“Perimenopause felt very destabilizing. I don’t think anyone really prepares us for the amount of brain remodeling that has to happen during this transition.” – Dr. Mariza Snyder

Dr. Mariza Snyder sat at her desk staring at the shopping list she’d written moments before. She couldn’t remember what she meant to buy. Her 4-year-old son finished her sentences now because she lost words mid-thought. For a woman who once managed a hundred tabs open effortlessly—scheduling interviews, ordering supplies, planning meals, managing her practice—this cognitive shift felt terrifying.

Was this early dementia at 46?

No. This was perimenopause meeting stored trauma.

Many women enter perimenopause unprepared for nervous system changes that make this decade-long transition feel destabilizing. For women carrying stored trauma from childhood, complex PTSD, or hypervigilant nervous systems, perimenopause amplifies symptoms in ways conventional medicine never explains. Understanding how nervous system dysregulation intersects with hormone decline changes everything about navigating this journey.

Why Blood Sugar Stability Becomes Foundation During Perimenopause

Cellular energy determines your capacity for everything—mood regulation, stress tolerance, cognitive function, and nervous system flexibility. Stabilizing blood sugar creates the homeostasis that supports your body through massive hormonal shifts.

Dr. Mariza identifies blood sugar stability as Pillar One in The Perimenopause Revolution: unstable blood sugar connects directly to unstable emotions, mood swings, and dysregulated nervous systems.

The Blood Sugar-Nervous System Connection:

• Blood sugar spikes and crashes signal danger to your nervous system
• Your body interprets instability as a threat requiring protective responses
• Unstable blood sugar lowers the threshold where you cross from stress into overwhelm
• During perimenopause, hormone fluctuations make blood sugar even harder to regulate

Dr. Mariza carries complex PTSD from childhood abuse. She’s struggled with mood swings, low stress tolerance, and hypervigilance her entire life. What made the biggest difference? Stabilizing cellular energy through blood sugar.

Food provides molecular information to your body. When you eat meals that stabilize blood sugar—combining protein, healthy fats, fiber, and complex carbohydrates—you create steady energy production at the cellular level.

What Stable Blood Sugar Supports:

• Your mitochondria producing ATP efficiently
• Your gut microbiome maintaining balance
• Adequate omega-3s reducing inflammation
• Micronutrient-rich antioxidants combating neuroinflammation
• Your brain receiving consistent fuel

Perimenopause represents a neuroendocrine transition where your brain and hormones remodel together. The more you stabilize blood sugar, the more you reduce inflammation—particularly neuroinflammation that makes executive function falter and memory fail.

How Perimenopause Creates a Neuroendocrine Transition

Perimenopause involves massive brain remodeling as estrogen, progesterone, GABA, and melatonin decline erratically rather than predictably. This transition affects neurological function as much as reproductive function.

The CEO Analogy:

Think about a CEO who showed up consistently every day for 30 years, arriving at 9 AM, binding to receptor sites throughout your brain, coordinating all major functions. Suddenly this CEO doesn’t show up at 9 AM anymore:

• Monday: Arrives at 3 PM, doesn’t leave until 1 AM
• Tuesday: Doesn’t show up until 11 AM, leaves at lunch
• Wednesday: Works all day but erratically
• Thursday: Completely absent

That’s estrogen during perimenopause. Your brain scrambles to adapt to this inconsistency.

What Estrogen Coordinates:

• Hippocampus → Memory formation and recall
• Amygdala → Emotional processing and regulation
• Limbic system → Mood and emotional responses
• Prefrontal cortex → Executive function and decision-making

Research demonstrates perimenopause involves default neuroinflammation. This inflammation in your brain creates the cognitive symptoms women find most frightening—lack of word recall, forgetting why you entered rooms, losing track mid-sentence, difficulty making decisions.

Dr. Mariza experienced this acutely during podcast tours. She’d been using oral micronized progesterone to delay her period for five days. When she finally surrendered to her cycle, the progesterone cliff dive hit hard. Her brain felt like it was on the fritz—the actual biological experience of hormone withdrawal affecting brain chemistry.

