This is one of the topics we explore 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 here.

Does this Sound Like You?

Zero to a hundred in seconds. A comment that would once have rolled off you sets something off that feels enormous and disproportionate. A door slammed a little too loudly. Someone who forgot, again, to do the thing you asked. Something small, and yet the response that rises isn't small at all. You feel the heat before you can even name it.

If this sounds familiar, I want you to know: this is not you losing your mind or your temper. This is your nervous system navigating one of the most significant hormonal transitions of your life.

What's Behind the Anger

During perimenopause, oestrogen and progesterone don't decline in a neat, predictable line. They fluctuate, sometimes dramatically, from week to week. One week can feel entirely manageable and the next overwhelming, and that unpredictability alone is enough to stretch the nervous system.

But the hormonal story goes deeper than that. Oestrogen plays a role in regulating serotonin, the neurotransmitter that helps stabilise mood. When oestrogen dips, your emotional buffer can dip with it, and things that once felt manageable begin to feel intolerable.

Progesterone, which has a naturally calming effect on the nervous system, also declines during perimenopause. Without that steady influence, the nervous system becomes more reactive, more easily triggered, quicker to escalate from calm to furious with very little in between.

And then there is the stress piece. As oestrogen declines, its natural anti-inflammatory effect on the body is also reduced. The adrenal glands, which are already working hard to regulate cortisol and adrenaline, take on more of the load. When the adrenals are stretched, everything is harder. Everything feels bigger. The threshold for overwhelm lowers, and the response when you cross it intensifies.

This is not a character flaw. It is the body under pressure, doing its best to adapt.

The Ayurvedic Perspective: When Pitta Gets Stuck

Ayurveda offers a lens that I find both illuminating and, oddly, comforting when it comes to this particular kind of anger.

During our productive years, most of us operate largely from Pitta energy: fiery, driven, focused, highly capable of getting things done. That energy serves us enormously well. It helps us build careers, raise families, show up reliably for other people. We become very skilled at directing it outward.

The transition into perimenopause asks us to redirect. But if the Pitta energy hasn't found a new outlet, it doesn't simply disappear. It accumulates and it looks for a release. And when it finds one, it can come out as heat, as irritability, as the kind of disproportionate rage that surprises even you.

The term menorage exists for a reason. This is a recognised, named phenomenon, and naming it matters. It removes the shame from something that is hormonal in origin, and it opens up a different question: not "what is wrong with me?" but "what does this energy need?"

What Yoga Can Do

Yoga doesn't ask you to suppress the anger or pretend it isn't there. It gives you somewhere to put it.

One of the most effective tools is Lion's Breath, known in Sanskrit as Simhasana. You take a deep inhale, open the mouth wide, extend the tongue, and exhale with a strong, audible ha. It is not exactly elegant, and that is entirely the point. It is one of yoga's most direct methods for releasing excess energy from the body, and it works in a way that is hard to explain until you've experienced it. The first time you do it in a class and hear everyone in the room exhale together, something genuinely shifts.

Beyond Lion's Breath, hip openers, chest openers and poses that create space around the throat and neck all serve a similar purpose: they give the body somewhere to move the energy rather than holding it. We carry an enormous amount of tension in these places, the jaw, the shoulders, the chest, and the hips are known in yoga and somatic traditions to hold emotional charge. Movement gives that charge somewhere to go.

The shift we are aiming for is from reactive to regulated. Not from feeling to not feeling, and not from full to empty, but from being completely at the mercy of the feeling to having just a little more space around it. Enough space to notice it before it takes over. Enough space to choose.

Try the Lion's Breath now (it's not as scary as it looks!)

The Reframe That Helps Most

When we understand what's behind the anger, it stops being a source of shame and starts being a source of information.

The rage is telling you something. It is telling you that the body is under pressure, that the nervous system is stretched and asking for support. It is Pitta energy that hasn't yet found its new direction, accumulated tension that needs somewhere to go, a system that is working very hard and could do with a great deal more rest and nourishment than it is currently getting.

Yoga's response to that is consistent. Slow down, breathe, and create a little space. Not to fix it, but to understand it, and to give it somewhere better to go than at the people who forgot to empty the dishwasher.

Join Us This July

Our six-week Yoga & Menopause course explores what's happening during perimenopause and menopause, and offers practical yoga tools for navigating it with a little more ease. Six Thursday evenings beginning 2nd July, 7-8.30pm, with recordings available the following day.

Included in your free 15-day trial, no card required.

Start your free trial and join us