How Perimenopause Impacts Your Creativity

Perimenopause will change your writing life, full stop. Today we’re going to talk about what’s actually going on during this transition, tie it into ways this impacts our creativity, and I’ll also share my own story and what I’ve been noticing the past few years.

Physical Changes in Perimenopause 

I had a hard time finding a primary source for this number, but when you do some digging on the generally recognized symptoms of perimenopause, there are about 34 listed. I’ve seen lists in the past that are longer, and other sites talk about the most common, like night sweats, but essentially there are two core categories: physical symptoms (like night sweats, breast tenderness, headaches, weight gain, and heart palpitations) and neurological symptoms (like mood changes, insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, and irritability). What can be really tricky, (and nuanced), is that many symptoms are pretty general on their own ,meaning a lot of different factors could be driving them, which makes it challenging to parse through and figure out what’s what. 

Neurological Changes in Perimenopause

Along with physical symptoms, we’re starting to understand even more how the brain is actually changed by perimenopause. A great book about this is called The Menopause Brain by Lisa Mosconi, and she writes: “Over time, our investigations yielded a treasure trove of data, demonstrating that it’s not just brain energy that changes during menopause but that the brain’s structure, regional connectivity, and overall chemistry are also impacted.”

That means in addition to our ovarian function declining and our fertile years coming to a close, we’re also going through a profound neurological transition. It’s not just reproductive. Estrogen is a brain chemical that interacts with everything from serotonin to dopamine, and when it fluctuates, it can cause some of those symptoms I mentioned earlier like brain fog, increased anxiety, and mood swings. Stress can also feel more intense, and recovery might take longer than it used to. 

All of this is bound to have an impact on our creativity. Brain fog can make it difficult to focus or interrupt flow. Lower dopamine levels can reduce motivation. If you’re feeling really sensitive or anxious, it might make your self-doubt even louder, and fatigue and poor sleep can drain energy for creative pursuits.

There’s a new book that came out recently called The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause. One of the essays is from Roxanne Gay, and she describes a moment of awakening when she learned that one of the symptoms she personally experienced, which was brain fog, was actually a symptom of perimenopause and how that helped her reframe her experience.

“So much of who I am is entwined with writing. I’m not talking about the public face of the work—the publications, the tours and events, the accolades. I can live without that. My original dream of being a writer was simple because I didn’t know what to dream beyond wanting to write good books and maybe have them published. All I needed was to be able to hold onto that dream, but as these fallow years stretched on, I tried to accept that I might lose even that. Almost every night, I stared at the ceiling asking myself, “Who am I if I am not a writer?” It was a question I could not answer then or now.

And then, one day I was talking with a friend over dinner. We were on a double date with our spouses, a warm Los Angeles evening, sitting outside. The din of a busy restaurant surrounded us. We had nice cocktails. Great music was playing. My friend was talking about how the worst part of menopause was the brain fog. It affected almost everything she did on a daily basis; it was only with time and various treatments that the fog started to clear. It felt like a lightning bolt struck our table. I immediately peppered my friend with questions because I did not know brain fog could be a symptom of menopause. When I got home, I immediately started searching for more information and learned that many, many women deal with losing focus and becoming easily distracted and having no ability to concentrate and forgetting the very things we know for sure. Finally, I found a lifeline, the idea that maybe my overwhelming writer’s block was not a personal failing rendering me beyond redemption, that maybe, the source of what ailed me was, at least in part, beyond my control and would not last forever.”

A Creative Rebirth

That last line about this not lasting forever is important to remember, and also that whatever you’re struggling with creatively is not a moral failing. It’s a structural change in your system, not a lack of willpower. 

The earlier part of Roxanne’s quote also touches on how our brain is being rewired to care less about external validation and people-pleasing and attuning more to depth and quality over consistent output. She talked about how being a writer, without the accolades, is what is most important to her deep down. 

I know a lot of people who enter their 40s and start to have this attitude of “I just don’t care anymore about things I used to,” or “I care less about what other people think,” and in some ways, it feels like this profound reorganization is actually pushing us to more meaning-driven creativity. 

This means we can embrace our own unique patterns rather than fitting into systems someone else creates, and make things that are aligned with the deepest parts of ourself. When I’m able to move past the very real struggle that some of these symptoms present in my day-to-day life, it’s actually exciting to think about this season as a radical reorganization that helps me focus on what really matters and tap me into my deepest wellspring of creativity. 

But this very optimistic conclusion, and how I’m thinking about perimenopause more now did not come easy. Now I want to move into sharing a bit more about my own experience, along with three observations about how perimenopause is directly impacting my own writing life. 

How Perimenopause Has Changed My Writing Practice

Because early menopause runs in my family, it’s something that’s been on my mind since my early thirties. It happened that my late thirties coincided with the early pandemic years, which turned out to be some of the most chronically stressful years of my life. So when I was experiencing anxiety, sleep issues, and heart palpitations, I was trying to figure out if it was perimenopause, the pandemic, or if both circumstances were fueling each other.

Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Changes

Even before the anxiety that started in 2020, the very first thing I can track now would be shifts in my cycle length. It had been pretty consistently 27 days for very long time, probably a decade, and then it started becoming 26 days, and then 25 was my new normal, and then I might have a fluke cycle that was 22 days. This was all over a period of several years so a very slow burn in terms of noticing eventual patterns.

