To be a modern woman in her thirties and forties with health or fertility challenges isn’t an easy place to exist.
On the one hand, we’re still relatively young by modern standards, but on the other, we’re facing a real biological clock and reproductive limitations that become more relevant with every passing year. Add in a culture that’s constantly reminding women of the importance of youth, beauty, fertility, and anti-aging everything, and it makes sense that so many women begin interpreting the changes and challenges they experience during these years as evidence that they’re simply getting old.
But I think we’re getting something deeply important wrong when we attribute all, or even most, of the health and fertility problems women experience after 35 primarily to our age.
Most women don’t enter their thirties and forties with sound, robust metabolic and reproductive health, only to then suddenly develop problems because they crossed some invisible age threshold. What I see much more often are female bodies with accumulating stress patterns; contraction, exhaustion, depletion, hormonal disruption, and overall metabolic strain that have gone unchecked for years before the symptoms become significant enough that we can no longer ignore them.
And on top of these metabolic issues often exist a lot of habits, relationship patterns, lifestyle choices, and possible vices we’ve adopted for stress mitigation that only mask and feed into the disruptions and depletion. This leaves us with more than just some symptoms to address once we do begin to realize we aren’t as healthy or as fertile as we’d like to be.
Our age matters because the longer these patterns continue, the less likely we are to get away with them without feeling their consequences. And because habits compound over time.
This is particularly important for women because our fertility is metabolically expensive and sensitive to disruptions elsewhere in the body. What we call “aging” can therefore become an amplifier of a path we were already on rather than the original cause of everything that seems to suddenly be going wrong.
You could apply this explanation as much to our fertility and metabolic health as to the other areas of our lives that might not currently be what we want them to be, causing us extra stress.
Understanding the distinction between the natural aging process — which is an inevitability for all of us — and the decline in health and fertility we experience as a result of our history and patterns, gives us a much more useful place from which to approach our health. We can acknowledge that women have real biological and reproductive limitations without turning age into an explanation for every symptom or assuming that there’s little we can do once we reach a certain birthday.
Why It’s So Easy to Blame Our Age
There are several cultural and biological realities converging right now that make the story of the “pathologically aging woman” particularly convincing for so many of us.
Women in developed countries are living much longer lives than we did historically, while our reproductive window hasn’t extended to match our longer lifespan. Modern women are also much more likely to delay motherhood now, whether because of education, career, relationships, finances, birth control, or simply because our lives no longer follow the same timelines or contain the same social expectations that they once did.
At the same time, many women reach these years carrying health patterns that began much earlier in their lives and went unnoticed or suppressed in one way or another.
Chronic stress, inadequate nourishment, hormonal disruption, years of birth control use, overworking, under-recovery, unresolved traumas, and the general pace and demands of modern life can all shape how a woman feels by the time she reaches her mid-to-late thirties or forties. When we’re younger, we may have enough resilience to compensate for some of these patterns without experiencing symptoms severe enough to force us to pay attention.
But no unsustainable pattern can go on forever, especially not with the energetic demands of our expensive female reproductive systems.
Interconnected with our entire metabolism, our reproductive system also sits downstream of our adrenal, thyroid, immune, and energy systems; these systems are all intrinsically linked and, for women, adapt to unsustainable energy demands (i.e. chronic stress) by slowing the functions of any function in the body that isn’t immediately necessary for survival.
This is where aging becomes a real drag.
Then we enter a digital environment saturated with conversations about infertility, perimenopause, female hormones, anti-aging, cosmetic procedures, declining egg counts, and the supposed biological cliff of turning 35. A woman who reaches this age is suddenly exposed to a very different set of messages about what her body means, what she should be worried about, and what she should be working to prevent in her life.
Any woman who also happens to be exhausted, struggling with her cycle, experiencing chronic symptoms, struggling to conceive, or noticing changes in her appearance, it’s not hard to see why age can become the obvious explanation for it all.
Personally, I’ve always liked to think of myself as subversive enough to be immune to these kinds of cultural messages, but looking back, it’s unfortunately clear that I wasn’t entirely immune to them either.
