Dr. Tabatha BarberI teach women how to fast their way to a faith-filled, hormonally balanced, fabulous life!

Hormonal Shifts in Your 40s #shorts

12 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:58

In this YouTube short, Dr. Tabatha Barber reflects on the hormonal turbulence many experience in their early 40s, likening it to the unpredictability of teenage years. She explains that fluctuating hormones can trigger strong threat responses—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn—driven by the amygdala. Dr. Barber proposes compassion, both toward oneself and others, as a powerful strategy to calm the amygdala, shift activity to the prefrontal cortex, and enable more grounded, logical decision‑making during this life stage.

Chapters

I can approach this from a professional lens and give you some professional answers, or from a personal lens and go, oh my gosh, me too. This is really an interesting season of life. For me, I'm in my early 40s, and this is kind of my— I feel almost like I'm back in those teenage years of unpredictability, hormones everywhere. So the first thing I would say is compassion. Compassion is an incredibly powerful tool. So I would say, and I'm gonna try and extend this to myself as well, In this season of life, compassion is key. Compassion can get you out of the threat center of your brain, which we can often inhabit a lot when we're managing hormones. We're in fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. All of those threat responses feel very strong. Compassion can help kind of soothe the threat center of the brain, the amygdala, and get you in the prefrontal cortex, which is where you make grounded, good, logical decisions.