125. Closing the Year with Calm, Clarity & Hope for 2026

As 2025 comes to a close, what if your most powerful health habit for the new year isn’t doing more—but learning to slow down? In this reflective episode of Cycle Wisdom, Dr. Monica Minjeur explores how calm, sleep, nervous system regulation, and simplified care can dramatically improve cycle health, mental health, and fertility outcomes.

Through a patient story and themes seen across hundreds of women this year, you’ll learn why less intensity often leads to better ovulation, stronger luteal phases, and greater emotional resilience. Dr. Minjeur also shares a gentle, step-by-step reset to help you enter 2026 with clarity, focus, and hope—without overwhelm or unrealistic expectations.

👉 Learn more or book a discovery call at radiantclinic.com

Transcript

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Welcome back to Cycle Wisdom, where we empower women to restore natural menstrual cycles, to improve health and promote fertility. I'm your host, Dr. Monica Minjeur, and I'm so glad you're listening today. What if your most important health habit for 2026 isn't a supplement or a new workout? Or some crazy fad diet, but instead learning to pause, breathe, and give your body time to heal. Today we're going to reflect on 2025, what mattered most for cycle and mental health, and how to step into 2026 with calm, clarity and hope. So let's start off with talking about Shelby. Now, Shelby had been trying to conceive for four years, and she felt like she was behind the game. Her friends were announcing pregnancies, work demands were relentless, and every time she had a period, it felt like a failure. Her sleep was broken, and every Sunday she started a new worry spiral into what would happen The next week, she kept on adding more supplements. Harder workouts, but continued to feel worse. In early December after a negative test, Shelby said, I can't do this anymore. I am done. Now I wanna interject here and say this is incredibly common. Every year we see many, many of our patients in December just give up. There is so much going on with the holidays. It marks the end of another year of trying, and for some people another year of not being pregnant still. And so I want to address the fact that this is a very real thing and it is absolutely normal and expected, but I also want to invite you to consider another option forward. And so what we did when I met with Shelby earlier this month is we decided to simplify things. We decided to pause anything that was non-essential. I made sure that her partner was taking a part in charting her cycles and handed all of that over to him. We built in a six week breakdown plan of what things looked like in order to make sure that she had her sanity. First, we talked about a consistent bedtime. Getting short 10 minute walks two or three times in throughout her day. We talked about simple steps to make sure that she had protein at breakfast, trying to decrease the amount of screen time that she was utilizing, especially before bedtime, and helping to focus on a shorter fertility window in order to avoid the increased stress and pressure that came during that time. At the end of our visit, Shelby said she felt more steady like this was a doable plan, and we discussed the option that if she decided to focus on health rather than conception every single month, that may feel a little less intense for her. She decided that going forward, she didn't want her anxiety to be the leading force she wanted instead to focus on improving her overall health, both physical and mental. So this all sounds great and easy, but man, it is anything but, and here are some things as we look at 2025 that I saw in patients across the board. The first is that calm always wins over chaos. Our patients felt better when they were able to protect sleep. When they were able to incorporate gentle movement rather than going intense. They were able to find better ovulation, better luteal phases when they were working on balancing what they were eating rather than going to the extremes. The other big theme that we saw resonate with many of our patients is simplifying their supplements and tests, trying to decrease the overwhelm. Less is always better. Especially when it is focused. So for example, instead of coming in and taking 20 different supplements that you think are going to help with fixing problem X, y, Z, let's focus on the two or three that are specific for your unique situation and focus on that instead. Focusing on your nervous system can also make a big difference when it comes to your hormones. So this may be things like breath work, setting boundaries. Specifically managing stressful situations. All of these pieces can help reduce cortisol, smooth out any PMS symptoms, and most importantly, give your body the break it needs to get back on track so you're not just constantly in this fight or flight. And finally, community counts. Having a supportive partner, friends, family members, or care teams who can hold space for you in whatever season you may be in, can absolutely change the outcomes of how you feel about your next steps. So I'd invite you to take just a moment and think to yourself, what did you learn about your body or your cycles this past year? Maybe it's something you learned about on this podcast, or maybe it's something you discovered after doing a deeper dive, but I can guarantee that you've learned at least something about yourself and what you need to do to go forward and have improved health in the next year. Lies in what it is that you learned this past year. So if you are ready to figure out what you can do to continue moving forward, whether that's on your fertility journey or in healing your cycles, here are some things to think through and a practical way that you can start that reset that makes sense without being restrictive going into the new year. So first and foremost, I would just like to say please don't feel like you have to do everything all at once. There are so many factors that can play a role when it comes to fertility evaluation and evaluation of your menstrual cycles, and really the focus instead should be on working with a trained healthcare professional who is able to take all of that off of your plate and just let them run with it. Because if you try and do everything all at once, it can just add to the anxiety and the overwhelm. You also wanna focus on making small step-by-step changes. Again, not feeling like you need to change everything all at once. So here's what I would offer for some practical steps. For the first week, focus on stabilizing your sleep and eliminating excess light. So what I mean by that is focus on getting to sleep at about the same time every night, plus or minus 30 minutes. Ideally turning off any artificial