The Perimenopause Panic

"She kept feeling something brush across her arm, light and tickling, like a hair. But every time, there was nothing there. She typed in "phantom feeling arm," and added - inevitably, given this was the 2020s and she was in her late 30s - "perimenopause." There it was: paresthesia, "a harmless but unsettling sensation like pins-and-needles... caused by fluctuating estrogen affecting the central nervous system and nerve signals.""

"When Anne Fulenwider began researching ideas for a potential women's health startup circa 2018, she wouldn't have known to Google those terms. She was 48 at the time and had recently left her post as editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, a magazine that regularly covered women's health. Nevertheless, "I had no idea I was in perimenopause," Fulenwider says with a laugh. "I didn't even know it existed.""

"Millennials are hitting their mid- to late-30s in an era of not just awareness but, arguably, hyperawareness. The cultural quantum leap we've witnessed around menopause - and, as the standup comedian Amy Miller has put it, " its hot, cool little sister, Peri" - cannot be overstated. Today, midlife female hormonal chaos is everywhere you look - taking top billing in books, articles, movies, celebrity interviews, one-woman shows. It's been memed, TikTok'd, and endlessly product-pitched. It even made it to SNL."

Many midlife women experience subtle, unsettling symptoms—phantom skin sensations, paresthesia, memory lapses, blurry vision, pelvic-floor changes—linked to fluctuating estrogen and altered nerve signaling. Some women only discover perimenopause after searching symptoms online and finding validation that explains otherwise inexplicable sensations. Awareness varies by age and background; some in their late 40s had not recognized perimenopause earlier. Millennials in their mid- to late-30s encounter both increased symptom prevalence and intensified cultural visibility. Menopause and perimenopause now permeate books, films, standup, social media, and mainstream media, while caregiving and work pressures intensify the daily impact of midlife hormonal changes.

Read at Bustle