Is it burnout, or could it be perimenopause? Here's what Irish women need to know
You’re exhausted. You can’t find your keys, you forgot to reply to that email three days ago, and you snapped at someone you love for absolutely no reason. You put it down to stress — the job, the kids, the fact that you haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since some point in 2023. Sound familiar? According to one expert, a lot of Irish women are telling themselves exactly that story, when the real explanation might be something else entirely.
Ahead of World Menopause Day this Sunday, 18 October, Dr Jo, Head of Human Performance at Nurosym, is urging women to consider whether what they’re chalking up to burnout could actually be perimenopause. And the numbers suggest this isn’t a niche concern. The latest Healthy Ireland Survey 2025 found that 75% of Irish women in perimenopause experience fatigue, while 73% report brain fog. Almost two-thirds — 63% — report increased low mood or rapid mood changes, and half experience difficulty sleeping or insomnia.
Those are not small figures. And when you’re a busy woman juggling work, kids, ageing parents and approximately four hundred WhatsApp groups, it’s genuinely easy to assume you’re just not coping very well with the demands of modern life.
Lottie Ryan’s experience resonates
Irish broadcaster Lottie Ryan has spoken candidly about going through exactly this. She’s described initially failing to connect the changes she was feeling with anything hormonal: “At first, I didn’t put two and two together; I just thought I was stressed, tired, maybe run down.” It was only after talking to her mother about her own experience that she started to consider whether what was happening might be hormonal.
It’s a story a lot of women will recognise. The mood that’s slightly off. The memory that lets you down at inconvenient moments. The feeling of being overwhelmed by things that never used to bother you. The temptation is always to look for a lifestyle explanation — you need a holiday, you need to cut back on caffeine, you need to get more exercise. Sometimes those things are right. But Dr Jo is asking a different question: “Has your life become more stressful, or has your ability to cope with the same life suddenly changed?”
Why perimenopause can look so much like burnout
The overlap between the two isn’t a coincidence. Dr Jo explains that during perimenopause, hormonal signals become more unpredictable, affecting the systems involved in sleep, energy, memory, mood and stress response. “That can make familiar demands feel different,” she says, “even when the demands themselves have not changed.”
Separate 2025 research by The Menopause Hub found that brain fog, memory problems or difficulty focusing was the symptom most commonly reported as affecting women at work, with 78% citing it, followed by fatigue at 61% and feeling overwhelmed at 54%. So if you’ve been quietly wondering whether you’re just not cut out for the workload any more, it may be worth widening the lens.
Dr Jo is careful to stress that this isn’t about jumping to conclusions. “This is not about saying that fatigue automatically means perimenopause,” she says. “There are many possible contributors to tiredness, sleep disruption, anxiety and difficulties concentrating, and we need to consider them together.” The key, she says, is noticing a change from your own baseline — particularly when multiple things shift at the same time, and especially if you’re also noticing changes in your menstrual cycle.
What to do if you think something has changed
Rather than trying to diagnose yourself, Dr Jo has a practical suggestion: keep a simple record for a couple of weeks. Track your sleep, energy, mood, concentration and menstrual cycle. The reason this matters is that looking at each thing in isolation makes it easy to explain away — you didn’t sleep because you were stressed, you’re exhausted because work is busy. Looking at them together can show a pattern, which gives you something much more useful to bring to your GP.
Over two-thirds of Irish women currently experiencing perimenopause — 69% — have already sought medical support for their symptoms, which is encouraging. But the Healthy Ireland data also shows that across women who have been through perimenopause or menopause, 13% said their symptoms had significantly affected their lives and a further third reported moderate impact. That’s a lot of women managing something without necessarily knowing what it is.
Dr Jo also touches on the role of the nervous system in all of this, and on technologies such as Nurosym’s CE-certified wearable device, which uses vagus nerve stimulation and has been studied across more than 60 clinical studies. She’s clear, though, that this is not a treatment for perimenopause and shouldn’t be presented as one. Supporting rest and recovery can sit alongside proper medical care, but it isn’t a substitute for it.
The bottom line, as Dr Jo puts it: “If your life looks broadly the same and you suddenly do not feel like yourself within it, that is worth exploring.” Not dismissing. Not pushing through. Actually exploring — with a GP who can help you figure out what’s going on.
The HSE has information on perimenopause and menopause, including guidance on talking to your doctor about symptoms.