Am I too young for perimenopause? I wondered.

Am I too young for perimenopause? Too many of us have asked this!

In my case, it was: Am I too young for perimenopause at 42?

At 42, I started waking up at 2 am. I was awake for an hour or more. A few months later, I felt more fragile, less able to cope, like my stress-response was off-kilter.  My friend and co-founder wondered, “Am I too young for perimenopause at 43?” She felt much more irritable and not only right before her period. It wasn’t like her. Were these changes menopause-related? Initially, we didn’t think so. Neither did our healthcare providers.

Women Living Better was born of our personal experiences with these what felt like all-of-the-sudden sleep and mood changes. These arose without corresponding changes in our lives, bodies ore menstrual cycles to explain them. We felt certain something physiological had shifted, but what was it?

Since we were in our early 40s, we assumed we were too young for menopause-related changes, and besides, we were still getting our periods every month. Visits with our healthcare providers — both primary care physicians and OB-GYNs — confirmed this. They said we were too young and that our monthly periods were further evidence that what we were experiencing was not perimenopause.

Here is why you wonder: Am I too young for perimenopause at 38? 39? 41? 43?

• Too little research has been done on this phase of women’s lives.
• Most of what has been done has focused on women 45 and older.
• The research that has been done on younger women didn’t begin until the 1990s. This post outlines those studies
• It takes research a long time to get to “translated” to women and medical providers.

Combing through this under-the-radar research and connecting with the researchers themselves led us to believe we were not too young for perimenopause at 42 or 43!

And it led us to create Women Living Better — a resource so other women could learn what to expect, when and what to do about the inevitable changes associated with this normal life transition.

In the past 10 years, we have been on a mission to create a better understanding of this earliest part of the menopause transition.

We focus our research on the late reproductive stage (LRS). We look at womens experience during this stage, when periods are coming monthly, but with subtle changes to cycle length (how close periods come to each other) and periods themselves (i.e., how much you bleed (more or less) and for how many days (more or fewer)) and compare it to womens’ experience during the menopausal transition, after noticeable menstrual cycle changes.

Historically, we women and our health care providers believed noticeable menstrual cycle changes would be the first signs that a reproductive transition was beginning.

We are on a mission to update this belief!

This will result in fewer of us asking: Am I too young for perimenopause?