Don’t Be a Bitch. Regulate.

A letter from Anne-Gaëlle, co-founder of Vivana

Girls,

I need to have a conversation with you that almost nobody in the menopause space wants to have.

Not because it’s comfortable. Because it’s honest. And I didn’t build Vivana to tell you what’s comfortable.

The conversation about perimenopause and menopause needed to happen. For decades, women’s hormonal health was dismissed, minimised, medicated into silence, or simply ignored. The push to take it seriously (to name the symptoms, understand the biology, demand proper support) has been necessary, overdue, and something I’ve dedicated a significant part of my professional life to.

But I’ve watched something creep into the edges of that conversation. Something that started as compassion and has, in some cases, curdled into something less useful.

Perimenopause has become, for some of us (and I say us deliberately, because I am in this transition too) a diagnosis that explains everything and excuses everything. The bad behaviour. The checked-out partnership. The friendships running on fumes because nobody’s been tended. The work delivered at 70% for eighteen months. The version of ourselves we’ve been putting on hold indefinitely, waiting for the hormones to sort themselves out first.

I understand the symptoms. I have them. I’ve spent years studying the biology behind them. And I’m telling you, as a pharmacist, as someone trained in Ayurvedic medicine, as a woman in her fifties who is living this alongside you:

Understanding your symptoms is not the same as outsourcing responsibility for your life to them.

We can hold both truths. The biology is real. And we are still the ones living our lives.

The distinction that matters

There is a version of perimenopause awareness that is genuinely liberating. I know it well. You understand why you’re sleeping badly. You understand why your cortisol is dysregulated and what that does to your mood and your patience. You understand that the anxiety arriving at 3am without invitation is not a character flaw. You understand that the brain fog is not stupidity and the exhaustion is not laziness.

That understanding is power. It removed my shame. It pointed me toward solutions. It helped me communicate what was happening to the people I love in a way that created connection rather than confusion.

And then there is another version. The one where the understanding has stopped at the explanation and never arrived at the response. Where ‘I’m in perimenopause’ has become the answer to every question, the defence against every criticism, the reason nothing has changed and nothing needs to. Where the diagnosis has become an identity rather than a chapter.

This version is not empowerment. It is a more medically credible form of stuck.

The specific things I want us to be honest about

Using it as a pass on our relationships

I’ve seen it: in conversations, in the communities I move in, occasionally in the mirror. Our partner is confused. Our friends have noticed we’ve gone somewhere they can’t reach. Our children are walking on eggshells. And the answer to all of it is: perimenopause.

The biology explains the difficulty. It does not resolve it. The people in our lives are not obliged to absorb unlimited collateral damage while we wait for our hormones to stabilise. They deserve the effort of our self-awareness, even when (especially when) that effort is harder than it used to be.

Being in perimenopause does not make us a bitch. Being in perimenopause and deciding that’s sufficient explanation for being a bitch is a choice. A different choice is available.

Using it as a reason to stop showing up

The gym membership lapsing. The work coasting. The creative project waiting for a better moment that keeps not arriving. I know this pattern. I’ve lived it.

Perimenopause is exhausting. That is true and documented and not in question. It is also true that the body responds to movement, that the brain responds to challenge, that the self responds to showing up even when it doesn’t particularly feel like it. The research on exercise and perimenopause symptoms is unambiguous: movement helps. Waiting until we feel like it is, for most of us in this phase, going to be a long wait.

The symptoms are real. Doing nothing about them is a position, not an inevitability.

Using it as a reason not to do the inner work

This one is the most important and the least discussed. I say it with full knowledge that it applies to me as much as to anyone reading this.

Perimenopause involves a significant psychological transition. The questioning, the recalibration, the things that no longer fit: these are real and they deserve attention. But there is a version of this transition that gets stuck in the questioning without arriving anywhere. That examines everything and changes nothing. That uses the enormity of the process as a reason to defer indefinitely the actual work of deciding who we are and what we want and what we’re going to do about it.

The symptoms create the pressure. The pressure is asking something of us. We are allowed to take our time. We are not allowed to take all of it.

The Vivana no-BS clause applies to ourselves as well

I built Vivana on a specific premise: no bullshit. About ingredients. About dosing. About what the science actually says versus what the label implies. About the gap between wellness aesthetics and physiological reality.

That premise does not stop at the supplement industry.

