This topic is one we explore in depth in our six-week Yoga & Menopause course, beginning Thursday 2nd July and included in your free 15-day trial of The Frog Project. Find out more and join us here.

Anxiety & Perimenopause

There is a kind of anxiety that arrives during perimenopause and feels different from anything you've experienced before. Not the anxiety of a difficult day or a looming deadline, but something that lives underneath those things, a low hum of worry that is harder to pin down or reason with. You might find yourself lying awake turning things over, or feeling a tightening in the chest that arrives for no obvious reason, or noticing that your tolerance for uncertainty has narrowed considerably.

If this sounds familiar, the most important thing to understand is this: it is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is biology.

What's Actually Happening in Your Body

Oestrogen and progesterone are not simply reproductive hormones. They are deeply involved in brain function, mood, sleep, and how the nervous system responds to stress. When they begin to fluctuate and decline during perimenopause, the effects ripple through the entire body, not just the reproductive system.

Oestrogen plays an important role in the regulation of serotonin, which is our mood stabiliser, and dopamine, which is linked to motivation and a sense of reward. When oestrogen dips, serotonin can dip with it, and the effects on mood and mental clarity can be significant.

Progesterone has a calming effect on the nervous system, working in part through GABA receptors, which help to regulate anxiety and support sleep. When progesterone declines, as it does in perimenopause, that natural calming mechanism becomes less reliable. The thing that was quietly keeping things steady is no longer as steady.

What makes perimenopause particularly challenging is that hormones don't simply decline in a smooth, predictable line. They fluctuate, sometimes dramatically, from week to week. One week can feel manageable and the next completely overwhelming, and there is no reliable logic to it. That unpredictability is its own source of anxiety.

This is why so many people notice mood changes and anxiety during perimenopause that feel almost neurological, because in many ways they are. It is not just in your head. It is in your head, and it is physiological.

An Ayurvedic Lens: When Vata Runs High

Alongside the science, Ayurveda offers a parallel and complementary perspective on why anxiety tends to intensify at this stage of life.

In Ayurveda, life is broadly understood to move through three energetic phases. Kapha governs youth: earthy, stable, nurturing. Pitta governs the fertile and productive years: fiery, driven, focused. As we move through perimenopause and beyond, we shift into Vata, an energy associated with air, movement and change.

This shift is entirely natural, and in many ways it is a gift. Vata energy, in balance, brings lightness, creativity and a greater capacity for introspection. But when the transition is abrupt or unsupported, Vata can run high, and the symptoms of excess Vata look a great deal like anxiety: scattered thinking, restlessness, difficulty concentrating, lying awake at night with thoughts going in every direction, and a hard-to-explain feeling of being untethered from yourself.

The Ayurvedic response to this is to increase what is called Kapha energy, which means earth, grounding, warmth and stability. Slow movement. Stillness. Consistent routine. Being held rather than moving.

This, of course, is exactly what a thoughtful yoga practice at this stage of life is designed to offer.

What Yoga Can Do

Yoga doesn't promise to fix the anxiety or make it disappear. What it does is create conditions in which the nervous system can begin to regulate itself.

There are two approaches I find particularly helpful for anxiety during perimenopause.

Letting Go

The first is about learning to surrender what isn't yours to carry. Yoga philosophy speaks of Ishvara Pranidhana, the practice of releasing attachment to outcomes we cannot control. The anxiety of perimenopause is so often bound up in trying to manage the unmanageable: the unpredictability of symptoms, the uncertainty of what is changing, the sense that things should feel different to how they do. A practice built around gentle, deliberate letting go, even for twenty minutes, can bring real relief.

Grounding

The second approach is about grounding. When the mind is scattered and you can't find your footing, we need something to draw attention back into the body. One of the practices we use in our classes involves balancing a cork block gently on the top of the head. It sounds simple, and it is, and yet the effect is almost immediate: it draws the attention inward, quiets the mental noise and helps you find your centre. The body knows how to find stillness. Sometimes it just needs something to anchor it.

Breathwork is another powerful ally here. Alternate nostril breathing, known as Nadi Shodhana in yoga, activates the parasympathetic nervous system and reduces cortisol. Even five minutes in the morning can genuinely shift the quality of a day.

A Different Kind of Strength

What I hope you take from all of this is not a to-do list, but a different way of understanding what you're experiencing. The anxiety that arrives with perimenopause is not a weakness or a failing. It is your nervous system responding to a profound hormonal transition, doing its best to find new footing on unfamiliar ground.

Yoga doesn't ask you to push through it or rise above it. It asks you to meet it, to notice it with kindness, and to give your nervous system something gentle and grounding to come back to.

Again and again, that is enough.

Join Us This July

Our six-week Yoga & Menopause course explores this and much more, through live practice, breathwork, Ayurvedic wisdom and the support of a warm, understanding community. Six Thursday evenings beginning 2nd July, 7-8.30pm. Recordings are available the following day if you can't make a live session.

The course is included in your free 15-day trial of The Frog Project, no card and no commitment required.

Start your free trial and join us this July

Do you recognise any of this in yourself? Or would you like a short practice to help let go and ground?