Jackie's Take: What's on My Mind in Women's Wellness ✍️ 🤔 📰 

From Metrics to Meaning: What HRV tells us about hormones, health, and why your nervous system might be the new oracle.

I’ve been wearing a Whoop since January—part curiosity, part clinical experiment, part “can I finally make sense of why I feel great one day and like a human puddle the next?”

Funny enough, Whoop founder Will Ahmed just posted a teaser this week—something big (5.0?) may be on the horizon.

In the meantime, I’ve been tracking everything from sleep and HRV to (yes) sexual wellness. This is my very unofficial, very nerdy N=1 experiment in perimenopause.

I’m not quite ready to share my results just yet (stay tuned), but this week I want to pull back the curtain on something that’s deeply intertwined with how we feel in midlife, even if we don’t realize it:

🔬 First, a quick primer: What is HRV?

HRV (Heart Rate Variability) is the tiny, beat-to-beat variation in your heartbeat. It’s one of the best non-invasive ways to track how well your autonomic nervous system is managing the balance between:

• 🧯 Sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight, stress)

• 🌿 Parasympathetic nervous system (rest, digest, recover)

Higher HRV = greater adaptability, better vagal tone, and stronger resilience.
Lower HRV = more stress, poor recovery, and less resilience overall.

And guess what? In perimenopause, HRV tends to drop. Here’s why:

• Estrogen supports healthy vagal (parasympathetic) tone. As it declines, we shift toward sympathetic dominance. Perimenopause palpitations, anyone?!

  • 💫 Interesting note: Some limited evidence suggests that estrogen therapy may improve HRV and, by extension, cardiovascular and cognitive function 🧠 ❣️ 

• Hot flashes, night sweats, disrupted sleep, and metabolic changes add more strain.

• Lower HRV has been linked to more intense menopausal symptoms—and even increased cardiovascular risk.

So yes—tracking HRV gives us a real window into what’s happening on the inside.

💡 But here’s the part I’m wrestling with...

Tracking is exciting. But lately I’ve been asking myself:

It’s the same thing that’s happened with GPS. I used to know how to get around town. Now? If my phone died, I’d be lost on the side of the road, wishing I still had the muscle memory to find my way without a screen.

As women, we’re inherently intuitive. We naturally cue into our moods, cycles, nutrition and gut feelings. But the more we track, the more we might second-guess.

Is a red recovery score helping me rest—or making me feel broken?

Are we actually changing behavior based on these metrics? Or just obsessing over them?

❤️‍🔥 HRV + Sexual Wellness = The Plot Twist

Here’s where things get really interesting: HRV also plays a role in sexual function.

• Lower HRV is linked to reduced sexual arousal and orgasm frequency.

• Higher HRV = better physiological flexibility, better responsiveness, and yes, more pleasure (for the science, see here).

  • This suggests that HRV biofeedback could be used to help women with low arousal or difficulty reaching orgasm. 🎇 

Let that sink in: your nervous system isn’t just running the show in the gym or your stress response—it’s involved in how you experience desire, arousal, and climax.

Wild, right?

🧭 So how do we use this info without losing ourselves?

Here’s what I’m holding as true right now:

✅ HRV is a valuable marker—but don’t let it become a moral report card.
✅ Use it to learn, not to judge.
✅ Not every day needs to be measured.
✅ Context matters: your luteal phase, your sleep, your stress, your sex life—they all show up here.

📣 Let’s open the chat.

Are you tracking HRV or using wearables? Is it helping you feel more in tune—or just more anxious?

🔜 More to come: I’ll be sharing my personal Whoop patterns soon—especially the ones tied to sexual wellness. Because while the data is helpful, it’s the reflection that brings it to life—and having a space like this to wonder out loud with you is half the magic. 🪄

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to bring more of that real-time connection to life. I want to start sharing more of the behind-the-scenes, the experiments, and the personal side of this midlife journey—not just as a clinician, but as someone living it too.

So I’m creating a quieter corner on Instagram to do just that. I’ll be posting the deeper, more personal updates to my Close Friends channel—only for those truly along for the ride.

Want in? Just reply to this email and let me know you want to be added.

