Our founding story
Women Living Better began when Nina Coslov and her good friend Jo McChesney were having a parallel experiences with what they now realize was perimenopause. But they didn’t know it then. They had no idea why they all of the sudden felt so not like themselves].
An initial survey of 400 women ages 35-80 in 2016, convinced them there was a need for better information about perimenopause. Together, they created the Women Living Better website in 2018 to be the resource they couldn’t find — something in consumer-friendly language that explained what was happening to their bodies, what was causing their symptoms and what they could do to feel better. The sites they found were selling a product, a program or wanted to help them fend off aging or make them sexier. This co-mingling with a product made them suspicious about accuracy.
They knew women deserved better — deserved to understand what they were experiencing and why; deserved education to fill in all they hadn’t learned about how hormonal patterns begin to change around 40 and the possible implications and deserved to know why healthcare providers aren’t able to normalize or validate these experiences.
They also believed that collecting and sharing the views of experts and the experiences of others would combat the shroud of secrecy around reproductive aging and normalize it.
We wondered: Am I too young for perimenopause? Too many of us have asked this!
In Nina’s case she asked herself: Am I too young for perimenopause at 42? At 42, she started waking up at 2 am. She was awake for an hour or more. A few months later, she felt more fragile, less able to cope, like her stress-response was off-kilter. Jo 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!
Original message from 2018 (still true today!)
Too many women deal with symptoms in their 40s and don’t know that they can be related to changing hormones. Waking at night. Irritability. Anxiety. Breast Tenderness. Headaches. Less interest in sex. Sudden Anger. And generally not feeling like yourself. It’s easy to think things are wrong with your life or your relationships when in reality it might be changing hormones causing these issues.
We’ve learned a lot over the past several years and knowing more about this phase has made us feel better. We hope you’ll look around, learn something and as a result feel better by knowing more.
