Women Who Podcast - How to start, run and grow your podcast · Alison Fraser

Can you stop your podcast and restart with a better focus? Sonya Lovell did.

·44 min

Alison Fraser opens by asking what happens when a podcaster wants to stop, rest, and come back with better focus. Sonia Lovell answers from experience with Dear Menopause. She says she built the show for people moving through perimenopause and menopause, and that the topic has become much more present in everyday life. She also says she did not fully think through how much time the work would take. The show was always a solo operation. She still edits and produces everything herself, with no team behind her. That meant finding guests, setting up interviews, recording conversations, cutting the audio, and then handling social media and marketing. By episode 79, plus a handful of bonus episodes, she decided to call it the end of season one. Burnout was part of the reason. Other life demands were piling up too. She recorded a brief update for listeners and told them she was taking a break, not quitting. She wanted them to know she would be back. The pause gave her a mental break from the weekly grind. It also created space to step away from the constant cycle of planning the next interview, scheduling it, and then doing the editing, producing, social media, and marketing that follow. She thinks the break lasted about eight weeks. When she returned, she had a better sense of what the podcast should be doing. She niched down. The conversation keeps circling back to the practical reality of making a show while living a normal life. It stays grounded and direct. The result is a useful conversation for anyone wondering whether a pause can become a reset.

As heard by us

A sensible pause and a narrower focus make the return feel earned.

Women Who Podcasts turns a familiar problem into something practical: what happens when a solo host is worn down, overextended, and needs to step back without losing the show.

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Why you'd press play

If your podcast needs a pause before a relaunch, this shows how one host handled the break, the listener update, and the return.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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