Feel like yourself again
after 50

It is one of the most common complaints of perimenopause, and it is not imagination. As oestrogen and progesterone fall, sleep becomes lighter and easier to break, and the natural early-morning rise in cortisol can land while you are in that lighter sleep instead of after it. You wake with your heart going and your mind switched on. Night sweats and a warmer core temperature add to it. Tracking what happened in the hours before you woke — food, alcohol, screens, room temperature, stress — usually reveals a pattern within two weeks. If it happens most nights, it is worth taking those notes to your doctor.

Difficulty finding words, losing the thread mid-sentence and forgetting why you walked into a room are widely reported during perimenopause and menopause, and are usually linked to the same hormonal shift rather than to early dementia. It usually eases as hormones settle. That said, brain fog is not something to simply accept and ignore: sudden or worsening memory problems, confusion, or changes that interfere with work and daily life should be discussed with a healthcare professional, who can rule out thyroid problems, B12 or iron deficiency, sleep apnoea, depression and medication side effects — all of which are treatable and all of which look like brain fog.

The PDFs are designed for printing, or for writing on with a stylus in an app such as GoodNotes, Notability or Samsung Notes. They do not contain typed form fields, so you cannot tap a box and type into it on a phone. That was a deliberate choice: the pages are laid out to be written on by hand, because handwriting a symptom log tends to get done and typing into a form tends not to.

No. They are for information and education only. Mayra Sterling has no medical qualifications and is not a clinician — she writes from the published research and from living these years herself. Nothing in the guides diagnoses anything, replaces a consultation, or should be used to delay getting help. What they are built to do is the opposite: help you arrive at an appointment with two weeks of written evidence instead of trying to describe a year of symptoms in ten minutes.

The free 146-page Perimenopause Reset Workbook is broad: it covers the whole picture and gives you trackers and doctor-visit sheets. Each paid guide takes a single problem — sleep, brain fog, cortisol, gut health, the vagus nerve, nutrition — and goes deep on it, with a protocol you can follow for 30 days. Most people start with the free workbook, find which one symptom is loudest, and then take the guide for that.