What You’re Simultaneously Losing:

1. Progesterone → Converts to allopregnanolone, activating GABA-A receptors that calm your nervous system
2. GABA → The brake pedal of your nervous system that lowers overwhelm and anxiety
3. Melatonin → Essential for quality sleep and cellular repair

Recent research shows women lose GABA at an alarming rate during perimenopause, faster than age-related decline alone would predict. Combined with progesterone loss that decreases your ability to utilize remaining GABA, your nervous system loses its natural calming mechanisms.

Your brain isn’t just dealing with fewer calming neurochemicals. It’s recalibrating how to function without the hormones that coordinated everything for decades.

When the Hundred-Tab Brain Stops Working

Women who effortlessly managed multiple priorities simultaneously suddenly struggle to focus on one task. This isn’t personal failure—it’s your brain recalibrating from parallel processing to sequential focus.

The Before Picture:

For years, decades even, you could have a hundred tabs open and manage them effortlessly:

• Ordering Halloween costumes for your children
• Scheduling flights for work trips
• Planning dinner menus for the week
• Returning items to stores
• Managing client appointments
• Coordinating family schedules

All simultaneously. Without conscious effort.

The After Picture:

Then one day, that executive function begins to falter. Dr. Mariza remembers the moment she realized she was really having to effort at something that used to feel automatic. The multitasking superpower that defined her competence suddenly required struggle.

Why This Terrifies High-Performing Women:

This cognitive shift frightens high-performing women more than any other perimenopause symptom. Many of Dr. Mariza’s colleagues worried they were experiencing early cognitive decline because the change felt so dramatic.

The biological mechanism explains why. Estrogen supports neurotransmitter production and receptor sensitivity throughout your brain. When estrogen declines erratically, your brain chemistry fluctuates:

• Good day: Adequate dopamine and serotonin supporting focus and mood
• Bad day: Those levels plummet, cognitive capacity crashes with them

Your prefrontal cortex—the brain region managing executive function—depends heavily on stable hormone levels. When hormones destabilize, so does your ability to hold multiple priorities, switch between tasks efficiently, or recall information quickly.

The Grief Work Required:

This requires grieving your former self. The version of you who managed everything effortlessly is changing. Your brain is recalibrating to function differently—potentially focusing more deeply on one thing at a time rather than surface-level attention across many things simultaneously.

This isn’t loss. It’s transformation. But it requires accepting that your new brain works differently than your old brain, and that’s okay.

Why Change Triggers Trauma Responses During Perimenopause

For women carrying stored trauma, perimenopause feels particularly destabilizing because change itself activates survival responses rooted in the unknown feeling dangerous. Your nervous system interprets transformation as threat.

The Core Pattern from The Biology of Trauma®:

Trauma survivors share one core discomfort: change. When you’ve experienced trauma, you learned that the unknown represents danger. Even if your current situation isn’t healthy or good, it’s the beast you know. The familiar suffering feels safer than uncertainty.

What Perimenopause Changes:

• Your body changes unpredictably
• Your brain function changes daily
• Your emotional responses become volatile
• Your energy levels fluctuate wildly
• Your capacity threshold shrinks

Nothing stays stable long enough to feel secure.

This activates what I call the startle response—the first step into trauma physiology. You don’t know if there’s actual danger yet, but you sense something might be wrong. Your nervous system begins scanning for threats even when no real danger exists.

Dr. Mariza’s Experience:

“My body’s like, we’re not good. My brain’s like, no, we’re in our zone of genius. This is great.”

Her oldest patterning—her stress response system developed through childhood trauma—constantly interprets ambiguous situations as potential danger. The disconnect between her brain (analyzing, rationalizing) and her body (sensing, signaling distress) creates internal conflict that maintains nervous system activation.

The Extended Uncertainty:

Perimenopause represents an extended period of not knowing:

• Which version of yourself will show up today?
• Will this be a good brain day or brain fog day?
• Will you have energy or exhaustion?
• Who are you becoming on the other side of this transition?

For trauma survivors, this sustained uncertainty keeps the nervous system in protective mode. You can’t relax into change when change historically meant danger.

Everything Comes Up for Review: The Invitation of Perimenopause

Perimenopause forces discernment about relationships, obligations, and patterns that no longer serve your nervous system. What you’ve been tolerating for decades suddenly feels intolerable because your body no longer has bandwidth for what doesn’t support healing.

