Why Rushing Is Wrecking Your Perimenopause (and 4 Other Things No One Tells You)
Why Rushing Wrecks Your Perimenopause Season
FIVE Lifestyle Changes To Consider
Before you read any further, I want to start by acknowledging what makes most articles like this useless.
You are already overwhelmed.
And the standard advice for perimenopause feels like it’s a second job: track your cycle, lift heavy, eat thirty plants a week, meditate, cold plunge, cut caffeine, cut alcohol, cut sugar, prioritize sleep, reduce stress.
And then there is the conflicting information that makes discerning what is real, what isn’t, and which advice to follow or ignore is another job in and of itself.
Every recommendation does have some merit, and they can genuinely make a difference.
But all in all, they're a workload, delivered to a woman who is already running on fumes.
The most common feeling women in session identify is a feeling of failure, a feeling of being behind.
Most women, including myself, recognize how important it is to focus on our physical and mental health (we’ve all heard the saying of putting the oxygen mask on yourself before putting it on others), but genuinely, it feels impossible to execute.
And if you’re like me, you want to get it right, not necessarily perfect, but you want to achieve the metrics set for optimal health.
You end feeling defeated, thinking, “twenty-four hours just isn't enough time to get these things done”.
And in my effort to support my clients (and myself), I have to remind them that our efforts compound.
Change starts atomically, as James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits, so often reminds us.
Focus on 1% improvement, instead of trying to do it all at once.
So in this blog post, I want to encourage you not to give up.
Here's how I'd like you to read what follows.
Pick one lifestyle change. Do it for two weeks.
That's it! That’s the whole assignment.
Not five changes. Just one.
If it helps, keep it and consider adding another in a month.
If it doesn't, drop it without fanfare or guilt.
I like to look at everything we do as an experiment.
You are not building a protocol; you are running a small experiment on a system called your life.
Because the reality is that we receive recommendations based (if we’re lucky) on independent, evidence-based studies that are not funded by companies that want to sell you something.
But even those independent studies speak to the general audience.
They do not take into account your life and your very unique circumstances.
We must be willing to see ourselves as an experiment of 1 and make choices that sustain our lives.
And if you’re lucky to live another 40 to 50 years, you will have lots of time to tweak and optimize.
These are the five I'd choose, in the order I'd choose them, and deliberately, they're the ones that tend not to make the lists.
First: why this has to be part of it at all
If you're doing hormone therapy, or you're in therapy for mental health, or both, that’s not enough.
I want to be careful here, because I'm not making the argument that those don't work.
They do, and I make my living from one of them.
But it's worth understanding what each thing is actually for.
Hormone therapy addresses the hormonal stuff.
Fluctuating and declining estrogen genuinely affects mood, sleep, cognition, and the stress response.
Replacing it can change the baseline your nervous system operates from.
That's real, and for many women it's transformative.
Talk to a menopause-informed physician about it (the Menopause Society keeps a directory of certified practitioners, and it's one of the more useful things you can do this month).
Therapy addresses the material we store and the meaning we make of our lives.
What stories we tell ourselves.
How do we make sense of the things happening in our lives?
What is our past connected to?
Who are you becoming?
Why is this particular transition hitting the particular way it is for you?
But neither one changes the daily inputs your nervous system is running on.
There’s the missing piece.
You can do real work on a Tuesday - process something old, shift something that's been stuck for twenty years - and then spend Wednesday through Monday on four hours of broken sleep, a blood-sugar rollercoaster, two glasses of wine, and ninety minutes of a feed engineered to keep you activated.
And then you wonder why the insights you gained in session didn’t lead to sustained change.
It’s not that the work you’re doing is pointless.
It's that the conditions weren't there for it to land in.
Think of it this way: hormones set the baseline, therapy helps repair wounds, and lifestyle determines whether the repair holds.
You can't out-treat your inputs.
This is not about piling on the guilt and making you feel bad about your choices.
