When Did You Stop Being Part of Your Own Life?
The mental load builds over the years.
At first, it’s keeping track of the diapers, the feedings and the naps. And then come the activities, the appointments, navigating daily changing emotions, and constantly questioning whether you have done enough to lay the foundation they need to face the world.
And somewhere in between all of that, there is work. Relationships. Aging parents. Groceries. Meal planning. Birthdays. School forms. The shoes they’ve outgrown. The friend they’re struggling with. The appointment that needs to be booked. The thing your partner asked you to remind them about.
It isn’t necessarily that each one of these things is overwhelming on its own.
It is that your brain is rarely allowed to stop anticipating what comes next.
We know motherhood asks us to sacrifice pieces of ourselves. Our body, our immediate desires, our identity we spent so many years building and defending. We get so wrapped up in just surviving that we lose sight of the woman who was once a dreamer.
These roles we play aren’t necessarily there to take us away from ourselves. Sometimes they are the very things that allow us to really understand who we are.
It is when we become so tunnel-visioned and can only see ourselves as the caregiver, the organizer and the everything-to-everyone that we forget her.
The girl who dreamt of a big life with big adventures.
And eventually, the body starts to notice that she has disappeared too and it begins to speak for you through your hormones and emotions.
Your hormones operate in response to their environment, both internal and external. There is a continuous conversation happening between your brain, hormones, and emotions. Your subconscious is asking,
Am I safe?
Do I have enough resources?
Can I rest?
Do I need to stay alert?
When you spend years anticipating everyone else's needs, holding things in, avoiding conflict, pushing through exhaustion and telling yourself that it is easier to just do it yourself, the nervous system can begin to interpret daily life as something it needs to continually manage.
And this is often where resentment begins. Resentment isn't simply being angry at your partner or your children. Sometimes resentment is what accumulates when there is a repeated gap between what you need and what you allow yourself to ask for.
It is the dinner you made when you desperately wanted someone else to take care of you. The intimacy you agreed to when what you really wanted was space. The hundredth time you answered, “I'm fine,” because explaining why you weren't felt like one more thing you would have to manage. The family outing you organized while quietly wondering why no one ever organizes anything for you.
Over time, those experiences can become their own kind of stress.
Not because resentment itself is a hormone, but because unresolved resentment often comes with rumination, hypervigilance, emotional suppression and repeated interpersonal stress. Your brain continues revisiting the problem even when the argument is over. Your body can stay prepared for the next request, the next disappointment or the next moment when you will once again have to put yourself last.
Physiologically, this involves the body's stress-response system—the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis.
When your brain perceives stress, the hypothalamus releases CRH, which signals the pituitary to release ACTH, which then tells the adrenal glands to release cortisol.
That system is designed to help us survive. The problem is not cortisol. We need cortisol.The problem is when the body rarely receives the message that the demand has ended.
With ongoing psychological stress, cortisol doesn't necessarily stay permanently “high.” The rhythm itself can become dysregulated. We can see changes in how cortisol rises, falls and recovers after stressful experiences.
And our stress hormones communicate directly with our reproductive hormones.
When the brain senses that resources are continually being directed toward survival, stress signalling can interfere with the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis—the communication system that regulates ovulation and ovarian hormone production. Stress signalling can influence GnRH and LH, the very signals necessary for healthy ovulation.
And why does that matter? Because ovulation is how we produce significant amounts of progesterone during the reproductive years.
So now imagine this woman entering perimenopause. She may already have spent years carrying the mental load, overriding exhaustion and swallowing needs that never quite made it onto anyone else's list.
Then ovulation naturally begins to become less predictable. Progesterone can become more erratic. And with that comes changes in allopregnanolone, one of progesterone's neuroactive metabolites that interacts with GABA receptors in the brain, part of the system that helps us experience calm and regulate our response to stress.Estrogen begins fluctuating too. Estrogen interacts with serotonin, dopamine and the brain circuits involved in mood, motivation, threat perception and stress regulation.
Suddenly the nervous system that once allowed her to keep pushing through doesn't have quite the same hormonal buffering it once did.
The noise feels louder.
The requests feel heavier.
Her tolerance for being interrupted is lower.
Sleep becomes lighter.
Anxiety may appear where confidence once lived.
Things she used to brush off suddenly make her furious.
And everyone around her wonders:
What happened to her?
But perhaps a better question is:
What was she able to tolerate before that her body is no longer willing to tolerate now?
This is why I don't always see the irritability and anger of perimenopause as something that needs to be shut down. Sometimes, it is information. Sometimes, the hormones are removing our ability to keep overriding ourselves. And this is where relationships can become particularly vulnerable.
The person beside you may still be relating to the woman you have always been the capable one, the organizer, the person who somehow makes everything work.
But something inside of you is changing. You want more space. More help without having to delegate it. More intimacy that doesn't feel like another person needing something from your body. More conversations that go beyond schedules and logistics.
You may want to travel again. Create again. Change careers. Sit quietly. Spend time alone. Dance. Learn something new. Have an adventure simply because you want to have one. And those desires can be confusing when the life you built was partly built around everyone else's needs.
This creates a feedback loop that we rarely talk about. This relationship stress can activate the stress response. Changes in estrogen and progesterone can alter stress sensitivity and emotional regulation. Symptoms like poor sleep makes the nervous system even more reactive.
And suddenly a conversation that might once have felt manageable becomes an argument. The argument creates more disconnection. The disconnection creates more resentment. And the body stays on alert. This is why treating the woman without looking at the life she is living will only ever give us part of the answer.
Yes, sometimes she needs support for her hormones.
But she may also need someone else to carry the mental load.
She may need to say what she actually wants.
She may need to stop automatically answering yes.
She may need to have a very uncomfortable conversation with the person she loves.
She may need to rediscover pleasure that belongs only to her.
She may need to remember that she is not only here to make everyone else's life work.
Because resentment doesn't always mean you no longer love the people around you. Sometimes it is grief. Grief, for the parts of yourself you have been leaving behind. And maybe this stage of life isn't asking you to become the woman you were before motherhood, before responsibility and before everyone needed you. Maybe it is asking you to finally meet the woman who has been forming underneath all of it. The woman who knows how much she can carry. And is finally ready to decide what she no longer wants to.
If this feels familiar, I explore this conversation much more deeply in my book, Heal Your Hormones, Reclaim Yourself.
The book is not only about understanding estrogen, progesterone, cortisol or the physical symptoms of hormonal change. It is about understanding the woman experiencing them.
We look at the patterns many of us have carried for years - overgiving, people-pleasing, perfectionism, resentment, relationship dynamics and the invisible emotional load that can keep the nervous system in a constant state of doing and anticipating.
Because healing your hormones isn't only about changing what you eat or what supplements you take. Sometimes it requires looking at the life your body has been adapting to.
If you are in a season where your body seems to be asking you to slow down, speak up, change something or simply come back to yourself, Heal Your Hormones, Reclaim Yourself will help you understand why - and give you tools to begin doing exactly that.