"Not Feeling Like Myself" in Perimenopause: The Identity Shift Nobody Names

Maybe you were the one who had it together, quick-witted, patient, motivated, getting things done. You trusted your body, you knew how to manage your weight, your moods, and you coped with whatever came at you.

Now compare that with how you feel, flat, short-tempered and forgetful. You just do not recognise yourself in the way you are responding to ordinary, everyday things anymore, and that is unsettling.

Researchers asked more than 1,700 women in a survey the direct question: did they feel like themselves during this stage of life. The answer was striking, 63% of perimenopausal women said they did not feel like themselves for at least half of the time.¹

This is not hot flushes, and it is not weight gain. The individual experiences most strongly linked to this feeling were fatigue, feeling overwhelmed, low mood, anxiety, irritability, difficulty concentrating, harder decision-making, an inner restlessness, forgetfulness, tearfulness, and increased worry.¹

Why every symptom starts to feel like evidence against you

When confidence, patience and memory all shift at once, it stops feeling like a list of separate symptoms and starts feeling like something about you has changed for the worse. You forget a word and think you are losing your memory. You snap at your partner and think you are becoming difficult to live with. Each individual moment gets read as a verdict on your character, when it is actually one hormonal system affecting several things at once.

A 2024 qualitative study captured this; women described feeling disconnected from the person they knew themselves to be, specifically because they found it so hard to regulate the emotions they were suddenly having.²

The hormonal reason this touches everything at once

Hormones influence your brain, your mood, your sleep, your appetite, your energy, your memory, your confidence and your resilience.¹ When oestrogen and progesterone are fluctuating as dramatically as they do in perimenopause, of course you feel different.

Oestrogen exerts profound effects on mood, mental state and memory, acting directly on two of the brain's major chemical signalling systems. The first is the monoamine system, which includes serotonin and dopamine, the chemicals most associated with mood and motivation, and the second is the neuropeptide system, a set of smaller molecules that help fine-tune stress response and emotional processing, a mechanism documented in the scientific literature since at least the 1990s.³ Anxiety-like changes have been linked to shifting oestrogen levels, and exaggerated oestrogen swings during perimenopause may heighten sensitivity to everyday psychosocial stress.³ In practical terms, the same event that once rolled off you can now land like a much bigger deal.

You have not gone anywhere

The woman you think you have lost has not disappeared, she is still there, underneath symptoms that are real, disruptive, and temporary. You are still intelligent, even on the days a word slips away mid-sentence. You are still capable, even when ordinary tasks take more out of you than they used to. They are symptoms, and they are not permanent.

Three takeaways

1. Not feeling like yourself is a named, researched pattern affecting the majority of perimenopausal women, you are not alone in this.

2. This feeling is driven most strongly by fatigue, anxiety, mood changes and difficulty concentrating.

3. The woman you were has not disappeared, she is still in there, and the symptoms creating this distance are real but temporary.

This is not your body failing you. It is your body changing, and asking for a different kind of support.

This information is educational only and does not constitute personal medical advice. Always consult a qualified health professional about your individual circumstances. © Menopause Hub 2026.

REFERENCES

1. Coslov N, Richardson MK, Woods NF. "Not feeling like myself" in perimenopause, what does it mean? Observations from the Women Living Better survey. Menopause. 2024;31(5):390 to 398.

2. O'Reilly K, McDermid F, McInnes S, Peters K. "I was just a shell": Mental health concerns for women in perimenopause and menopause. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing. 2024;33(3):693 to 702.

3. Fink G, Sumner BE, Rosie R, Grace O, Quinn JP. Estrogen control of central neurotransmission: effect on mood, mental state, and memory. Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology. 1996;16(3):325 to 344.