What is Perimenopause?

On a clinical level perimenopause is the years leading up to you having had no period for 12 months. Then for one day you are in menopause, day 366 since your last period started. And then after that you are post menopausal, although you may have another period or bleed.

Perimenopause can be felt in the body and mind, showing up in an array of different symptoms. Some women will experience none of these, for some they’ll have a few and for other they can be debilitating.

It’s difficult to have a blood test to determine weather you are in perimenopause or not, because our hormone levels change from hour to hour. So in my opinion, the best way we can discover if we are in perimenopause by looking at our symptoms.

So what do perimenopause symptoms include?

Lets break them down into the body, physiological and the mind or emotions, psychological.

Possible psychological emotional/mind symptoms of perimenopause

• low mood

• anxiety

• depression

• rage

• anger

• brain fog (this falls into both physical and emotional symptoms)

• low libido (as does this)

  Possible bodily symptoms of perimenopause

• Abdominal pain

• bloating

• constipation

• diarrhea

• altered sense of smell/taste

• heavy or light bleeding

• brown discharge

• spotting

• breast tenderness

• brittle nails

• dizziness

• difficulty breathing

• dry eyes

• dry/ itchy skin

• oral health problems

• hearing issues

• heart palpitations

• heartburn

• hot flushes

• night sweats

• joint pain

• muscle pain

• migraines

• pelvic floor problems

• overactive bladder

• vaginal prolapse

• urinary tract

• Infections

• vaginal dryness

And this is by no means exhaustive.

You can also see how the two could very much interact with one another. If your bleeding heavily and in terrible pain with vaginal dryness, its quite likely that would affect your mood.

And likewise, if your mood is low and you lack the motivation to leave the house, its highly like that you could end up suffering with joint and muscular pains from a lack of gentle movement. Note the word gentle here. Perimenopause is not the time for extreme exercise in my opinion, but gentle to moderate exercise with weight and resistance training could be just what you need, to support you physically and emotionally through this time of transition and change.

So now you know what PERIMENOPAUSE is. How it may look, feel and show up in your body. Next week in my blog we’ll be exploring the why. Why are these symptoms occurring, what is going on?

Thanks for reading, Heather*