Nobody Warns You That Perimenopause Comes With Opinions
Written by Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant
Sass Allard is a strategic coach and change consultant helping leaders and high-performing women navigate complex change with clarity, resilience, and practical insight drawn from over 20 years in global organisations.
Inside twenty-four hours, I managed to annoy no fewer than five people, one of whom was a good friend and another a recruitment agent. It was not a coordinated campaign. It simply happened, the way weather happens, and by the evening of the second day I was reviewing the wreckage with the mild interest of someone watching a documentary about a country she used to live in.
For years I have made decisions I later wished I had not made, and gone along with choices that were never really mine, because I am pretty easy-going. Most of the time, I genuinely did not mind. That is changing, and it’s arrived without much in the way of warning.
Compliance was part of my nurturing. By nature, I am nothing of the sort, but I was taught early, partly by my upbringing and partly by everything around it, that being strong-headed was a flaw to be managed rather than a quality to be used. Women of my generation learned this thoroughly, and what almost nobody mentions is that perimenopause takes a view on all this.
The female brain undergoes a substantial neuroendocrine renovation during this period. Fluctuating and declining oestrogen and progesterone disrupt the brain's energy metabolism and alter neurotransmitter levels, which forces a genuine physiological adaptation rather than a mood. As a result, emotional processing shifts. The threshold for what registers as tolerable moves, and it does not consult you first. Whatever mechanism was used to convert irritation into a pleasant expression and a reasonable question appears to have been decommissioned without notice.
The result, in my case, is that I have entered what I can only describe as my DGAF era. I would like to report that I am handling it with grace, most of the time.
What interests me professionally is that behaviour changes long before anyone around you updates their model of who you are. People have known you as accommodating for twenty or thirty-plus years. They have built plans around it, allocated work on the assumption of it, and made social arrangements that depend on you being the one who bends. Your accommodation was load-bearing, and when you withdraw it, the people leaning on it feel the building move.
They do not experience this as you finding your voice. They experience it as you becoming difficult. The vocabulary that gets reached for is remarkably consistent. She's changed, not herself, being oversensitive, and hormonal. That last one is a particular achievement, given it is simultaneously accurate and used as a dismissal.
There is a further complication, which is that none of this arrives fully formed. I am not moving through the world with the settled clarity of a woman who has decided on her boundaries and installed them. I am correcting course in public, in real time, with an audience. I still fall into the old patterns. I still hear myself agreeing to something and feel the small internal lurch of recognition about four seconds too late, at which point I have to go back and revise, which looks considerably worse than simply having said no in the first place.
To the observer, this reads as flip-flopping. I concede the point. From the outside, there is very little difference between a woman who does not know what she wants and a woman who is unlearning thirty years of automatic ‘yes’, and I have no particular way of signalling which one I am on any given afternoon.
In my defence, I would offer that the correction is the work. The initial yes is muscle memory. The retraction is the new thing, and new things are clumsy. Anyone who has ever led a team through a change programme knows that the messiest period is not the old way or the new way but the stretch in between, when people are operating both systems at once and doing neither of them well. I have spent two decades telling organisations that this phase is normal and survivable. It is a slightly humbling experience to be living inside it.
What I have found useful is being explicit about it, sparingly and with the people who matter. Not an apology, and certainly not a medical disclosure to a recruitment agent, but a plain acknowledgment that I am recalibrating and that some of my recent responses have been overcorrections. The friend I upset received a version of this. The recruiter did not.
The wobble does settle. What emerges on the other side is not a difficult woman but an accurate one, which some people will prefer and others will not, and that sorting process turns out to be one of the more useful side effects of the whole business.
There is a version of this transition in which you spend the entire time apologising for the recalibration, and another in which you let it happen and accept that a small number of people will find you inconvenient for a while.
I have made my selection. Five people in twenty-four hours suggests I am at least committed to it.
Read more from Sass Allard
Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant
Sass Allard works at the intersection of leadership, behaviour, and wellbeing, supporting individuals and organisations as they navigate demanding periods of change. Her background spans two decades in global companies, where she has helped senior leaders strengthen culture, clarity, and capability. She brings a grounded understanding of how hormonal shifts shape women’s experience at work without limiting the broader conversation. As a UN Women delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women, she brings a global lens to agency and progress. Sass writes about adaptation, resilience, and the practical shifts that create real movement in work and life.
