet that is that 28-day-ish routine is the moon. And there's a lot of theories that before there was non-natural light that women all were syncing up with the moon. So, kind of the idea that around the new moon, that is your bleed. So when the moon is low in the sky, that's our lowest energy point. And then as we move towards the full moon, that's like our ovulation time. And so if you don't have your own cycle, you can definitely tap in and create a ritual, like a feminine ritual for yourself with the moon. And that's been really, really powerful for a lot of our users.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So I mean, you said there's the there's there's, I mean, I looked it up, like there's the free app, and then obviously the paid app with if someone is listening today and they're like, well, you know what, this sounds like a good idea. Maybe I should try it. So what's the one small shift that you could start with right away?
SPEAKER_03:Daily cycle check-in. So it's we have we have we do have it in the app, but no matter even if you just have it on a journal, is taking five minutes a day to write about your feelings, to write about your mood, to write about your energy, and then keeping it all in the same place. That is what allows you to see patterns over time, is where you have something all put together for yourself because then you can start to notice. Oh, I get really mad on day 24. Like, what's going on over here? That's a thing, right? So, whatever the case may be, you need to have a place where you can illuminate for yourself and give yourself your own loving attention. Women are, I love women, I've worked with women my whole career, and we are all almost always last on our own list of who needs to get taken care of and how we prioritize our time. And that is definitely something that women can hold each other accountable for because that leads to a lot of the resentment that causes divorce and perimenopause. Because we're not speaking up for ourselves. We've got to put our own oxygen mask on first before we can take care of anyone else in our life.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. You know, I can I can relate to that because I feel like like the whole brain fog thing, like I'm no, like I, like you said, I wasn't paying attention to it, but it's like the second, the second time it's happening, the second month in a row it's happening where I'm like, but I know how to do this. Why am I making so many mistakes? And it's like my coworker would joke over me and be like, Hey, did you just start? You know, I know he's just joking, but it's it's interesting when you're starting to monitor, and I'm like, well, I need to check into this because something's not right. You know what I mean? Like trying to figure out what the solution is to the brain fog and the forgetfulness. And you know, I already have other things that I have struggles with. So, like you said, the mental health and your diet and everything, what's it called, come into play with it, right?
SPEAKER_03:So yes. I'm looking, I'm I'm taking some notes really quick to see. Like, I'm I'm off the top of my head. Okay, so here's why brain fog happens in perimenopause. So the estrogen can start to decline, which disturbs sleep. And then we've got the stress and cortisol imbalance, right? And then they're all kind of layered together the blood sugar instability and a nutrient depletion. And so we're looking at all of these pieces together, and that that's why when we talk about it, when we talk about health and overall like hormonal health, we we're just launching a program right now. For women, it really has to be about the the food that we're eating, like what are we putting in and out, how we're moving, because it's not just about what our body looks like, but actually our movement is one of our biggest brain support tools that we have. And then the relationships that we have, whether that's at work, whether that's with kiddos, whether that's with a partnership, because all of those interactions, because again, remember, we're so oriented, either pro-self, pro-social, or pro-self, all of those things are really gonna impact. And so for women, when we're looking at longevity and health, it's not just about getting to the gym, it's about how all of these complex factors link together and are put over our menstrual cycle because we need different things in the four phases as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. No, I looked into it. And so, like for me, it's like I guess, I guess when you're when there's something wrong, and I'm like, you're what's how do I say this too to explain myself better? Is that when I when I got really sick and then I I had that wake-up call, it's like you said, when you were meditating, it's like you have that call and you're like, I need to get back on track with my health and everything, right? When you figure out what's wrong, because they did all the tests, and then you know, now I know like what I'm doing, but it's really, it really sucks when you're always playing ketchup. So I'm anemic too, right? And so it's just like one of the things that I've learned from talking to other women like yourself is that what I have is it could be a progesterone deficiency, and so that's affecting everything across the board. So it's like the battle, you know what I mean? Um, with brain fog, you know, memory loss and that thing. But I think it's amazing that you created this helpful tool for other women, and I hope that with this conversation, other women will look into it and see if they can start monitoring their monthly cycles so that it can start the I guess the progress. Because I mean, knowing is half the battle, but like implementing it and doing it that's another thing, too, like starting a new habit, right? And so the one thing I want to ask you if you could give one piece of advice to women if. In their 40s, about creating more balance and intention. Like what would it be?