I remember feeling old in my late twenties, comparing myself to women in their early twenties, and feeling like I’d lost something — value, innocence, or time, perhaps. Now I see women beginning to develop these same fears about their age and fertility as young as 33, and looking for examples of their declining age in the ways they look and feel. This message has become so culturally normalized that many women arrive at their mid-thirties already expecting something to start going wrong, assuming that any loss of energy, hair, or libido they experience must be age-related!
You may have heard the phrase, “youth is wasted on the young,” and I recognize so much truth in this phrase now.
We often don’t understand just how young we truly are until we’re much older and can look back at ourselves with hard-won perspective. If a woman struggles with how she feels in her own skin at 23, 29, or 33… there’s a good chance that 40 won’t be easy either because it’s clearly her relationship to aging itself that’s driving her experience, not necessarily her specific age.
What begins to happen to us in our thirties and forties, though, is that the world seems to reaffirm any limiting beliefs we already have, silently whispering in our ears countless times a day: “its your age.” And if we didn’t already have this struggle, we’re certainly more likely to develop it.
What’s also true though is that, despite all that life often puts our bodies through, we usually have more agency over how we age than we realize.
What Happens When Age Becomes the Explanation For Our Problems
The problem with attributing our health and fertility struggles primarily to age isn’t simply that the explanation can be incomplete, which it often is; it also changes the way we relate to our bodies and the choices available to us.
Because age itself, as in the number of years we’ve been alive, isn’t something we have the ability to change.
If I believe that my fatigue, hormonal imbalances, fertility struggles, poor stress tolerance, and changing body composition are happening because I’m 38 instead of 28, there isn’t much for me to do with that information. Other than just accept this premise without any consideration as to what might actually improve things, this leaves me in a pretty helpless state over something as deeply personal as my own body!
The things that often begin to change in our thirties and forties, like muscle synthesis, bone density, skin and hair health, and energy metabolism, are actually influenced by a lot of our own choices.
But with this view that being 38 is the problem, and I cannot turn back the clock, my options begin to look like accepting my decline or finding increasingly aggressive ways to fight against it. This is one reason I believe women can become especially vulnerable during these years to marketing around expensive anti-aging supplements, cosmetic procedures, hormonal treatments, fertility interventions, and other solutions promising to correct what aging has supposedly done to us.
I see the consequences of this belief in my work when women explain away all manner of symptoms and fertility struggles they’re experiencing with their age alone.
If age were sufficient to explain these experiences, however, we would expect women of similar ages to experience roughly the same degree of illness and reproductive dysfunction across the board, and they clearly don’t. What I see instead is tremendous variation in women’s health, vitality, cycles, stress tolerance, appearance, and fertility during these years, even among women in the same socioeconomic class. This tells me that we need to be looking at a lot more than the number of years a woman has been alive.
This is also where the conversation about fertility requires more nuance than the current zeitgeist tends to offer.
I don’t believe it serves women to pretend our biological clocks aren’t real or that delaying conception until our late thirties and forties has no consequences at all because it does! But, at the same time, I also don’t believe it serves us to assume that fertility after 35 is determined almost entirely by age. Both stories remove important pieces of the picture, neither helps women understand what’s actually happening inside their bodies, and both can lead to a level of helplessness that serves no one except the industries benefitting financially from the desperation and fear of an aging female population.
We’re all aging. This cannot be prevented. Therefore, I believe its a spiritual calling to find ways of surrendering to this reality while taking care of ourselves in ways that our older selves will look back on and praise us for.
What If Age Is Only Amplifying Our Problems?
As I’ve discussed many times in my work, women’s fertility requires a tremendous amount of cellular energy and resources, which means that reproductive function doesn’t exist independently from the health of the rest of the female body.
Our metabolic health, thyroid function, stress physiology, immune health, nutritional status, and cellular energy production all contribute to the environment in which reproductive function is taking place. When these systems have been strained or under-supported for years, fertility can eventually reflect that strain as well. This is what we’re seeing with so many women’s health and infertility now — an amplification of this chronic and unaddressed strain.
This is one reason why I think it’s more useful to understand many of the problems women encounter in their thirties and forties as age-amplified rather than simply age-caused.
