A perimenopause book for the woman everyone leans on:
feel like yourself again without adding one more routine

When everything still gets done and you don't feel like yourself

The dentist got booked. Bin night got remembered. Your mother got her call from the car, the kids got where they needed to be, and the work went out at full output like it always does.

Then, perhaps, you sat in your own driveway with the engine off for ten minutes before you could go inside. Nobody knew. You walked in cheerful and made dinner.

The thoughts that come with it are quiet ones. "I just don't feel like myself anymore." "I used to handle everything and now I can't cope with dinner." And the one that rarely gets said in daylight: "What if this is just who I am now?"

Have you ever stood at an open fridge at six o'clock and not been able to turn anything in it into a meal? Or snapped at someone you love over nothing much, then replayed it long after they'd forgotten?

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone, and you're not broken.

Here is what almost nobody points out. The woman this book is written for is carrying more than one body can hold: broken sleep, shifting hormones, kids who need her differently, parents who have started needing her more, the whole household's mental load, and often a decision she hasn't told anyone about. Nobody can see the weight because she keeps delivering. So when the fog and the short fuse arrive, she reads them as news about her character.

Why the snapping and the fog say more about your load than your character

The common belief goes like this: if I'm short-tempered and foggy, something in me has gone wrong, and a more disciplined woman would fix it.

It's an easy belief to hold. You know the reaction was out of proportion. You watched yourself have it. That knowing feels like proof.

Jennifer has a name for this: the Behaviour Verdict. A hard moment gets read as a judgement on who you are, and the case closes before anyone asks what was going on underneath. The trouble with it is where it sends you next. It sends you looking for a fix for yourself, when the thing that needs attention is the pile.

The research gives this some context. Work from Lisa Mosconi's team at Weill Cornell, Jerilynn Prior's research at the University of British Columbia and the long-running Study of Women's Health Across the Nation all describe this stage as a period of real change in the brain and body, with effects on sleep, mood and thinking. Put broken sleep and a full day of managing everyone on top of that, and a short fuse is what you would expect. The short fuse describes the conditions. It says nothing about the person.

Why sleep routines, supplements and new habits stop working on a full plate

Look at the list most women are handed. Screens off at nine. Cleaner eating. A morning routine. A meditation app. A supplement stack, the bottles still half full in the pantry.

None of it is foolish. Much of it has evidence behind it. But every item asks you to add something, and each one becomes one more thing to keep up on top of everything you were already keeping up.

When a routine slips, and on a full plate it will, the conclusion is rarely "this asked too much of a full life." It's "I can't even manage that." The dropped routine goes onto the list of what's wrong with you, next to the fog. The book calls this the One More Thing Trap. You end up carrying the original load, untouched, plus the weight of every fix you started and stopped.

The pile gets heavier. Nothing comes off it.

Why I wrote this book

In March 2020 I stood in the doorway of my workroom and couldn't make myself walk in.

I’d spent more than 22 years in the wedding industry, over fourteen of them running my own bridal gown business. Then Covid arrived, weddings in Australia were cut to five people, and within weeks the fittings stopped and the room went quiet. I’d been feeling trapped by that business for a while. When the work stopped, I chose not to start it again. My father had died the December before. I was trying to help my mother. I was lying awake working out where the money would come from.

I called it burnout, because that's the word you're given. It didn't fit.

The fog and the short fuse had been creeping in for months. One afternoon I needed to tell my daughter the jam doughnuts were in the fridge. What came out was "I put the round things in the cold place in the kitchen." We laughed. Then she left the room and I stood there a moment longer than I needed to.

My daughters copped moods that had nothing to do with them. So did my mother, while she was grieving too. And quietly, I assumed I was becoming a worse person.

So I did what I knew how to do. I added. Supplements, routines, more effort. When I started helping other women, my first programme was a fourteen-day reset with a workbook. I asked friends to test it. Not one of them finished. They had to print it, find the time, find the file again. I'd made the exact trap I was trying to get women out of. The change came when I swapped one question for another. I stopped asking what is wrong with me and started asking what is on me.

Why putting one thing down works when adding routines stopped working

When you write the whole pile on one page and take a single thing off it, the fog and the short fuse stop reading as who you are, and the relief can come quickly because there's nothing new to keep up.

The book explains why. Your mind keeps a ledger of everything unfinished, and it doesn't rank them. The dentist and the decision about your marriage sit in the same queue, each one quietly asking to be checked. Your body keeps a second ledger of everything spent. Most capable women are running a quiet deficit on both.

The heaviest open loop is usually the decision nobody has heard. Saying it aloud to one person doesn't make the decision. Nothing has to change. It simply stops costing you every single day.

The five-step approach at the centre of Still You. It takes weight off instead of adding tasks, it sits beside your doctor, and it leaves every big decision in your hands.

What happened when one woman wrote it all on one page

There’s a woman I know well. She isn’t a client, and I’ll call her M. When I suggested she write the pile down, she said what nearly everyone says: “I know what’s on me.”

She did. She could have recited it. But reciting it, you hold one item at a time, and each one on its own looks manageable. She’d never seen it in one place.

She wrote it. She sat with the page for a long moment. Then she said, “No wonder.”

Something shifted in her face. The short fuse and the flatness had stopped being a verdict on who she was. She hadn’t taken a single thing off the pile yet. She’d only seen it, and that was enough to move from.

Feel like yourself again,
with one thing
off the pile

Same kids, same parents, same job. The whole pile on one page, one thing gone, and the big decision waiting until you’re steadier. Claim your copy and start with one page and a pen tonight.