Is Cardio Good for Anxiety During Perimenopause?
Anxiety is one of the most common perimenopause symptoms. Find out how cardio exercise helps regulate your nervous system and reduce anxious feelings.
Anxiety and Perimenopause: What's Driving It
Anxiety in perimenopause can arrive out of nowhere. Women who have always been fairly calm find themselves dealing with a racing heart, catastrophic thinking, a sense of impending doom, or constant low-level worry. Oestrogen plays a moderating role in the brain's stress response. It influences GABA receptors, the ones responsible for calming neural activity, and regulates cortisol. As oestrogen fluctuates, the nervous system becomes more reactive and harder to settle. This is not a personality change or weakness. It's a hormonal shift with neurological consequences. And cardio exercise is one of the most effective things you can do about it.
How Cardio Calms the Anxious Brain
Aerobic exercise reduces anxiety through several overlapping mechanisms. It burns off excess adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormones that fuel anxious feelings. It increases serotonin and GABA activity, promoting a calmer mental state. It also provides a healthy outlet for the physical symptoms of anxiety such as muscle tension, restlessness, and a racing heart, by giving the body a legitimate physical reason for them. After a good cardio session, the physiological signature of anxiety, elevated heart rate, tight muscles, wound-up nervous system, is discharged rather than suppressed.
The Longer-Term Benefits
Regular cardio builds what researchers call autonomic flexibility, the ability of the nervous system to move smoothly between states of activation and rest. People who exercise regularly tend to have lower resting heart rates, better heart rate variability (a marker of nervous system balance), and more rapid recovery from stressors. Over weeks and months, consistent aerobic exercise literally retrains the nervous system to be less reactive. For women with perimenopause-related anxiety, this cumulative effect can be genuinely life-changing.
Choosing the Right Intensity
The intensity of your cardio matters more for anxiety than for some other symptoms. Moderate intensity, where you're working but could still hold a short conversation, is most consistently linked to anxiety reduction. Very high-intensity exercise can temporarily spike cortisol, which may worsen anxiety symptoms in some women immediately after a session. If you love intense workouts, that's absolutely fine, but pay attention to how you feel afterwards. If you notice anxiety worsening after intense sessions, shift to a more moderate pace for a while.
Making It a Regular Practice
For anxiety, frequency matters more than duration. Three to five shorter sessions per week tend to produce better results than one or two long ones. Even a 20-minute brisk walk every day can make a measurable difference over time. Building cardio into a routine, the same time of day, the same route, the same playlist, reduces the cognitive load of deciding to do it, which is helpful when anxiety is making decisions feel overwhelming. Use PeriPlan to log your workouts and track how your anxiety patterns shift over weeks.
When Cardio Alone Isn't Enough
Exercise is a powerful tool for anxiety, but it is not the only one available. If anxiety is interfering significantly with your daily life, speak to your GP. HRT helps many women whose anxiety has a hormonal root. CBT and other therapeutic approaches are highly effective. Mindfulness, breathwork, and social connection all play supporting roles. Cardio works beautifully alongside all of these. You don't have to choose between them.
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