Am I Losing My Edge?

It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I knew what I was saying. I could hear the words coming out of my mouth, I knew my frustration was bubbling over, and yet, in those moments, I couldn't seem to stop myself.

It was humiliating.

I'd spent decades building a career in leadership, change and transformation. I knew how to navigate difficult conversations, read a room and regulate myself in challenging environments. And suddenly, something felt different.

The frustrations themselves weren't new. I'd experienced them before. What had changed was my ability to manage how those frustrations came out.

And I started to wonder: Am I losing my edge?

When you stop trusting yourself

My ambition hadn't disappeared. I still had the drive. I still wanted to contribute, lead and do meaningful work. But I began to dampen it.

I was working in a very male-dominated environment where, at the time, I experienced very little empathy for what I was going through. And I was frightened. What if it happened again? What if I put myself forward, stepped fully back into my ambition — and ended up sabotaging myself?

For perhaps the first time in my career, I started questioning whether I could trust myself. And that did something to my confidence.

So I started looking for answers

Eventually, instead of continuing to judge myself, I started getting curious. I went inward. I paid attention to what was happening.

For me, finding my equilibrium involved a combination of adjusting my HRT with medical support, mindfulness and meditation, Pilates, self-care — and something I'd been remarkably reluctant to give myself: a little empathy for me.

I also started researching. Initially, I wanted to understand the physical changes associated with menopause. But increasingly, I became fascinated by another question: What is happening to the brain during menopause?

That's when the story started to change for me.

Menopause isn't happening only to the body

Estrogen doesn't operate solely within our reproductive system. The brain contains estrogen receptors, and changing hormone levels during the menopause transition interact with systems involved in cognition, mood, sleep, temperature regulation and energy metabolism.

In 2021, a multi-modality neuroimaging study led by neuroscientist Dr Lisa Mosconi and colleagues, published in Scientific Reports, demonstrated measurable changes in brain structure, connectivity and energy metabolism across the menopause transition.

Importantly, the researchers found these changes were specific to menopausal endocrine ageing rather than chronological ageing.

In other words, this isn't simply about getting older. The menopause transition itself is associated with changes in the brain.

That can sound frightening. But this is the part of the research I find particularly important.

In the same study, Mosconi and colleagues observed that brain biomarkers largely stabilised post-menopause, grey matter volume recovered in key regions associated with cognitive ageing, and cognitive performance was preserved — findings the researchers interpreted as evidence of adaptive, compensatory processes in the female brain.

More recent work from Mosconi's team, published in Scientific Reports in 2024, adds another layer. Using estrogen-receptor PET imaging, the researchers found that estrogen receptor density in the brain increases through perimenopause and remains elevated into the post-menopausal years — interpreted as a compensatory response to declining estrogen.

None of this means every woman emerges from menopause cognitively “sharper.” The science doesn't allow us to make that claim.

But it does challenge another assumption — the one I'd quietly begun to make about myself:

That what I was experiencing was permanent decline.

For me, that distinction was enormous.

I discovered I wasn't alone

As I read more, listened more and started hearing other women's experiences, something shifted. This wasn't just happening to me. It was happening to women I respected — capable, accomplished women who had also found themselves wondering what on earth was happening to them.

I came across Dr Mindy Pelz's work and her much more optimistic interpretation of menopause: that rather than simply representing decline, this period can be understood as a significant transition from which women can emerge with renewed clarity.

Her interpretation goes further than the scientific evidence currently allows us to state as fact. But the possibility behind it stayed with me.

There was another side.

At a point when I was wondering whether an important part of me was disappearing, that felt like light at the end of the tunnel.

What if this isn't the beginning of the end?

We talk a great deal about what women lose during menopause: sleep, energy, concentration, emotional equilibrium, confidence, sometimes libido and, sometimes temporarily, our sense of who we are.

Those experiences are real and shouldn't be minimised. But I wonder whether our cultural obsession with decline means we're asking only half the question.

What if we also asked: What might be emerging?

That question eventually changed the direction of my own life. Once I understood that I wasn't alone, I wanted other women to know it too.

I wanted the woman sitting at her desk wondering whether she's suddenly become bad at a job she's performed brilliantly for 20 years to know that there may be more going on.

I wanted to tell her: I know how you feel. I've been there, and it sucks. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

You're moving through an enormous transition — physically, emotionally and neurologically. Be kind to yourself. Pay attention. Get curious about what's happening rather than immediately deciding that something is wrong with you. And seek support when you need it.

Become an observer of your own transition

One of the most useful things we can do during this period is start noticing. Notice your thoughts, your reactions, the situations that repeatedly trigger you and the patterns that emerge. Journal if that helps.

But don't create a catalogue of everything that's going wrong. Notice what's going right, too.

Where are you clearer? What matters more? What matters less? What are you becoming less willing to tolerate? Where are you surprising yourself? What are you learning?

Maintain a growth mindset towards the woman who is emerging rather than continually comparing her with the woman you used to be.

Because I don't think the goal is necessarily to “get her back”.

I'm not sure I want my old self back.

At 60, I trust myself again

Today, I think I'm more confident than I've been in years. Not because menopause was easy — it wasn't — but because it taught me something about myself that I don't think I fully understood before.

I'm resilient. I can survive difficult things.

And perhaps the biggest change of all is that I've stopped seeking approval.

For much of our lives, women receive extraordinarily sophisticated training in being acceptable — being good colleagues, good leaders, good partners, good mothers, good daughters. We learn to read the room. We accommodate. We smooth edges. We seek reassurance that we're doing it right.

Somewhere through my own transition, I stopped needing that reassurance.

I don't need anyone else's approval anymore.

I need my own.

And perhaps that's why I no longer see menopause as the beginning of the end. For me, it became the beginning of a new chapter.

And the extraordinary thing about a new chapter is this:

We get to decide what we write next.

Research:

Mosconi L, et al. (2021), “Menopause impacts human brain structure, connectivity, energy metabolism, and amyloid-beta deposition”, Scientific Reports.

Mosconi L, et al. (2024), research using estrogen-receptor PET imaging to examine changes in the female brain across the menopause transition, Scientific Reports.