How psychotherapy can help your mental health during perimenopause
Welcome back to my blog series on all things perimenopause! This is the fifth and final post of the series. In case you missed the first four posts:
MENTAL HEALTH CHANGES DURING PERIMENOPAUSE: SYMPTOMS, CAUSES, AND SUPPORT
DOES PERIMENOPAUSE CAUSE MOOD CHANGES AND DEPRESSION
DOES PERIMENOPAUSE CAUSE ANXIETY? UNDERSTANDING SYMPTOMS AND TRIGGERS
WOMEN, PERIMENOPAUSE, AND ADHD: WHY SYMPTOMS OFTEN GET WORSE
For many women, perimenopause brings emotional and psychological changes that feel confusing and overwhelming. Mood swings, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and worsening attention option appear during this stage of life, sometimes, for the first time, sometimes is return of struggles that once felt resolved.
Psychotherapy can be a powerful support during perimenopause because it addresses both the biological reality of hormonal change and the psychological, relational, and identity shifts that often accompany it. For many women, perimenopause is not just a physical transition—it’s an emotional one. While a therapist can’t prescribe HRT to help you manage your fluctuating hormones like estrogen and progesterone, she can help you understand how these natural, biological hormonal fluctuations impact everything from your mood, stress response, sleep, and more.
Therapy helps you make sense of what's happening in perimenopause
As hormone levels rise and fall unpredictably during perimenopause, the brain’s ability to manage anxiety, stress, mood, even multi-tasking, can be disrupted. These mental health changes during perimenopause can be:
Emotional- how we feel.
Cognitive- how we think and process our thoughts.
Behavioral- how we act, react, and behave.
One of the most powerful benefits of psychotherapy during perimenopause validation. If you’re a woman in perimenopause, no doubt you’ve had moments of not feeling yourself, more anxious, more edgy, annoyed or irritable, more emotional or tearful.
Therapy helps you to:
Normalize your experience
Reduce self-blame, what is happening is a natural transition
Become a better advocate for yourself when you have a better understand of what’s happening
Today, 34 symptoms of perimenopause have been identified. Of them, nearly a third of them can be associated with our mental health:
anxiety
depressed mood
difficulty concentrating
fatigue
heart palpitations (common in anxiety and panic)
irritability mood swings
libido changes- especially when related to motivation, pleasure, interest, and ability to focus and be in the moment
memory lapses and brain fog
mood swings
panic attacks
sleep issues, particularly insomnia or 2:00am-4:00am wake-ups
Therapy helps by:
Naming perimenopause as a hormone-driven nervous system transition
Separating symptoms from character flaws
Replacing self-criticism with self-compassion
Reducing shame, guilt, and self-blame
Simply understanding “this makes sense” can be profoundly stabilizing. Therapy helps women advocate for themselves rather than feeling dismissed or misdiagnosed.
Treating Mood and Anxiety Symptoms Without Pathologizing
During perimenopause, fluctuating estrogen and progesterone affect serotonin, dopamine, GABA, and cortisol—making stress tolerance lower and emotional reactivity higher.
Serotonin, which helps regulate mood and emotional stability. Declining estrogen and progesterone, can lead to mood swings, irritability, anxiety, and depression, as estrogen normally boosts serotonin production.
Dopamine, which affects motivation and pleasure. Declining estrogen directly affects dopamine activity, leading to reduced motivation, focus, pleasure, and energy. It can also contribute to "brain fog," irritability, and mood swings. These changes disrupt the brain's reward system and executive functions, creating symptoms like difficulty concentrating, loss of joy, and fatigue.
GABA, the brain's calming neurotransmitter. Hormone fluctuations, especially progesterone, can reduce its calming effects leading to increased anxiety, insomnia, irritability, and mood swings.
Perimenopause can trigger:
New-onset anxiety or depression
Panic attacks
Increased irritability or rage
Worsening PMDD-like symptoms
Psychotherapy can help treat mood and anxiety symptoms by:
Creating an individualized plan to help manage symptoms and make you feel more empowered during this transition
A nuanced view that avoids minimizing the impact of this HUGE biological transition- its not just in your head and even though it is part of aging, that doesn’t mean you have to suffer through it
Support in discerning when symptoms may benefit from both therapy and medical care (e.g., HRT, SSRIs)
Perimenopause and Depression: When Low Mood Isn’t “Just Stress”
Depression during perimenopause is common and often misunderstood. Hormonal fluctuations can affect serotonin and dopamine, increasing vulnerability to depressive symptoms.
