Awake at 3am, foggy by 10, flooding by 3, furious by 6?You can happily navigate perimenopause with a plan from the Menopause Biologist to help your body adapt to changing hormones.Sleep deeply, think clearly and feel better than you have in years. Yes you can.

I discovered the existence of perimenopause purely accidentally via my acupuncturist. Just as I was leaving, I had mentioned my recent spate of unusually heavy irregular periods, at which point he said – well you’re coming up to that age. I’m thinking – I’m sorry, what age might that be? You know, he replied. I’m thinking, no, not really?? Then he says, you know, menopause. I was absolutely livid. How dare he talk to me like that?! I’m only 45! Isn’t menopause for half-dead old women? Or something? I left his clinic and furiously didn’t return for 2 years.

A few days later, after I'd calmed down, I looked it up on Google. Bloody hell. The fear was real. It seeped into my soon-to-be osteoporotic bones. Apparently my rapidly approaching future looked like this:

I wouldn't be able to sleep all night because of something called night sweats, and when I woke up tired as hell, my energy would get lower over the whole day until I collapsed on the sofa for a comatose nap. The day would be peppered with something called hot flushes, described as random, humiliating, and like swallowing a furnace. Then anxiety would take over, for no reason at all, or possibly because I was wondering why I was putting on so much weight. Also, was I dying? Was it cancer? What sort of cancer? Or maybe it was brain fog, which meant I would finally find my hairdryer in the fridge. All this accompanied by heart palpitations, although GPs invariably do tests and say there's nothing to worry about, so that's okay. Or is it? And good luck holding down a job. Oh, and if I fell and broke my hip, I'd die a lot earlier than I otherwise would have. That's menopausal osteoporosis for you.

I would lie in bed at night with the fear like a boulder on my chest. I'd already been diagnosed with fibroids and adenomyosis, early-stage perimenopause had me flooding everywhere, and now this nightmare was around the corner. I still had two years of functional medicine training to go. Was it worth continuing if my clinical work would be impossible the moment I started?

I was frightened, and I was on my own with it. No one was coming. No one was saying "this is what's happening and here's the way through." Instead, the oestrogen deficiency narrative was making no sense to me. If declining oestrogen is normal, how can it be a deficiency? This meant HRT wasn't an option for me. You can't replace something that doesn’t need to be replaced, and expect healing. And I believe the body wants to heal. It is designed to heal; it just needs the right conditions. So I did what I've always done, and I started asking questions. Armed with a degree in molecular biology, a functional medicine way of thinking, and a deep belief in biology's spirit, I set out to find out what was really going on. Ten years of clinical work and hundreds of women later, I know why. I was so alone for so long. You don't have to be. I'm here, for all of it, and I'll help you not just get through this but thrive.

Here's what I found.