Women Have Been Doing This for Hundreds of Thousands of Years
My TikTok algorithm has decided I am the exact correct age for perimenopause content. My For You Page is now a rolling carousel of women in their forties explaining their symptoms, their supplements, their hormone panels, and their absolute outrage that no one warned them. I’m not unsympathetic. I’ve watched hours of it. But after a while I started noticing something. Women have been navigating perimenopause for the entire span of human existence. Hundreds of thousands of years. Somehow, civilisation continued.
So why does it suddenly feel, in the past hundred years or so, like perimenopause is a medical emergency? Like a deficiency. Like something that requires intervention, hormones, supplements, and a small fortune in functional medicine appointments before you’ve even worked out what’s going on with your body. The marketing alone could fund a small country. Every other ad is a woman in soft linen telling me my hormones are crashing and she has the answer for $89.99 a month.
I’m not saying perimenopause isn’t real. I’m not saying women aren’t suffering. I am very much saying both of those things are true. What I’m asking is whether we’ve been sold a particular story about why it’s happening, and whether that story has more to do with selling us things than understanding our bodies. Because something doesn’t add up when ancestral women managed this transition without HRT and almond lattes, but modern women are apparently falling apart by 38.
The West Has a Very Specific Drama About Ageing
Look at how perimenopause is described in non-Western cultures and you’ll find a very different vibe. In Japan, the word for menopause translates roughly to renewal or second spring. In many Indigenous cultures, the transition is associated with becoming a wise woman, an elder, someone whose voice carries more weight, not less. The symptoms reported are often milder. Hot flushes are less common. The whole experience is treated as a phase of life, not a medical crisis.
Meanwhile in the West, we treat ageing in women like a personal failure. The wrinkles, the softening, the slowing down, all of it gets framed as something to fight, fix, or hide. We pour money into looking 28 forever. We get told our worth is tied to our youth, our fertility, our ability to be palatable. So of course the moment our bodies start signalling a transition, we panic. We’ve been trained to read every sign of change as a sign of decline. That’s not biology. That’s culture doing a number on us.
And then conveniently, the medical industry shows up with a solution. Synthetic hormones. Patches. Pills. Creams. An entire industry built on the premise that your natural transition is a deficiency that needs correcting. I’m not anti HRT, by the way. For some women, it’s genuinely life changing and necessary. But the speed at which we leap to medicalising a normal biological process is wild when you stop to think about it. We don’t pump teenage boys full of hormones during puberty. We let them be moody and weird and grow into themselves. Why are we so quick to override women?
What If the Symptoms Are Our Body’s Reaction to Modern Life
Here’s the thought that won’t leave me alone. What if the dramatic perimenopause symptoms so many women report aren’t proof our bodies are giving up, but proof our bodies are reacting to the absolute chaos of modern Western life? Because let’s be honest about what we’re dealing with. Ultra processed food. Inflammatory seed oils. Microplastics in everything. Constant blue light. Chronic stress. Disrupted sleep. Endocrine disrupting chemicals in our skincare, our cleaning products, our drinking water.
Women in cultures where perimenopause is reportedly milder tend to eat differently. They move more. They sleep in actual darkness. They aren’t drowning in cortisol from being permanently switched on. They’re not eating beige food from a packet at their desks while answering emails on their phones. Their bodies aren’t being asked to navigate a hormonal transition while simultaneously processing seventeen different kinds of inflammation and a low grade panic attack.
When I started getting symptoms, the hot flushes, the disrupted sleep, the inexplicable rage at minor inconveniences, I made a choice not to immediately panic and book a hormone panel. I changed how I lived instead. Anti inflammatory food. More rest. Cutting back on the stuff I knew was making me feel rubbish. Saying no more often. Drinking water like it was my job. Letting myself sit on the couch with Lulu chewing on my toes instead of pushing through. And the symptoms eased. Not because I’m magic, but because my body was apparently quite tired and trying to tell me something I’d been ignoring.
Maybe We’re Not Hormonal, Maybe We’re Tired
One of the most commonly listed perimenopause symptoms is a sudden lack of patience. Irritability. Not wanting to cook. Snapping at people. Feeling like you’ve reached the end of something. And every time I read that list I think, sweetheart, that’s not your hormones. That’s your forty year audit finally arriving. That’s your body sending you the bill for two decades of carrying everyone else’s emotional weight and pretending it didn’t bother you.
Women in their forties have been doing the mental load, the emotional load, the social load, the domestic load, the work load, and somehow the everyone else’s birthday card load, all at once, for years. By the time perimenopause rolls around, of course we don’t want to cook. We’ve cooked ten thousand meals. Of course we’re impatient. We’ve been patient for decades and it got us absolutely nowhere. Of course we don’t want to manage anyone else’s feelings. We’re done. The rage isn’t a malfunction. The rage is information.
We’ve pathologised something that, to me, looks suspiciously like women finally hitting their limit and their body refusing to keep performing. Maybe perimenopause isn’t a breakdown. Maybe it’s a rebellion. A biological line in the sand. A loud, sweaty, sleep deprived demand to be heard, supported, and allowed to actually rest. And instead of listening, we’ve been told to fix it, medicate it, push through it, and keep going. No wonder we’re flushing.
So What Do We Actually Do With This
I’m not telling anyone to throw out their HRT. I’m not telling you to ignore your symptoms or refuse medical care. I’m not telling you that lifestyle alone fixes everything, because for some women it absolutely doesn’t, and that’s where medicine genuinely earns its place. What I am saying is, before we accept the story that our bodies are simply broken at 40, maybe ask whether the story is even ours.
Try the unsexy stuff first. Eat food that didn’t come out of a packet. Sleep in a dark room. Move your body in a way that doesn’t punish it. Drink your green tea. Buy your matcha out if making it at home feels like one more task. Sit with the discomfort instead of immediately reaching for a fix. Notice what your body is actually asking for, because in my experience, it’s almost never another supplement. It’s usually rest, food, water, and being left alone for an afternoon.
And then, if you still feel rotten, get the bloods. See the doctor. Take the hormones if they help. Do whatever you need to do. But do it from a place of knowing your body, not from a place of being terrified that ageing means falling apart. You’re not falling apart. You’re transitioning, the same way women have transitioned for hundreds of thousands of years. You’re allowed to question the modern panic around it. You’re allowed to be a tired forty something who needs less, not more. You’re allowed to call this what it might actually be. A reckoning. A rebellion. A second spring.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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