The longer we’ve been alive, the longer our body has been exposed to whatever conditions we’ve been asking it to live within. There’s simply been more time to experience chronic stress, burn through vital nutrients, live at an unsustainable pace (raising my hand here), deal with illness or trauma, experience hormonal disruptions, or simply fail to adequately replenish what our body has been using up.
Eventually, the body becomes less able to compensate for those conditions because it’s ran out of essential raw materials, such as cellular minerals, stored glucose, and quality proteins, and the body habituates eating itself to get these raw materials from it’s own tissues.
Symptoms that were subtle or manageable at 25 can become louder at 35 or 40, and reproductive problems may appear at the same time that fertility is naturally becoming more time-sensitive. It’s easy at that point to look at the calendar and conclude that age caused these problems, when age may instead be exposing the accumulated effects of everything that came before.
Of course, this doesn’t make aging irrelevant.
Egg quantity does decline over time, and for the average (healthy) woman, fertility is supposed to peak around age 25. Our reproductive years are finite, and eventually there are physiological changes associated with aging that no lifestyle intervention can completely prevent. But a woman between 35 and 45 who’s experiencing chronic symptoms or unexplainable infertility isn’t necessarily experiencing the inevitable degeneration of an old body — she’s experiencing a body that can no longer afford to ignore what it’s needed for a long time.
If you think I’m making sweeping generalizations here by discussing women’s bodies on a larger scale in this way, I suggest you look at the statistics available around the average woman’s health and fertility — a lot of us are struggling! But if I though that this was the result of age alone, I wouldn’t have so much success with my clients who are in this age range and respond dramatically from greater nourishment and regulation.
Personally, I look back at the pace and patterns I lived with at ages 22, 27, 34… and I can honestly celebrate that I genuinely feel more balanced and healthy now at 40 than I did in those earlier years when I was supposed to be at my reproductive peak!
The reason for this is because the lifestyle habits, chronic stress, and unresolved trauma patterns I was living with during these earlier years were not conducive to strong health and fertility. What’s also true at the same time is that I feel the impacts of choices I made earlier in life much more acutely now, at 40, than I did back then when I was living them in real time!
At 25, when my fertility was supposedly at its peak, I was moving at 100 miles per hour, fasting & dieting, dating men that triggered all my trauma patterns, and struggling all month long with hormonal and immune system symptoms that left me feeling helpless. I might feel more centered, mature, and healthy in my choices now, but I’m also much more sensitive to the ramifications of stress now.
By the way, I see this sensitivity as a good thing! My entire way of being in my twenties and early thirties was completely incompatible with being well.
This Approach Changes the Questions We ask Ourselves
Once we stop making age the sole explanation for our struggles, we can begin investigating the parts of the picture where we actually have some direct influence. Instead of asking whether we’re too old to feel better or even to conceive naturally, we can look at what our bodies have experienced over the years and what they may currently be asking from us. This will likely involve increased nutrients, increased fuel for energy production, and a slower pace in life.
We cannot undo the results of every choice we’ve made in our lives, but we can repair and replenish a lot more than we often get taught!
For me, this process means helping women learn more about energy metabolism, bioenergetics, nutrition, mineral status, stress physiology, and natural fertility so that they can understand their symptoms within a larger physiological context. Even just a basic understanding of these things can increase her confidence in caring for herself long-term. It also means becoming more discerning about the information we consume, particularly when an expert or influencer repeatedly frames age as the central explanation for illness, hormonal problems, or female infertility.
There may be pieces of truth in that message, but if the conclusion leaves you believing there’s almost nothing meaningful you can do for yourself, it’s worth asking whether you’re getting the whole story.
The process to better health also requires a willingness to make changes rather than simply gathering more information — something I see women do a lot, oftentimes while confusing this information gathering with the real actions that lead to real change. As modern women, we’re flooded with health advice, and having access to endless information doesn’t immediately translate into nourishing ourselves, changing the pace of our lives, addressing our sources of chronic stress, or understanding what our own bodies are communicating to us.
This work involves a lot more than learning about health; it involves becoming willing and able to create conditions in which the body can function differently, little by little each day, in a way that compounds for us over time.
The biggest obstacle for women in my age range to greater health and fertility is the fear that we don’t have enough time to compound in the first place.
I believe we do.
