Why Your Body Keeps the Score in Menopause — and How to Release What It Holds
What if the tension you can't explain isn't a mystery? It's a memory.
The clenched jaw. The gut that reacts before your mind catches up. The ache in your shoulders that no massage seems to fully release. In menopause, these things tend to get filed under “just hormones” and left there. But your body has been keeping a record long before perimenopause started, and this stage of life is often when that record finally gets loud enough to notice.
Fifteen years of working with women's bodies has taught me this above all: the body never lies. It just waits until you're ready to listen.
What “Keeping the Score” Actually Means
Your body doesn't just experience stress and let it pass through. Unprocessed stress, old fear, years of swallowing what you wanted to say — all of it gets stored, physically, in muscle tension, breath patterns, posture, and gut function. This isn't a metaphor. It's how the nervous system works: what isn't discharged gets held.
For most of your adult life, oestrogen has quietly helped buffer some of this. It supports the systems that regulate mood, calm the stress response, and keep your resilience reserves topped up. As that buffer fades in perimenopause, the tension you've been storing for decades doesn't have the same cushioning it used to. It surfaces.
Where It Tends to Show Up
Everyone holds it differently, but a few patterns are common. A jaw that clenches overnight without your permission. A gut that flares under stress in ways it never used to. Shoulders that sit up near your ears by 10am. Old injuries that suddenly ache again for no clear reason. None of this is random. It's the nervous system running out of the padding it used to have.
The Wisdom Behind the Science
Bessel van der Kolk showed what many ancient healing traditions already knew: unresolved stress and trauma doesn't disappear. It gets stored in the body, the muscles, the fascia, the nervous system, until something gives it permission to release.
Louise Hay mapped this in You Can Heal Your Life, connecting specific emotional patterns to specific physical areas: lower back fear, throat tightness around unexpressed truth, hip tension holding old grief.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, there's a principle I return to constantly: stagnation equals pain. Where energy stops flowing, physically, emotionally, energetically, the body registers it as tension or illness. This is also why chakra work matters in midlife. The root chakra governs safety and survival; when depleted, it shows in the lower back, anxiety, hypervigilance. The sacral governs emotional flow; when stuck, it shows as flatness and disconnection.
Why This Isn't Just “Getting Older”
It's easy to write all of this off as ageing. But tension that's stored is tension that can be released, at any stage of life. The difference now is that release has to be more intentional, because your body isn't clearing it automatically the way it once could.
How to Start Releasing What It Holds
You don't release stored tension by thinking your way out of it. The nervous system responds to physical signals, not logic.
Let your body shake: Stand and shake out your hands, arms, and shoulders for thirty seconds. It's how most mammals discharge stress, one of the few things humans were taught to suppress instead.
Lengthen your exhale: A longer out-breath tells your nervous system the threat has passed. Four counts in, eight counts out, for six rounds.
Move before you sit with it: A short walk, gentle stretching, or simply changing rooms can shift stored tension that stillness alone won't touch.
Get supported touch: A hand on your own chest, a longer-than-usual hug, or bodywork from someone you trust tells your body it's safe to unclench.
Try a full body scan: Ten minutes, no fixing required. Lie down or sit comfortably, close your eyes, and take three slow breaths, in for four counts, out for six. Move your awareness slowly from feet to crown, pausing at each area to ask one quiet question: what are you holding? You don't need an answer. The asking is enough. Afterwards, if it feels right, write down whatever surfaced, not to analyse it, just to honour it.
You're Not Broken. You're Backlogged.
Your body isn't holding things to punish you. It held them because it had no other option, because the feelings were too big, the pace too relentless, the circumstances too unsafe to feel them in the moment.
Years of holding it together left a backlog, and backlogs clear with steady, repeated release, not one dramatic fix. Every time you let your body shake, breathe, or move instead of gritting through, you're clearing a little more of what's been stored.
Go Deeper
For the full picture of what's happening underneath, read How to Regulate Your Nervous System in Menopause and 8 Ways to Tone Your Vagus Nerve in Menopause — together they explain both the why and the how.
And if you'd like one grounding practice a week, gently guided, that's exactly what my Sunday Soul letter is for. Free, every Sunday, no fixing required.
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