Stormy Weather
Along with Perimenopause, Anxiety has come for a visit, and she’s making herself at home.
For the past 9 months I have been overcome by intense feelings of insecurity, panic, and fear the week before my monthly period.
The first time it happened, I hadn’t yet realized the timing. I sat in my office feeling my chest tighten, my heart quicken, my thoughts racing from one possible cause of this distress to the next, and not finding any reasonable answers, my body raised the alarm and soon I was in a full blown panic attack.
The second time it happened I was halfway through a speech to my partner about not feeling appreciated when I realized that even I didn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. I stopped mid-sentence, apologized, and left the room.
Panic attacks are real, contrary to what David Rose might have you believe, and are not just a celebrity grab for attention or an excuse to avoid an unwanted engagement. And also, they’re manageable if they can be caught in time.
The trick for me is to realize when I’m being baited by my insecurities and negative self-talk, and not take the bait.
What makes it so difficult is the physiological changes that are happening inside my brain, which are creating fertile ground for those insecurities and negative self-projections to take root.
When we experience anxiety or panic, our bodies are activating a system that evolved to keep us alive: the fight-or-flight response. The amygdala, that’s the small almond-shaped part of the brain responsible for detecting threats, sends an alarm signal, causing our adrenal glands to release adrenaline and cortisol. Our heart rate speeds up, our breathing becomes shallow, our muscles tense, and our thoughts start scanning for danger.
In other words, our body believes something is wrong and is preparing us to run or fight.
The problem is that in modern life, the “threat” is rarely a tiger in the bushes. More often, it’s an email, a conversation, a memory, or an insecurity that gets amplified by stress and hormones.
For those of us in perimenopause, the terrain is even more volatile. Fluctuating estrogen and progesterone levels directly influence neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, and GABA. These are the chemicals that help regulate mood, calm, and emotional stability. When these hormones swing, the emotional guardrails that usually keep our thoughts in perspective can temporarily loosen.
Suddenly, our usually small voice of doubt gets a megaphone.
And because our bodies are already in a heightened physiological state, our brains start scrambling to explain the feeling. We search for reasons. We tell ourselves stories. And often these stories are wildly untrue.
Anxiety itself isn’t new. Descriptions of panic-like symptoms appear in ancient Greek medical texts, in Ayurvedic writings, and in early Chinese medicine. The Greeks referred to overwhelming fear as “panikon deima,” the terror inspired by the god Pan, the sudden irrational fright travelers might feel alone in the wilderness. Over time, medicine began recognizing panic as a physiological response rather than a moral failing or weakness of character.
Which is still important to remember, when it happens to us, that our nervous systems are simply trying a little too enthusiastically to protect us.
What I do when it starts is remind myself that it will pass.
It usually takes about 20 minutes of gentle tending and attentive self-care before my mood and beliefs begin to shift. Twenty minutes, incidentally, is about how long it takes for the physiological effects of adrenaline to subside, once we’ve calmed down.
Sometimes, when I can remember to, I write my thoughts down and try to stay actively journaling until something shifts. And when it does, I usually go back and reread my first few sentences and realize that either I’m an insane person or I was possessed, when, of course, it was just my inability to resist negative self-talk while my brain is trying to make sense of a hormonal thunderstorm.
Emotions are forces of nature like a storm or an earthquake. They swirl and shake things up. They tell us where pressure is building and where something in our lives needs attention, compassion, or release before it bursts forth abruptly and unbidden. It’s my job to weather the storm or survive the quake, not succumb to it. My emotions don’t have the ability to propel my actions for a reason. They’re not meant to be instructions. Of course, I have good days and bad, and I try not to take myself too seriously. But I do take my anxiety very seriously as I continue to seek to understand the triggers and cycles of my shifting hormonal and emotional landscape so that I can get ahead of my feelings and choose how I want to respond.
I’m learning that anxiety, like anger or grief, is information.
It is asking me to slow down, to listen, to care for myself a little more gently than I might otherwise.
Some days that means taking a walk. Some days, that means breathing slowly until my nervous system remembers it is safe. Some days it means writing down all my completely unhinged thoughts until they loosen and dissolve.
But the most important practice I’ve found is this:
Don’t believe everything I think when I’m anxious.
My brain, on anxiety, is not a reliable narrator.
So instead of arguing with it, I sit with it.
I breathe. I write. I remind myself that this will pass.
Because it always does.
And when the storm clears, what remains is the same steady ground that was there all along.
