“Not Feeling Like Myself in Perimenopause” — A Vague Sense that Something is Off
[If you are coming from our newsletter, and have read this background, you can go directly to our findings here.]
In the early days of my perimenopause experience, when I didn’t have an explanation for my newly disrupted sleep or my mood changes, I remember saying to a friend, “I just don’t feel like myself. I don’t know what’s going on”.
When I started working with one of my research collaborators, Dr. Marcie Richardson, OBGYN and founder of a menopause clinic, I asked her if she heard this phrase from patients. She said, “yes, all the time. But it’s very non-specific”.
We went on to discuss how it is hard to know what it means in a time-crunched appointment. That discussion led our research team to add a question to the Women Living Better Survey that would allow us to better understand what this often-used phrase meant.
The question in the survey read: Many women report just not feeling like themselves during this phase of life. How often was this true for you over the past 3 months?” Participants chose from 5 options ranging from “none of the time” to “all of the time.”
We also asked participants about their experiences with 61 symptoms. We then analyzed which symptoms or groups of symptoms were most associated with Not Feeling Like Myself.
A Scientific Poster And Washington Post Article About “Not Feeling Like Myself” in Perimenopause
We presented a scientific poster about the symptoms most correlated with “Not Feeling Like Myself” at The Menopause Society’s annual meeting in Philadelphia in September of 2023. The Washington Post wrote an article about this initial research.
We then went on to further analyze what “Not Feeling Like Myself” in perimenopause meant by looking at groups of symptoms. That analysis is now published research, online ahead of print in the Journal Menopause, as of March 25, 2024. It will be published in Volume 31, Issue 5 later this year.
Thank you to the many of you who have already supported our GoFundMe campaign to allow us to make this paper open access. We paid for open access so the entire paper would be available immediately but have a bit more fundraising to do to cover those costs.
If you find this research helpful and can make a small contribution to get us to our goal, we would be grateful.
Our Findings about “Not Feeling Like Myself” in Perimenopause
Overall, sixty-three percent (63.3%) of participants reported feeling not like themselves (NFLM) 50% of the time or more over the previous 3 months.
Here is a spider graph of the individual symptoms most correlated with NFLM. Notice that hot flashes and vaginal dryness, 2 of the most expected or known symptoms of the menopausal transition are the most weakly correlated.
For more about our findings including which symptom groups were most associated with “Not feeling Like Myself” in perimenopause, you can find the whole paper here.
The Impact of this Research Paper
Our hope is that this research will be validating for the many of us who have said this phrase and experienced some of these symptoms.
And we hope that it will allow health care providers to be able to follow up with more specific questions when they hear this phrase from their patients.
Not Feeling Like Myself (#NFLM) is being increasingly mentioned in the perimenopause space. An excellent researcher shared this work in her presentation at The Menopause Society meeting in September 2024.
When we shared the paper with a group of healthcare providers that support midlife women one internal medicine primary care physician responded with:
Oh my God this is so timely. This is exactly what I hear as I’m sure you know from all your research every single day of my life when I walk into a room with someone between the ages of 44 and 60.
