Why the Nervous System Matters in Peri/Menopause

July 30, 2026|Tania Mullan

SOMA WELLNESS CO. | OUR APPROACH

Why the Nervous System Matters in Peri/Menopause

Why SOMA starts with your midlife nervous system, not your hormones.

Written and edited by Tarnia, Founder of SOMA Wellness Co. · 15 min read

Quick Answer: How does perimenopause affect the nervous system?

Perimenopause is a hormonal transition, but oestrogen and progesterone also interact with brain, sleep, mood and stress-response systems. As those hormones fluctuate, some women become more sensitive to stress, disrupted sleep and sensory load. Rage, brain fog, anxiety, exhaustion, autoimmune flares, low libido and identity loss can share overlapping contributors — including the system underneath that has been carrying decades of pressure. [1–6]

SOMA offers hormone-free, stimulant-free, sedative-free support through quality, clinically studied botanicals to nourish you from within — plus community, connection and nervous-system practices for external support through our SOMA Circle.

Somewhere in your 40s, or maybe earlier, things start to wobble.

Not all at once. A comment lands harder than it should. A night arrives when you cannot switch off. A word goes missing mid-sentence. Your body aches in places it never used to. For some women, a diagnosis finally gives a name to years of vague unwellness. For others, it is simply exhaustion — the kind that does not lift no matter how much they sleep.

Everyone calls it perimenopause. Hormonally, that may be part of the answer. But it is not always the whole story.

It was never 'only hormones'

Oestrogen has been doing far more than regulating periods. For decades, it quietly does a huge amount of invisible work. It helps buffer your stress response. It supports the brain chemistry that lets you pause before reacting, sleep properly, find your words, regulate your mood, and recover from a hard day. [1–5] It works alongside your nervous system almost like a silent business partner. Until it doesn't. For most women it can start to decline anywhere from the late 30s to early 40s — and that invisible buffer wears thin.

At the same time, many women arrive in midlife already carrying a heavy physiological and emotional load: work, children, ageing parents, grief, trauma, chronic illness, neurodivergence, financial pressure, broken sleep, and years of being the person who keeps everything moving. When the hormonal buffer becomes less predictable, the strain that was previously manageable can become much harder to absorb. [3,4]

"Your body isn't malfunctioning. It's finally showing you the bill from a lifetime of keeping all the balls in the air." — Tarnia, Founder, SOMA Wellness Co.

Different symptoms, overlapping systems

This is why midlife can feel as though ten unrelated things have gone wrong at once.

Rage that arrives before you have finished the thought. Brain fog that makes you question your competence. Anxiety that feels physical rather than logical. A wired-but-exhausted body clock that leaves you flat all day and awake at 3am. Autoimmune symptoms, pain, low libido, sensory overload, or the unsettling feeling that you no longer recognise yourself. [1,2,5]

Different symptoms. Same underlying system.

Your nervous system — specifically the HPA axis, the network that governs your stress response — doesn't operate in isolation. Research supports interaction between the menopause transition, the central nervous system and autonomic regulation. When oestrogen fluctuates and the buffer thins, the HPA axis becomes more reactive, affecting downstream systems that depend on it: mood, memory, immunity, digestion, desire and sleep.

That's the actual throughline. Not 'hormones cause everything.' Hormonal change removes the cushioning around a nervous system that, for many women, was already carrying more than it should have been for a very long time.

What the evidence tells us: midlife biology deserves a wider lens

Mood, sleep and cognitive changes are recognised during the menopause transition. [1,2,5]
Ovarian hormones and the body's stress-response systems interact, and women vary widely in how sensitive their bodies are to those changes. [3,4]
Any history of mood sensitivity, PMDD, post-natal depression and stress — alongside current demanding life circumstances — also impacts how heavily the transition is experienced. [2–4]

Why some women feel it more intensely

Not every woman experiences the midlife transition in the same way. A history of PMDD, postnatal depression, trauma, ADHD, chronic stress, autoimmune illness or an already-demanding life may mean there was less spare capacity before perimenopause even began. The loss of hormonal stability can matter more when the system was already working overtime.

That does not mean the harder version is a lack of coping skills, and it does not mean an easier transition shows a better capacity to cope. It means hormone levels are only one part of the picture. The life and body receiving those hormonal changes matters too.

Whether or not you choose HRT

SOMA is not anti-HRT, anti-medicine or anti-psychology. Women have been pitched into camps for far too long — breastfeeding vs bottle-feeding, stay-at-home mum vs working mum, ageing naturally vs having treatments. It is beyond time for us to be united and to encourage everyone's choice in how they do 'life'.

SOMA's biggest encouragement is to be informed, so your choices are informed — and to trust yourself, to know YOUR body best.

