Spicy Midlife Women: Real Talk, Raw Truth, and Bold Moves for Women Over 40

28. Midlife Is A Mindset, Not A Number

• Jules and Michele: Midlife Mentors • Episode 28

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What actually makes a woman “midlife”? Is it a number… or is it something deeper? In this week’s totally ad-libbed, no-notes conversation, Jules and Michele get real about the midlife mindset, why age has nothing to do with it, and why so many women feel boxed in by outdated definitions of what midlife “should” look like.

From hot flashes to empty nests, from divorce to rediscovery, from career shifts to perimenopause, the hosts break down how life experiences — not birthdays — shape who we become in our 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond. They also dig into the pressure women have felt for decades to perform, perfect, and pretend everything is fine… and how today’s midlife woman is rewriting the rules in community with other spicy, strong, scrappy women.

Whether you’re 36 or 66, if you feel midlife, live midlife, or are stepping into a new era of your identity, this episode will give you perspective, a few laughs, and a reminder that midlife is a mindset — not a number.

In this episode, we explore:

  • Why midlife isn’t about your age — it’s about your life experiences
  • What younger generations get wrong about “midlife women”
  • How Gen X and older Millennials survived their 30s and 40s without the internet, community, or support
  • Why menopause and perimenopause aren’t the only indicators of midlife
  • The hidden emotional load women carried while putting on a “fake smile”
  • How divorce, career shifts, raising kids, or becoming an empty nester shape the midlife identity
  • Why community matters more than ever for modern midlife women
  • The rise of spicy, confident, empowered midlife energy on platforms like TikTok
  • The importance of stepping out of the boxes society puts us in
  • What it really means to reclaim your power in this season of life

Tune in to feel seen, supported, and spicy — no matter your age.

Are you ready to take your "spiciness" to the next level?!

Connect with Julee & Michele on Instagram @spicy_midlife_women and send a DM about what resonated most during this episode so they can encourage you with steps forward in your own life.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey, all you spicy ladies out there, Jules and Michelle here from Seattle, Washington, the Emerald City, bringing you all kinds of real life stories and nobius conversations that we are gonna have right now with all of you, right, Michelle? Oh yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_00:

Today we are having a conversation too. We are here to help all you midlife women redefine your relationships, ditch those toxic cycles, and reclaim your power one episode at a time. So let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01:

Today we are going to bring you a little insight, totally ad-lib, no notes, nothing like that, regarding the topic of the midlife mindset. And the whole idea behind this is really to gear your mindset towards ours, or really what we're thinking about our podcasts and what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00:

We've had some people point some things out. Yes. We've had people uh that we have relationships with point some things out. We've had people in our community on social media point some things out, and it just kind of keeps resurfacing and popping up. And when we got the comment on social media, I told Jules, I was like, you know what? I think we need to have a conversation about what midlife is and the mindset surrounding it. Because to me, it's not about the number. And I think that that's what's happening is people out there get caught up in the number in what is actual midlife. Like we can cut it out in a box with a cookie cutter or what have you, because it is what it is, and that's what it is, and that's that. Midlife is 36.

SPEAKER_01:

And you know what happens if you're, you know, 42.

SPEAKER_00:

And then there's that because we've heard that too. Oh, I'm almost 40. Midlife is not 40. I don't consider myself a midlife woman, right?

SPEAKER_01:

But a lot of it has to do with where you're at in your life. So if you think about women who are have raised children, maybe they started early with children, maybe they got divorced early, maybe they're raising their kids on their own, maybe they're doing who knows? They could be 42 years old, they could be 41 years old, they could be 55 years old, and they're going through some of these things. And I guess it really doesn't matter. So when I start thinking about like it was just that one comment, and then we heard it from somebody else too. To me, it seems like that is a very narrow way of looking at things, not to throw shade at the narrow people. Oh, I just did. Okay. But you know what I'm saying? It's like you just gotta think differently, and that's where I'm kind of at with this.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, like no shade to be thrown at anybody here. I just it made me think really how interesting it is and how much it can bring about in people when they're considered midlife. It is not a bad thing to be considered a midlife woman. It is not a bad thing to be in your midlife. Now, is menopause and perimenopause and all the things that are associated with midlife? See, that's where it comes in. They suck, and I think that it does suck. Yeah, and that's where it's like, oh, well, I have none of those things are happening. So I'm identifying as a midlife woman.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I don't identify that way.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm not old enough, you know. I don't know. Yeah. So that's where I say I think definitely it is not about the number, it's about the mindset. And to Julie's point, depending on where you're at in life, where you got started with adulting in life is gonna be a dependent factor also. And I don't know, I it just really made me think about things. And I'm 60 years old, I consider myself to be a spicy midlife woman.

