Is It ADHD or Is It Perimenopause? The Answer, It Could Be Both

Johanna shares an episode from Dr. Tyna Moore and UK women’s health practitioner Adele Wimsett break down why perimenopause makes every coping strategy you’ve ever had stop working — the hormonal perfect storm, ADHD medication across the cycle and GLP-1s in neurodivergent brains.

🎯 Dr Tyna Show Link

🤩 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dr-tyna-show/id1577258582?i=1000706781536

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Swingin' through the ears with legal. Midlife's calling honey where nobody's full. Got that fire side where I'm another shine. This is our time, yeah. So divine. Old driven, free, driven, hold and free. Women own in midlife. Just you wait and see. Dance through the changes with a heart so strong. This is our anthem. Come and sing along.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Not Your Mother's Midlife. Today we're gonna take a look at an episode of the Dr. Tina Show. I love her show. Dr. Tina Moore sits down with Adele Wimsett. She's a women's health practitioner from the UK who specializes in hormones and ADHD in women. As usual, I'll link the full episode in the show notes so you can go listen for yourself. But let me walk you through what they cover because there's a lot in here worth knowing. So why are so women getting ADHD diagnosis in perimenopause? Is it just better awareness, more information out there? Well, Adele says no. Something is actually happening in the body. She spent three months going through her own research trying to understand it, and here's what she landed on. In early perimenopause, late which is in your late 30s or early 40s, progesterone is the first thing to drop. And progesterone does a lot more than most people realize. It's not just about the uterus lining, it's a mood stabilizer. It calms the nervous system down. It sensitizes your GABA receptors, the ones responsible for helping you feel calm and regulated. When progesterone drops and your adrenals are already exhausted for decades of overdrive, you lose that buffer completely. And because estrogen is often still relatively normal at this stage, you end up in an estrogen-dominant pattern. Not because you're producing too much estrogen, but because there isn't enough progesterone to balance it out. That matters because estrogen feeds histamine. And histamine isn't just hives and sneezing, it has significant impact on mood and inflammation. Adele started noticing histamine symptoms showing up across her client base. There's a growing body of thought about the link between ADHD and histamine sensitivity. And while the research isn't fully there yet, the clinical pattern is hard to ignore. Then there's a third layer, how your liver is actually clearing estrogen through the methylation pathway. Women with the MTFR gene mutation don't methylate well. Whenever I see that, MTHFR looks like motherfucker. I'm immature. Anyway, if you have that gene mutation, you don't methylate well. So estrogen will build up rather than clearing properly. Progesterone dropping, histamine rising, estrogen not clearing, Adele calls this the perfect storm. Dr. Tina shares her own experiences with this. She went on an estrogen patch and she felt great. And then a few months later she started having panic attacks. Her blood work from her labs looked completely normal. Everyone she showed them to said increase the dose, but she could feel something was wrong. It reminded her of her postpartum psychosis that she'd experienced years earlier. Eventually she realized her body wasn't clearing the estrogen. She was effectively overdosing. Even though nothing in her blood work was indicating it, she went back on a much smaller dose and was fine. Her takeaway, and it's important, is labs can completely mislead you. You have to go with symptoms, not your blood work, because your hormones are going up and down every day, week to week. Then they get into ADHD medication too. Dr. Tina has been resistant to it, but is starting to reconsider after seeing real changes in some of her patients. Adele's view is that in her community, it pretty much goes one or two ways. It either transforms a woman's life or it becomes an exhausting trial and error process that a lot of women eventually just give up on. The reason is that estrogen and progesterone directly affect how the medication works. Estrogen estrogen sensitizes it, progesterone can blunt it. So what works the first half of your cycle may not work in the second half. But prescribers are increasingly aware of this, but most don't yet know what to do about it. Adele's preference is to get hormones balanced first, see what you're actually left with. Sometimes what looks like ADHD symptoms is really just progesterone deficiency. You don't want to be managing a hormone imbalance with ADHD medication all the other way around. And medication can mask blood sugar dysregulation, the crashes, the cravings, the energy swings. So the problems keep happening, you just stop feeling it. But they also bring up GLP ones. Dr. Tina uses low dose, not for weight loss, but for what they do to your brain, reducing neuroinflammation, supporting neuroplasticity, and quitening the dopamine-chasing noise that a lot of ADHD brains run on constantly. The rumination, the hyperfixation, the mental chatter that never fully stops. She also knows GOP1s are being looked at for quitting smoking, alcohol reduction, opioid dependency, anything driven by chasing dopamine. The dose matters though too much and you tip into a kind of emotional flatness. Dr. Tina likes microdosing. She likes giving very small doses of the GOP ones rather than using it as a weight loss with the higher doses. And there's something they both touch on about the pull towards isolation in perimetopause. The social battery that was never easy to get filled just gets harder and harder. It becomes genuinely comfortable just to stay home, close the curtains, and opt out. Both of them say it's understandable and sometimes necessary, but loneliness has consequences for immunity, cognition, and longevity. The answer isn't to force yourself into spaces that drain you, it's to find the people that you can completely be yourself around and protect those relationships. Both of them talk about perimenopause as the season where the mask starts coming off, not because things are falling apart, but because there's no longer the energy or inclination to keep it on. The bullshit filter drops. People pleasing stops. Dr. Tina talks about learning to hold a boundary without negotiating it away and how that changed things for her. Adele calls herself the Queen of Boundaries. They both frame it as one of the better things about this stage of life, and I have to agree with that. Finally knowing who you are and what you're not willing to do anymore. The link is going to be in the show notes below. Please share my show with your friends. It'll help my audience grow and get all this valuable knowledge out to more women. Hit the follow button so you don't miss an episode. And go and subscribe to my YouTube channel too. There's lots of fun videos over there. And all my links are below as well. This links, links, links, links, links below. Thank you so much for coming back every week and supporting me. I really appreciate you. And until next week, I'm Joanna, and this is Not Your Mother's Medlife. Bye bye.