I understand that many of those choices are your efforts to cope with the overwhelming stress that comes with parenting, working, and just plain old living life.
Most of these choices are the ordinary consequences of a demanding life, not failures of discipline.
But they are the part with the most immediate choices you can leverage.
And unlike the other two, you can start this afternoon.
One more thing before the list.
If your instinct on reading these is “right, I'll do all five starting Monday”, that instinct is the one that got you here. I've written elsewhere about why rest keeps feeling like something you have to earn.
Read that one first if the optimizing part of you is already making a spreadsheet.
1. Stop rushing. It isn't a time problem; it's a nervous-system state
This is the one nobody puts on a perimenopause list, and I suspect it matters more than making sure you get the right amount of fiber.
Rushing is fight-or-flight with a to-do list. Your body doesn't distinguish between running from danger and running late for pickup.
Heart rate rises, breathing gets high and shallow, shoulders brace, and attention narrows to the next obstacle.
Adrenaline arrives within seconds, and cortisol follows behind it.
Once, that's fine. That's what the system is for.
The problem is that many of us rush from 6:45am to 9pm without the sense that the “dangers” of life are over.
Each small activation of “I have to do this thing” and “I don’t have enough time” compounds in a perimenopausal nervous system that already has less buffer than it did at thirty-five.
Multitasking is the quiet version of the same thing. You're not actually doing three things at once.
You're switching between them very quickly, and every switch has a cost.
Researchers at UC Irvine studying interrupted work found that people compensated by working faster, and they reported significantly more stress, frustration, and time pressure doing it.
We get quicker and more frazzled, and the output barely changes.
Chronic hurry seems to show up in the body over time.
In a long-running study following young adults for fifteen years, the people highest in time urgency and impatience had a measurably higher risk of developing high blood pressure.
I wouldn't hang everything on one study, but it fits what I see in my office every week.
Rushing also costs us connection.
In a famous 1970s experiment, seminary students were sent across campus to give a talk, some told they had plenty of time, and some told they were already late.
On the way, each passed a man slumped in a doorway, clearly in distress.
About six in ten of the unhurried students stopped to help. Of the ones who were rushing, about one in ten did, and some of them were on their way to give a talk about the Good Samaritan.
Rushing doesn't make us bad people.
It narrows our attention until we can't see what's in front of us, and for most of us, what's in front of us is our kids.
And it's contagious.
Children read our nervous systems long before they understand our words. "Hurry up, we're late," said fifteen times between 7:15 and 7:45, sets the emotional temperature of the whole house.
What to actually do
Find the rush points in your day. Most of us have three or four predictable ones: out the door in the morning, school pickup, the 5–7pm stretch, bedtime.
Name yours. You can't slow down everywhere, but you can slow down somewhere specific.
Add margin to one transition, and don't fill it. Ten minutes of buffer before the morning departure, not ten minutes to squeeze in one more thing. The empty space is the point.
Do one thing at a time in the moments that matter. When your child is telling you something, put the phone face down. When you're writing the hard email, close the other tabs. Single-tasking feels slower. It usually isn't.
Walk slower on purpose. Literally walk to the car at about 80% of your usual speed. Pace and posture feed back into how alarmed you feel, so moving like someone who isn't being chased is one of the few ways to send that message from the body up.
Catch your "meanwhiles." Folding laundry while on a call while supervising homework. Notice how often your day is built out of meanwhiles, and drop one.
Change the instructions, not just the volume. Swap "hurry up, we're late" for plain next steps: "Shoes. Then car." Same urgency, without the alarm bell.
Ask what's actually causing the rush. Usually it isn't that you're slow. It's that there are eleven things in a slot built for seven. Rushing is often a scheduling problem dressed up as some kink in your process.
Rushing tends to be at its worst when your nervous system is already running hot. If you're waking at 3am with your heart going, the morning rush is landing on a body that never fully came down.
2. Learn your wiring, then notice where your life is fighting it
Some of your exhaustion may not come from doing too much. It may come from doing too much of the wrong things for you.
