PERIMENOPAUSE NOT JUST HOT FLASHES

It is one of the most painful chapters of a woman's life

- BY LAKSHANA N PALAT Assistant Features Editor

"You're just being hormonal right now, we will talk later.

Dubai-based Agrima (name changed on request) remembers this particular comment from her cousin, after she had just broken down into tears over her halwa going wrong. “I don’t know what happened to me that day, but I started crying so much. I just wanted to do something for my mother’s birthday, and I messed up my halwa. And so my cousins didn’t know what to do, and just said, ‘Okay, this is your perimenopause’, we will talk later.”

They were right, she agreed, but the dismissal was thorny. “I felt like I was just this overemotional woman, reacting to nothing at all and everyone was looking at me as if I was crazy,” remembers Agrima.

As she says, it’s exhausting. She’s tired of perimenopause becoming a throwaway punchline. She’s tired of the hesitance, the eyerolls that accompany the word. “It is just such a draining experience and I think the attitude around it, just makes it worse,” says Agrima.

Perimenopause is one of the most painful and misunderstood chapters of a woman’s life not just physically, but emotionally too. This complicated transitional phase begins when the ovaries gradually produce less oestrogen. The shift doesn’t just disrupt the menstrual cycle; it also affects brain chemistry, particularly serotonin and dopamine — the neurotransmitters that regulate mood. These may sound like clinical terms, but their effects are very real, triggering a cascade of changes that can impact everything from sleep and focus to emotional stability.

'NOT JUST IN THE HEAD'

Hiba Salem, psychologist, Adult and Families Specialist at Sage Clinics explains further: “These hormonal shifts are not ‘just in the head,’ they are biological processes that interact with emotional health.”