The Therapy Room with Rhu

If it isn’t just age, what changed? I went back to the 1970s to look at how we eat, work and live, and what it might mean for men reaching andropause

Testosterone decline in men is usually blamed on age. The research suggests sleep, stress and food matter far more than we think, and that’s hopeful news.

My mum had a hysterectomy in the 70s, never had HRT, and at 89 remembers absolutely everything. So when the headlines said HRT lowers dementia risk, I went and read the study properly.

Not that long ago, women were routinely asked about children at interview. We stopped, and rightly so. But now that menopause is finally being recognised at work, could a new version of that old question be creeping in? A look at menopause and recruitment, why small firms are where it's most likely to slip, and why including andropause in the picture protects women instead of watering down their case

Menopause Action Plans become compulsory for large UK employers from 2027, but the law says nothing about the forty years of periods before menopause. I look at what the new ISO 45010 standard adds, and what a plan covering the whole cycle looks like.

What would genuinely good workplace menopause support actually look like, seen from the employee's side of the desk rather than the policy document? This piece is not about ticking a box. It looks at trust, at who employees are actually asked to open up to, and at something I think gets missed completely, that menopause does not check your job title first. A cleaner and a chief executive deserve exactly the same depth of support, not two different versions of the same trainin

A recent editorial on 'couplepause' warns that treating menopause and andropause as a couple's shared experience risks assuming both partners are going through the same thing. They're not, and here's what that difference actually looks like, inside a real household.

Why perimenopause makes ADHD harder to hide, whether you have known about it for years or never had a word for it until now. By Rhu Strand, Functional Wellness Practitioner - August 2026 A woman in the support group I co-run, asked something this weekend that has stayed with me. She already knew she had ADHD and peri-menopause. What she wanted to understand was why it had suddenly become debilitating, why the noise in her brain, something she had managed for years, had tippe

By Rhu Strand, Functional Wellness Practitioner and Workplace Wellness Consultant - June 2026 There's an argument that keeps cropping up, in conversations with couples I know and within the menopause group that I co-run. It doesn't usually start as an argument about anything specific. It begins with one partner feeling quietly hurt that the other doesn't seem to care anymore. Meanwhile, the other partner feels quietly accused of something they don't understand. Neither of th