What Is Happening To My Body?

Recently, I've had a surge of messages from friends, texts, DMs, voice notes, all some version of the same thing.

"Hey, I saw Balance.

Is this what I'm going through? Why is this happening to me? Am I losing it?" If you haven't heard, Balance is a docuseries I worked on as an associate producer about perimenopause.

It's been out in the world for a few months now, and with that comes something I didn't fully expect: women reaching out in a quiet panic.

And I get it, because just before I turned 40, I had a moment that felt exactly like that.

I was out in public going through the motions of a workday, and then out of nowhere it hit, a wave of heat rising through my body so quickly it felt like someone had flipped a switch.

My heart started racing.

My skin felt flush.

I could feel the heat in my face, my chest, my neck, and immediately my mind went to one place: something is wrong.

Am I okay? Is this anxiety? Am I having a panic attack? Is it something worse? Because when the body changes suddenly, the mind tries to make it an emergency.

That's what we do.

We're trained to interpret discomfort as danger, but here's the truth I had to learn slowly, and honestly, I'm still learning it.

For anyone who knows someone or is someone going through perimenopause, it's important to know your body is not betraying you, but it is changing, and those two things feel very different in the moment.

When something unfamiliar happens in the body, especially something intense like a hot flash, the instinct is to fight it, to cool it down, to control it, to make it stop as quickly as possible.

What I've learned through both experience and this work is that the faster we label it as a problem, the louder it becomes.

There's a difference between sensation and panic.

The sensation is the heat, the rush, the shift in your system.

The panic is the story we add on top of it.

"This shouldn't be happening.

I can't handle this.

This means something is wrong with me." And once that story kicks in, the nervous system escalates.

I've had to practice something different.

When that wave comes in now, I try to stay with the sensation just a moment longer before reacting.

I notice where the heat is.

I notice my breath.