Here's a finding I wish every mother knew. Researchers asked people to deliberately act more extraverted for a week: more talkative, more assertive, more spontaneous.
The extraverts mostly felt better.
Introverts got less benefit, and they also reported more fatigue and feeling less like themselves.
I am an introvert, and know this feeling all too well.
Psychologist Brian Little has a useful way of describing this. At times, we all feel the need to be “on”, especially for things we care about.
An introvert can give a great presentation or host a beautiful party.
But constantly acting against our nature has a cost, and we need what he calls restorative niches: time and space where we get to be ourselves again.
Many mothers in midlife have no restorative niche at all. An introverted mom can spend every waking hour being talked to, touched, needed and interrupted, then wonder why she feels like she's disappearing.
The same applies to values. There's good research showing that goals which come from what we genuinely value are easier to sustain, and better for wellbeing, than goals driven by guilt, obligation or someone else's expectations.
A life running mostly on "should" costs more energy than one running on "want to."
Here's the perimenopause piece.
Many women find their tolerance for misalignment drops sharply in midlife.
The job, the role, the obligation you could grit your teeth through at thirty-two suddenly becomes unbearable. It's tempting to read that as falling apart.
Sometimes it's more like the body withdrawing its consent for things that were never quite right.
Tools that can help you see your wiring
You don't need a perfect instrument. You need a mirror.
The Big Five personality model (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability). It's the most rigorously researched personality framework, and free versions are available online.
A values exercise. Either a values card sort or simply a list of values where you pick your top five. The question isn't "what do I admire?" but "what do I need in my life to feel like myself?"
The VIA Character Strengths survey. It's free, research-based, and focuses on what's right with you rather than what's wrong.
The Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, or Human Design.
To be straight with you, these have much less scientific support, and in Human Design's case none. I use Human Design myself as a reflective lens, and I treat it as a source of good questions, not as science. If a framework gives you language that helps you notice yourself, that's its value.
The exercise: a one-week energy audit
This is where the insight turns into something you can use.
For one week, after each chunk of your day, jot one word: filled, neutral, or drained. School drop-off. That meeting. Cooking dinner. The call with your mother. The hour alone in the car.
At the end of the week, look for patterns rather than individual bad days.
Then sort the drains into two piles. Some things are simply hard, like toddler bedtime, and they'll always cost something.
Others drain you because they run against your grain. That second pile is where you have leverage.
Change one thing in the second pile. Protect one restorative niche. Renegotiate one role. Hand off one task that someone else would find easy, and you find corrosive.
Examples of what this tends to reveal:
The introvert who hosts every family holiday because she always has, then spends a week recovering.
The deeply creative woman whose every free hour goes to logistics and spreadsheets.
The deep-focus thinker whose work is a constant stream of interruptions and messages.
One thing to consider: the point isn't to label yourself in a way that explains everything away ("I'm an introvert, so I can't").
It's data for redesigning your life, so you spend your limited energy where it's actually yours to spend.
3. Sleep: look at your bedtime as a time problem, not a hygiene problem
You already know the sleep hygiene list. Cool room, no screens, same bedtime. You've probably tried most of it. Here's what that list tends to miss for mothers.
Revenge bedtime procrastination
If you stay up until midnight, not because you aren't tired, but because 10 pm to midnight is the only part of the day that belongs to you, there's a name for that.
Sleep researchers began studying bedtime procrastination about a decade ago.
The phrase "revenge bedtime procrastination" spread a few years later, describing people who claw back the hours their days took from them.
If that's you, no amount of hygiene will help, because it isn't a hygiene problem. It's a protest, and a reasonable one.
The fix isn't more discipline at 11 pm.
It's giving yourself some of that time earlier, so the night doesn't have to carry all of it.
Thirty minutes that are genuinely yours in daylight (a walk alone, a book, a project) take some pressure off the hours you're stealing from sleep.
