You’re not lazy. I need you to hear that before I say anything else.
You are not lazy, you are not “just a tired mum,” and no, another green smoothie isn’t going to fix this. I know because I spent eighteen months blending kale into everything and waking up just as wrecked as the night before, standing in the kitchen at 6:15 AM staring at the blender like it owed me something while the school lunches still had to be made and the washing was still wet in the machine from yesterday and the kids still needed me to be someone I could not remember how to be.
Here’s what nobody told me. Perimenopause can start in your mid-thirties.
Not your late forties. Not after your last period. Your mid-thirties, while you’re still in the thick of school pick-ups and swimming lessons and negotiating screen time and trying to keep the house from looking like it’s been ransacked by possums and wondering why your jeans don’t fit anymore and thinking maybe you should do a Pilates class and then falling asleep on the couch at 8:30 instead.
Researchers at the University of Virginia screened women and found that 55.4% of those aged 30 to 35 already had moderate to severe perimenopause symptoms. I’ll say that again.
Thirty to thirty-five
More than half.
I was 37 when the exhaustion became something different. Not tired-because-the-baby-woke-up different. Not tired-because-I-stayed-up-too-late different.
A heavy, leaden, gravitational kind of tired that didn’t respond to sleep, didn’t respond to weekends, didn’t respond to that holiday in Noosa where I slept ten hours a night and still came home feeling like I’d been dragged behind a truck. My bones ached. My brain was full of static. I could not remember my neighbour’s name. The one I’d known for four years.
Everyone called it mum burnout. Like a weekend away would fix it.
My GP said it was stress.
Let me explain why that answer, while not wrong exactly, is catastrophically incomplete.
When your oestrogen starts fluctuating (and it does this for years before your periods actually stop) your mitochondria take a hit. Mitochondria are your cells’ power stations. They produce energy. When oestrogen receptors on their membranes stop getting a steady supply, those power stations start sputtering.
This isn’t “feeling a bit run down.” It is a cellular energy crisis.
(This is where I wanted to scream. There is a measurable, biochemical reason why I couldn’t get off the couch, and my GP offered me a brochure about mindfulness.)
At the same time, progesterone starts dropping. Progesterone is what helps you sleep deeply. It binds to GABA receptors in your brain, the same receptors that sedatives target, so when it declines you lose the chemical that was essentially tucking you in at night and keeping you asleep through till morning. Less progesterone means lighter, more fragmented sleep. So you’re producing less energy during the day AND recovering less efficiently at night, and if you add cortisol dysregulation from years of cumulative stress on top of that, you’ve got a system operating on fumes.
Researchers call it allostatic load. A clinical way of saying your body has been running on empty for so long it’s forgotten what full feels like. And the anxiety that tags along — the 3 AM panics, the heart racing for no reason — it’s the same cascade.
If you’re wondering whether what you feel is normal worry or something hormonal, this free anxiety quiz might be worth two minutes of your time.
Chiu and colleagues published a study in Menopause that found 46% of perimenopausal women reported physical and mental exhaustion, compared to 20% of premenopausal women. Nearly half. And most of them didn’t know perimenopause was the cause.
I want to talk about the thing that made me properly angry.
The North American Menopause Society reports that over 75% of perimenopausal women experience this fatigue. Seventy-five percent of us walking around with a physiological energy crisis, and almost none of us were warned it was coming. The Australian Government has finally noticed: $573 million in the 2025-26 budget for women’s health, including new Medicare menopause assessment rebates. That’s huge. But even with new funding, over 71,000 women accessed those consultations in the first months and the demand is outstripping what the system can handle.
How is this still where we are?
I spoke to a woman, I’ll call her Deb, who’d been to her GP three times in five months, complaining of exhaustion and brain fog and this new thing where she’d forget what she was saying mid-sentence, just drop the word right out of the air like she’d never known it, and her husband would finish her sentences and she’d stand there in the kitchen feeling like she was watching her own brain deteriorate in real time. She got a suggestion to “reduce her commitments.” She has three kids under ten. Which commitments, exactly?
The school run?
Feeding them dinner?
Deb was 36. Nobody mentioned perimenopause.
She eventually found answers herself, the way most of us do now. Online, at midnight, scrolling through posts from other exhausted women who were describing her exact symptoms back to her, until she stumbled on resources for recognising perimenopause exhaustion that helped her understand what she was experiencing had a name and a mechanism and wasn’t a character flaw.
It has a cause. And it can be investigated.
So here’s what I’d tell you to do, if you’re reading this at the kitchen table while your kids watch something on the iPad and you’re wondering if this is just what life feels like now.
Go to your GP, but go armed. Use the word perimenopause out loud, because if you just say “I’m tired” they’ll hear something different, and ask for bloods that actually mean something: ferritin (the reference range starts at 12, but researchers target above 50 for fatigue), a complete thyroid panel (not just TSH), vitamin D, B12, and a hormone assessment, and if your GP looks at you blankly when you ask for all this, that is information too.
Track your symptoms for two to three months. The rage. The fog. The bone tiredness. The 3 AM wake-ups. Write them down. A five-minute symptom check can help organise what you’re feeling into something a GP can actually work with. Having it on paper changes the conversation.
And stop blaming yourself. Please. That guilt loop (“I should be coping, other mums cope, what’s wrong with me”) burns more energy than you’ve got spare, and every minute you spend hating yourself for not being the mum you were at 32 is a minute you could’ve spent lying on the couch doing absolutely nothing, which is sometimes the most productive thing a perimenopausal woman can do.
In our research data, the word “exhausted” showed up 238 times across four platforms from women aged 30 to 50. Two hundred and thirty-eight women typing that word into their phones because they’d run out of people to say it to.
I’d love to wrap this up with “and then I did these five things and now I feel amazing.”
That’s not how it went.
Some things helped. Getting my ferritin up made a real difference. “Low normal” and “optimal” are very different places to live. Gentle exercise, but not HIIT. I tried that and made everything worse for three weeks. What helped most was knowing what was happening inside my body. Having the vocabulary for it.
Some weeks are still rubbish. The fatigue still rolls in, usually around day 21 of my cycle when progesterone drops, and on those days I cancel what I can and order pizza and let the kids have too much screen time and go to bed at 8 PM without apologising for it, because fighting your own biology when your body is screaming at you to rest is a battle you will never win. I’ve stopped pretending I’m fine.
I’m not fine. But I know why, and that has made all the difference.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult your GP or healthcare provider for personal medical guidance.
A Wellls.com contributor. Wellls is a Lifestyle Medicine platform for women, built from the analysis of 18,927+ real social media stories and backed by 14,745 clinical sources.
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