Your Nervous System in Perimenopause (And Why It Feels Like Your Body’s Take on Stranger Things)
Stranger Things was an ah-mazing show, but living through it? No thanks. I can’t be alone in this…
But there are days my body feels as unpredictable as the plot of that show often felt.
This is not an isolated experience.
There’s something I hear often from women in perimenopause, and I’ve experienced it myself: I don't recognize myself anymore.
They may not use those exact words, but I will, because it was in every bit of our stories. Not in a dramatic way, though it may, at times, feel dramatic. It's the friend who says she's been snapping at her kids and doesn't know why. The teacher, who had been a champion sleeper for forty years, suddenly woke up at 3 a.m., as if her body had just remembered something urgent. It’s how her whole family laughs about that one time she said “little taco shells” instead of “tortilla chips.”
Here's what I remind them: Your nervous system is not betraying you. It's responding to a real, significant hormonal transition, and nobody prepared you for what that actually looks like from the inside.
What Every Woman Should Know About Estrogen
Let's talk about estrogen for a second, because most conversations about perimenopause leave it out of the nervous system discussion entirely, and it belongs there. Estrogen supports the production of serotonin and GABA (two of the brain's primary “settling” neurotransmitters). Estrogen regulates cortisol rhythms. It helps maintain the stability that makes you feel like you can handle your life. When estrogen starts fluctuating erratically in perimenopause (and it fluctuates more before it declines…), the nervous system becomes easier to activate and harder to settle.
Translation: You're not really more anxious because you've become a more anxious person. You're more activated because your nervous system's internal regulatory chemistry has shifted, and nobody prepped you for what was coming.
This is why I'm so committed to cycle-aware, nervous system-centered approaches to this transition. The usual advice — eat better, sleep more, meditate, reduce stress — is not wrong, but it's also not enough. It doesn't account for the fact that your nervous system is navigating a genuinely different hormonal landscape, and the approach you use needs to meet you there.
What actually helps:
Understanding your personal activation patterns, in other words, what sends your nervous system into a stress response, how that's changed, and what helps you come back to yourself. Not what worked five years ago. Now.
Tracking your cycle if you're still cycling, even irregularly. Perimenopause doesn't mean cycles stop immediately, rather it means they become unpredictable. Knowing where you are hormonally on any given week can explain much of what feels random and alarming.
Building real nervous system capacity, not just coping mechanisms. There's a difference between getting through the hard moments and actually increasing your window of tolerance, so there are fewer hard moments.
Addressing sleep not as a willpower issue but as a physiological one. Sleep in perimenopause is disrupted for nervous system reasons, and estrogen decline affects sleep directly. That means the support needs to account for that, not just treat you like someone who needs better sleep habits.
Nutrition that supports, not stresses. Your blood sugar stability is directly linked to your stress response. Eating in ways that keep your blood sugar regulated is, in this season, a form of nervous system care.
None of this is about perfecting your perimenopause experience. It's about having real information and real support, so you're not just holding-on-for-dear-life through a transition that could last a decade.
In case you need to hear it:
You are not falling apart. You are in an important and wildly beautiful biological transition, and you deserve a real framework for it, not just reassurance that it'll be over eventually.