Trying harder makes it worse
Sleep is one of the few things that gets worse the harder you try.
Sleep researchers even have a term, orthosomnia, for people whose sleep trackers made them so anxious about sleep that their sleep deteriorated.
If you check your sleep score every morning and it decides your mood before you're out of bed, try a two-week break from it.
If the tracker genuinely helps you spot patterns without fueling worry, keep it. You'll know which one it is.
The one anchor worth keeping
Of everything on the standard list, one lever earns its place: a consistent wake time, plus about ten minutes of outdoor light within the first hour.
Your circadian rhythm is set more by when you wake and see daylight than by when you go to bed. It's the backbone of CBT for insomnia, which outperforms sleep medication over the long term.
Pick a wake time you can actually keep seven days a week, and get outside, even if it's just the back step with your coffee.
Two things to consider
If you're awake for more than about twenty minutes, get up.
Go somewhere dim and boring until you're sleepy. Lying in bed struggling teaches your brain that bed is where you go to struggle.
If you drink in the evening, it's worth a two-week experiment off alcohol. Alcohol helps you fall asleep, then fragments the second half of the night as it wears off.
That 2 AM–3 AM waking, heart going, is a very common alcohol signature in perimenopause, and many women are surprised how quickly it settles.
If sleep problems arrived alongside old memories or feelings resurfacing, that connection is worth understanding.
4. Learn the difference between resting and numbing
Scrolling feels like rest. You're sitting down, nobody needs anything from you, and nothing is being asked of you.
So why do so many of us finish an hour of it more tired than we started?
Because most scrolling isn't recovery.
It's consumption: a stream of novelty, comparison, and other people's emergencies, drawing on the same attention you've been spending all day.
It's the mental equivalent of eating from the bag while standing at the counter. Something is going in, and nothing is being restored.
What actually restores you
Researchers who study recovery, led by Sabine Sonnentag, have found that four kinds of experience genuinely replenish us:
Detachment: mentally leaving the work and the worry, not just physically stepping away.
Relaxation: low activation and low effort.
Mastery: doing something absorbing and slightly challenging that you're learning or improving at.
Control: choosing how you spend the time, rather than defaulting into it.
Mastery is the one that surprises people.
Effortful hobbies often restore us more than doing nothing at all. Learning a piece on the piano, trying a new recipe, a jigsaw, a garden bed, a sewing project.
These use a different kind of attention than the kind your day drains, and they leave you with the feeling of having done something.
Scrolling offers a little detachment and almost none of the other three.
Creativity seems to work similarly. In a study that tracked young adults' daily lives, on days they did something creative they reported more enthusiasm and a stronger sense of flourishing the next day.
It didn't have to be art. Cooking, writing, arranging, making music and building all counted.
Active rest, in practice
Think of four doors: make, move, meet, or learn.
Make: cook something for pleasure rather than duty, knit, paint, write, rearrange a shelf because you want to, plant something.
Move: a walk outside, ideally among trees. Even twenty minutes in nature is associated with lower cortisol, and natural settings appear to restore the kind of focused attention that screens use up.
Meet: call a friend instead of watching her life on a feed. A five-minute voice note counts.
Learn: a book, a class, a documentary you chose on purpose.
And one simple test you can apply to anything, including your phone:
"Do I feel more like myself after this, or less?"
Not all screen time fails that test. A show you love, chosen on purpose and watched with your feet up, can be genuine rest. The difference is choice and absorption, versus default and numbing.
Since you'll still scroll: Do a fifteen-minute feed audit
Go through who you see and notice your body a few seconds after each account.
Tight chest, quiet comparison, a longer list of things you're failing at? That account is a cost.
Mute, don't unfollow. It's invisible and reversible, and nobody will ever know.
Turn off notifications rather than deleting apps. It's easier to keep up, and you get most of the benefit.
Protect the two ends of your day. If you wake straight into a feed, your first physiological event of the day is someone else's emergency.
5. Complete the stress cycle, and let joy do some of the work
Stress isn't only a mental state.