light, so specifically from phones, tablets, computer screens, or tv, at least one to two hours prior to bedtime, and also focusing on getting it really, really dark in your room as this can make a huge difference with the quality of sleep and ovulation. If you need more practical tips on how to help restore your sleep and its impact on hormones, go back and listen to episode number 98 where I talk about restoring sleep. Alright, now after you've got week one, that's sleep down, let's talk about week two, focusing on breakfast and breathing. So for this week, I want you to focus on getting at least 20 to 30 grams of protein with your breakfast every single day. Now, this does not need to necessarily be one particular food group, but think about eggs, nuts, dairy, meat, other ways that you can get that protein in specifically helps to reduce a mid-morning cortisol spike, and helps to start balancing your blood sugar. The breathing part of this is to focus on at least five minutes a day of deep breathing. Now you can do this multiple different ways of inhaling for a count of four, exhaling for a count of six, or do a guided body scan where you're laying quietly or sitting quietly and just looking through each area of your body to see where you might have tension. Ideally, trying to do this for five minutes a day can be incredibly helpful for reducing stress levels and an added bonus if you do it before. Sleep often tends to help with getting to deep REM sleep more quickly and helps to turn off that hamster wheel that might be running a million miles an hour trying to get your stress amped up. So, week two, breakfast and breathe. Week three, start some movement. Gently. Now, if you are already somebody who is an intense exerciser, I would recommend trying to cut back on the intensity. From a hormone standpoint, we want to be looking at the equivalent of 20 to 30 minutes of walking daily. Now, this doesn't have to be all at once. Some people like to break it up and walk for three separate sessions, 10 minutes at a time. Some people choose to walk while they're on the phone with a friend or carrying out business meetings if with clients, if they're able to do that. And then I would also invite, if it feels right for you to add in some resistance training. We know that resistance training is so good for our bones, for our muscles, and for helping with insulin resistance. So trying to replace maybe that extra session of doom scrolling with something that helps. To get good exercise or activity in, maybe that's when you're doing resistance training instead, or getting that walk. So week three, starting to move the needle gently with some exercise. And then week four, focusing on simplifying and what you need to do to move forward. So of the things that you had done previously, helping with sleep, breakfast, and breathing, moving. Choose now in week four to keep only the three things that were most helpful for you, and then put it at the rest of it on a shelf. You can always pick it up and review again in February. If you're trying to conceive. Use your biomarkers to kind of focus in that narrow fertile window and start to pay attention to what are the things that are gonna actually move the needle for me. All of this will help with knowing where do I need to start. Next. So just a quick recap. Here's some things that you could try that might feel good to move the needle for you. Picking a bedtime and guarding it. Eating protein at breakfast on a daily basis, and noticing how you feel taking a walk after dinner, most nights, during a week, replacing doom, scrolling with five minutes of deep breathing instead. Choosing what one medical step that you're going to take to move forward. Not five steps, not 20 steps, but what is the one best step to move forward and get it scheduled? And most importantly, paying attention to what your body did right this year. You are learning so much, and it is really easy to overlook that sometimes. Looking ahead to 2026, we're going to be digging into many different topics on cycle wisdom, and I would love your help with knowing what you want to hear more about things that we heard, common themes that we will continue to talk more about are the relationship between mental health and your hormones. Things like cycle informed fitness and lifestyle changes. Talking about male factor and how we talk through practical changes that need to be made when we evaluate male factors, specifically when it comes to fertility concerns, perimenopause. And menopause. We're gonna be talking about a lot of these transition changes because there is so much that takes place during this timeframe and so much that is variable, but it absolutely can be impacted and can see changes for the positive. And finally, and probably most importantly. Patient stories. We hear from patients all the time that they love to hear stories about others like them, and so we'll continue to share patient stories, the real wins that our patients are having, the challenges, the struggles, and how we work through that because we can't wait to partner with you in 2026 to be able to get clear vision on your goals and help you achieve the healthcare goals that you are looking for. Imagine if the calendar flipping over didn't pressure you to do more, but was an invitation to do less with more focus and more intention. Imagine relearning, calm. With sleep. That can be restorative food that studies your insulin levels movement that regulates your cycles without seeming too intense and letting your healthcare be sequenced, not scrambled or overwhelmed. All of this is possible for your next steps forward, a decision to be more kind to yourself, to give yourself grace and to honor the phase that you are in to improve health. And promote fertility.

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If you're ready to work with our elite team of healthcare professionals, go to our website, radiant clinic.com to schedule a free discovery call and learn more about our package based pricing for comprehensive care. We are currently able to see people for in-person appointments in our Cedar Rapids, Iowa Clinic, or can arrange for a telehealth visit if you live in many different states across the us. Check out our website for current states that we can serve medical clients and let us know if your state is not listed to see if we can still cover you there as we are constantly expanding our reach. Please note that our fertility educators are able to take care of clients no matter where they live. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please share this podcast with someone in your life who would benefit from our services. Remember to subscribe to this podcast for more empowering content that I look forward to sharing with you on our next episode of Cycle Wisdom.