SPEAKER_03:And say your body during this time is it's doing all of those things to bring you back to yourself. And so making sure you have your own creative outlets, making sure that you are living a life that you don't want to run away from. I think that's super duper important to create a joyful, luscious life in our 40s. And and our bodies are definitely giving us those opportunities of here's here's the time and the attention to do that now. So do it with intention because then you won't feel so whipped all over the place by your own life. If you're really kind of sitting with this this midlife stage with intention, you'll set yourself up really well for a very full and happy second, second phase of life.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, second phase. I mean, it it it it has its pros and cons. I think this is like the lead up, but there's also like more pain. I I really is, you know. Oh my gosh. I mean, wait, you were talking, I I mean, I didn't ask you about this. One more thing I want to say, uh ask you is like you were talking about how you're dealing with perimenopause. So how did you know that that's exactly what you're dealing with and it's not anything else?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I've been tracking my cycle professionally for for six years, and like I really, you know, I really know the ins and outs of my menstrual cycle, and I've been in periods of very high stress before and very low stress, and I am a fertile myrtle. So I ovulate and I like it's like clock, you should set the world clock by my ovulation schedule until the last two months. So I and I'm a twin mom. I had a spontaneous twin pregnancy in 2020. And in my two cycles ago, I dropped two eggs five days apart. So I had the cervical, the fertile quality cervical mucus. I dropped an egg, and then I kind of like crashed out because I had like extreme ovulation pain on my left side, and then like, but like the the mucus came down, and then three or four days later, I started getting more of the cervical mucus again, and then I had a couple days later extreme ovulation pain on the right side, and then my period came five days late. And so, like, I know that I dropped it, like I had all of the signs, all of the biomarkers, all of the tracking. And so that's why there isn't actually a one test that is definitive about perimenopause, and it's more we need to start understanding it is these subtle shifts that is just showing our our period is starting, it's going away from its regular pattern and it is shifting towards. Like, I'm not at the end, I'm obviously still young. I'm not like gonna get menopause tomorrow. But if we looked kind of like at the peak, I'm now coming back down the other side of that. And that is a disservice, I think, that the medical community right now it keeps telling women they're definitely not in menopause or perimenopause when we know that these changes are tied to our hormonal production. And so it just leaves more women feeling crazy if they're like, wait, no, like I think I am actually going through this thing. And doctors, like, no, you're too young for that. Like, no, we're now showing pretty, pretty consistently that it can start in your mid-30s.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you know, it's one of the things that is just like there's signs and then there's symptoms, obviously. But I think the one thing is like telling your doctor those symptoms that you're having, like just advocating for yourself. I've been an advocate for myself since 2020, and I think that that's the only thing you can do. You're the only person who can talk for yourself, and like the doctor will give you the information based on what you're telling them, and and that's the thing, right? And so, but yeah, you said your mom of twins, I can hear that right? Yes, twin mom. Oh, very interesting. Wow, how is that going, mommy dearest? Twins.
SPEAKER_03:Double the fun. Oh my god, double the fun. I mean, it's fun now, like when things like that.
SPEAKER_02:You have all this energy.
SPEAKER_03:Are you being a mom is not easy when you're in the luteal phase because kids like their voices are so annoying in the luteal? Like when you have low estrogen, like a screech from a child feels like nails on a chalkboard. I'm like, I can't, yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, so um twin now that they're they're gonna be five in November, it's pretty fun. So but the baby state that first year, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Sleep, who is it?
SPEAKER_02:Didn't know her, like wow, it was crazy. My goodness, I just learned something very new. I I didn't I didn't know that. Oh my gosh, twins. I have one friend with twins, and like, yeah, that is definitely a game changer. Chaos, yes, chaos, chaos, chaos, wow, but you're doing it, you're doing you're doing it, you're here, and yeah, and you're helping you're helping uh women one step at a time. And and so what is your mission in this next phase? I guess what we call it, we could call the next phase, right? You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Our mission is just continuing to make sure that people have as much access to this health information in this body literacy because I think it's a human right to understand how your body works. I think that that feels like a pretty honestly low bar for what we should make sure every human has access to. And so we're really dedicated to ensuring we can create whatever creative tools and resources are going to meet people where they're at.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. No, it's it's it's it's amazing that you created something like this and like you know, just monitoring. They always say to monitor your period, like you know what I mean. But I I don't think we were paying attention in class in school when you know, like you were talking about those things.
SPEAKER_03:I wasn't, I surely was not I was not paying attention. And my 10-year-old self would have been like, What do you mean you created a period company? That's so cringy. Like, what's wrong with you? My 10-year-old self mortified right now. Like, just like this is embarrassing.
SPEAKER_02:You know what, even now, like this is the one thing, like, you know, when you go to the store and you buy pads, like it's still a thing of like what see, that's the thing. It's it's it's like put it in a bag, hide it. Like, we we just you know, and like even when I had it the other day at the store, I'm like, are they looking at the package? Like, is that what they're looking at?
SPEAKER_03:And if women like globally, because this is something that connects us no matter like our socioeconomic status or like where we live in the world, if one were like, hey guys, we've been really unchill about this, and so now we're just gonna demand period leave. Oh, and you can't replace us. We make over half of the uh global workforce. So people would have no choice but to get involved. Women, we just need to like have a giant global period party, and we'll like just like we'll like everyone get over it and like we're just gonna talk about periods now. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Alex, we're gonna start the movement. I'm waiting on you. Starting the movement. Are you? Yes. Let's see, let's go, let's go. Let's see. I will help you here in Canada. Let's do it. You know, so I want to thank you so much for sharing your story and your wisdom with what you've learned. Like, it's amazing. So, how can my listener find you? Where are you? You're online, right?
SPEAKER_03:Theagendaperiod.com. Everywhere on TikTok, I make like lots of spicy content over there and Instagram. So come hang out with us on socials and um, yeah, check out our website. That's that'll give you the link to the products we've created and all of the different cool resources that we have. So definitely check out theagendaperiod.com.
SPEAKER_02:Theagendaperiod.com with Alex Cobafrakes. Thank you so much. All the way in Iowa, right? Yes, Alex. Thank you. Thanks for having me. For sure, I'm Carlene, and this is Diva Tonight. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00:Diva Tonight with Carlene will be back. Send us a message on Instagram at Diva underscore tonight.
