May is National Women’s Health Awareness Month: Honoring Our Bodies, Our Mothers, and Ourselves—Every May, I find myself pausing—not just as a physician, but as a woman and a mother—asking the same question I now invite you to ask too: how am I really caring for myself?
May is National Women’s Health Awareness Month, a time to pause, reflect, and recommit to caring for women’s health at every stage of life. It is also the month that holds Mother’s Day.
For me personally, it is the month I became a mom. That moment forever changed how I understood care, responsibility, and love. It was also the first time I really felt my own needs move to the back burner.
Motherhood in All Its Forms
Motherhood goes far beyond biology. Women are caregivers in countless ways: raising children and fur babies, supporting partners, caring for aging parents, and tending to friends, communities, patients, and teams.
Whether or not you have given birth, most women know what it means to care for others, often at the expense of ourselves.
What We Learned From Our Mothers
My own mom is a retired pediatrician. I grew up watching her care deeply for countless kids and their parents while navigating the demands of medicine, family, and her own womanhood.
She modeled intellect and service to others, but like many women of her generation, she also lived in a system that did not prioritize women’s internal health or emotional well-being. It was much later that I realized how often her own health took a back seat to everyone else’s.
That legacy—of caring deeply while quietly enduring—shaped me, and it is one many women recognize. Does this resonate with you?
Women’s Health Often Comes Last
Women are statistically at higher risk than men for developing many chronic and life-altering conditions, including depression, anxiety, hypothyroidism, autoimmune disease, and osteoporosis.
Yet women are also far more likely to put their own health last, prioritizing everyone else before themselves. Caregiving becomes an identity, and self-care drops way down on the priority list.
Women’s Health Is Lifelong
Women’s health is not just about the reproductive years. It is about our full lifespan. It is about hormonal health, emotional resilience, sexual vitality, bone strength, metabolic function, nervous system regulation, and the profound transitions of perimenopause and menopause.
Although these transitions are natural, they are not meant to be dismissed, minimized, or endured without support.
Mental Health, Midlife, and the Missing Hormone Conversation
May is also National Mental Health Awareness Month, which makes this conversation even more important. In midlife, many women present with mental health issues, including anxiety, low mood, irritability, insomnia, brain fog, and emotional overwhelm.
Too often, these symptoms are treated in isolation—with antidepressants or sleeping pills that I call “band-aid medications.” While these medications absolutely have a place in health care (sometimes you need a band-aid), they are often prescribed without addressing the root cause: declining and fluctuating hormones.
I can’t count how many women have sat across from me saying, ‘I thought I was losing my mind,’ when what they were actually experiencing was hormonal depletion.
Hormones Are Essential for Mental Health
Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone play critical roles in mood regulation, sleep quality, cognition, motivation, and emotional stability. When these hormones shift—as they inevitably do in midlife—women may be told they are depressed, anxious, or “just stressed,” without looking at the root cause.
Supporting mental health in midlife must include supporting hormonal health. One without the other does not address the total picture.
Seeing the Whole Woman
As a physician specializing in women navigating menopause, grief, identity shifts, and major life transitions, I see daily how intimately interconnected our bodies, minds, and life experiences truly are.
Women do not experience one symptom at a time. Stress, loss, caregiving, trauma, and unrelenting responsibility all have real health impacts. Healing requires seeing the whole woman—not just a symptom checklist or a handful of lab values. I often sit with women while they cry with relief when they finally feel heard and believed.
Listen to the Wisdom of Your Body.
This month of May, let’s reflect on where our relationship with our own health begins. For many of us, our mothers were our first teachers—showing us how to care, how to endure, and sometimes how to ignore our own needs.
This month invites us to honor our mothers while also choosing to evolve beyond patterns of self-sacrifice that no longer serve us.
Call to Action
National Women’s Health Awareness Month is a call to action. Schedule the appointment you have been delaying. Ask deeper questions. Learn about your hormones. Pay attention to your sleep, energy, mood, libido, and body signals.
You are not imagining your symptoms, and you do not need to accept “you are ‘just’ getting older” as an answer. If any part of this feels familiar, that’s not a coincidence; it’s your body asking for attention.
Put Your Own Oxygen Mask on First
This month is about honoring the women who came before us and empowering ourselves now. Remember that women’s health matters.
• Self-care is not selfish—it is what makes everything else possible.
When women are supported, informed, and thriving in their health, it ripples through families and communities.
As we honor mothers this May, biological or otherwise, let’s also learn to mother ourselves with the same compassion, patience, and attentiveness we so freely give to others. Women deserve healthcare that listens, asks questions, and honors the fullness of who we are.
If your body whispers to you in fatigue, restlessness, or other health issues, those signals are not failures; they are invitations. This May, choose to respond with compassion instead of dismissal. Choose self-care over tolerating not feeling great.
Take care of your health, both physical and mental. When you put your own oxygen mask on first, you create more space to breathe for yourself and for everyone whose life you touch.
“This May, I invite women to mother themselves with the same compassion they so freely give away.“
-Dr. Liz Lyster
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