Perimenopause Symptoms Explained: Why Anxiety, Overwhelm & Reactivity Get Worse After 40

Perimenopause symptoms and menopause symptoms often show up as anxiety, overwhelm, and emotional reactivity in women over 40. This video explains why these symptoms are not a personal failure, but a nervous system shift driven by hormonal changes.

Most conversations about perimenopause and menopause focus only on estrogen and progesterone levels. What’s often missed is how these hormones directly affect your brain’s stress response, emotional regulation, and window of tolerance.

In this video, you’ll learn
• Why your stress buffer feels smaller than it used to
• How perimenopause symptoms can look like anxiety or burnout
• The role estrogen and progesterone play in nervous system regulation
• Why “just relax” advice does not work in midlife
• Practical ways to support your nervous system during perimenopause

If you’ve been wondering why you can’t handle things like you used to, this is not a mindset failure. It’s a biological transition that requires a new operating system.

If you want guidance, support, and a clear roadmap through perimenopause, join the Perimenopause Coaching Waitlist below.
👉 Join the waitlist here: https://waitlist.embrmornings.com/

You are not broken. You are recalibrating.

If this resonated, like, subscribe, and share it with a friend who might need it too.

EMBR MIDLIFE METHOD

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Kimberly Hoyt is a physician assistant with two decades of clinical experience who helps women navigate perimenopause and menopause with clarity and confidence. Her work focuses on midlife health and education, helping women understand what is happening in their bodies so they feel prepared, informed, supported and empowered.

Medical Disclaimer: The information shared on this channel is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Kimberly Hoyt, PA-C, and associated content are not a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. Viewing/Listening to this content does not establish a patient-provider relationship. Always consult your own healthcare provider before making changes to your health plan, starting supplements, or addressing medical concerns.

General Disclaimer: I am not a CPA, attorney, insurance/real estate agent, contractor, l...

Transcript

Kimberly Hoyt: 0:00

If you feel more anxious, more overwhelmed, or more reactive than ever before, you keep asking yourself, why can't I handle things like I used to? This video is for you. Because what you are experiencing is not a personal failure. It's a nervous system shift. Most people will tell you it's just hormones or just anxiety. They're missing the biggest piece of the puzzle. Today I'm gonna show you why your stress buffer has disappeared, why your window of tolerance has shrunk like a scene out of Alice in Wonderland, and the exact reason why you can't think your way out of this. Stay with me because we're gonna walk through the new operating system that you need to stop the self-blame, and finally feel like yourself again. Most perimenopause conversations focus on hormones in a vacuum, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, those matter. But here's the core idea. Hormones do not work in isolation. They directly influence how your brain processes stress and how your body regulates focus and emotional control. Think of estrogen as a physical buffer. When your levels are steady, that buffer is thick. You can absorb a lot of life stress without feeling hit by it. But in perimenopause, as estrogen fluctuates, that buffer thins life didn't suddenly get harder. Your capacity to buffer stress got a little smaller. To understand how this looks in your daily life, think about your before and your now. Before perimenopause, you're at work. A deadline gets moved up. Your kid forgot their lunch. The dog just threw up on the rug. It's a lot, but you handle it. You stay in the driver's seat. That was your thick buffer system. Now you're in the kitchen and you realize you're out of milk, just milk. But because your buffer is thinner, your brain doesn't see no milk. It sees a threat. Maybe your heart starts racing, you feel a surge of heat, And you find yourself snapping at your partner or bursting into tears because there's no milk. It's not that you've become more dramatic, it's that your shock absorbers have worn down to the metal. This is where it helps to separate the roles of estrogen and progesterone. Estrogen is the regulator. When it fluctuates, it lowers your threshold for stress. This is why you feel those sudden adrenaline surges, heart palpitations, or internal tremors. Progesterone is the brake pedal. It has a calming effect on the brain, but in perimenopause, that progesterone level starts to drop off. The result. Your accelerator estrogen is fluctuating. It is hypersensitive while your brake pedal, the progesterone is fading. You are driving a high performance vehicle with little to no brakes and stuck in throttle. Let's talk about this window of tolerance. There's a concept in psychology called the window of tolerance. Think of this window as the space between your floor and your ceiling. When you're inside that space, you're calm, you're capable. You can be frustrated without screaming. You can be sad without spiraling. Before perimenopause, that room was huge where you had high ceilings and a low floor. You had a lot of room to move before you hit one of those limits. But perimenopause is like a scene from Alice in Wonderland. Think about it. When she grows too big for the room, and suddenly the ceiling of anxiety is pressing down on your head and the floor of exhaustion is rising to meet your feet, your window between that ceiling and the floor has shrunk. Now. Even a tiny movement, a loud noise, a snarky comment, a busy schedule may cause you to hit that ceiling or that floor much faster, and when you hit that ceiling. You're in that hyper arousal stage. This may be rage or panic, that wired feeling. When you hit the floor, you're in the hypo arousal. Maybe it's brain fog, maybe it's shut down. Maybe you just feel emotionally numb. You aren't failing at life. You are just living in a much smaller room. If you're listening to this and thinking, yes, this is exactly how I feel, I want you to pause and leave a comment below. Even just the words"this makes sense now." Helps other women realize they aren't alone, and it helps this video reach the women who are currently sitting in their cars crying because they think they're losing their minds. This part is vital, and I want you to hear this. Anxiety and perimenopause is often physiological, not psychological. It's why advice like just relax feels like an insult. You aren't anxious because of a mindset problem. You're experiencing a nervous system that's responding to the loss of its noise canceling headphones. It's why the sound of your partner chewing suddenly feels like a physical assault. As women, we are used to being high functioning. So when our nervous system can no longer tolerate the same volume of input. We assume it's a character flaw. We say, I should be able to handle this. That self-blame creates a secondary stress response that thins your buffer even more. You are essentially yelling at a circuit breaker for tripping when you've plugged in too many appliances. If you're realizing you can't push through this phase like you used to and you need a roadmap for this new territory, I have a perimenopause coaching wait list linked below. We are cultivating a space where we can go deeper into how to actually support your physiology, so you can stop guessing and start feeling steady again. How do we actually support our nervous system that has lost its buffer? We upgrade the operating system. So number one, stop pushing through. In the old operating system, you could ignore a bad night's sleep and keep going in this new operating system. Pushing through triggers a system crash. If you feel that wired but tired feeling you need a 30 second reset. Splash some cold water on your face. Maybe take a minute and step outside. Take some cleansing breaths. You are telling your brain the threat is over. You can come back to center. Number two, externalize your breaks. Since your internal progesterone breaks are weakening you have to use external ones. This is sensory management. If the grocery store is too much, wear noise canceling headphones, lower the lights in your house by 6:00 PM. You are manually reducing the load on your circuit breaker. Number three. This one's fun, is the three task rule. When your room is small, right, the ceiling and floor are close, you cannot process a 20 item to-do list. Pick three things. That's it. Completing three things keeps you inside your window of tolerance. Failing at 20 pushes you out of it. Perimenopause is not about becoming fragile. It's about learning a new operating system. When you stop fighting your nervous system and start working with it, things begin to settle. Understanding that this is a nervous system shift is the first step back home to yourself. But there might be other symptoms that you're experiencing that you haven't connected to this shift yet. If you're wondering, is this also part of perimenopause? I want you to watch this video here on 11 weird symptoms of perimenopause, or if you're just getting started in this journey, check out my guide on the nine early symptoms of perimenopause that you need to know about. I'll see you in the next one.