PART 1

A lot of women in midlife are doing enough “wellness practices” to qualify for a punch card.

They are eating all the proteins, drinking water from containers large enough to bathe a toddler, walking like a wolf covering its Alaskan territory, and they have considered strength training with the grave seriousness of a woman reviewing a legal settlement. Their kitchen cabinets are full of magnesium (at least 2 kinds), they’re convinced cortisol is out to get them, they have tried to sleep better on “cooling” bedding, they breathe deeper, drink less, stretch more, track all the things, stack every habit, and believe that regulating their nervous system is a do or die daily practice in order not to turn into a satanical mess,

Point is, they are not doing nothing.

When the body starts changing in midlife, many women assume the first problem must be effort. They start to believe that they don’t have enough discipline, or enough consistency. They think they’re not eating enough of “the right things” or weight training enough.

The culture we live in tells them these things, and it hands them one of two tidy little explanations about why they still feel like a potato pancake:

“You need to DO MORE of all the things”.
OR

“If you get the right HRT program, you’ll feel like yourself again!”

Even in 2026, we still do not talk about midlife transitions with enough depth, and many women are left trying to interpret a whole-body change with the vocabulary of self-improvement.

This is not a minor software update.

Menopause itself is officially marked after 12 consecutive months without a period. Perimenopause is the change-years before that point, and for many women, it can last 4-8 years…many of them filled with a variety of uncomfortable symptoms

Let’s talk about some of the things that we don’t hear as much, because we have heard “hot flashes” and “stubborn weight gain” a lot. The internet has covered those with the enthusiasm of a cruise director….but what about the ones that can make a capable woman feel like she is suddenly bad at life?! Can we talk about those?

Perimenopause can make you feel like you’re not even yourself anymore.

For many women, this feels hard to explain.

Maybe they’re sobbing in the pantry or throwing a ceramic mug at the moon. They still love their people, but feel less connected to them. They still care about their work, but it feels farther away somehow. They know they’re still strong and capable, but ordinary things feel oddly more expensive, energetically and physically.

They recognize their life, but don’t feel fully inside it anymore.

A 2024 study exploring the phrase “not feeling like myself” during perimenopause found that women used this language alongside symptoms involving anxiety and vigilance, fatigue and pain, brain fog, sexual symptoms, and volatile mood. In other words, “I don’t feel like myself” is not just a vague complaint. It may be the only language a woman has for a cluster of real changes she has not been taught to recognize.

This matters because the phrase “I don’t feel like myself” often gets flattened into stress.

And sure, stress is involved. Most women in midlife are not exactly living inside a spa brochure, but stress is not the whole story. Stress is what happens when a woman is expected to run the household, answer the emails, work a side hustle, remember the orthodontist, locate the shin guards, keep the aging parent safe, communicate with non-violence, drive to seven different places, and produce a cooked vegetable by 6:30pm.

On top of that, their body is undergoing about thirteen different new experiences because the hormonal highway is on strike. That definitely makes someone feel not like the Self that they were used to for the last 20 years.

Perimenopause can cause emotional flatness and disinterest in pleasure.

There’s a word for this: anhedonia.

Anhedonia means a reduced ability to feel pleasure from things that would normally feel good, satisfying, or meaningful.

It can be connected to depression, grief, burnout, chronic stress, poor sleep, medications, thyroid issues, nutrient deficiencies, and other medical concerns. And, during perimenopause, hormone changes can also lead to anhedonia. It’s not always connected to clinical depression.

This is where language can change everything.

Many women do not walk into a provider’s office and say, “I am experiencing reduced pleasure and emotional flatness.” They say, “I feel weird.” They say, “I don’t feel like myself.” They say, “Maybe I’m just ungrateful.” They say, “My life is good, so why do I feel so far away from it?”

Without language, the symptoms become “stress”. Then, shame.

With language, the unexplainable becomes something to investigate, not dismiss as “just stress.”

Why is stress tolerance lower in perimenopause?

Stress tolerance can feel lower in perimenopause because the body’s stress system may become more reactive while its recovery system becomes less reliable.

That is not a poetic way of saying “you need a vacation,” though you may also need a vacation, ideally somewhere no one asks where the scissors are.

Estrogen and progesterone do more than manage reproduction. They also interact with brain chemicals and stress-response pathways that affect mood, sleep, focus, arousal, and emotional regulation. Estrogen has relationships with serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, GABA, and the HPA axis (the communication system between the brain and adrenal glands that helps regulate cortisol and the stress response). Progesterone and its metabolites also interact with GABA receptors, which are part of the brain’s calming system.

During perimenopause, these hormones can rise and fall unevenly, and that fluctuation seems to make the system more sensitive. The body may read ordinary demands as louder than before. The brain may move into vigilance faster. The nervous system may have a harder time coming back down after being activated.

Then sleep gets involved, because of course it does. Broken sleep, night waking, hot flashes, pain, urinary symptoms, or early morning waking can further disrupt the body’s stress regulation. Research has found that estradiol suppression and sleep fragmentation can each affect HPA-axis activity, which is one reason poor sleep and stress can become such an irritating little duet in midlife.

Women often get called “more irritable”, but that can feel like a scolding. It’s too close to “be nicer” when their physiological landscape is causing a series of natural disasters they can’t control.

Meditation and breathwork can feel wonderfully relaxing, but they do not suddenly dictate a balanced hormone schedule and make a biological stress response disappear.

Perimenopause can reduce stress tolerance, period.

You are not failing the wellness checklist.

None of this is a character flaw wearing a hormone costume.

It is a long, unannounced physiological transition that most women were handed approximately zero useful vocabulary for, and then left to interpret through the lens of self-improvement, discipline, and the vague suspicion that everyone else is handling it better.

They are not.

In part two of this blog series, we're going to talk about what actually helps during this transition, what it cannot do, and what it might look like to care for the body you're living in right now without treating every new symptom like evidence of something you did wrong.