Where to Start When You Don’t Feel Like Yourself Anymore
There comes a moment for many women when they have a quiet realization:
I don’t feel like myself anymore.
It can feel confusing. Unsettling. Even frightening.
You may wonder:
Is it hormones?
Is it stress?
Am I losing it?
Hormonal changes don’t just affect the body.
They alter how you experience yourself.
And when your internal rhythms shift, your sense of identity often shifts with them.
This is where many women begin to feel lost.
But it’s also where a new approach can help.
Hormones and Identity: This Isn’t New
Think back to your first major hormonal transition: puberty.
Before your first period, you may have known it was coming. Or it may have arrived without warning. You might have felt fear, embarrassment, excitement, confusion — often all at once.
Your body began moving through cycles you didn’t fully understand. Hormones rose and fell. A new rhythm began. Every. Month.
Hormonal transitions continue throughout your life — and each one can shift your sense of self.
Every major hormonal phase asks something different of you.
Menstruation introduces cyclic change, often layered with shame, silence, or uncertainty.
The caregiving years pull your attention outward. Your needs can feel secondary — or worse, invisible.
Perimenopause begins eroding your tolerance for overextending yourself.
Menopause often closes the door on long-held patterns of people-pleasing and self-abandonment.
What you once “just dealt with” may suddenly feel unbearable.
Your body says no before your mind can rationalize why.
This isn't a disconnection.
It’s a realignment.
When estrogen, progesterone, and stress hormones fluctuate, they influence mood, resilience, sleep, metabolism, and emotional regulation.
This is often why you don’t feel like yourself — and why your emotions may feel unpredictable.
“So Why Am I So Irritable, Anxious, or Sensitive?”
This is one of the most common questions clients have during perimenopause and menopause.
Many women notice they can no longer ignore what once felt manageable:
Disappointment lands harder.
Inauthenticity feels intolerable.
Obligations without meaning feel exhausting.
Noise, chaos, and emotional labor feel overwhelming.
After years — sometimes decades — of accommodating others, your system begins insisting that something needs to shift.
These emotional changes are often labeled as mood swings.
But they are meaningful signals.
Signals that:
Your priorities are evolving.
Your tolerance has changed.
Your capacity for chaos is limited.
Life circumstances may be the same. But you’re no longer willing to drain yourself.
It’s not anything going wrong.
It’s something integrating.
From an Ayurvedic perspective, the emotions that arise during this time are not problems to eliminate — they are vital messages.Often, they are messages that have been suppressed for years.
Grief can signal a chapter closing.
Irritability can illuminate boundaries that need reinforcement.
Anxiety can surface when identity is shifting.
Fatigue can reflect prolonged overgiving or overdoing.
What surfaces during perimenopause or menopause is rarely new. It is often what never had space to emerge before.
Why Forcing Yourself Back Won’t Work
One of the most painful responses to this phase is self-criticism.
You may try to “get back to normal.”
To push through.
To return to strategies that once worked — only to feel worse afterward.
Hormonal transitions are not phases you power through. They are phases you metabolize.
They require:
Slower pacing
Clearer boundaries
Emotional honesty
Support that respects change rather than resists it
Presence — feeling without fixing — sounds simple. In practice, it is one of the hardest skills to develop.
If you don’t feel like yourself anymore, the first step is not to force your way back.
It is to get curious about where you are now.
You cannot use old strategies for a new internal state.
The version of you who learned to overextend, overaccommodate, and power through got you here.
But she is not the one who will guide you forward.
A new blueprint begins with three things:
Noticing what no longer fits.
Releasing what feels intolerable.
Allowing what is surfacing to speak.
It may feel destabilizing at first.
And then it becomes clarifying. And freeing.
This is not the loss of who you were.
It is the arrival of who you are becoming.
You are not unraveling.
You’re finally returning to yourself.
