Perimenopause made me realise that our brains need looking after. When my hormones changed, I found my attention span got scrappier, and I couldn’t fifinish a whole page of a book.
Little did I know, oestrogen fluctuations can lead to brain fog. And the perimenopausal drop in progesterone impacts the amygdala, the brain’s fear-processing centre.
“That is going to make you more easily triggered, bothered by things and more likely to worry, too,” says neuroscientist Nicole Vignola, author of Rewire. If this sounds all too familiar, take comfort. Most women do recover from peri-brain fog once in menopause (and HRT can help alleviate it, too). But then, I also worry about dementia, which affects twice as many women as men.
“The thought of getting Alzheimer’s disease or dementia frightens people,”…
