I’m a holistic women’s health practitioner, and I’ve come to believe we’re starting the women’s health conversation twenty years too late.
Every week women walk into my clinic convinced their bodies have suddenly turned against them. They’re exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed by brain fog, sleepless nights, hot flushes and hormonal chaos, not to mention an unbearable new intolerance for other people’s bullshit. They tell me they don’t recognise themselves anymore and wonder what happened.
But I don’t think their bodies have suddenly stopped working.
I think they’ve been trying to communicate with them for decades. We’ve simply never been taught how to listen.
That tiredness you pushed through during your last luteal phase? Your body heard that as a rejection of your needs. The ‘yes’ you gave a co-worker when you really wanted to say no? Your body felt the anger, and when you pushed it down, it didn’t vanish. It’s still there, simmering just below the surface.
Your body remembers.
Everyone’s talking about perimenopause, and I think that’s a wonderful thing. For years women suffered in silence. Today we finally understand terms like brain fog, hormonal changes, HRT and menopause. There are books, podcasts and specialists helping women navigate this stage of life in ways previous generations never had.
But the more women I see in my clinic, the more convinced I become that we’re still asking the wrong question.
What if the biggest opportunity to improve women’s health came twenty years earlier?
For most of us, our relationship with our bodies begins at puberty. Yet we aren’t really taught about how to work with our menstrual cycle. At best, we’re just taught how to manage it.
We learn how to hide our periods, push through the discomfort and carry on as though nothing is happening. We carry tampons up our sleeves, tie jumpers around our waists after an accident at school and apologise for needing the bathroom.
What we aren’t taught is that our menstrual cycle might be one of the body’s most sophisticated health feedback systems.
Here’s the irony.
I spent almost twenty years working in the health, beauty and period care industry. I knew the products. I knew the research. I understood the marketing and what women wanted from their pads and tampons.
But I didn’t truly understand the menstrual cycle itself.
Not as a monthly report card on a woman’s overall health.
Not as one of the body’s earliest indicators that something is out of balance.
Not as a roadmap pointing towards stress, inflammation, hormonal health and nervous system regulation.
Like so many women, I’d been taught to see my period as something to manage rather than something to understand.
Today, I see it very differently.
Painful periods. Heavy bleeding. Crushing fatigue. Irregular cycles. Severe PMS.
We’ve been taught to see these as inconveniences to suppress or simply “part of being a woman”. I see them as information. They’re often the body’s earliest clues that something deeper deserves our attention.
Our body is always communicating with us.
We’ve simply become very good at overriding the conversation.
Unlike men, women are cyclical. We move through four hormonal seasons every month, while men’s hormones follow a far more consistent 24-hour rhythm. Yet we’ve built workplaces, exercise routines and expectations around the assumption that everyone should perform the same way, every day.
Every time we betray our own biology by living on their timeline instead of ours, we pay for it later.
We push through the exhaustion because there’s too much to do. We say yes when we desperately need to say no. We train harder, work longer, sleep less and convince ourselves we’ll rest later.
For years that can seem to work. Until it doesn’t.
Every time we override our body like this, she takes notes.
She speaks to us in a myriad of ways, and our cycle is one of the clearest.
A little PMS here… some bloating there, PCOS, crushing fatigue, all signs of a body that isn’t flowing well.
We can live like this for years.
Perimenopause doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. By the time many women reach their forties, their bodies have often spent decades adapting to chronic stress, relentless productivity and putting everyone else’s needs ahead of their own.
Perimenopause doesn’t necessarily create all of those problems.
Sometimes it simply turns up the volume.
The whispers become impossible to ignore.
One of the biggest patterns I see isn’t simply hormonal. It’s nervous system dysregulation.
Many women have spent years living in fight-or-flight because that’s what modern life rewards. Constant doing. Constant production. Constant striving. We’ve normalised living in survival mode without ever stopping to ask what that might be costing us.
And perhaps that’s because we’ve been trying to live as though women are machines.
We’re not.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that women’s bodies are failing us. Perhaps we’ve built a world that asks women to ignore the way their bodies naturally work.
Traditional Chinese Medicine has understood this for thousands of years.
It teaches that health depends on a balance between Yin and Yang.
Modern life celebrates Yang: doing, producing, striving, achieving.
But we’ve quietly forgotten Yin: rest, reflection, nourishment, softness and restoration…..the NOT doing
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons so many women arrive in midlife completely depleted.
None of this means giving up on ambition.
It means recognising that there is a time to push forward and a time to pull back. A time to create and a time to restore. A time to achieve and a time to receive.
Working with those rhythms isn’t a weakness.
It’s wisdom.
If I have one hope, it’s that today’s girls never have to wait until they’re forty-five to discover what their bodies have been trying to tell them since they were fifteen. Because by the time we’re talking about perimenopause, we’ve already missed twenty years of opportunities to understand ourselves better.
And I can’t help wondering how different women’s health might look if that conversation began much, much earlier.