Perimenopause and Performance Reviews: How to Advocate for Yourself When Your Brain Feels Unreliable
Perimenopause can make performance reviews feel higher-stakes than ever. Learn how to prepare, document your wins, and advocate for yourself clearly despite brain fog.
The Review You Are Dreading
Performance review season arrives, and instead of walking in with a clear list of your accomplishments, you find yourself struggling to remember what you actually did in the past six months. The brain fog is real. The anxiety is amplified. And the stakes feel impossibly high at exactly the moment when your cognitive tools feel least reliable. This is a specific experience of perimenopause in the workplace, and you are not the only person sitting in that chair feeling this way.
Why Perimenopause Changes the Review Experience
The hormonal shifts of perimenopause have direct effects on the cognitive and emotional tools you typically bring to a high-stakes work conversation. Estrogen supports working memory, verbal fluency, and processing speed. When it fluctuates, the mental clarity you might normally have in a confident, prepared conversation can feel patchy or slow. Anxiety, which rises for many women in perimenopause due to reduced GABA production, amplifies the perceived stakes of the review and can make it harder to think clearly in the moment. The combination of unreliable memory and elevated anxiety can make the review feel like a performance when your instrument is tuned differently than usual. The solution is to rely less on in-the-moment performance and more on preparation done in advance.
The Wins Log: Your Most Important Tool
The single most effective thing you can do for your performance review in perimenopause is start a wins log now and maintain it weekly. This is a running document, a notes app, a work journal, a shared doc with yourself, where you record specific accomplishments as they happen. Include the project name, your contribution, the outcome, and any measurable result you can attach. A sentence or two is enough. Reviewing this log before your performance review means you are not trying to reconstruct six months of work from a brain that is currently struggling with verbal recall. You are reading from evidence you collected when your memory was working well. The wins log also helps in the event that your review does not go as you hope. Having documented evidence of your contributions gives you a basis for a conversation about discrepancies between your self-assessment and your manager's.
Preparing When Memory Is Unreliable
Start your preparation at least two weeks before the review. Pull together emails, Slack messages, project summaries, or any written record of your work. The goal is to have a one to two page summary of your contributions that you can review the day before and the morning of the review. Practice saying your key points out loud. Verbal memory is strengthened by spoken rehearsal. Write down two or three things you want to make sure you communicate, even if the conversation goes in an unexpected direction. Take notes into the room. Many people do this as a matter of course, and it signals preparation rather than impairment. If your manager allows it, ask if you can take notes during the conversation. This also gives you something to look at if you lose your thread.
Advocating for Yourself Clearly
One of the cognitive effects of perimenopause anxiety is a tendency to soften or minimize self-advocacy. The same anxiety that makes the review feel high-stakes can make it harder to speak directly about your value. Prepare specific language in advance. "In the first half of the year, I led the X project and delivered Y result" is a complete, professional sentence. Practice saying it so it does not feel arrogant in the moment. If you tend to hedge, notice it. Hedges like "I think I did reasonably well" or "I tried to contribute to" undersell your work. Reviewing your wins log before the meeting helps you speak in specifics rather than approximations, which reads as confidence.
Managing the Emotional Response
Performance reviews can trigger strong emotional responses in anyone. In perimenopause, with emotional regulation running on a less stable hormonal baseline, the risk of an unexpected tear or a spike of anger during a difficult piece of feedback is higher than it may have been before. This is not weakness. It is physiology. A few things help. If you feel your voice beginning to waver, slow down your speech and take a slow breath before continuing. Having water in front of you gives you a natural pause. If the review contains feedback that genuinely surprises or upsets you, it is completely professional to say "I'd like to sit with that and come back to it" rather than responding in the moment. A follow-up conversation is better than a conversation you regret.
When Your Performance Has Genuinely Slipped
Sometimes perimenopause symptoms affect work performance in real, observable ways. Brain fog causing missed details, fatigue leading to slower output, anxiety affecting decision-making, these are real possibilities. If this is your situation, it is worth approaching your review with honesty about your current capacity and a concrete plan for support or accommodation. You do not need to disclose perimenopause specifically. Saying "I've been managing some health-related fatigue and I'm working with my doctor on it" is accurate and professional. Most reasonable managers respond well to employees who name a challenge alongside a plan. What tends to go less well is unexplained performance gaps with no acknowledgment or plan attached.
Whether to Disclose and How
Whether to disclose perimenopause to your manager is a personal decision that depends on your workplace culture, your relationship with your manager, and your own comfort. You have no legal obligation to disclose. In workplaces where you have observed colleagues be treated differently after disclosing health information, discretion is wise. In workplaces with strong psychological safety, more openness may work well. If you do choose to disclose, frame it around what you need rather than what is wrong. "I'm navigating some hormonal changes that sometimes affect my concentration, and I find I do better with quiet focus time in the mornings" is a practical, forward-looking disclosure. You can use PeriPlan to log your daily cognitive and energy patterns over time, which gives you real data about your patterns rather than impressions. That information can be useful for planning your work schedule around your most capable windows. Download PeriPlan at https://apps.apple.com/app/periplan/id6740066498. You have built a career that belongs to you. This transition is one chapter in it, and you have the tools to navigate it with your professional standing intact.
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