Spiritual Wellbeing During Perimenopause
Perimenopause often prompts deeper questions about life and meaning. Learn how to nurture your spiritual wellbeing during this significant transition.
The Spiritual Dimension of Perimenopause
Spiritual wellbeing does not require a religion, a belief in the supernatural, or any particular philosophy. It refers to something more fundamental: a felt sense of connection to something larger than the self, a capacity for meaning-making, and an orientation toward what genuinely matters. Many women find that perimenopause activates this dimension of experience in ways that surprise them. The physical changes and the psychological reorganisation that accompany this transition tend to strip away some of the surface-level distractions that keep deeper questions at bay. Questions about mortality, about what a life well-lived looks like, about the relationships and values at the centre of a life, become more pressing. This is not comfortable. But many women find it, in retrospect, one of the most significant and ultimately enriching aspects of the transition.
Why This Stage Prompts These Questions
Midlife has long been recognised across many cultures as a time of spiritual deepening. The Jungian concept of individuation, the idea of a second adulthood, and traditional rites of passage all acknowledge that the second half of life involves a different kind of engagement with meaning and mortality than the first. Perimenopause, as the biological marker of this transition for women, concentrates these questions. The body itself is signalling change. The social roles that have defined you are shifting. The sense that time is not unlimited becomes real in a way it was not in your 30s. These conditions are exactly those that have historically led people toward spiritual practice and philosophical reflection, not as an escape from life but as a way of engaging with it more fully.
Practices That Support Spiritual Wellbeing
Spiritual wellbeing is cultivated through practice rather than arrived at through belief alone. For some women, this means formal religious practice: prayer, attendance at services, engagement with sacred texts. For others, it means meditation, time in nature, creative practice, or contemplative reading. What these practices share is a quality of attention: a willingness to be fully present with what is, without the constant forward momentum of productivity and task management. Perimenopause, with its disruptions to normal routines, sometimes creates unexpected openings for this kind of presence. The sleepless 3am can become, unwillingly at first and then more deliberately, a time of reflection. The slowing down that symptoms impose can become an occasion for a different quality of attention to life.
Connection and Community
Spiritual wellbeing is rarely purely individual. Most spiritual traditions emphasise community, and the evidence from wellbeing research supports this: social connection is one of the strongest predictors of both psychological and physical health. For women in perimenopause, finding communities of shared meaning can be particularly valuable. This might be a faith community, a meditation group, a book club centred on meaningful texts, or simply a small group of friends with whom depth is possible. The quality of connection matters more than the quantity. Relationships in which you can be honest about what you are experiencing, including the spiritual and existential dimensions of perimenopause, tend to be more nourishing than relationships that remain at the surface.
Engaging with Impermanence
One of the central realities that perimenopause brings into focus is impermanence. The body that has felt stable is changing. The roles that have defined you are shifting. The people you love are ageing alongside you. This can feel like loss, and in many ways it is. But most contemplative traditions across cultures point toward impermanence not only as something to be endured but as something to be engaged with honestly and even, in time, with a kind of appreciation. Knowing that things are transient can make them more vivid and more precious rather than less. Learning to hold what you love with some lightness, not because it does not matter but because it matters more honestly when you are not clinging to it, is one of the more demanding and rewarding aspects of this life stage.
Grief as Spiritual Work
Grief is an underacknowledged aspect of perimenopause, and it can have a spiritual quality. There is grief for the younger body, the easier sleep, the fertility that is ending, the version of yourself that existed before this transition began. This grief is real and deserves to be honoured rather than hurried past. Many traditions treat grief as sacred work: a form of love that continues beyond what has been lost. Allowing yourself to grieve what is changing, without demanding that the grief resolve quickly, is a form of spiritual maturity. It also tends to make space for what comes next. Many women find that the losses they grieve during perimenopause are accompanied, sometimes simultaneously, by genuine openings and arrivals.
Living from the Inside Out
The phrase that many women use to describe what they are reaching toward in perimenopause is living from the inside out, orienting their choices and commitments from their actual values and convictions rather than from the expectations of others or the momentum of decisions made long ago. This is spiritual work in the broadest sense. It requires honesty, courage, and a willingness to disappoint people occasionally. It also tends to produce a quality of life that feels more genuinely one's own. Tracking what supports your wellbeing during this period, including sleep, energy, mood, and symptoms, using a tool like PeriPlan can help you build an evidence base for what your particular body and life actually need, which is where the inside-out life necessarily starts.
Related reading
Get your personalized daily plan
Track symptoms, match workouts to your day type, and build a routine that adapts with you through every phase of perimenopause.