Navigating Perimenopause: What I Learned When I Asked 30,000 Women About HRT

What I Learned After I Asked 30,000 Women About HRT

Perimenopause AMIRIGHT? It seems like everyone is talking about it.

My older sister has been navigating this since her late thirties and I have spent the last few years watching her wade through symptoms that nobody warned us about, while she ominously informed me that my turn would be coming soon.

Bless the big sisters.

For a while I thought maybe it would be easier on me than it was on other people.

After I reversed my Hashimoto’s, PCOS, and alopecia and made the Happy Thyroid lifestyle my baseline, the worst of my hormonal stuff went away. Painful periods that left me calling out of work completely stopped, mood swings evened out, and I honestly felt really good for years.

And then, sometime in the last several months, I started to notice things.

I was agitated in a way I hadn’t been since I was dealing with PCOS. Struggling to regulate myself in moments that didn’t deserve the intensity of response I was bringing.

My husband would chew on a carrot and I felt physically assaulted.

I started getting vaginal dryness for the first time in my entire life.

Suddenly I had fatigue that didn’t match what I was eating or how I was sleeping.

My ADHD symptoms, which had been subtle/manageable for years, came roaring back.

And the histamine reactivity I had been managing would get really wild leading up to my period.

Literally felt like I was on a bucking bronco trying to hold on for dear life.

While my cycle remained 28 days long, everything around it felt more intense.

So. I did what I always do when I’m trying to think something through. I crowd sourced experiences by asking the women in my community to share their stories.

Because we need the stories of women who come before us — each story is like a doula that helps us transition into midlife.

I posted a question to my audience of about 30,000 women, most of whom are dealing with Hashimoto’s or some kind of autoimmune disease, and I asked who’s on HRT, who white-knuckled peri, and if they did/didn’t go on it, do they have regrets.

The DMs came in for two days and the range of experiences was wild!

I’m going to share them below, as well as research I’ve been doing that changed how I think about HRT, labs I think we should all be running before we make a decision about HRT, and the protocol I have myself on for the next six months to see if it helps my hormonal picture.

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What The Women Had to Say

Most of the stories I heard from women on HRT were positive and that they wished they had started sooner.

One woman told me she was 48 by the time she finally convinced her doctor she needed hormones, and looking back, her symptoms had started six full years earlier. She had spent that decade convinced she had Lyme disease, getting bounced from specialist to specialist with inconclusive tests, before she eventually self-diagnosed and begged for hormones. The relief she described once she started was almost cinematic. Joint pain reduced within two weeks, her headaches were gone, and weight gain stopped…My body could not anymore, she wrote about the years before. The hormone roller coaster was too much. Another woman echoed her. Yes to HRT, I wish I would have started sooner.