"I couldn't finish the call." That's how Nicolle put it.
She emailed me last month, forty-eight hours after it happened, still shaken and looking for someone to tell. Nicolle is 51, a senior account director at a media agency in Chicago, fifteen years at the same firm and the kind of colleague everyone else calls when things get hard.
It happened on a Tuesday afternoon. A routine voicemail to a client whose renewal she had handled a dozen times before.
She dialed and started speaking, and somewhere around the second sentence her throat closed and her eyes filled. She hung up without leaving a message and cried at her desk for eleven minutes.
"Nothing had happened," she kept telling me, and she meant it. Know that feeling, when the size of your reaction has nothing to do with what set it off, when your body catches up with something before your mind knows what it is?
Here's what was happening in Nicolle's brain that Tuesday afternoon, and why the voicemail was less about the client than about her neurochemistry. Estrogen has been quietly regulating her emotional signaling for most of her adult life, doing work she has not had to think about.
It binds densely to receptors in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, the two regions that handle emotional regulation and threat detection. For decades, it has helped the prefrontal cortex signal calm to the amygdala when the amygdala starts firing about something small, keeping the reaction proportional to the input.
In perimenopause, estrogen does not simply decline in a clean straight line the way most of us were told. It fluctuates wildly, sometimes swinging within a single week, sometimes higher than it was in her twenties before crashing again days later.
Think of estrogen as the volume knob on emotional signal-to-noise, the thing that has kept ordinary inputs at ordinary volume for most of Nicolle's adult life. Her knob has stopped holding its setting, so a routine voicemail, a benign email, a small comment from a colleague can now land at unpredictable volume.
I am telling you Nicolle's story because she is not the only one, and because she thought she was. The SWAN study (Study of Women's Health Across the Nation), which has followed thousands of women through the menopausal transition since the mid-1990s, has documented significantly higher rates of emotional lability during perimenopause, independent of prior mental health history.
If you have cried in your car after a meeting you would have handled easily three years ago, if you have hung up a voicemail because your voice cracked and would not come back, if you have snapped at someone you love over something that used to roll off you, that is not you falling apart. That is a real neurological shift, it has a name, and it has an end date.
Two things that can help right now, both grounded in the biology we just walked through.
🌊 First, name the wave when it comes. Saying to yourself "my amplifier is loud today" loosens the feeling's grip on your identity without dismissing it.
☀️ Second, protect your morning cortisol rhythm with something free and boring. Ten minutes of daylight on your face within an hour of waking helps regulate the HPA axis, which is deeply entangled with estrogen's effect on emotional reactivity and stress recovery.
If the crying spells are worsening, if they come with persistent low mood, disrupted sleep, or thoughts that scare you, talk to your doctor. Perimenopause and clinical depression can coexist, and both deserve real attention, not a shrug and a normal thyroid panel.
You are navigating a real biological season with a nervous system that has served you well for decades and is now asking for different care, not different judgment.