Perimenopause for Event Planners: Managing the Unpredictable When Your Body Is Too

Two Unpredictable Systems, One Person

Event planning is one of the most stressful professions around. The hours before a major event can produce exactly the kind of high-cortisol, fast-moving pressure that demands every cognitive and physical resource you have. You are managing vendors, resolving last-minute disasters, keeping clients calm, and holding a hundred variables in your head simultaneously.

And perimenopause brings its own unpredictability to that equation. A hot flash during the ceremony. Brain fog the morning after a late breakdown. Mood instability on a day when client management requires patience you are already running short on. Fatigue after a three-day event run that takes two weeks to shift instead of two days.

You already manage the unpredictable professionally. Managing it personally at the same time requires a slightly different set of tools.

Why Event Work Is Particularly Challenging During Perimenopause

The event planning profession has some specific features that intersect badly with perimenopause symptoms.

The stress-symptom loop is the biggest issue. High cortisol from event stress is a direct physiological trigger for more frequent and intense hot flashes. Stressful situations also worsen sleep, which worsens brain fog, which makes managing the next high-stress situation harder. The crunch period before a major event can set off a spiral of compounding symptoms that takes significant time to recover from.

Physical demands are often underestimated by outsiders. Event days involve long hours on your feet, carrying and moving materials, working in spaces with poor temperature control, inadequate water access, and no real opportunity to step away and manage a hot flash privately. The physical cost of a full event day during perimenopause is higher than it was five years ago, even if the work is the same.

Irregular schedules during event season mean irregular sleep, which is one of the most powerful amplifiers of perimenopausal symptoms. Cognitive symptoms in particular are dramatically worsened by insufficient sleep. A two-day event with late nights and early setups can leave you cognitively depleted for days afterward.

Client pressure adds an emotional dimension. Clients at weddings, corporate events, or major conferences are often highly stressed themselves and look to you as the calm centre. Providing that regulated, reassuring presence requires emotional resources that perimenopause temporarily makes more expensive to deploy.

Managing Hot Flashes During Events

Event days present specific challenges for hot flash management because you often have no control over the environment, limited ability to step away, and a professional obligation to remain visibly composed.

Pre-event preparation is your main lever. Wearing breathable, moisture-wicking base layers under event-day attire is worth investing in. If your event-day wardrobe has any flexibility, building it around breathable, easily adjusted pieces reduces the misery of a flash in a warm venue.

Staying consistently hydrated throughout an event day is more important than it might seem. Dehydration worsens flash intensity, and event days make it easy to run on coffee and forget water entirely. Building hydration into your event-day logistics, a water bottle in your bag that you actually drink, is protective both for symptoms and for sustained cognitive performance.

Having a brief exit strategy for the peak of a flash helps. Stepping into a back corridor, a prep room, or outside for two minutes is often possible even during busy event execution. Having this as an automatic, pre-planned option means you are not improvising while a flush is happening.

Slow, controlled breathing through a flash, particularly extended exhalation, helps reduce the autonomic arousal that intensifies the experience. Developing this response as a practised habit, not something you try for the first time during a wedding ceremony, makes it genuinely useful.

Brain Fog, Logistics, and the Importance of Good Systems

Event planning requires holding enormous amounts of logistical detail in your working memory. Vendor timings, seating configurations, run-of-show schedules, supplier contacts, contingency plans: the cognitive load of a complex event is substantial even when your brain is operating at full capacity.

Brain fog, which is a genuine effect of fluctuating estrogen on how the brain processes and retrieves information, can make this cognitive load feel genuinely dangerous to manage without additional support.

The good news for event planners is that good systems and documentation are already part of professional practice. The adjustment during perimenopause is to rely on those systems more deliberately rather than operating on memory and instinct. Detailed written run-of-show documents that you consult rather than memorise. Supplier briefing sheets that you reference rather than recalling from memory. Brief end-of-day notes about open items that you check each morning rather than holding in your head overnight.

These are not compromises. They are professional practice that happens to be particularly protective when working memory is temporarily less reliable. Many event planners describe becoming more systematically organised during perimenopause and finding that their events actually run more smoothly as a result.

Recovery and the Season Structure

Event planning often follows a seasonal pattern, with intense periods of event execution followed by relative quieter patches for planning and administration. This structure, if you have any control over it, is an opportunity.

The recovery time between major events matters significantly during perimenopause. What used to require two days to recover from may now require four. Planning your season with more recovery buffer, if your business model allows it, is not laziness. It is sustainable professional practice.

For event planners running their own businesses, the capacity to build in recovery time is greater than for those employed in corporate or agency settings. If you have some schedule autonomy, using it to protect sleep and physical recovery during the busiest event periods is a sound business decision. An exhausted event planner with poor concentration is a liability. A well-rested one is an asset.

For those in employed roles, honest conversations with a line manager about workload intensity during a difficult phase of perimenopause may open access to small adjustments. Not necessarily a reduced workload, but thoughtful scheduling that protects recovery time between major projects.

Getting Support and Building Long-Term Resilience

Managing perimenopause well in event planning is partly about immediate symptom management and partly about long-term resilience.

Seeing a GP or menopause specialist is the most important single step, and it is typically delayed longer than it should be. Hormone therapy and other treatments have good evidence for reducing vasomotor symptoms, improving sleep, and stabilising mood, all of which are directly relevant to your professional performance. If symptoms are affecting your work, treatment is available.

Sleep is the highest-leverage lifestyle factor. Cognitive performance and emotional resilience both depend heavily on sleep quality, and perimenopause already compromises it. Addressing night sweats and sleep disruption with your GP is a direct investment in your professional capacity.

Physical activity that includes both cardiovascular and strength work supports mood, stress resilience, sleep quality, and bone health during perimenopause. Finding a movement routine that works around event seasons rather than being abandoned during them is a long-term advantage.

Tracking your symptoms over several months with PeriPlan helps you understand your patterns clearly: when symptoms are typically worse, how they correlate with sleep and stress, and whether the changes you make are having an effect. That data is useful both for your own planning and for a medical consultation.

You have built a career on making complex, stressful events look effortless. You bring the same practical intelligence to navigating this chapter.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not replace medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider about your specific situation.