Reclaim pleasure in your body

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,' wrote Mary Oliver, in her poem Wild Geese. Children know this innately. Yet, by midlife, we might have long lost the ability to relate to our body as an instrument for pleasure.

Perhaps we've spent decades living in our head, steeped in our worries and to-do lists. Plus, as Mills says, 'We're conditioned to view our bodies through the distortion of the male lens, and believe they're only valuable for their appearance and their youth. This can leave us with a disassociated sense of them not really being our own.' This can come hand in hand with a sense we don't measure up. And if the relationship many of us have with our body is thorny at the best of times, then add in the very real changes perimenopause and menopause can bring and it can become even trickier.

'It's scary to see and feel our body change,' acknowledges Gabriella Espinosa, a midlife and sexual wellness coach. 'But there's another way of looking at this transitional period: Chinese medicine calls it our Second Spring, a time of renewal and rebirth.

'We might have been living in the service of others - be it our kids,partners or bosses - for a long time, and typically put ourselves last. Midlife can be a new chapter, where we finally learn to prioritise our own pleasure, and rediscover the joy of inhabiting our body,' continues Espinosa.