Broken Patterns: A Reflection from the Menopause Escape Room
- Erin Slutsky
- May 20
- 3 min read
A woman stood in front of me holding a marker in one hand and a thin rebreakable karate board in the other.
The room around us was loud in the best way. Women were laughing, talking, moving between stations about hormones, pelvic floor therapy, nutrition, mindset, relationships, and stress. The energy felt hopeful. Curious. Alive.
But she looked completely still.
She stared at the board for a long moment before finally writing four words across the front:
“My mind won’t shut off.”
Then she laughed a little after she wrote it. Not because it was funny. The kind of laugh women give when they feel unexpectedly seen.
She handed me the marker and said quietly, “I thought it was just me.”
That moment stayed with me long after The Menopause Escape Room ended.
Because all morning long, women came to my station and wrote down the patterns they wanted to break. I expected to see things like confidence struggles or burnout. Maybe body image. Maybe fear of aging.
Instead, the same themes kept showing up again and again.
“My mind won’t shut off.”
“I don’t have time to slow down.”
“I’ll do it later.”
Different women. Different lives. Same exhaustion.
One woman told me she wakes up tired before her feet even hit the floor because her brain starts running the second she opens her eyes.
Another said she cannot remember the last time she sat down without feeling guilty about it.
Another laughed while writing “I’ll do it later,” then immediately said, “That’s basically my entire life right now.”
And there it was.
Not laziness. Not weakness. Not failure.
Patterns.
Patterns built slowly over years of carrying too much for too long.
What struck me most was how normal these women thought it all was.
They thought everyone’s brain felt this loud. They thought living in constant urgency was adulthood. They thought procrastination meant they lacked discipline.
But as I listened to woman after woman share, I realized something important.
Most women in midlife are not struggling because they are incapable.
They are struggling because they have adapted.
Adapted to being needed. Adapted to emotional labor. Adapted to rushing. Adapted to pressure. Adapted to never fully resting.
At some point, survival mode stops feeling temporary and starts feeling like personality.
That is why the exercise became emotional for so many women.
Because for the first time, they were not just thinking about the pattern privately in their heads. They were naming it. Looking at it. Holding it in their hands.
And then they broke it.
Literally.
One by one, women snapped the board with their hands and chose a new message to replace the old pattern. Tiny stress balls printed with phrases like: “Take a deep breath." ”Believe in yourself.”“Focus, listen, breathe.” "Make it happen.”
It sounds simple.
But something shifted in those moments.
Not because a stress ball changes your life. Not because breaking a board magically rewires your brain.
But because awareness changes things.
Language changes things.
Being able to say, “This is the pattern I keep repeating,” is often the very beginning of freedom.
I think many women are walking around believing they need more discipline, more motivation, or better time management.
But what they may actually need is permission to pause long enough to notice what has been running their lives in the background.
The women at that event did not need someone to fix them.
They needed someone to help them recognize that the pattern is not the same thing as who they are.
That overwhelmed is not an identity. That urgency is not a personality trait. That overthinking is not proof that they are broken.
It is proof that they have been carrying too much for too long.
And maybe change does not begin with fixing everything at once.
Maybe it begins much smaller.
One deep breath. One pause before reacting. One decision without second-guessing. One moment of doing something differently than you did yesterday.
That is how patterns begin to break.
Not all at once.
But one interrupted moment at a time.
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