She was doing everything right. That was the problem.
She sent me a message on a Tuesday morning. She had been up since 3 a.m. again. She was a senior director at her company, training five days a week, eating what she thought was healthy, and still waking up drenched, exhausted, and completely at a loss.
“I feel like my body is broken,” she wrote. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do.”
That line has stayed with me. Because she was not doing anything wrong. She was doing everything she had been told to do — for a body that no longer responded to those rules the same way.
That is perimenopause. And it is one of the most disorienting experiences a high-functioning woman can go through, precisely because the strategies that worked before stop working, and nobody explains why.
Here is the piece of this that I think matters most right now.
Your hot flashes are not random. They are coming from your hypothalamus — the part of your brain that regulates body temperature. As estrogen declines, your hypothalamus loses its ability to accurately read your core temperature. So it overcorrects. It sends emergency cooling signals — a rush of blood to the skin, sweating, a racing heart. That is the flash. That is the 3 a.m. soak-through. That is your brain doing exactly what it thinks it should do, with the hormonal information it has available.
Once she understood that, something shifted. She stopped feeling broken and started asking better questions.
The research on exercise and hot flashes is genuinely interesting — and genuinely more nuanced than “work out more.” Certain kinds of movement help regulate the nervous system, reduce cortisol, and improve the hormonal conditions that make hot flashes less frequent and less severe. Other kinds of training — particularly high-intensity work done at the wrong time of day without adequate recovery — can make things measurably worse.
She was in the second category. Five intense sessions a week, evening workouts, not enough protein, not enough rest. Her body was under more stress than it was recovering from. We changed the structure. Not the effort. The structure.
If any of this is resonating, I wrote the full version of this conversation into a blog post — the mechanism behind hot flashes and sleep disruption, what the research actually shows about exercise and perimenopause, and what a smarter training approach looks like in practice.
It is worth a read, especially if you have been working hard and still not feeling better.
Read more here
And if you want to talk through what this looks like for your life specifically, that is exactly what 1-on-1 coaching is for. No generic plans. Just a strategy built around where you actually are right now.