Psychotherapy can help reduce symptoms:
Persistent sadness, numbness, or loss of interest
Fatigue and low motivation
Feelings of hopelessness or low self-worth
Depression that feels “out of character” or confusing
Therapy offers a space to understand whether depression is hormonally influenced, situational, or both—and to treat it without minimizing or dismissing your experience.
Anxiety in Perimenopause: Why You May Feel More On Edge
Anxiety during perimenopause often shows up as constant worry, irritability, restlessness, or feeling easily overwhelmed. Hormonal changes can increase cortisol sensitivity, making the nervous system more reactive to everyday stress.
Psychotherapy helps by:
Learn grounding and regulation skills that work with a sensitive nervous system
Reducing catastrophic thinking
Identifying triggers that feel new or unfamiliar
Many women are relieved to learn that their anxiety has a biological component—and that it’s treatable.
Panic Attacks During Perimenopause: Understanding Sudden Fear Responses
Some women experience panic attacks for the first time during perimenopause. Sudden surges of fear, racing heart, shortness of breath, or dizziness can feel alarming and destabilizing.
Psychotherapy can help you:
Understand the connection between hormones and panic
Learn tools to interrupt panic cycles
Reduce fear of future attacks
Rebuild a sense of internal safety when the body feels unpredictable
Restore confidence in your ability to cope with a panic attack in the future should attacks become recurrent
With the right support, panic symptoms can become more manageable.
Worsening ADHD Symptoms in Perimenopause
Perimenopause can significantly impact executive functioning, especially for women with ADHD. Estrogen plays a key role in dopamine regulation, and when estrogen fluctuates, ADHD symptoms may intensify.
Women often report increased distractibility, difficulty focusing or completing tasks, emotional dysregulation, reactivity, mood swings, and irritability, as well as feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities that once felt manageable.
Psychotherapy can help women with ADHD in perimenopause by:
Building executive function skills
Reduce overwhelm and emotional reactivity
Reducing shame, self-criticism, and low self-esteem
Perimenopause and Identity, Meaning, and Life-Stage Transitions
On average, perimenopause aligns with women between the ages of 35-50. This time of transition often coincides with:
Decisions around parenting: to have children or not (and sometimes a fear of time running out), juggling parenting responsibilities with competing demands of life, or confronting the empty nest as children begin leaving home
Juggling caregiving for aging parents with other competing demands of life- your own health, partners, children, and career
Climbing the career ladder or reassessing if you’re in the right field or role
Loss, grief, or existential questioning
A reckoning with time, mortality, and unmet desires
Psychotherapy can support you as you:
Grieve what is changing or ending
Integrate earlier versions of the self with emerging ones
Reprioritize and clarify what really matters to you now
Reclaim agency over your life’s path
Making informed decisions about their health, lifestyle, and and psychological wellbeing
Viewing perimenopause as a transition toward greater authenticity, not decline
Perimenopause is a biological and psychological transition, not a personal failure. Perimenopause is not a sign that you’re “falling apart.” It’s a developmental transition that often exposes coping strategies that no longer work and invites new ways of caring for yourself.
therapy Supports Relationships During Perimenopause
Mental health symptoms during perimenopause often affect relationships. Increased irritability, emotional sensitivity, or withdrawal can create distance with partners, family and friends.
Therapy can help you:
Communicate needs more clearly
Set boundaries without guilt and balance emotional labor in your relationship
Renegotiate roles and expectations
Reduce resentment and emotional eruptions or explosions because you’re communicating your needs more clearly
Navigate changes in libido and intimacy and how to communicate your related needs more clearly without your partner taking it personally or feeling rejected
Strengthen intimacy through honesty rather than self-silencing
You Don’t Have to Go Through Perimenopause Alone
If you’re experiencing depression, anxiety, panic, worsening ADHD, or emotional overwhelm during perimenopause, help is available. Psychotherapy offers compassionate, evidence-based support tailored to this unique stage of life. With the right support, perimenopause can become not just something to survive—but a transition that leads to greater clarity, authenticity, and emotional resilience.
If you’re a woman looking for support in perimenopause, let’s connect for a FREE 15-minute call to talk through how I can support you! I am located in Michigan and offer online therapy to women in CT, FL, IL, IN, MI, OH, SC, and WI, states where I am licensed to practice.
As a therapist and licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) with nearly 20 years of experience, I support women in midlife and the struggles that come with it- perimenopause, anxiety and stress, ADHD and inattention, depression, grief and loss, and those unexpected life events that throw you off course.