Francesca Rudkin

And I'm kind of like, yep, no, go.

And actually it's like, it's not that hard, Francesca, just, you know, listen.

So when you talk to women with ADHD who are in perimenopause, what kind of experiences are they having?

impacts of perimenopause is that they cross over so you don't really know whether one what what is causing what and I think yeah that that can be really challenging so I mean perimenopause kind of crashes into all our lives you know embarrassingly I didn't even know what it was till it crashed into my life like I didn't even know there was I just thought you had menopause which was a year and then you got on with the rest of your life like the whole

And the embarrassing thing is I'm still learning about my body and what it's doing and what, you know, anyway, hopefully we can change that for our daughter's generations and things to come.

They might be a bit more prepared.

But if you have ADHD, you call this sort of a collision, like the ADHD and the perimenopause, they just collide.

So why do ADHD symptoms often get worse during menopause?

The problem is that with perimenopause, when our estrogen and our noradrenaline is moving around on things,

For most of us, it moves around to a certain point and it creates a deregulation with our emotions and things like that.

But the problem is if you've got ADHD, you're already dealing with a deregulated system.

Your emotions are, you already have all these strategies or the scaffolding, as you say, in place to deal with that deregulation.

So when that comes along, am I right in saying perimenopause just knocks all that scaffolding away?

Like it just hits so much harder that that all disappears and you cannot, all those coping mechanisms disappear and it just becomes actually harder.

When you're sitting looking at yourself going, why can't I do what I did last year?

Why can't I do what I did six months ago?

Why am I waking up really anxious about going to work or this or that?

You do start to wonder what's going on with yourself and what's happening and are you just not coping?

And I just think for someone to go, hey, it is a thing.

It's a thing.