If you're reading this at 11pm with a cup of tea you forgot to drink, this one is for you.
I'm a single mum of three. I run my own business. I have ADHD, I'm dyslexic, dyscalculic, and I have an auditory processing disorder that means by 3pm most days my brain is full of static. I am also forty-seven, perimenopausal, and on HRT.
Last month my patch came off and I didn't notice for two days. Forty-eight hours of crying I couldn't explain. A brain that wouldn't catch a sentence. The kind of overwhelm where you sit on the kitchen floor because standing up feels like a project. Then I found the patch on the inside of my pajamas and the whole thing made sense.
Nobody told me this is what perimenopause does to an ADHD brain. Nobody told me oestrogen is what was holding the wiring together. Nobody mentioned that the year your body starts to change the rules is also probably the year you'll wonder if you've broken something inside yourself.
You haven't broken anything. The rules just changed.
ADHD is hard enough on its own. Then add the bit where the medication that worked last year suddenly doesn't. Where you stand in the kitchen at 6:15am and genuinely cannot remember whether you’ve brushed your teeth or even had your first cup of tea. Where you book a breast clinic appointment between two meetings because you found a lump and that's just a Tuesday now — midlife normal, nothing dramatic, and yet another thing you're carrying alone.
Nobody hands you a guide. There isn't a leaflet. The women in your life don't talk about it because their mothers didn't talk about it. You Google ADHD perimenopause at midnight and find six articles, all of which assume you have a partner, a stable income, and a brain that can read for ten minutes without drifting.
I'm writing this because I would have liked to have read it.
What an actual Tuesday looks like
Alarm at 6:05. You don't want to get up. You haven't slept properly in a week because the night sweats came back. By 7:15 you're downstairs, three children at three different stages of needing you, all three of them are also neurodivergent and Tuesdays are hard for them too. The different schedules. The PE kit they forgot. The form that needed signing yesterday. The dentist appointment that you booked six months ago suddenly seems absolutely like a straw that is going to break the camels back and then they is …. The dog. The fucking dog needs you too.
By 8:40 only one of them has gone. The other two are struggling still. You sit on the floor and the silence is enormous. You have a client call at 9:30 and you cannot remember what it's about. You open three tabs. You close two. You make a coffee you won't drink.
This isn't a productivity problem. This is what holding it all looks like when nobody else is holding any of it.
The bit nobody says
You are not lazy. (I hate the word lazy. It get’s overused in. our world.)
You are not failing.
You are not bad at this.
You are a woman in her forties, with a brain that was never built for the systems you operate inside, in a body that just changed the rules, doing a job — being a parent, running a household, being the only adult on the rota — that does not stop and cannot be paused while you figure out what's happening.
That's not a personal flaw. That's a load.
What actually helps
Not a productivity app. Not another planner. Not a podcast that tells you to wake at 5am and go for a run.
What helps is:
Naming it. Out loud, to someone who already gets it. The first time I said "I think my hormones and my ADHD are tangled up and I can't tell which is which anymore" to another ND woman in her forties, she said "yeah, mine too" and I cried. That's the medicine.
Medical support that actually listens. A GP who knows ADHD doesn't disappear in your forties — it gets louder, because the buffer is gone. HRT, if it's right for you, isn't a vanity thing; for a lot of ND women it's the difference between coping and not coping. Push for the conversation. Push twice if you have to.
A smaller circle of women who get it. Not a bigger one. Three women in a WhatsApp who you can text "the wheels are off again" and they reply "same" are worth more than a thousand-strong Facebook group.
Letting some things drop on purpose. Not by accident. On purpose. Pick the things. Let them go. The world does not end. (Some of the things I have let go this year would have horrified the version of me from 2015. She was also exhausted. She was wrong about which things mattered.)
A room — physical or virtual — where you don't have to perform being okay.
The room I built
I made Loop Breakers because I needed it. A small online room, every Tuesday at 10:30, for women who are looping and tired and want to actually do the thing. Not another course. Not another podcast. Not another framework that shouts at you - “this will change your life”. Just a room with the right people in it, who already get the shape of your week. £10 a seat, £5 if money is tight, no questions.
If you want something quieter and more one-to-one, I run a 30-minute A chat with Nici call for free. No agenda. No assessment. Just me, somewhere quiet, listening. If you want to keep going after that, I do longer coaching at £100 a month. But the chat isn't a sales call — it's just hello.
If neither of those is right, that's fine too. Forward this to the friend you've been worrying about. Tell her she's not failing. Tell her her patch might have fallen off.
We're going to look back on this decade and wonder how nobody warned us. The least I can do is write it down for the woman behind me.
- Nici x