The Unraveling:

Perimenopause functions as an unraveling. A multi-year unraveling of who you’ve been, what you’ve prioritized, and what you’ve tolerated.

What You’ve Been Expected to Manage:

• Caring for children
• Managing households
• Maintaining careers
• Supporting partners
• Showing up for friends
• Volunteering at school
• Organizing family events
• Being everything to everyone

You prioritized everyone and everything before yourself because that’s what women learn to do.

Then perimenopause arrives and declares: you don’t have capacity for this anymore.

What Becomes Intolerable:

Suddenly you lack bandwidth for:

• Relationships that drain you emotionally
• Work obligations that exceed your energy
• People-pleasing patterns maintained since childhood
• Commitments that create body contraction rather than expansion

Your nervous system refuses to accommodate what doesn’t serve your wellbeing. This isn’t failure. It’s your body demanding you examine what’s truly worth your energy.

Everything Up for Review:

Dr. Mariza emphasizes perimenopause as a time for discernment precisely because everything surfaces for examination:

1. Stored trauma → Childhood experiences that created hypervigilance surface for healing
2. Boundary violations → Things you said yes to that should have been no
3. Draining relationships → Connections that create contraction not expansion
4. Misaligned obligations → Commitments that no longer reflect who you’re becoming

The Essential Question:

What do I want to take with me into the second half of my life?

At 46, if you live to 91, you’re literally at the halfway point. This transition invites radical reassessment of priorities based on what keeps you healthy versus what perpetuates the conditions that created illness.

How the Critical Line of Overwhelm Shifts During Perimenopause

Your capacity threshold shortens during perimenopause, making you reach overwhelm faster than before. This forces discernment about what matters enough to maintain your regulation.

Understanding the Critical Line:

The critical line of overwhelm represents the threshold where manageable stress crosses into trauma response:

• Above the line → You’re stretching yourself but remaining within capacity
• Below the line → You’re in overwhelm where there’s no growth, only breakdown

What Happens During Perimenopause:

The line moves. You have less capacity. The line shortens. Demands that previously stayed within your tolerance now push you over the edge into dysregulation.

Dr. Mariza explains this isn’t necessarily bad if you become aware. The shortened capacity threshold forces discernment because you really don’t have choice anymore. Your body won’t let you ignore what’s draining you.

The Biology Behind Shortened Capacity:

According to The Biology of Trauma® framework, your capacity operates like a bank account receiving deposits and withdrawals:

Capacity Deposits:

• Quality sleep
• Stable blood sugar
• Healthy gut microbiome
• Genuine connections
• Moments of joy
• Regulated nervous system

Capacity Withdrawals During Perimenopause:

• Hormone fluctuations creating biological stress
• GABA loss removing natural brake system
• Neuroinflammation affecting cognitive function
• Sleep disruption from night sweats
• Emotional volatility from estrogen swings

Your account balance shrinks. The critical line moves closer. Demands that used to stay within capacity now exceed it immediately.

Dr. Mariza’s Reframe:

“At the end of the day, these don’t matter. These don’t matter enough. They don’t matter enough to push me over the edge. They don’t matter enough to drive me into hypervigilance and drive my stress response system into the ground.”

What Becomes Non-Negotiable:

• Quality sleep shifts from optional to essential
• Stable blood sugar moves from helpful to required
• Nervous system regulation becomes daily practice
• Saying no transforms from selfishness to survival

Understanding capacity during this transition prevents you from judging yourself as weak or inadequate. You’re not broken. You’re in a profound neuroendocrine transition requiring different support than you needed before.

The Cake Pop Phenomenon: Disconnection from Your Body

Women operate disconnected from their bodies—all cerebral, nothing below the neck. Perimenopause demands you drop into your body and form new relationships with its signals.

Dr. Mariza’s Metaphor:

“I feel like a cake pop sometimes. Everything is just happening here and what’s below my head, there’s nothing below. You know, I’m so disconnected.”

Many women have been taught to be cake pops:

• Operate cerebrally
• Think your way through problems
• Analyze and strategize
• Ignore body signals that communicate distress

Why This Survival Strategy Developed:

Your body holds emotions, memories, and trauma that your conscious mind suppressed or denied. For decades, you could function by staying disconnected from those body sensations. Thinking overrode feeling.

