Menopause at work
Losing a word in a meeting. Rereading the same email four times. Wondering, for the first time in your career, whether you can still do this. You can — and you are far from the only one asking.
This tends to arrive at the worst possible career moment: often the years of most seniority and responsibility, exactly when broken sleep and brain fog make the work feel hardest. The private worry — that you are slipping, that someone will notice — is one of the most common and least discussed parts of the transition.
It is not a niche problem
The Fawcett Society’s 2022 study, Menopause and the Workplace, found that a large share of women — about half of those surveyed — reported a loss of confidence at work, and that roughly one in ten who worked through the transition had left a job because of it. Most employers offered no information, training or policy at all. The CIPD’s workplace research points the same way: most working women in this age group say the changes have a mostly negative effect on them at work, sharply worse when they feel unsupported. In other words, the difficulty is real and structural — not a private failing to hide.
What actually helps day to day
- Externalise memory. Notes, lists and written agendas take the load off a working memory that is temporarily less reliable. This is a workaround, not a defeat.
- Protect your hardest task for your best hours, and guard sleep as a work strategy, because the fog is worst after a bad night.
- Decide deliberately who, if anyone, you tell. Sometimes a single trusted manager or colleague changes the daily experience; sometimes discretion is the right call. Either is legitimate.
- Remember the reassurance under the fog: for most women the cognitive dip of the transition eases afterwards. You are not losing your competence permanently — see brain fog, explained.
The load underneath the work
Work rarely arrives alone at this age. It sits on top of teenagers, ageing parents, and a domestic load that is often invisible. When the exhaustion is bigger than the job itself, the more useful frame is burnout and the mental load, and the skill underneath it is boundaries and resentment.
How Still Me helps
Still Me gives you somewhere to think about work honestly without it going on a record anywhere. You can rehearse a hard conversation with a manager, decide who to tell and how, or simply say out loud the fear you have not admitted — and the coach remembers the context, so you never start from scratch. There is a focus session for the brain-fog moment at work specifically: a way to steady yourself after you have lost a name in front of the room, instead of spiralling in the car afterwards. Small, practical, and yours alone.
Grounded in the Fawcett Society, Menopause and the Workplace (2022); CIPD workplace menopause research (2023); and Emily and Amelia Nagoski, Burnout.
This is general information, not medical advice, and Still Me does not diagnose or prescribe. For anything about your own body or treatment, talk to a clinician. If you feel unsafe, contact your local emergency service.