No BS means no BS. Including the stories we tell ourselves. Including the explanations that have become comfortable enough to stop questioning. Including the version of perimenopause that has become an identity so complete it no longer leaves room for agency.

The women I built Vivana for are not looking for permission to be difficult. They are not looking for a medical framework that confirms they have nothing left to work on. They are looking for support (real, honest, scientifically grounded support) so they can do the things that actually matter to them. Relationships. Work. Health. The life they’re in the middle of living.

Support and accountability are not opposites. The most useful thing I can offer you is not ‘this explains everything’ and it is not ‘get a grip.’ It is: here’s what’s happening, here’s what helps, and you are still the author of this.

So. Regulate.

Not in the sense of suppressing what you feel. Not in the sense of performing composure you don’t have. Not in the sense of going back to the version of yourself that smiled through everything and said she was fine. I have no interest in that version of any of us.

Regulate in the biological sense: support the systems that are under load so they can function. Sleep. Movement. Nutrition. The formulation layer where it helps. The honest conversation with yourself about what you’re using the symptoms to avoid.

And regulate in the personal sense: take ownership of the experience. Not blame. There is nothing to blame yourself for in the biology. But ownership. The difference between ‘this is happening to me’ and ‘this is happening and I am the one responding to it.’

I have a word for this. I made it up myself, somewhere in the middle of my own work: the kind of work that happens not in a therapy room or a workshop, but in the quiet moments when you stop performing and start actually looking. It arrived as an epiphany, the way the honest ones usually do: suddenly, uncomfortably, and with no way to unknow it.

The word is ownershit.

Own your own shit. Not with a whip. Not with a verdict. With the same compassion you would offer a friend who came to you with the hard truth about herself: held gently, but held clearly. The discomfort, the edges, the places where the hormones stop and the habits begin, the behaviours that were yours before perimenopause arrived and will still be yours after it leaves. The question I keep returning to, in my own life, is: what is mine here? Not all of it. Not none of it. What is actually mine?

The biology is not the whole story. We are also in the story. Owning that (with compassion, without self-flagellation, without making it a new reason to be hard on ourselves) is where the actual work lives.

The IDGAF energy that arrives in perimenopause is real and, directed well, it is one of the most powerful things that can happen to a woman. I feel it. I use it. Zero tolerance for things that don’t deserve our time. Clarity about what actually matters. The confidence to stop performing and start being.

That’s the energy. The bitch mode is what happens when that energy runs through an unregulated nervous system and a body that hasn’t been supported. It’s the crocodile, not the dragon. We know the difference, because we’ve felt both.

The conversation I actually want us to have

Not: your symptoms don’t matter. They do. Mine do too.

Not: push through and stop complaining. That is not what I’m saying and it is not what I believe.

Not: you’re fine, everyone goes through this. I’m in my fifties. I’m Gen X. We are the generation that was handed a recession, a broken system, and the instruction to figure it out. And we did. We are not the generation that lets biology write the ending of our story.

We are survivors. Not in the dramatic sense. In the quiet, stubborn, entirely unglamorous sense of women who have always found a way through. This transition is hard. It is also not the hardest thing we have done. And it will not be the thing that gets in our way.

This: we are in the middle of a significant biological transition that deserves to be taken seriously, supported properly, and understood clearly. And we are also fully formed adults with agency, with relationships that matter, with lives that do not pause for the duration of the hormonal reorganisation.

Both things. At the same time. Without apology in either direction.

Understanding perimenopause is the beginning of the work, not the end of it.

You already know this. That’s probably why you’re still reading.

Life. Better.

With love,
Anne-Gaëlle
Co-founder, Vivana

References

1. Carstensen LL et al. Emotional experience improves with age. Psychol Aging. 2011.
2. Epperson CN et al. Perimenopause and the appearance of psychiatric symptoms. J Clin Psychiatry. 2015.
3. Erickson KI et al. Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory. PNAS. 2011.
4. Gross JJ. Emotion regulation: conceptual and empirical foundations. Handbook of Emotion Regulation. 2014.
5. McEwen BS. Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. N Engl J Med. 1998.
6. Segar ML et al. Fitting fitness: do women have realistically positive self-images of their bodies? Women Health. 2006.
7. Vgontzas AN et al. Chronic insomnia and activity of the stress system: a preliminary study. J Psychosom Res. 1998.

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