Perimenopause Changes the Rules:

Your body demands a new version of attunement and attention. The hormonal shifts create sensations you can’t ignore:

• Hot flashes
• Heart palpitations
• Night sweats
• Digestive changes
• Muscle tension
• Crushing fatigue

Your body forces you to notice it.

What Sensations Communicate:

Sensations betray your stress response system before you consciously recognize activation:

• Tightness → Moving into sympathetic activation
• Constriction → Nervous system preparing for threat
• Racing thoughts → Prefrontal cortex going offline
• Shallow breathing → Fight-or-flight physiology engaging
• Heaviness → Approaching shutdown state

You’ll notice your body moving into dysregulated states before your mind catches up.

Dr. Mariza’s Practice:

When she notices physical sensations of dysregulation, she immediately works to shift her state:

1. Go outside
2. Look about ten feet out
3. Start naming objects: flowers, fence, plants, tree
4. Bring prefrontal cortex online through active observation

This orienting practice grounds her nervous system. Only after shifting state can she effectively use breathwork or other regulation tools.

Prevention Over Reaction:

Throughout her day, she bookends morning and evening with safety signals for her brain—practices that communicate to her nervous system that everything is okay. This preemptive regulation prevents the tailspin into overwhelm before it starts.

Practical Tools: Shifting State When Overwhelm Hits

Simple grounding practices like naming objects in your environment activate your prefrontal cortex and shift your nervous system state before trying more complex regulation tools.

Step 1: Recognize Early Warning Signs

Notice sensations before you’re fully dysregulated:

• Tightness in chest or shoulders
• Faster or shallower breathing
• Racing thoughts or mental fog
• Constriction in throat or stomach
• Sudden temperature changes

Step 2: Shift State First

Don’t go straight to calming techniques. Your nervous system needs to shift out of high activation first.

Orienting Practice:

1. Get outside or near a window
2. Look about 10 feet out
3. Name neutral objects you see: tree, fence, car, bird, flower
4. Continue until you feel your thinking brain come back online

Step 3: Use Regulation Tools

Once you’ve shifted state, engage calming practices:

The Heart Hold:

• Place hand over your heart
• Breathe slowly and deeply
• Feel the pressure and warmth
• Activates parasympathetic nervous system

Sensory Grounding (5-4-3-2-1):

• 5 things you can see
• 4 things you can hear
• 3 things you can touch
• 2 things you can smell
• 1 thing you can taste

Bilateral Movement:

• Walk while noticing left foot, right foot
• March in place
• Any movement crossing body midline
• Integrates left and right brain hemispheres

The Voo Breath:

• Take deep breath in
• Make long “voooo” sound on exhale
• Feel vibration in chest
• Stimulates vagus nerve

Step 4: Use Mantras for Interruption

Dr. Mariza’s two favorite mantras:

1. “It feels good to feel good” → Reminds you that regulation is the goal
2. “Nothing is wrong” → Interrupts rumination and problem-scanning

She catches herself constantly looking for problems to solve. At the zoo with her son, rather than being present to beauty, she’s worried about snacks, sunscreen, what might go wrong. She reminds herself: Nothing is wrong. Stop trying to find something to do right now. Just be present.

This practice interrupts the rumination loop—her brain making up problems to solve even when no real problems exist.

The Five-Week Midlife Reset: Your Implementation Guide

Dr. Mariza’s comprehensive program provides workout plans, meal strategies, sleep protocols, and symptom trackers that create wins without overwhelming your already-shortened capacity.

The Perimenopause Revolution includes a five-week implementation plan designed specifically for women who don’t want to add more overwhelm to already-shortened capacity.

Week One: Mindset Shift

The foundation—distinguishing between blame and ownership:

• Blame → This is your fault
• Ownership → This is your biology, and you get to respond

Perimenopause isn’t your fault—you didn’t cause this hormone shift and brain remodeling. But you get to take ownership of how you navigate it.