For many women, MHT/HRT is a legitimate, evidence-based part of care. It can help with symptoms related to menopause and keep bones stronger going forward. For other women, HRT may not be suitable, not wanted, or not the whole answer. [6] Whichever path you choose, supporting the conditions in which your nervous system must operate still matters.

Behind SOMA: A Peek Behind the Curtain

How years of illness, exhaustion and searching led me to build SOMA around the nervous system.

When the answers stopped fitting

In my mid-40s, things started falling apart quietly. I was a single mother of four, studying part-time, working full-time, and life was genuinely hard — so when I went to the doctor and asked about perimenopause and my blood tests came back clear, I believed them. I was told it was 'anxiety and depression,' and I was put on SSRIs.

Over five years I then collected two separate autoimmune conditions. I followed every piece of specialist advice I was given, including immune-suppressing IV therapy to stop new lesions forming in my brain. My depression got worse as my life felt like it was spiralling downwards rapidly, and I wasn't keen on the future I could see coming.

Across that decade I tried almost everything, one thing at a time: medication, diet change, juicing, cutting inflammatory foods. Each one helped a little. None of it moved the needle enough.

Then, turning 50 in the middle of COVID, I found the work of Gabor Maté — specifically his writing on autoimmunity in midlife women, and the idea that rising midlife autoimmune illness can be driven by a nervous system that's been overstimulated and stuck in overdrive. That was the moment my ears properly pricked up. What if this had been what was driving my decline the whole time?

I spent the next two years going deep into neuroscience and nervous-system research: Gabor Maté, Stephen Porges and Bessel van der Kolk. I attended global summit webinars with leaders in the field, absorbing the information like a woman possessed. It all made sense of what I was seeing in my own friend groups: so many women developing chronic health conditions in midlife — lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto's, fibromyalgia and M.S.

In my early 50s, blood tests finally confirmed I'd already been through menopause. Fancy that. Typical Gen X. I'd white-knuckled my way through — not by choice — supported only by my trusted and wise therapist, skilled in nervous-system practices and a lighthouse for me during a challenging time.

The decision I made at this stage was to start HRT. The research I'd conducted indicated it would improve my bone density and, with it, the mobility I was trying to preserve. I noticed an improvement in many ways, but not in the ways that mattered to me most. I was at the point of needing assistance to walk longer distances, and relenting to a wheelchair on my most fatigued days.

The retreat that changed my approach

In desperation, I spent almost a house deposit on a hinterland retreat that I now understand was less about healing and more about running away from a reality I didn't know how to face.

There I attended seminars on the foundational importance of our circadian rhythm, our sleep-wake cycle, the impact of constant stress on our health, how nutritional deficiencies are created from pushing our systems on empty, and how botanicals — once considered a 'hippy' approach — now have recent clinical studies showing real results for mood, stress and sleep.

There were rules to follow. No electronics whatsoever. We went to bed with the moon and woke up with the sun, attuned to nature. We were taught to listen to our bodies, to give them rest when needed, and daily movement at whatever level they could manage. The entire week revolved around nourishing and restoring the nervous system.

I felt agitated by the amount of quiet at first — unable to switch my brain off, and more aware than ever of the racing thoughts competing for my attention. It felt like a lot of woo-woo and an immense investment for gumtrees and bone broth.

Then, on the last day, something shifted. I heard the kookaburras for the first time that week, even though they'd been singing every evening. I noticed I was walking unassisted, with a spring in my step — not hobbling in pain. And humming. I felt something in my chest I hadn't felt for longer than I could remember, and I recognised it as joy.

What I brought home

I came home determined not to lose that feeling — determined to synthesise everything I'd learned that had finally moved the needle, and restore my health to live a better quality of life. And that is what the last two years have been.

My hormones were part of the story. The loss of oestrogen's buffering effect was real, and it was happening at the same time as everything else. But my nervous system had been under pressure for most of my life, long before perimenopause arrived, and it needed real support — not just a hormone conversation.

Since then, implementing everything I learned over that decade, I've stopped the immune-suppressing therapy. It was a real risk I chose to take, because the combination of that treatment and prednisone had added 40kg of weight and taken my mobility with it. I've slowly lost close to that much since, over nine months, alongside starting taekwondo: white belt, once a week, no pushing it.

None of that is the point on its own. The point is that it shows what can be possible when a body finally gets what it needs. I just needed to learn how to listen and discover the internal and external support my body had been asking for.

It wasn't an overnight fix. No claim of miracle cure here. Some weeks it still feels less like steady progress and more like a squiggled pencil drawing: round and round, up, down, backwards, forwards — two steps forward, one step back. Some kind of cha-cha. But at 56, I'm in better condition than I was in my 40s, by a long shot, and I'm still building on an upward trajectory.

Which led me to my audacious adventure of launching a women's nervous-system support brand in my "third act". SOMA exists to offer women who can't take a week away, screens off, focused on breathing in the hinterland. Most are lucky to get five quiet minutes.

