Starting a Business or Side Project During Perimenopause
Many women start their most meaningful work during perimenopause. Learn how to launch a business or side project while managing this life stage.
Why Perimenopause Is a Surprisingly Good Time to Start Something
At first glance, perimenopause seems like an unlikely time to start a business or side project. Sleep disruption, brain fog, and variable energy are not the conditions that startup mythology celebrates. But there are several things that perimenopause tends to provide that are genuinely useful for building something new. Clarity about what matters. Reduced tolerance for work that is meaningless or exploitative. Decades of accumulated skill and experience. A sharpened awareness of time that tends to convert vague intentions into actual decisions. Many women who have launched businesses or meaningful side projects in their 40s and early 50s describe the decision as feeling overdue rather than premature, as though perimenopause provided the final push past the hesitation that had been holding them back.
What Kind of Project Fits This Life Stage
Not all business models suit the variability that comes with perimenopause. A venture that requires consistent long hours, back-to-back client calls, and the kind of sustained cognitive intensity that brain fog makes unreliable will be harder to build sustainably. The projects that tend to work best are those that offer some flexibility in when and how work happens, that draw on existing expertise rather than requiring a steep learning curve in parallel with everything else, and that can be built gradually without requiring a full immediate commitment. Consulting, coaching, and advisory work often fit this profile. Creative products, online courses, and service businesses that can be scaled at a manageable pace also tend to work well. The goal is to design the project around your actual life rather than assuming your life will adapt to the project.
Starting Small and Testing First
The biggest mistake most people make when starting a business is spending too long planning and too little time testing. A side project is a test of whether the idea actually works, whether people want what you are offering and whether you enjoy providing it. Starting with one client, one product, one course, or one piece of content rather than building a full infrastructure before anyone has engaged with what you are offering tends to produce faster and more useful learning. During perimenopause, when energy is limited and the stakes of burning out are real, starting small is not a compromise. It is an intelligent design choice that protects your capacity while letting you gather genuine information about what works.
Managing Energy Across the Working Week
Working around perimenopause symptoms requires intentional energy management. Most women in perimenopause find that their capacity is not uniform across the day or the week. There are windows of clearer thinking and higher energy, and there are times when complex creative or analytical work is genuinely not productive. Identifying your personal pattern and protecting the high-capacity windows for the work that most requires them is a practical strategy. Logging energy and symptoms over time with PeriPlan can make these patterns visible rather than leaving you guessing. Routine administrative tasks, emails, and straightforward decisions can fill lower-energy periods. Structuring your working week around your actual capacity rather than an idealised standard produces both better work and better wellbeing.
The Financial Side of Starting Something
Starting a business or side project during perimenopause requires some financial planning. If you are building alongside an existing job, the financial risk is lower but the time available is more constrained. If you are planning to leave employment at some point, having a realistic estimate of how long your savings can support you before the new venture needs to generate meaningful income is essential. Many women find it useful to run a side project for a year or two alongside existing work before making any change to their employment situation, using that period to test the model, build a client base, and develop a clearer picture of what sustainable revenue looks like. This approach reduces pressure and produces better decisions.
Using the Experience You Already Have
One of the significant advantages that women in perimenopause have when starting something new is the depth of experience they bring. Decades of professional life, relationship management, problem-solving under pressure, and navigating complex organisations are genuine capabilities that have market value. The challenge is often recognising them as such, particularly for women who have been in employed roles and have not previously needed to articulate the value they create. Packaging existing expertise into a consulting offer, a coaching practice, or a product that solves a problem you understand intimately from the inside is a direct application of what you already know. You are not starting from scratch. You are redirecting accumulated competence.
Building Without Burning Out
The greatest risk when starting something new during perimenopause is overdoing it during the good periods and then crashing badly when symptoms are difficult. The recovery time from a crash is longer at this life stage than it was in your 30s, and the project suffers along with your health. Building in genuine rest, maintaining the sleep and exercise habits that support your baseline, and being willing to reduce output during difficult symptom periods rather than powering through at a cost tends to produce better results over a 12-month arc than any amount of short-term intensity. Starting something meaningful during perimenopause is absolutely possible. Building it sustainably is the skill that makes it last.
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