Hot flushes
A sudden wave of intense heat, often with a racing heart, in the middle of a presentation, a client call, a packed meeting room. Brief, visible, and mortifying only because nobody talks about it.
What it can feel like at your desk
Symptoms don’t stay home when you go to work. Here is what the most common ones look like in a professional setting, for anyone who’s wondered, or wondered about a colleague.
Broken sleep
Night sweats and 3 a.m. wakefulness add up to running a demanding job on five hours of sleep, for months. Much of what reads as “fading energy” is simply exhaustion with a hormonal cause.
Brain fog
Losing a word mid-sentence, re-reading an email three times, blanking on a name you know perfectly well. It feels like lost competence. It isn’t. It’s a temporary, well-documented cognitive effect of fluctuating oestrogen.
Anxiety & mood shifts
New-onset anxiety, irritability, or low mood, often in women who’ve never experienced them before. Frequently misdiagnosed, and one of the strongest reasons women quietly lose confidence at work.
Heavy, unpredictable periods
Perimenopause can make cycles erratic and heavy, turning travel days and long meetings into logistics problems no one else knows they’re solving.
The confidence spiral
The symptom that does the career damage. Symptoms get misread, by the woman herself, as decline. She starts avoiding visibility, declines the stretch role, and eventually concludes it’s time to go. This one is preventable with knowledge alone.
The key fact: symptoms are treatable and temporary. Competence is intact. Lifestyle changes, workplace adjustments, and medical options including hormone therapy (a conversation for a woman and her clinician) resolve or ease most of what’s listed above.