How to Help Yourself When the Perimenopause Brain Fog Arrives

You walk upstairs to get something. Halfway there, you’ve forgotten what it was. You stand on the landing hoping the sight of the bathroom might trigger some ancient neurological pathway that reminds you why you’ve made the journey, but nothing happens. You go back downstairs. Ten minutes later, you remember. You go upstairs again.

You open your phone to send an email and somehow end up looking at the weather. You put the washing machine on without putting the washing in it. Someone asks what you’re doing Thursday and, despite Thursday being tomorrow, you genuinely have no idea. Then there are the words. Words you have used for thirty years suddenly disappear mid-sentence, leaving you pointing at the thing you mean and saying, “You know... the... fucking thing.”

Welcome to perimenopause brain fog.

And perhaps one of the biggest breakthroughs is simply acknowledging that it’s there.

Because before you recognise brain fog, you tend to compensate for it. You try harder to remember. You replay conversations in your head. You become annoyed with yourself for forgetting appointments, names and why you opened the fridge. You start worrying that you’re becoming disorganised, incapable or simply not quite as sharp as you used to be.

Meanwhile, your brain has approximately 47 tabs open, three are frozen, one is playing music and you cannot for the life of you work out where it’s coming from.

So perhaps the answer isn't trying harder.

Perhaps it's closing some tabs.

Stop asking your brain to remember everything

Women carry an extraordinary amount of invisible information.

Birthdays. Appointments. School forms. What’s in the freezer. Who needs new shoes. When the car needs servicing. The thing your colleague asked you to remember on Tuesday. Your mother's appointment. The electricity bill. The present you need to order. The fact you've run out of toothpaste but haven't technically run out because you've been squeezing the tube against the sink for four days.

Then perimenopause brain fog arrives and we continue expecting our brains to hold all of it.

No.

Get it out of your head.

Write lists. Use a diary. Put a notebook in your handbag. Keep one beside your bed. Stick Post-it notes around the house if that's what works. Put the important thing somewhere you physically cannot avoid seeing it.

There is no prize for remembering everything unaided.

Write it down — with an actual pen

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about this, but writing things by hand can be useful for memory because handwriting requires different cognitive and motor processes from simply tapping something into a phone.

It also slows you down.

You have to decide what you're actually writing.

Which, when you've got 47 tabs open, isn't a bad thing.

Keep a notebook beside your bed. If you suddenly remember at 2am that you need to book the dentist, don't spend the next hour desperately trying not to forget that you need to remember to remember the dentist.

Write:

DENTIST.

Then go back to sleep.

The irony of needing to remember to use the notebook as a tool for forgetting less is not lost on us.

Tell people your brain is struggling

This one matters.

If you're experiencing brain fog at work, you don't have to pretend you aren't.

You can ask somebody to email something rather than telling you in passing. You can take notes during meetings. You can say, “Give me a second, my brain has disappeared,” rather than panicking because you've lost your train of thought.

The same applies at home.

Tell your partner. Tell your children. Tell your friends.

Not because everybody needs a running commentary on your hormones, but because hiding brain fog creates another job for your brain.

And frankly, it already has enough jobs.

Delegate some of the bloody tabs

This might be harder than making lists.

If you've spent years being the person who remembers everything, other people become remarkably comfortable with you remembering everything.

So stop.

A teenager can remember their own appointment. A partner can remember that the dog needs flea treatment. A colleague can own a task from beginning to end rather than you keeping half of it running in the background “just in case”.

Delegating doesn't mean asking somebody else to do something while you continue mentally supervising it.

That tab is still open.

Give them the tab.

Give yourself ten minutes of silence

Not an hour-long morning routine involving journaling, yoga, lemon water and becoming an entirely different woman before 6am.

Ten minutes.

Sit somewhere without doing anything else and ask yourself:

What actually matters today?

Not what could be done. Not everything everybody would quite like you to do. Not the enormous list you've accumulated because apparently every thought you've ever had has become an urgent administrative requirement.

What actually matters?

Pick it.

Then decide what can wait.

Brain fog becomes much harder to navigate when everything has been assigned the same level of importance.

Build structure before you need it

Structure isn't particularly exciting, but neither is spending twenty minutes looking for your glasses while they're on your head.

Put your keys in the same place.

Keep appointments in one calendar rather than three.

Have somewhere for paperwork.

Create recurring reminders for things you regularly forget.

Make repeat shopping lists.

Leave tomorrow's important things somewhere visible tonight.

The less your brain has to actively remember, the more capacity you leave for everything else.

You're essentially creating an external brain.

Use it.

And stop treating brain fog like a personal failure

This may be the most important part.

If you're experiencing brain fog during perimenopause, being furious with yourself every time you forget something doesn't make your memory better. It simply adds frustration, embarrassment and anxiety to a brain that already feels overloaded.

Acknowledge what is happening.

Talk about it.

Notice when it's worse.

Build systems around yourself.

Ask other people to carry some of the load.

And give yourself permission to work differently for a while.

You cannot always move around brain fog. Sometimes you have to move through it.

That might mean more lists, more Post-it notes, more alarms and occasionally finding your phone in the fridge.

Fine.

The goal isn't to prove that your brain can still hold everything it held before.

The goal is to make your life work with the brain you have today.

And if you want somewhere to start untangling those 47 open tabs, the UNPAUSED Symptom & Pattern Tracker gives you somewhere to record what you're noticing and begin spotting your own patterns.

Because sometimes the first thing you need to remember is simply this:

You don't have to remember everything.