How I Approach This Work With Women
When I work with women in this stage of life, I’m interested in teasing apart what might actually be happening in their bodies rather than assuming the answer is contained in the date each woman was born.
I’ve known some of the most vitally robust women in their forties and I’ve worked with women who were full-speed on the struggle bus and barely able to get out of bed while still in their twenties! So, I’ve seen and worked with a wide variety of ages and health states. And I always approach every woman as a whole dynamic being with patterns, strengths, and resources completely unique to her, regardless of what age she may be on paper.
I also use HTMA interpretation alongside a woman’s health history, symptoms, current nutritional intake, and other available lab work to get a clearer picture of the metabolic and hormonal patterns that may be contributing to how she feels.
Depending on a woman’s goals, we may also look at hormone testing and fertility tracking to better understand things like when or if she ovulates, overall cycle patterns, and her progesterone levels post-ovulation. The physiological information matters, but it’s only part of how I work. As a trauma-informed somatic health coach, I’m also interested in how a woman experiences her body; how she responds to stress, how fast she moves throughout her life, and whether she can actually perceive and respond to the signals her body is giving her each day.
Sometimes a woman knows intellectually that she needs to slow down, eat more consistently, or care for herself differently, but the deeper patterns that keep her from doing those things cannot be solved by handing her another nutrition plan or with more intellectualizing.
This is where we need to slow our sessions down and work with the deeper patterns living within her body. Oftentimes, what’s become familiar and safe for her somatically is what she’ll need the most accountability and support around changing in between sessions. And in this kind of work, we might address a woman’s parts doing somatic parts work (IFS), or address a woman’s suppressed emotions using accelerated experiential dynamic therapy (AEDP), or any unmet core needs from childhood using the Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM.) These are all the somatic therapeutic certifications I received over the past three years that assist my clients in a more embodied approach to their overall wellness.
I believe that a lot of our struggles with aging can also be related to our shifting place in the world as a sex, our shifting values as we age, and the accumulation of our previous choices.
Although I’m not a licensed therapist and I have limitations to what I focus on in my client work, I do place an emphasis on supporting the whole woman, and use these somatic practices alongside mindset coaching to guide women back to the agency they have over their lives in the present moment — through building their lives up in the here and now.
This is where I think women can begin developing a very different relationship with the aging process itself. Instead of experiencing the body as something that’s suddenly betraying them as a result of their age, they can begin seeing their symptoms as information about what their individual physiology requires from them now.
This process can create more confidence in caring for ourselves long-term, as it has for myself. And this can be true regardless of whether fertility is part of our current goals.
What This Looked Like for One of My Clients
I worked with a client I’ll call A at two separate points over roughly four years, beginning when she was in her late thirties and again when she returned to work with me about two and a half years later in her early forties. Although she was health-oriented and practiced yoga, she struggled with self-worth, financial stress, and being fully present in her own body.
Many of the beliefs underneath her habits and symptoms were connected to what she thought her age meant about her health, fertility, and place in the world.
A wanted a child, but she didn’t feel physically, emotionally, or financially prepared for motherhood. She carried regrets about choices she wished she’d made differently, and she frequently explained her symptoms and stress through the fact that she was approaching or already in her forties. Alongside tracking her symptoms and choices, we used her HTMA results to guide a nourishment and remineralization protocol, while our somatic work helped illuminate how unsafe she often felt in her own body and how difficult it was for her to get underneath her beliefs about herself long enough to feel what was actually happening.
This work was slow and required a great deal of trust, but over time we were able to shift some of the deeper patterns connected to her age and her sense of agency while also supporting her metabolically.
A eventually became naturally pregnant at 42 and went on to have a healthy pregnancy and a natural birth at a birthing center. I cannot prove that our work caused her pregnancy, and I don’t use her story to suggest that every woman who makes similar changes will have the same fertility outcome; what I could clearly track was the change in her relationship with her body, her nourishment levels, her changing feelings about herself and her body, and the choices she believed were still available to her.
But How Much Control Do We Really Have Over Our Fertility After 35?
This is where I think we need to resist the temptation to replace one overly simple story with another.
