One morning you wake up and you feel like yourself. Clear headed, energized, ready. Two days later you can barely peel yourself off the sofa. Your face looks tired in a way sleep does not fix. Your skin is drier. Your eyes look different. You just don't feel like yourself. And it all makes sense once you understand what estrogen actually does: Estrogen helps your brain hold onto deep sleep, so when it drops, you get the 3am wake-ups and the wired-but-exhausted mornings. It feeds the chemicals that keep your mood steady, which is why the irritability and meno rage can show up out of nowhere. Then there is your skin: Estrogen keeps collagen production going, and women can lose up to 30% of their skin collagen in the first five years of menopause. That is the dryness and the change you are seeing in the mirror, on a real timeline. Estrogen even shapes how your brain uses energy, and that’s the brain fog. The feeling of walking into a room and forgetting why or forgetting words you use everyday. And during perimenopause it swings, up and down and back up, which is exactly why one day you feel like you and the next you do not. So if you have been wondering whether you are imagining it, you are NOT! And you are not alone in it. What physical change caught you most off guard? Drop it below, we read every single one. 🧡 #menopause #over50 #menopausesymptoms #hormonehealth #womenover50 - @control.menopause