As someone who has really leaned into a cycle practice and come to trust those inner seasons, perimenopause can sometimes feel so disorienting because I might be in my inner summer when historically I felt more open and connected, and now I just want to crawl under a bpanket. It’s not as predictable in terms of how I’ll feel inner season to inner season, so I’ve really had to learn to lean less on what I’ve come to expect and just check-in on a daily basis to see how I’m feeling.

But the other big physical symptom for me–two actually–the first being sleep disturbances. Particularly, staying asleep. I don’t have any trouble falling asleep, but often wake up multiple times a night. (I also find that sleep issues aren’t always first on the list of physical signs of perimenopause but it’s definitely a big one for a lot of people.) There have been days that because I’m feeling more tired, I may have intended to write, or work on something for myself, but I had to admit that I just couldn’t do it.

It’s frustrating when your desire to do something is there, but physical limitations prevent you from showing up the way you want. Ghat’s meant I’ve really had to practice self-compassion, be very kind to myself, and change how I approach my work now where. I no longer create deadlines. That used to fuel me more, and I’d work backwards towards a goal and figure out what I needed to do when, but there’s a hyper-organized project manager inside me that’s had to learn to be a lot more flexible. I’m not even sure I use the word deadline anymore when I’m thinking about my writing. It’s more of, I might *like* to have something done in a certain range of time, and I’ll work towards that as best I can, but I let things change a lot more easily depending on how I’m feeling, and I definitely didn’t need to do that in the same way prior to perimenopause.

In addition to sleep issues, the second physical change I experienced was heart palpitations. After this had been going on for a while I eventually met with a cardiologist, did some tests, and her theory was stress, but there are so many cascading hormonal changes that can impact vascular health too. (This is not medical advice, but for me personally, progesterone has really helped with the palpitations, so something to talk with your doctor about if this is a symptom you experience as well.) 

Mentally, the last five years, I would say it’s becoming harder to multitask, and I find that I need a lot more space around events, or even generative writing days. I was starting to notice this need, a lot more subtly, after my first book came out in 2017. I was in my mid-thirties, I had a two or three year old at the time, and I remember coming back from some book events where I traveled over a period of about three months and I thought, ooof, that felt like a lot. Because of that experience, I started creating new policies for myself around rest days. Needing to take breaks around generative writing days also wasn’t something I had to think about in my twenties.

Early perimenopause, for me, also laid the foundation for slow writing. I started recognizing this deep need (and desire) to move at my own pace within a culture that doesn’t normalize this, which can feel like swimming upstream. But this sustainable way forward puts our physical needs and our mental health front and center rather than on the backburner, and I think that skill is essential to hone in perimenopause.

And then in more the spiritual camp, I’ve felt that sense of ‘not caring what other people think,’ that I mentioned earlier. It wasn’t a switch that turned on the day of my 40th birthday, but this slow turning towards myself in a deeper way that just wasn’t part of my self-care routine before.

Another book recommendation is Wise Power by the founders of Red School, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer. And something they share is this idea of how the quickening–which is what they call the perimenopause period–is really a report card of how you’ve been treating yourself energetically and physically up to this point, and it basically forces you to confront what must be addressed for you to step into your fullest, most authentic self. And when you strip away the pathology that often comes with this period )not to discount the real, uncomfortable symptoms, of course) it just helps reframe where there can also be power in these changes, and it’s bringing us home to ourselves. 

How to Support Your Writing Practice in Perimenopause

The first recommendation I have would be to engage in some kind of cyclical practice. I recommend the last episode if you haven’t listened to that already, because we talked about 6 or 8 different kinds of cycles we can use so I won’t go over all of them here, but the reason I think this is so valuable is it roots us into rhythms both inside and outside ourselves, and it allows us to track patterns over a period of time, and notice what’s going on. The hope beingthat based on what we’re gathering, we can make some decisions about how to support ourselves, and determine what we might need. This is really about staying tethered, and because perimenopause can feel really ungrounding in many ways, that sense of rootedness is helpful. 

With that building sense of awareness, I would ask a couple of questions like “What are you energy levels like right now? And then follow up with “How does writing impact you energetically?” In perimenopause, energy can feel illusive, it can feel unstable, it can feel unpredictable, and if you’re writing, you’re using energy, especially mental energy. Creation is life-giving, but get curious about how your writing practice both fuels and depletes you, as well as the kind of support you need around each session.

Finally, pacing. This is probably one of the most important lessons that has come out of perimenopause, and I consider it an essential skill in my writing life. Alongside my inner project manager, I used to be able to plan my work months in advance, and while I still tend to have a general sense of where I’m going and when I’d like to work on something, the only thing that matters, really, is how I’m feeling. Moving at my own pace, and moving at your own pace, is a requirement for navigating this shift. I used to feel a surge of energy moving from inner winter to inner spring. Physiologically, this is when hormones are at their lowest and then begin to rise. But when estrogen starts to be a bit more erratic, what happens? That feeling of being like a racehorse that sprints out of the gate disappears. Sometimes that transition feels really rocky for me and I just want to stay in my cocoon for a while longer. So I’m not only pacing my physical energy, but then translating that to pacing my creative energy, and doing each day what I have the capacity to do.

Perimenopause can feel like we are living in bodies we no longer recognize. Like the writer we used to be has gone missing. But our system is reorganizing in profound ways. Our creative power isn’t disappearing, it’s just changing shape. And if we can meet that with compassion and tenderness, if we can do less in order to focus on what matters most, if we can move more slowly in order to create more intentionally, we will, eventually, find ourselves transformed.