Until then—trust your gut and your data. One doesn’t have to cancel out the other. 🌟

xx,
Jackie

The Tea: What's Trending in Women's Wellness & Culture 🍵 🛍️ 

🥓 🐔 🧠 Protein is having a PR moment—and Khloé Kardashian is the new poster girl.
Between Khloud-branded protein popcorn and the WSJ’s breakdown of the booming protein economy, it’s clear: we’re obsessed with gains. Muscle is the new status symbol in wellness, and yes—protein and muscle mass are key currencies in the longevity game.

But let’s not forget the other half of the equation.

Longevity isn’t just about lifting heavier and sipping protein shakes—it’s about blood flow, too. Cardio. Fiber. A well-fed microbiome. Emotional regulation. If muscle is your retirement account, circulation is the income stream that funds it. 💰️ 

So when a health trend blows up (and the consumerism follows), stay curious—but stay skeptical. Because real longevity is built on systems, not snacks. (NYT & WSJ)

📱🤕 As a neck pain sufferer myself, I felt very seen.
A new study reviewed data from over 43,000 people and found that being sedentary for more than six hours a day increases your risk of neck pain by 88%. And the worst offender? Our phones. Scrolling increased neck pain risk by 82%—more than even computer use. (Wapo)

Apparently, modern life is slowly breaking our necks.

So yes, I’m officially asking for this Theragun Mini for Mother’s Day— it’s on sale now, and my trapezius is begging.

🥰 💄 Brain fog in perimenopause is real—and often dismissed.
Yes, hormone therapy can help some women. But unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to brain fog. One often overlooked root cause? Low iron levels, especially in women with heavy periods (which are very common in perimenopause thanks to declining progesterone, metabolic shifts, and structural changes such as fibroid development).

A recent study published in Nutrients found that women with lower iron levels performed worse on cognitive tasks like memory and attention—even when they weren’t clinically anemic. It turns out, iron plays a critical role in getting oxygen to the brain, and when your levels are low, brain fog often follows.

If your periods are heavy and your mind feels fuzzy, ask your provider to test your iron, including ferritin, iron saturation, and total iron binding capacity.

Start with food (red meat, lentils, tofu, spinach), but don’t be afraid to supplement if needed. (Women’s Health)

Wellness Wordplay: Talk the talk 🔈️ 

Term of the Week: Suffering Economy

🗣️ (n.) A profit-driven wellness culture that thrives on women’s burnout, confusion, and compliance—selling overpriced supplements, unnecessary tests, and self-optimization plans instead of real solutions. It romanticizes resilience, gaslights symptoms as “normal,” and labels empowered care-seeking as excessive. The suffering isn’t accidental—it’s the business model.

👉️ For real examples of how this plays out in women’s lives, check out my IG carousel here and leave a comment letting me know your POV🎠 

The Group Chat Edit 📲 👯‍♂️ 

🎧 To Listen: Life Kit - 5 simple ways to minimize stress 

Sometimes you just need a quickie—and this 17-minute listen hits all the right spots.

In this episode, Harvard physician Dr. Aditi Nerurkar breaks down how chronic stress shows up in the body—raising your risk for heart disease, stroke, inflammation, and burnout. But here’s the twist: her five “resets” are surprisingly doable, even for overstretched women in midlife. (NPR)🎵📻️ 

🛍️ To Buy: Longevity medicine… in the wild. 🧬🌿

OK, I’ll admit—I’m still a little skeptical about some of these microbiome tests. But I picked up a sample of the JONA Microbiome Test at a longevity event, and the tech (yup, AI) behind it piqued my interest. It’s an at-home stool test that promises insights into digestion, metabolism, skin health, inflammation, and more—based on your unique gut bacteria.

Since I’ve already been tracking everything from HRV to sexual wellness, I figured… why not see if my gut has anything to say about the rest of it?

If you’ve ever wondered whether gut health actually connects to how we feel in midlife— join me! I’d love to compare notes in real time. Just reply to this email and let me know you’re in, and we can track the wild world of midlife gut health together. 🧬💩📉

❣️To Try: Heart disease is still the leading cause of death for women—more than breast cancer. But it’s not just about risk—it’s about optimization.

Because blood flow powers everything: your brain, your libido, your longevity. This 2-minute quiz might just be the wake-up call your heart needed.

👉️ Want to go deeper? Ask your provider to run a CardioIQ® test through Quest Diagnostics.

It’s an advanced lipid panel that looks beyond basic cholesterol, measuring markers like ApoB, Lp(a), and small dense LDL particles—offering a much clearer picture of your cardiovascular risk (especially if your “normal” labs haven’t told the whole story). 🧪