Be Generous, It Pays

Something happens in my community all the time, and I have never stopped noticing it.

A woman posts that she got through her first full week. She is nervous about saying it out loud. Within a few hours there are replies from women she has never met, telling her she did it, telling her about their own first weeks, telling her to keep going.

Here is what gets me every single time. The women doing the encouraging are not the ones who need it. They are further along. They have nothing to gain from any of it.

They are also, almost without exception, the women who stay. Month after month and coming up on year after year.

That is not a coincidence, and I want to talk about why.

What the Research Actually Found

In the last weeks I wrote about connection and how long we stay healthy. I want to go one step further today, because there is a detail in that research that surprised me.

It is not just about being connected. The direction matters.

In a study of older adults, researchers looked at both giving support and receiving it, and tracked what happened over the following five years. Providing support to others had a stronger relationship with living longer than receiving support did. Giving it helped more than getting it.

There is more. A meta-analysis in Psychology and Aging looked at fourteen studies of adults over 55 and found that those who volunteered had a meaningfully lower risk of dying over the follow up period, even after the researchers accounted for health, income and marital status.

And then there is the finding I love most.

Researchers looked at why people were helping. The ones who did it for other oriented reasons, because they genuinely wanted to help someone, got the benefit. The ones who did it mainly to feel better about themselves did not.

Your body knows the difference. You cannot fake your way into this one.

Why This Works for Us Specifically

I think this matters more for women in our stage of life than almost anyone, for three reasons.

Helping makes your own habit stick. When you tell another woman that ten minutes counts, you have just said it in front of yourself. You will remember that on your own low day. We believe things more deeply when we are the ones saying them.

It turns a private project into a shared one. Working on your health alone is fragile. The moment somebody else is counting on you to be there, it stops being optional in a way that has nothing to do with willpower.

Everything you have figured out becomes useful. This is the one I want to spend a minute on.

The Conversation I Wish I Had Gotten

When I hit 42, my body started doing things I did not recognize.

My sleep changed. My temperature regulation went strange. I was training the same way I always had and getting different results. I was a fitness professional and I still did not have the language for what was going on in my own body.

So I did what I do. I got curious, I dug in, and I figured it out.

But here is the interesting part. Once I started talking about it out loud, women came out of the woodwork. They had been through the exact same thing. They knew precisely what I was describing. It had simply never come up, because it never does.

Honest conversations got me there so much faster. That is a gift any one of us can hand to the woman behind us, and it costs nothing.

It is also the entire reason I wrote a book about it.

The Perimenopause Pivot comes out on November 1. It is not a medical textbook. It is my story alongside everything I have learned since, written to be the conversation I wanted somebody to have with me. Pre-orders are open now if you want it early.

I am telling you that here because it is the clearest example I have of what this post is about. What you figured out the slow way becomes a shortcut for somebody else.

How to Do This Week

None of this requires a big gesture.

Answer one comment. Find a woman who is just starting and say something true to her. Thirty seconds.

Tell someone what you went through. Not advice. Your actual experience. The thing you wish someone had told you.

Ask one woman how it is going. And then wait for the real answer, not the polite one.

Stop assuming she already knows. This is the one that gets us. We stay quiet because we think our story is obvious or unremarkable. It is not. Somebody is working on the exact thing you already figured out.

The Part That Matters Most

You have figured out a lot. Every one of you reading this has.

All of that experience made you the only person who can say a particular sentence to a particular woman at exactly the right moment. Nobody else has your version of it.

That is not a small thing. According to the research, it might be one of the most protective things you can do, for her and for you at the same time.

So my question for you this week. What do you know now that you wish someone had told you ten years ago? Say it in the comments. Somebody reading needs to hear it today. I will be in there reading and responding later.

Big hug, everyone.