It's a physical sequence with a beginning, a middle and an end. Something activates you, your body mobilizes, and when the threat passes it's supposed to complete and return to baseline.
Modern stressors rarely let that happen.
The difficult email ends when you close the laptop, but your body never gets the signal that it's over.
That's why you can sit down at 9pm, technically resting, and still feel wired. Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain this beautifully in Burnout: rest is the absence of new stress, but completing the cycle is something your body has to do.
The familiar ways to complete it still work:
Move for about twenty minutes in a way that raises your heart rate.
Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Try in for four and out for eight.
Let a cry finish, rather than starting it and swallowing it.
Make something with your hands.
Here's the part I want to highlight, because women in midlife tend to treat joy as dessert, something you earn after the hard work is done. Joy isn't the reward for regulating your nervous system. It's one of the ways you do it.
Laughter
Laughing properly, the helpless, undignified kind, is one of the most efficient cycle-completers there is.
A brain-imaging study found that laughing with friends triggered the release of the brain's own opioids, the natural chemistry of calm and connection.
Laughter is also overwhelmingly social.
One researcher who spent years observing it estimated we're around thirty times more likely to laugh with other people than alone.
So, the most useful question may not be "how do I laugh more?" but "who do I laugh with, and when did I last see them?"
Dance
Researchers have found that people who danced in sync with others had higher pain thresholds and felt closer to each other afterwards, a sign that the body's own feel-good chemistry was involved.
You don't need a class.
Three loud songs in the kitchen before dinner counts. If your kids join in, even better: you're co-regulating together, and showing them what it looks like to shake a hard day off your body.
Connection, in small doses
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has argued that connection isn't only built in long, deep conversations.
It's built in small moments of shared warmth: eye contact and a laugh with the woman at the coffee counter, a neighbor waving, a friend's voice note that makes you snort.
You may not have time for a girls' weekend. You almost certainly have time for three of those moments a day, if you stop rushing past them (see number one).
A twenty-second hug with someone safe. Long enough that it stops being a greeting.
A voice note instead of a text to the friend who always makes you laugh.
One unhurried conversation a day, even five minutes, where you're not doing anything else.
Glimmers
Therapist Deb Dana coined the term glimmers for the opposite of triggers: small moments that bring a flicker of safety or delight.
The light through the kitchen window, the smell of coffee, your child's hand slipping into yours.
Our brains are built to notice threats automatically. Delight usually needs a little help.
The research on savoring suggests that deliberately staying with a good moment for a few extra seconds, and noticing it rather than rushing past, makes its effect last longer.
Try naming one glimmer out loud each evening. At the dinner table works well; kids are surprisingly good at this, and surprisingly good at reminding you to do it.
Play
Do something with no goal at all. Not exercise, not self-improvement, not content for later. Just the thing you'd do if nobody were measuring anything.
If you do all of this and the activation never seems to bottom out, or it keeps attaching to something specific and old, that's often a sign the material underneath needs processing rather than discharging.
That's a different kind of work, and it's most of what I do.
If you only do one thing
Start with rushing.
Pick one rush point in your day, add ten minutes of margin, and walk through it slowly, phone in your pocket, with plain next steps instead of an alarm. It costs nothing, needs no equipment, and changes the physiological weather in your house, not only in you.
Then leave it alone for two weeks.
The instinct to do all five at once, immediately, to a high standard, is the same instinct that's been quietly exhausting you for about twenty-five years.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What lifestyle changes help most with perimenopause anxiety and overwhelm?
Five changes tend to help more than the usual advice: slowing down and cutting multitasking, noticing where your daily life works against your temperament and values, treating late bedtimes as a time-ownership problem, replacing scrolling with active rest, and completing the stress cycle through movement, laughter and connection.
They work because perimenopause narrows your nervous system's margin, so reducing the load on it has an outsized effect. Start with one, not all five.
