Slow to Go Fast: What Hysterectomy Recovery and Perimenopause Have in Common
There's a pattern I see constantly in the women I work with after hysterectomy.
They are high-functioning. They are used to pushing through. They have businesses to run, families to show up for, lives that don't pause because their body needs them to slow down. And so they try to do recovery the same way they do everything else. Hard. Fast. Efficiently.
And it doesn't work.
The same thing happens in perimenopause. The symptoms start showing up and the instinct is to push harder, optimize more, add another supplement or another habit or another thing to track. But a body in hormonal transition doesn't respond to force. It responds to attention.
The two failure modes
In my experience there are two ways women get stuck in hysterectomy recovery and in navigating perimenopause.
The first is pushing too hard. Returning to full activity too soon, overriding exhaustion, treating rest as something to earn rather than something the body requires. The second is the opposite: becoming so overwhelmed and uncertain that they freeze. They don't know what to do so they do nothing, and then feel guilty about that too.
Both of these come from the same root problem. Not having a clear, personalized plan means either overdoing it or doing nothing at all. Neither gets you where you want to go.
What "slow to go fast" actually means
I worked with a woman recently who owns her own business. She came to me a few months post hysterectomy and was starting to recognize something uncomfortable: she had been compromising her recovery by refusing to compromise on her work. She kept pushing. Kept delivering. Kept meeting every demand her business made of her, even as her body was telling her something different.
What shifted for her wasn't dramatic. She started paying attention to her capacity rather than her output. She got honest about what she could actually sustain versus what she was white-knuckling through. She started making decisions based on what she actually had to give rather than what she felt she should be able to give.
Her words when she wrote to me about it were something like this: the surgery had been insisting all along that she stop compromising on her values, in her work and in her life. She just needed to finally listen.
Her recovery started moving forward when she stopped trying to outrun it.
And I see this exact same dynamic play out in perimenopause. The women who start to turn a corner are almost never the ones who added more. They're the ones who got more intentional. Less scattered, more focused. Honoring what their body actually had to give on any given day rather than demanding it perform at a level it couldn't sustain.
That is slow to go fast. It does not mean doing nothing. It means doing the right things, at the right intensity, in the right order, and letting that focused effort do more than scattered effort ever could.
Why focusing on one thing works
One of the things I come back to again and again with clients is this: when you focus on one area of recovery at a time and do it well, you almost always see improvement across multiple areas.
Fix your sleep and your energy starts to return. Your mood stabilizes. Your motivation to move comes back. Improve your nutrition and your gut health supports your hormones, which affects your sleep, your weight, your clarity.
This is true whether you're recovering from surgery or navigating the hormonal shifts of perimenopause. The body is a connected system. You don't have to do everything at once. You have to do the right thing first and do it well. That is a completely different approach than most women come in with, and it changes everything.
Why googling at 11pm isn't helping
I say this with a lot of compassion because I understand the impulse completely.
When you're not feeling right and you don't have answers, you look for them wherever you can find them. The internet is always available. There is always another article, another forum thread, another woman's story that might hold the clue.
But generic information cannot account for your body, your hormones, your history, your specific surgery, your stress load, your sleep patterns. It gives you pieces with no way to know which pieces actually apply to you. And at 11pm when you're exhausted and overwhelmed, that usually makes things worse, not better.
This is just as true for the woman trying to figure out perimenopause on her own as it is for the woman post hysterectomy. The information is everywhere. A plan built for your specific body is a different thing entirely.
A place to start
If you're recovering from a hysterectomy and not sure where to actually put your attention, the free guide is a great first place to start. It walks through the five most common mistakes women make in hysterectomy recovery — most of which come back to the same thing: trying to do too much without a clear picture of what actually matters.
[Download the free guide here.]
If you're a woman in midlife who's tired of spinning her wheels — whether you've had a hysterectomy or you're navigating the hormonal shifts of perimenopause and just know something needs to change — let's chat. I offer a free 30-minute introductory call. No pressure, no pitch. Just a real conversation about where you are and what's actually getting in the way.