I’m not interested in telling women that age doesn’t matter, only to substitute the equally unrealistic promise that enough nutrition, mineral replenishment, somatic work, or metabolic support can guarantee a healthy pregnancy. This wouldn’t be honest or ethical to do so.
The amount of influence any individual woman has over her fertility will vary depending on her health and stress history, her overall nutrition and lifestyle, her willingness to do the work, and her age.
Even women who track their cycles carefully, run extensive testing, make significant nutritional and lifestyle changes, and do everything they reasonably can may continue to experience fertility challenges or unwanted symptoms.
This work therefore involves both taking responsibility for what’s within our influence and developing some surrender, faith, and acceptance around what remains unknown or outside of our control. Believe me when I tell you that I understand how hard this surrender, faith, and acceptance can be! If you’ve already been told that your health or fertility issues are age-related and feel as though you’ve tried everything, I would still encourage you to examine what “everything” has actually included up until this point.
As an example, have you looked at your mineral status through an HTMA and applied very specific mineral, nutritional, and lifestyle choices based on your own unique mineral profile?
Most women who approach work with me have never worked with an HTMA, despite running many other labs throughout their journey, nor have they ever heard of bioenergetic principles. Many women haven’t truly explored the full scope of metabolic replenishment or examined how consistently they’re nourishing themselves, simply because the protocols many clinicians and practitioners place women on tend to be very supplement-focused and reductive.
Combined these tools with tracking our cycles beyond simply noting when we bleed and using somatic work to address our nervous system health and the pace at which we’re living, and we’re creating a very powerful protocol that approaches the whole woman and all of her fertility and wellbeing needs simultaneously.
These aren’t always the first approaches women encounter in conventional health or fertility settings, let alone functional medical clinics, which means there may still be parts of your physiology and lived experience that haven’t been meaningfully explored or tended to.
We Need a Better Story About Women and Aging
I don’t think the answer to this phenomena is to deny aging or encourage women to believe that our biological limitations don’t exist (which is the direction a lot of industries and politics are moving us toward.0
There can be real grief involved in accepting that our reproductive years are finite and coming to a close, especially for women who reach their late thirties or forties and realize that circumstances, choices, health problems, or relationships have left them with less time than they hoped they would have for building a family.
But accepting our female limitations doesn’t require us to turn our age into a pathology. We can recognize that the longer we’ve lived, the more accumulated stress and depletion our bodies will carry, while also recognizing that many of those patterns remain responsive to how we nourish ourselves, how we live, how we relate to stress, and how well we understand our own physiology as biologically, spiritually, and psycho-emotionally distinct from men.
Whether a woman ultimately conceives naturally, uses IVF or another reproductive intervention, or isn’t pursuing motherhood at all, improving her overall health is still valuable because the body she’s caring for now is also the body carrying her into the decades ahead.
This is ultimately why I want women to uncouple their health and fertility from their age enough to become curious about what else is happening inside of them.
There is very little agency to be found in a story that says that the way you feel is determined by the number of years you’ve been alive, because that number only moves in one direction. On the other hand, there’s much more agency in understanding your body’s history, identifying what it’s been missing or compensating for, and making different choices day-by-day based on what you need as an individual.
If This Sounds Like You
If this article speaks to your experience, you may benefit from working together to tease apart what’s actually happening within your body from what you’ve been attributing to your age alone.
I help women dial in their nourishment based on their health histories, symptoms, and I combine this with my signature HTMA interpretation to get a clearer sense of the metabolic and hormonal patterns that could be contributing to their symptoms and fertility issues. I also look at any other lab work you already have so that we can build a more well-rounded picture of how your body’s functioning and what may be impacting your health and fertility the most.
If this work calls to you, feel free to schedule a free chat with me so we can assess your needs and whether I’m the right person to support you.
And if you’re specifically looking to dial in your nutrition and lifestyle choices for the sake of your fertility as you work toward your conception goals, you can also check out my coaching container, Nourishing The Mother, created specifically to support women through this process.
Please remember that there’s far more to you as a woman than the amount of years you’ve been alive, than your reproductive limitations, than whether you fit the standards of youth and beauty our current society is pressuring women to fit into, indefinitely, or than the pace at which your path has you moving. You are an individual and you deserve a treatment plan that caters to this.