SPEAKER_01:

Actually, I'm super proud of the fact that I'm a spicy midlife woman. Yeah, and I think where a lot of that comes from is you guys, we have been Michelle talked to you a little bit about our TikTok journey. Yeah, we kind of stayed away from it to begin with because we were thinking, oh, the algorithm's weird and it's being taken over by the government, you know, and all this crap. And yeah, Michelle's scared of it, and they wouldn't let her play the music she wanted to play, you know, it's so frustrating. Yeah, how many of us are out there? Yeah, there are so many of us out there, and there's so many that I see that that really probably would love to be in a community that is like-minded or women who are going through some of the similar experiences that they are anticipating, or maybe they're going through experiences that they can share with other people. Absolutely, but isn't that kind of what it's all about? I mean, being a girl's girl, yeah, and when we were growing up, we didn't have any of this stuff. When I was a mom, when I was in my 30s and 40s, I didn't have shit to work with, I just kind of figured it out as I went.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm described a lot of times as scrappy. Yeah, I do. I call her scrappy, scrappy, and I think that's part of it though, is at that time in in my life when I was, you know, late 30s, going into my 40s, I had to be scrappy. And I was figuring, to your point, Julie, a lot of shit out on my own because there wasn't really a huge internet presence and platforms of people and podcasting and doctors and research and social media, all these things where we have so much kind of overload. You got to pick and choose where you're gleaning your information from, but we didn't have all that. So we're learning from observing and other people's situations and listening sometimes to other women depending. I mean, at that time, I was a Mormon church going individual. And so, yeah, my social as far as conversations with women, we weren't talking about the shit going on in marriage and the menopause things with our bodies and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_01:

We weren't doing or even even like raising kids and the problems that you run into. It's more like it was, I wouldn't say shameful, it's just stuff that people didn't talk about.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and even outside of the churchy thing, anyways, I know I was always like trying to make it seem like everything was good. Yeah, we're good, yeah. You know, sunshine and rodents coming out of her ass. So putting on that performance and you you're keeping that fake smile on your face. This is me. I'm just talking about me, keeping the fake smile on your face, trying to do the best you can with the kids while figuring all the other shit out in your marriage and all the other shit out in being a working mom outside of the home and doing it, trying to do it somewhat gracefully. And you know, I look back and I was not graceful about it really at all. Oh my God, I was a hot mess.

SPEAKER_01:

I just I mean, nobody really could see that part of it, but this is exactly what you're talking about. Think about women in the corporate world, which I am 100% in support of women striving for and achieving everything that they want, whatever dream they want. And if they don't want to be parents, they don't want to be moms or whatever, totally they're jammed, whatever they want to do. There's no judgment about any of that stuff. That wasn't the path that we chose. But when I really step back and think about it, it's like I was trying to be everything to everybody, and there wasn't a lot left over. And so, like you were saying, you kind of put on this happy face where you know, the 2.5 kids and the dog and the station wagon and okay, that maybe wasn't caravan, the caravan van. Yeah, yeah, or you know, and I'm traveling for work and I'm doing all these things, and it's like, you know, why? You know, the mindset was just very different on what we felt like we had to achieve.

SPEAKER_00:

We didn't have time to think about midlife stuff and uh about ourselves. We barely had time to sleep and eat and breathe.

SPEAKER_01:

I I recall like the first time I ever had a hot flash, I was like, what is happening to me? Because nobody talked about it. We didn't have doctors talking about it. It took me forever to really go and figure out what I needed to do to make it better. It was really bad. But I'm talking to some man at my kids' school and in the parent teacher night or whatever, and I can feel the beads of sweat on my forehead kind of coming down. I mean, this is like all of a sudden, and I wasn't that old, really. I mean, when you think about it, I really wasn't that old, but I'm like, oh, what is happening to me? You know, yeah. Nobody really talked about it. So anyway, point being being ladies is that we want to really identify that this is a movement in a lot of ways, where spicy or not spicy or striving to be spicy, women who are in midlife, whatever age you are, you know, even if you are, it doesn't matter what age you are, really. We're just saying midlife, you know, over 40. But if you're, you know, 38 and you feel like you're midlife to knock yourself out, you can be a part of our community. It's totally fine. Yeah. We want to have a place for everybody to feel comfortable and feel safe and feel like they can say what they need to say or ask the questions that they need to ask about whatever topic, how vulnerable you know, they they could potentially be doing that. They know they've got people here who are not gonna like roll their eyes at them or you know, go, oh my god, what a stupid question. None of that's gonna happen. Yeah. Because I'll slap Michelle if she does it. She would never do that. Anyway.

