Perimenopause and Workplace Relationships: Managing Colleagues, Managers, and Your Own Reputation

When Your Work Self and Your Perimenopausal Self Collide

You have spent years building professional relationships, a reputation, a way of showing up at work that you are proud of. Then perimenopause arrives, and suddenly you are less consistently the version of yourself that colleagues know.

Brain fog makes you lose track of things in meetings. Irritability surfaces more quickly than you would like. A hot flash hits in the middle of a presentation. You need to leave an event early because your sleep has been so disrupted that you are running on empty.

None of this erases your competence or your value at work. But it does create friction between how you present and how you know yourself to be at your best. Managing that friction, and the workplace relationships it can affect, is worth thinking through carefully.

The Relationship With Your Manager

Your manager is probably the most important workplace relationship to consider carefully during perimenopause. They are the person most likely to notice changes in your performance, and the person with the most direct power over your working conditions and your opportunities.

Whether to disclose to your manager depends heavily on your specific relationship and your organisational culture. There is no universal right answer. What matters is that you have thought it through rather than waiting for a difficult conversation to land in circumstances where you are less prepared.

If you do decide to tell your manager, framing it around what you need rather than around a full account of your symptoms is usually more effective. Something like I am managing a health condition that affects my energy and focus on some days and I want to keep you informed as my manager gives context without over-sharing. Then move directly to any specific adjustments you are looking for.

The Relationship With Peers and Colleagues

Colleagues who work closely with you will notice changes, even if they do not name them. If your mood is more variable than it used to be, if you are less available for social interaction, or if your performance is inconsistent in ways it was not before, the gaps will be visible to people who know your work.

You are not obligated to explain yourself to colleagues. But leaving the gaps unexplained can lead to assumptions you would rather correct. A simple acknowledgement, when it feels right, can shift the dynamic. Something like I am managing some health stuff at the moment can be enough to redirect a colleague's interpretation without requiring detail.

With colleagues you trust more, a more direct conversation may feel appropriate and may actually deepen the relationship. Many women are going through similar experiences and simply have not brought them into the workplace. Your openness can create space for others to be less isolated too.

Managing Visible Symptoms in Professional Settings

Hot flashes, flushing, and visible sweating in professional settings are among the most commonly reported concerns for women navigating perimenopause at work. The self-consciousness they create is real, and it adds a layer of anxiety on top of the physical symptom itself.

Practical management strategies help. Layering clothing so you can adjust quickly, choosing natural breathable fabrics, keeping a small personal fan accessible, and staying well-hydrated all reduce the intensity and visibility of hot flashes during work. Knowing your typical hot flash triggers, such as hot drinks, warm rooms, or stress spikes, and managing around them during high-visibility moments is also useful.

If you are presenting or leading a meeting, arriving early to assess the temperature of the room and adjust it if possible gives you more control. Positioning yourself near a door or air conditioning if a room tends to run hot reduces the risk of a difficult moment during a key professional interaction.

Protecting Your Reputation When Cognition Fluctuates

Brain fog is one of the most professionally threatening aspects of perimenopause because the work most knowledge workers do, processing information, communicating precisely, and making nuanced decisions, is directly affected.

Compensating strategies matter here. Writing things down more than you used to, using calendar and project management tools to hold context you used to keep in your head, arriving at meetings with pre-prepared notes, and building more preparation time into important tasks all reduce the risk of public-facing lapses.

If you do have a visible moment of forgetting something important or losing your thread in a meeting, recovering calmly and briefly, rather than drawing extended attention to it, is the more professionally effective response. Most people are more forgiving of a brief loss of thread than of an extended, self-conscious recovery.

Building rest into your schedule also matters for cognitive function. Running consistently depleted accelerates cognitive symptoms. Protecting your sleep and managing your workload on harder days is not indulgence. It is a professional maintenance strategy.

When Mood Changes Affect Working Relationships

Irritability and emotional reactivity that are out of character for you can damage working relationships if left unaddressed. A colleague who receives a sharper response than they expected, or a team member who notices a pattern of tension, may begin to adjust their behaviour in ways that create distance or friction.

If you have had a moment of uncharacteristic irritability with a colleague, a brief, direct acknowledgement, I was sharper than I needed to be yesterday, I wanted to say that, repairs a surprising amount of relationship damage. It does not require a full explanation. It just signals that you are aware and that the relationship matters to you.

Knowing your own patterns also helps here. If you track your symptoms over time and notice that particular phases of your cycle tend to be higher-irritability periods, you can schedule your most relational and collaborative work away from those windows where your calendar allows, and flag to yourself when patience is most likely to be thin so you can apply extra attention to your responses.

Tracking Symptoms as a Professional Tool

Logging your symptoms with PeriPlan over time builds a picture of your patterns: when you tend to be at your best cognitively, when your energy is most reliable, when mood variability is highest. That information is professionally useful.

When you know your patterns, you can schedule demanding work, important presentations, and high-stakes relationship interactions during periods when you tend to perform better. You can build more recovery and preparation time around periods that tend to be harder. This is not resignation. It is intelligent planning.

Bringing documented symptom patterns to a healthcare appointment also leads to better clinical conversations and more targeted support options. Perimenopause that is well-managed has a smaller footprint at work than perimenopause that is endured in silence.

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