5 Signs I Thought Were Just “Menopause”… But Were Actually My Nervous System Breaking Down.
And This Is What Finally Helped Me.
Okay so I have been putting off writing this one for a while. Not because I do not want to share it. Because I kept trying to figure out how much of it to share and I kept landing on: all of it. Which is slightly terrifying but also I am 47 and I have stopped having the energy to be precious about things that might help someone.
So. All of it.
In March of 2023 I sat in my GP’s office and described what had been happening to my body for the previous eight months and she listened and nodded and said the word perimenopause and then said something about how symptoms varied enormously between women and that we could look at HRT if things became unmanageable.
I drove home and cried in the car park of Boots for about ten minutes. Not because the diagnosis was bad news. Because I had just described five different things going wrong simultaneously and been given one word that covered all of them without explaining any of them. I had the very specific feeling of having gone somewhere for an answer and come back with a label instead.
It took me two more years to find out what was actually happening. And when I did, the first thing I felt was not relief. It was fury. Because it was not complicated. And nobody had told me.
01.
The Anxiety That Had No Reason to Be There
I need to be specific about this because anxiety is one of those words that covers too much ground. I was not having panic attacks. I was not unable to function. What I had was a permanent low-frequency hum underneath everything. A background static of dread that was just always present. Not about anything specific. Not triggered by anything I could point to. Just there, sitting underneath every ordinary Tuesday like something bad was about to happen even when nothing was.
I had never been like this before. I was the person in a crisis who stayed calm. The anxiety was not my personality — it was new, and it had arrived quietly enough that I had half-convinced myself it was just a reasonable response to being a woman in her mid-forties with a full life and a lot to think about.
My husband noticed before I admitted it. He said I seemed braced. Like I was always waiting for something. He was right. I just did not know what.
Here is the thing nobody told me and that I want you to actually understand rather than just read past.
Think of oestrogen as a phone signal. And the vagus nerve — the nerve that runs from your brain down through your neck and into your gut — as the phone itself. All the apps on the phone: your anxiety regulation, your sleep, your temperature control, your hair follicle health. They all depend on that signal to work properly.
When oestrogen starts declining, the signal drops.
The anxiety that appeared from nowhere was not anxiety. It was five bars dropping to one. My nervous system had lost the thing that was keeping it calibrated. Not a mental health problem. A signal problem. And nobody thought to say that out loud.
02.
The 3am Wake-Up That Had Never Existed Before in My Life
I have been a good sleeper since I was a child. I fell asleep fine. Always have. Within ten minutes of lying down, reliably, for forty-six years.
What started happening in the second year of perimenopause was specific and consistent and maddening. I would fall asleep at 10:30. Then at some point between 2:30 and 3:30, without any external trigger, I would be completely awake. Not groggy. Awake. Heart slightly elevated. Mind already running through tomorrow’s schedule, last week’s conversation, the email I forgot to send, something I said in 2019 that nobody remembers but me.
Every. Single. Night.
I tried melatonin. Started at 1mg, worked my way up to 10mg over six months. It helped me fall asleep faster and did absolutely nothing for the 3am thing. I tried magnesium. L-theanine. The Huberman protocol. Mouth tape, which my husband found so funny he used a photo of me wearing it as his phone wallpaper for four months. My husband slept through all of it. Every night he lay six inches away from me, completely at peace. There is a specific loneliness in being awake at 3am next to someone who is not. I know that now.
What I now know: Melatonin is aimed at helping you fall asleep. That is its one job. It works at the beginning of the night and then it is finished.
What was waking me up at 3am was happening in a completely different part of the night and a completely different system. When the signal drops, your body cannot properly suppress the cortisol rise that naturally starts in the early morning hours. Cortisol goes up too early. Your body decides the night is over. You wake up at 3am feeling immediately alert because as far as your nervous system is concerned, it is morning.
Melatonin cannot fix that. Not at 1mg, not at 10mg. I was putting fuel in the wrong tank for eight months.