How can I better cope with perimenopause?

Taking care of yourself

A Tuesday at ten past one, in your office. You have forty minutes ahead of you, the first gap of the day, and you know exactly what would do you good: going out for a quarter-hour walk. Instead you open your personal email, because you have to call your mother's cardiologist back before four o'clock, otherwise the appointment falls through and you'll have to start the whole process again. The callback takes twelve minutes on hold. Then a message from your son about a form to sign. At quarter to two, you have eaten a sandwich in front of the screen and the gap has gone. You did not waste it: it went towards something necessary. That is precisely what makes this scene hard to challenge, and it is also why it repeats itself.

To try: For two weeks, note only the number of genuinely free minutes in your day — not assigned to an obligation, however legitimate. Do not note what you do with them. This figure is probably far lower than you think, and it shifts the question: it stops being "how do I organize myself better" and becomes "where could extra minutes come from", which is a question that is negotiated with other people.

Working with the discomforts

Thursday, half past ten, in a meeting. The heat rises all at once, as usual without warning, and you feel it in the back of your neck and then in your face. You know it will last two or three minutes and you also know that you have to speak in a moment. You concentrate on making sure nothing shows, which takes your full attention and makes you lose the thread of what is being said. When your turn comes, the word you are looking for does not come. You work around it, no one notices anything, the meeting goes on. But you come out with that double fatigue: the fatigue of the episode itself, and that of having spent twenty minutes acting as if nothing were happening.

To try: For one month, note these episodes with just three pieces of information: the day, the time, and what had preceded them in the previous hour. You are looking for a regularity that the overall impression may be masking — many women find one after a few weeks, where everything had seemed random. And take this record to a consultation: disabling hot flushes in a work setting are a legitimate reason to consult, and some of them can be managed.

Inner supports

Sunday evening, ten o'clock. The week has been bad: two broken nights, a word forgotten mid-sentence in front of a client, an argument with your daughter. You are sitting on the edge of the bed and you expect the usual harshness to arrive. It does not really arrive. Instead, you hear yourself thinking something quite simple: that the week has been hard and that it is not your fault. It is not a consolation, you do not entirely believe it, but it is enough not to add another layer to what is already there. You turn out the light. You do not count that moment as a resource — it does not look like anything in particular. Yet it is exactly what allows you to start again on Monday.

To try: Write down once, in five lines, what you come back to when a day has been bad: a sentence you say to yourself, a thing that matters, a person you think of. Put the sheet somewhere visible. These are your most solid supports, and they are the first to disappear silently when a period drags on — not because they stop existing, but because you forget they are there.

Turning to support

Friday evening, a friend asks you how you are. You open your mouth, and you stop. To answer honestly you would have to mention the nights, the lapses of memory, the cycles that no longer follow any logic, the fact that you do not know yourself whether it is perimenopause or fatigue or age. You would have to establish that something is happening before even saying what. You quickly calculate what that would take — ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and the energy to be precise — and you answer "I'm fine, a bit tired". The conversation moves on to something else. It is not that you do not trust her. It is that you did not have, that evening, the energy to start from the beginning.

To try: Look for someone to talk to with whom there would be nothing to establish — a woman who has been through the same phase, or a professional. Most of the cost of turning to someone does not lie in the asking: it lies in the preliminary work of explaining, and that work drops to almost nothing with the right person. Try it once and compare what that conversation cost you with the others. The difference is often striking.

Willingness to talk about it

One Monday morning, you open the booking calendar to make an appointment. The first slot is in five weeks' time, at two o'clock — that is to say in the middle of a working afternoon, with half a day to take off. You hesitate. You tell yourself that in five weeks it may have passed, that you have nothing specific to report anyway, that other reasons would be more legitimate. You close the tab, promising yourself you will come back to it. This is neither embarrassment nor denial: you know perfectly well that the subject is worth it, and you consider yourself entirely entitled to consult. It is simply that between that conviction and the appointment booked, there is half a day to be found in a month that does not have one.

To try: Make the appointment without waiting until you have a clear picture: establishing that picture is the role of the consultation, and waiting until you know what to say is the leading reason for postponement at this stage. Treat the half-day as a logistical obstacle, not as a question of legitimacy — and book it now, while the slot exists. Take your record with you: in ten minutes it will do the work you are afraid you won't know how to do.

A problem of load rather than a problem of perimenopause

This is the reading that this report favors, and it must be presented as a hypothesis and not as a fact. It proposes that your low scores measure first and foremost a saturated schedule, and not a defective relationship with yourself: three simultaneous responsibilities, no room to manoeuvre, and a fatigue that makes anything requiring organization costly. The contrast with your solid inner supports supports it. But it remains an interpretation of a set of answers, not an observation of your life. If, on reading it, you feel that it misses something more intimate or more long-standing, it is your experience that is right, not this text. A report can offer a framework; it cannot know what you are living.

A medical picture to explore before any psychological interpretation

This is the most serious reading, and it would be dishonest not to state it explicitly. Persistent fatigue, degraded sleep, difficulties with concentration and unstable mood are attributed to perimenopause with disconcerting ease, when they also figure among the manifestations of a thyroid disorder, anemia, a deficiency, a medication effect or a depressive episode. No questionnaire can make this distinction, and automatic attribution to age is one of the best-documented factors in delayed diagnosis among women in this age group. In this reading, the first step is not to adjust your organization but to have checked what can be checked. This hypothesis costs no more than one consultation, and it is the one that would have the greatest consequences if it were confirmed.

A phase that mainly requires time

A competing reading would be to consider that what you are going through calls for neither adjustment nor strategy, but for time. Perimenopause is a transitional phase, with a beginning and an end, and part of what it produces eases of its own accord once the transition is complete. In this version, trying to live it better would be less useful than holding on while limiting the damage, and the energy devoted to improving things would be better spent elsewhere. This reading has a share of truth and a risk: it is right about the length of the phase, and wrong about what it produces, since part of the discomforts can be treated right now and does not improve by waiting. To be taken above all as a corrective to the demand to do things well — not as a reason to ask for nothing.

What if you are getting through this period better than you think?

This reading is rarely offered, and yet it deserves to be stated seriously. Your answers describe someone who keeps her perspective, who does not berate herself, who maintains a clear relationship with what matters, and who holds three simultaneous responsibilities in a phase where the body is not cooperating. This is not a profile in difficulty: it is a profile under constraint. It is possible that part of your worry comes less from your state than from the gap between what you are living and the image of a woman who would go through this period taking care of herself every day — an image almost no one matches, and certainly not at your stage of life. If, on honest reflection, what weighs on you is the saturation of daily life more than your way of going through it, then what there is to adjust is not you, and the outlook is better than your low scores suggest at first glance.