The Rise Decoded Founder

I had my second baby at 38. What came afterwards didn't feel like new-mum exhaustion. It felt like an overwhelm much bigger than me — like my brain had stopped being able to handle things I'd been doing without a second thought for years.

It made me doubt myself every single day. Worst of all, it made me doubt whether I was a good mother. I'm not a perfect one and I've never tried to be, but being a mum to my two girls is the role I love most in my life. Questioning that daily was the worst feeling I've known.

I've always got an audiobook or a podcast running. One day I stumbled into a Diary of a CEO roundtable with four women's health experts, and it changed my life. Here were specialists describing precisely what I was living through — and explaining that it had biological causes. That I wasn't broken.

The relief was enormous.

I started following those experts. Read their books, listened to everything, applied what they recommended, and went looking for a menopause specialist of my own. Within the first month I was less tired, my head was clearer, and I'd started training again.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, menopause is called the Second Spring — not a decline, but the point where the body conserves its energy and moves into a new, more balanced phase of life. I love that. It turned out to be accurate.

- Paola