Perimenopause anxiety - does it go with menstrual cycle?

[FreezerBird]

I'm having increasing mood/mental health symptoms which I am pretty sure are peri-menopause related.

I'm having a pretty stressful time at work but have been experiencing anxiety out of all proportion to what is actually going on. Last week I was waking up every day feeling sick with worry and resolving the issues I was worrying about just led to something else hopping up the list to take its place.

Then this week it's eased significantly, with no change to the things I was actually worrying about, if that makes sense.

Looking at the calendar it seems to me that I was feeling awful in the days preceding ovulation, and then once I'd ovulated I felt much better. Work is still difficult but I've been able to deal with it better.

This has happened quite suddenly and I think I need to give it another couple of cycles to see if there is a connection, but has anyone else experienced anything like this? What's particularly annoying is that this is the time of the month I used to feel at my best, with a real spring in my step. I would definitely prefer this to curling up in bed and crying.

No advice but I'm also wondering whether there's a connection with the bouts of anxiety & depression I have been having for the last few years and peri, as there's nothing in my life to cause these and they tend to last a couple weeks or so at a time. I never had this before I was about 40.

If there is a pattern to it I find it's actually that I feel worse in the first part of my cycle rather than in the PMT phase, if that makes sense. Seems back to front to me. But this is no fun.

That sounds similar! I have found a few people saying they developed anxiety alongside PMS symptoms in perimenopause, but that's definitely not what I'm experiencing.

Interestingly after a few years of much shorter cycles which again I've assumed is peri related, this cycle has been 32 days! And I feel awful, so it sort of fits that there was something weird about this last ovulation!