2. Can rushing and multitasking make perimenopause symptoms worse?
Rushing is a fight-or-flight state: heart rate rises, breathing gets shallow, attention narrows, and stress hormones follow.
Done occasionally that's harmless, but rushing all day means the stress response rarely switches off, in a nervous system that has less buffer in perimenopause.
Research on interrupted work found that people who switch between tasks work faster but report more stress and time pressure.
Adding margin to one daily transition and doing one thing at a time are simple places to start.
3. How do I know if my life is out of alignment with my personality or values?
A practical test is a one-week energy audit: after each part of your day, note whether it left you filled, neutral or drained, then look for patterns.
Some drains are simply hard, but others run against your temperament or values, such as an introvert in a constant-contact role.
Research shows introverts who act extraverted for long stretches report more fatigue, and goals aligned with your values are easier to sustain.
Tools like the Big Five, a values exercise or the VIA Character Strengths survey can help you name what you find.
4. What is revenge bedtime procrastination?
Revenge bedtime procrastination is staying up late, not because you aren't tired, but because the late evening is the only time that feels like yours.
It's common in mothers whose days are fully claimed by other people.
Better sleep hygiene rarely fixes it because the problem is time ownership, not habits; giving yourself some protected time earlier in the day usually helps more.
A consistent wake time with morning daylight is the one standard sleep habit worth keeping.
5. Isn’t scrolling on my phone a form of rest?
Not usually. Recovery research identifies four experiences that genuinely restore people: mentally detaching from work, relaxing, mastering something absorbing, and choosing how you spend the time.
Scrolling offers a little detachment and little else, which is why many women feel more tired afterward.
Active rest such as making something, moving outdoors, connecting with a friend or learning something new tends to restore more.
A useful test is whether you feel more like yourself afterward, or less.
6. How do laughter and joy help regulate the nervous system?
Joy is one of the ways the body completes a stress response, not just a reward for getting through it.
A brain-imaging study found that social laughter releases the brain's natural opioids, and synchronized dancing has been shown to raise pain thresholds and feelings of closeness.
Small moments of connection, a long hug, or noticing and savoring brief moments of delight all help the body return to baseline. They work best shared with people you feel safe with.
7. Can lifestyle changes replace hormone therapy or therapy?
Usually not. It’s part of a broader, more holistic approach.
Hormone therapy addresses the hormonal, physical baseline, therapy addresses stored psychological material and meaning, and your lifestyle impacts whether either is sustainable in your daily life. Many women need some combination.
Talk to a menopause-informed physician about the medical piece.
8. How long before I notice a difference?
Slowing down and joyful stress release can feel different within days.
Sleep changes usually take two to four weeks and improve in consolidation before they improve in total hours. An energy audit takes one week to run and longer to act on.
If you've genuinely changed something for a month and nothing has moved, that's useful information worth raising with a provider rather than a sign to try harder.
Is therapy with me a good fit?
If you live in New Jersey and you're wondering whether working together makes sense, there are two easy first steps.
Take the Midlife Transition Check in quiz. It takes about five minutes and shows where you are in this transition and which area could use the most care.
Think of it as a starting point for a conversation about fit. Take the Check-In
Book a free 15-minute consultation. We'll talk about what's going on, what you're hoping for, and whether EMDR and nervous system work with me is the right match. There's nothing to prepare. Book your free consultation
I see clients in New Jersey only. If you're outside NJ, everything above still applies, and the Menopause Society's directory of certified practitioners is a good place to find medical support.
Edwige Theokas, LPC, is an EMDRIA Certified therapist and the founder of Planting Seeds Counseling in Bordentown, NJ. She is also certified in Sandplay and trauma. She works with women navigating perimenopause and midlife resets using EMDR, two-hour sessions, and intensives. She is 48 and in the middle of her own. Learn more at plantingseedscounselingnj.com.
T
his article is for general education and is not medical advice. Please consult your physician about hormone therapy, sleep problems, or any significant change to alcohol use, particularly if you have an existing medical condition.
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