Hello and welcome to The Happya Life podcast. I'm Clare Deacon and today I want to talk about something that comes up a lot in my conversations with women going through menopause, and that almost never gets an honest enough conversation.

Not the hot flushes. Not the sleep disruption, although goodness knows that's real. The part that tends to get even less airtime and that is, for many women, significantly more distressing.

The loss of patience. The reactions that don't feel like you. The going from calm to furious, or calm to overwhelmed, faster than you can track. The snapping at people you love over things that would never have touched you before.

And then the shame. Because you know this isn't you. You know you're better than this. And the gap between who you know yourself to be and how you're currently showing up is both confusing and frightening.

I want to tell you what's actually happening. Not to tell you it's just hormones and to wait it out. Because what's happening is more significant than that, and understanding it is genuinely useful.

Let me name the experience before I explain it, because I think many women have never had it named accurately.

You used to be able to absorb things. Frustrations, disappointments, demands. They would land and you would manage them. You weren't endlessly patient, nobody is, but you had a buffer. A capacity to take things in your stride.

And now that buffer feels dramatically reduced. Things are getting through that never used to. You're reacting to small things as though they're large. You're saying things you would have bitten back before. You're having internal responses that feel wildly disproportionate to the situation in front of you.

And you're frightened by it. Because this doesn't feel like a bad week. It feels like something has changed. Like the steady, capable version of you has been replaced by someone who is harder to trust and harder to predict.

I want to say this very clearly before we go any further. The woman you're describing is not who you've become. She's who you are right now, under specific and significant neurological pressure. Those are not the same thing.

Oestrogen doesn't just regulate reproduction. It regulates your nervous system.

It modulates your stress response. It influences how quickly the part of your brain that responds to threat fires. It's involved in serotonin production. When oestrogen levels shift, as they do during perimenopause and menopause, the emotional thermostat changes. The buffer between what you feel and what you show gets thinner. Things that used to go through your filtering system now arrive more directly.

This is a neurological change. Not a personality change. Not a moral failing. A neurological change.

But here's where I want to go deeper than most conversations about menopause actually go. Because the lower patience isn't just about the hormonal shift in isolation. It's also revealing something.

The things that are breaking through now, the irritations, the resentments, the things that are provoking reactions you can't contain, they were there before. Your system was absorbing them. Quietly, consistently, at a cost. And now, with less capacity to manage, they're coming through unfiltered.

Your lower tolerance in menopause is not a failure. It's an unfiltered signal about what your system has been carrying. And what it's no longer willing to carry without complaint.

I work with a lot of women in menopause. And one of the things I see consistently is that the loss of patience is very often a boundary signal.

The things that are breaking through, the things provoking the biggest reactions, are almost always things the woman has been absorbing for a long time. Dynamics she's been tolerating. Demands she's been meeting at the expense of her own needs. Patterns of overgiving that have never really been examined.

The menopause nervous system, with its reduced capacity to absorb, is essentially surfacing what probably should have been addressed years ago. It's saying, we can't keep carrying this. Something has to change.

Now that's not comfortable. Especially when the change it's pointing to involves relationships or workplace dynamics or family patterns that feel complicated and permanent.

But what if the lower tolerance isn't something to manage back down to acceptable levels? What if it's actually the beginning of something? The beginning of hearing what your own system needs, perhaps for the first time, clearly?

A lot of women on the other side of menopause say something unexpected when I ask them about this period. They say their tolerance went down, and they're glad it did. Because what they stopped being able to tolerate, they really shouldn't have been tolerating. And it was the change in their system that finally made that impossible to ignore.

I want to tell you what this actually looks like when women work through it rather than against it.

The first shift is from shame to understanding. When you know that your reactions are a neurological response to a specific hormonal transition, combined with a lifetime of absorbed overgiving, you stop treating yourself as someone who's losing control. You start treating yourself as someone whose system is giving her important information. That shift changes the quality of the experience significantly.

The second shift is clearer limits. Not overnight and not without discomfort. But women who explore what the lower tolerance is pointing to start to make changes that their previous, more absorbent self would never have made. They have conversations they'd been deferring for years. They start choosing their own needs as a genuine factor in decisions, not an afterthought.

And what many of them describe on the other side of menopause is a version of themselves who is genuinely different. Not angrier. Not harder. Clearer. Someone who knows what she will and won't carry. Someone whose yes means yes because her no is real.

That's not a loss. That's something worth having.

If what I've described today has felt recognisable, I want to say this gently but clearly.

Your lower patience is not the end of something. It can be the beginning of something. The question is whether you take the signal seriously, or whether you spend your energy managing it back down and getting back to absorbing what your system is clearly telling you it can't absorb anymore.

You don't have to figure out what that means alone.

A Cuppa and Chat is a free conversation with me. No pressure and no agenda. Find out more and book at happya.co.uk, or search The Happya Life podcast wherever you listen.

I'll be back next Wednesday. Take good care.