# How the Inner Seasons Change ##### Menstrual Cycle Awareness for Perimenopause --- ![[Pasted image 20261024192213.png]]![[Pasted image 20261024192216.png]] --- ## TL;DR - How your inner seasons change depends on where you are in perimenopause and how your hormones affect you personally. - In phase one, a shorter cycle can mean a shorter inner spring and summer. - Later on, if we don’t ovulate, we don’t have the inner autumn we knew before, and mood, motivation and energy can feel like a roller coaster. - We can’t be superwoman all the fucking time. Inner autumn and winter give us time to turn inwards and look after ourselves. --- ## Transcript So now we’re on to how the inner seasons change. We know a little bit more about the physiology and the changes in oestrogen and progesterone. And again, you know, I am just covering the surface here and giving you a brief overview. But I think it’s important to understand how it affects our inner seasons and how we can explain things and understand things that little bit more. Obviously, it will change depending on which phase of perimenopause you’re in. So, again, this is why you need to know your own cycle, know where you are so you can understand what is going on for you. So if you’re in phase one of perimenopause, where your menstrual cycle is still regular but has shortened a little, this means you will have a shorter spring and summer. Your inner autumn will usually stay about the same length. With more oestrogen fluctuating wildly, it depends on how oestrogen affects you personally. Now, for me, oestrogen makes me more impatient. It definitely makes me into superwoman. I think I can do it all. I can have it all. And people struggle to keep up. So my boys call me the mega bee. OK, and this was before perimenopause. So with more oestrogen, it means I’m even more of a mega bitch. Yeah, I am. Yeah, I think I accept that term now. Sometimes as well, you know, oestrogen can have an effect on my anxiety. I sort of think of it a bit like caffeine, so it can make me more anxious. So whereas progesterone is more of a sedative and it calms me down, too much oestrogen can really affect me. And it can also make me feel a little bit too seen in the world, making me feel a little bit more vulnerable. So, again, things just become more extreme. So if you know how your hormones affect you, then you can have an idea of what will happen during perimenopause as they change. Later in perimenopause, when we’re not ovulating as often, there may be no corpus luteum, no luteal phase and no progesterone. Without those, we don’t have an inner autumn. And we don’t have progesterone. That’s what happens with the inner seasons. We still have inner spring and summer and they can continue on. And, you know, they do continue on and they fluctuate as well. So remember, again, that other image where you’ve got oestrogen that’s high and wildly fluctuating. So it might be that you’ve got this inner spring and summer and it just fluctuates all over the place. It can also drop suddenly, taking you very close to inner winter. So I think the big thing is your mood and motivation and energy. They just change constantly. It’s like this massive roller coaster. You know, you thought it was bad before. It can become more of a roller coaster. And you won’t have an inner autumn like you did before. You might go straight into an inner winter again if the hormones drop enough to cause a bleed. Now, for some women, not having an inner autumn is the best thing in the world because of how progesterone affects them. This is where PMS comes in and maybe PMDD. If you struggle with PMS or PMDD, sometimes it might be because of progesterone. That’s what you struggle with. It’s that hormone. And if you struggle with progesterone, then your inner autumn can be really difficult. You know, that week or two before your period. If you struggle, that’s when you’re going to have an issue. So the thought of not having an autumn, of skipping that completely, would feel amazing, you know, at least in theory. The thing is, progesterone is extremely beneficial. I’m not going to get into that now because it could be a whole other presentation. Just know that it matters for our health. But the person we are in the first half of our menstrual cycle—that superwoman who looks after everyone, has all the energy and all the ideas—can’t keep going that way all the time. She will burn out because that shit is exhausting. And that, I believe, is one of the benefits of having a menstrual cycle the way that we do, because we can do it all. We can have it all and we can look after everyone during the follicular phase. You know, we can do it for a short amount of time, our spring and summer. But then in the luteal phase, in our inner autumn, you know, and our winter, that’s the time for us to turn inwards and to look after us. The problem is that society tells us, and we tell ourselves, that we should be superwoman all the fucking time, right? That looking after ourselves, taking time for ourselves is not something that we should be doing, you know, that we should even have to do, right? We tell ourselves we don’t need to look after us—that it’s selfish, an indulgence, and that we can just get on with everything else. In a nutshell, how your inner seasons change depends on where you are in your perimenopause journey. And it depends on how your hormones affect you personally and how sensitive you are to oestrogen and progesterone, which is why menstrual cycle awareness can help you know these things. But there is benefit to having a regular menstrual cycle and to ovulate as much as you can. And to have these seasons as much as you can. On that note.