SPEAKER_00:

But yeah, I mean, like, so I thought it would be a good conversational thing. Midlife isn't this cookie-cutter time in life. Uh, on the technical side of it, uh I don't know if I mentioned this when I saw the comment that midlife is 36, not 56. I looked up the average lifespan of for a woman in America, and surprisingly, it's 74.

SPEAKER_01:

So it just blows my mind because I thought that was like the average lifespan for a man. And women are usually higher, you know. I mean, it's obviously an average, so there's one women that are older and women that are younger, but I really I mean, I think I'll probably last into my 80s.

SPEAKER_00:

Anyways, I was surprised to find that that that lifespan was 74. I thought it would be older for women, but either way, it doesn't matter. That's my point being the number doesn't matter. It's the circumstances in our life, it's the way that we're handling things and moving through things in our life that bring us to midlife, uh, whatever the age. It's those experiences, you know, you might be an empty nester by the time you're 38. If you had a child that, you know, when you were 18, right? You're 36 and they're flying the coop. And here you are, an empty nester at 36, 38 years old.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, you're going through the same thing that 50-year-olds are going through. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

So that's a good example of, you know, it doesn't really matter what that number is. It's the experiences that move us through these times in our life where we're learning how to take care of ourselves again. Yeah. We're learning how to set boundaries for our sanity and for what feels good. And, you know, we're learning how to move through it in it's never graceful, but we're learning how to through move through it the however we have to to have peace within. Yeah. So that's my that's her take on it. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Yeah. Midlife is a mindset, it's not a number.

SPEAKER_01:

When did you think about yourself being was there ever like an epiphany moment or anything where you went, shit, I'm in midlife, or I'm a midlife woman? Or was it when you were like, my knees, my back? I mean, when do you remember?

SPEAKER_00:

It was a bit, it's been this journey between 50 and 60. Me too. And it's some of those things, you know, the the body is feeling differently, working out feels different, the outcomes are different. I have had to adjust and learn new ways, different things with a lot of stuff. I've lived with with sex, with exercise, with health, sleep, so many different things. Just self-care, all of it.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, you're actually doing some of it now.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Not the sex part. I'm talking about you were doing that anyway. But I'm talking about, you know, the self-care and all of the things that we are talking about. I think that with me, a lot of that was transitional around that divorce time frame. Yeah. Because that's when I kind of felt like I was taking control over my life. Now, there's a lot of women in our audience who are not divorced, are happily married, or are with a partner of some kind, you know, whether you're male or female partner, it doesn't really matter. You know, we're all women, right? Yeah. And so that is when maybe they're starting to see some of these pivotal changes. Or perhaps they never really experience things the way we do. And some of these things are very foreign concepts to them. So I think taking bits and pieces out of what we're talking about and applying it to your life is probably one of the best opportunities you can have to try to open those horizons or step out of the damn box. Yeah. We need to step out of the box that we feel like we were put in. Yeah. Yeah. So with that in mind, Michelle is really into her TikTok box right now.

SPEAKER_00:

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_01:

She loves TikTok.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I do love TikTok.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I do too.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. We're over there. Go check us out. It's been a lot of fun. We love the community there. And so many women. Yeah, so many, so many midlife women, Gen X women, all of those things. And they're fun, they're sassy, they're spicy, they're sexy, they're all the things. They're married, they're divorced, they're, you know, young, single with kids, they're just like all the things. And uh, yeah, so we are over there on TikTok. So go follow us on all the socials.

SPEAKER_01:

And as now you can see, we're gonna be on YouTube as well. We have old episodes from when we rebranded that are on YouTube as well. So there's several, but we definitely will have the little shorts and everything coming out for these episodes on there now.

SPEAKER_00:

So stay tuned. Yeah, for all those things. Stay tuned for the community, be in tune for your midlife mindset. And we can't wait to share another episode next week. That's right. So until then, everybody. Spicy. Stay spicy. Stay spicy. Yeah. Become spicy.

SPEAKER_01:

Do the spicy thing. Okay. Later.