My mission became: how do I bring a slice of what I've learned and experienced home to the suburbs, into an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of an ordinary life?

I took my research to a herbalist and naturopath and formulated Vitalitea and Serenitea — The Circadian Duo — botanical infusions intentionally crafted to nourish and support the nervous system, acting as steadying anchors both morning and night. SOMA Circle came next, because the retreat had also taught me something else: it's much easier to co-regulate your midlife nervous system in a room with other people who get it than it is alone.

It has been a time of learning new skills in technology, botanical formulation and navigating indemnity insurance — with a brain that often doesn't seem to want to co-operate. I meet each day with the capacity I have, and continue to reject the narrative "it's all downhill after 50."

So far, I have orbited the sun 56 times, with all its trials and tribulations. And I am not done yet.

Tarnia Founder, SOMA Wellness Co.

What actually helps

Start with assessment, not assumptions

Brain fog, fatigue, mood changes, sleep disruption and pain can overlap with iron or B12 deficiency, thyroid problems, medication effects, sleep apnoea, blood-sugar instability, mental-health conditions and chronic illness. A thorough menopause-trained GP or integrative practitioner conversation helps stop everything being filed under either 'just hormones' or 'just stress'.

Integrative GPs have additional training on establishing underlying nutrient deficiencies that can be supported through targeted supplementary care, and have a wider scope they can test for (albeit out of pocket). For those able to invest in their health, this is a time I would encourage you to put yourself first on the priority list. You matter too. And let's face it — the whole house functions better when you do.

Rebuild the foundations

Consistent sleep and wake times, morning light, enough protein, stable meals, movement at a level your body can tolerate, and correcting genuine nutritional deficiencies are not glamorous. They are also the conditions every other strategy has to work inside.

Give the body repeated cues of safety

Slow breathing has a growing evidence base for influencing autonomic and psychological measures, although it is not a treatment for disease. [7] Grounding, gentle movement, nature, trauma-informed therapy, meditation, tapping and creative activity may also give some women practical ways to slow down or reconnect with their bodies. Not every practice suits every person. The useful question is not whether it is fashionable — it is whether it helps without causing harm.

Use rhythm rather than relying on rescue

A single calm evening cannot cancel months of overload. Nervous-system support works best when it becomes recognisable: light in the morning, a steady meal, a walk, a warm cup, a quieter evening, a bedtime your body can predict. Small cues repeated often can be more useful than one dramatic reset.

Let community carry some of the load

Humans regulate in relationship. Feeling understood, moving or breathing in a safe room, laughing with women who do not need the backstory, and being able to stop performing for an hour can all matter. Support does not have to be solitary to be legitimate.

Where SOMA fits

SOMA exists to make nervous-system support easier to return to in ordinary life.

The SOMA Circadian Duo — a day-to-night place to begin

Vitalitea Daylight Ritual and Serenitea Moonlight Ritual were designed to work as one system.

Vitalitea (Daylight Ritual) contains gotu kola, tulsi and lemon balm. Individual ingredients have been studied in relation to stress, mood or cognitive function.
Serenitea (Moonlight Ritual) contains passionflower, lemon balm and chamomile. Individual ingredients clinically studied for calm, sleep quality or sleep onset.

Here's why the two matter together: a steadier, less reactive day makes it easier to properly wind down for deep sleep at night. A deeper night's sleep improves your focus, memory and ability to emotionally regulate the next day. One genuinely reinforces the other.

Note: Neither product treats, cures or replaces required medical care. Please consult your health specialist if you have any chronic health condition, or are pregnant or breastfeeding, before starting any botanical support.

SOMA Circle

SOMA Circle is where the retreat came home. Midlife women gather to slow down, explore different nervous-system practices, drink tea and be around people who understand without needing a full explanation first. Different sessions may include breathwork, gentle movement, sound, creative making or other supportive approaches. The point is not to tell every woman what should work — it is to create a safe place to discover what genuinely resonates.

This is the toolkit

You do not have to choose one path through midlife. You can use medical care, including MHT/HRT where appropriate. You can address deficiencies, sleep and chronic illness. You can use therapy, movement, community, rhythm, botanicals and rest. Most women end up using more than one.

What matters is understanding the pattern well enough to build support on purpose, instead of guessing in the dark at 2am. Your nervous system has been carrying a great deal for a long time. It is allowed to ask for support now.

Share this article. Sometimes an article can say what we are too tired, frightened or overwhelmed to explain ourselves. Send this to a friend, partner, daughter or colleague who may need a wider way of understanding what midlife can place on a woman's body.

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Join the conversation: Do you think your nervous system could be contributing to symptoms you are experiencing? What have you already tried to best support yourself during your midlife transition?