Weeks Two-Five: Practical Implementation

Movement Plans:

• Beginner workout videos for perimenopause bodies
• Intermediate plans as capacity builds
• “Exercise snacks”—brief 5-10 minute movement sessions
• Focus on nervous system regulation, not intensity

Meal Plans & Recipes:

• Over 70 recipes in bonus materials
• Blood sugar stability emphasis
• Antioxidant-rich foods combating neuroinflammation
• Omega-3s reducing systemic inflammation
• Anti-inflammatory nutrition supporting brain health

Sleep Strategies:

• Protocols for falling asleep
• Strategies for staying asleep through night sweats
• Room optimization (temperature, darkness, sound)
• Bedtime routines signaling safety to nervous system

Symptom Trackers:

• Monitor nervous system state patterns
• Track hormone fluctuation cycles
• Identify which interventions work for your biology
• Discover your specific triggers and supports

Lab Guides:

• Which biomarkers to test
• How to interpret results through trauma-informed lens
• When to consider biochemical imbalances (copper excess, pyroluria, methylation issues)
• Working with practitioners who understand the Biology of Trauma®

The Win-Based Philosophy:

The program recognizes you’re not looking to overwhelm your system with complex protocols. You need achievable actions that create wins:

• A movement win → 10 minutes of walking
• A food win → One blood-sugar-balanced meal
• A self-care win → Morning safety signal practice
• A sleep win → One night with better rest

Small hinges move big doors. Consistent small actions compound into significant transformation.

Why This Matters for Trauma Healing

Perimenopause becomes another trauma for women when they feel trapped by symptoms, powerless about their changing bodies, and alone navigating the transition. Trauma-informed support transforms perimenopause from something to survive into invitation for healing.

The Three Defining Qualities of Trauma:

Trauma occurs when you experience:

1. Feeling trapped → No escape from the overwhelming situation
2. Feeling powerless → Unable to change or control what’s happening
3. Feeling alone → No one to help, witness, or validate your experience

How Perimenopause Becomes Traumatic:

For many women, perimenopause meets all three criteria:

• Trapped → In a body that no longer works the way it used to
• Powerless → As cognitive function declines, energy depletes, emotions destabilize
• Alone → Conventional medicine dismisses symptoms or offers only hormones without addressing nervous system

Perimenopause becomes one more thing to survive in your life.

The Integration of Hormones + Nervous System:

Dr. Mariza’s work creating The Perimenopause Revolution stemmed from her own experience with complex PTSD meeting perimenopause. She knows personally what it feels like when stored trauma amplifies every symptom. She understands the hypervigilance that makes uncertainty feel dangerous.

The manual she created doesn’t just address hormones. It addresses the whole picture:

• Cellular energy through blood sugar stability
• Brain inflammation through antioxidant-rich nutrition
• Movement that supports rather than depletes
• Food that nourishes nervous system function
• Tools that actually work with your biology

This comprehensive approach prevents perimenopause from becoming trauma. Instead, it becomes the invitation to examine what’s no longer serving you, release what’s been draining your capacity, and step into the second half of your life with fierce discernment about what matters.

Your Next Step: From Surviving to Thriving

At the halfway point of your life, perimenopause presents one essential question: Is this it? Is this how I want to keep going?

Dr. Mariza anchors to two powerful decisions:

1. “It feels good to feel good” → She chooses feeling good
2. She refuses to perpetuate the pattern of pushing through, ignoring body signals, and prioritizing everything before her own wellbeing

What the World Taught You:

Sacrifice yourself—your energy, capacity, nervous system regulation—for everyone else’s needs.

What Perimenopause Declares:

That pattern is unsustainable.

• Your nervous system no longer has bandwidth for relationships that drain you
• Your brain can no longer maintain the hundred-tab operating system
• Your body refuses to be ignored while you live entirely in your head

This Isn’t Loss. It’s Liberation.

You get to:

• Let go of obligations that never served you
• Release relationships that create contraction instead of expansion
• Say no to demands that push you over your capacity threshold
• Work on stored trauma that’s surfacing for healing
• Choose what truly matters for the second half of your life

Perimenopause becomes the portal where you decide: Will I perpetuate conditions that created illness, or will I create conditions that support healing?

You don’t need all the answers. You don’t need perfect implementation. You just need to start where you are with one small step toward supporting your body through this profound transformation.

Your body knows how to heal. You’re not broken. You’re in transition. Support your biology, regulate your nervous system, and trust the wisdom of transformation unfolding.