Episode 18 - Rage in Perimenopause

The Rage Episode: Why You Want to Scream at Everyone and It’s Not Your Personality

The sudden anger of menopause and what it’s actually telling you

In this episode:

My husband was eating an apple. Just eating an apple. And the sound made me want to leave the country. If you’ve experienced disproportionate, white-hot rage over absolutely nothing, this episode explains why. I cover the progesterone-GABA connection, why your emotional buffer has thinned, and five practical ways to manage the rage without suppressing it — including why a blood sugar crash before dinner might be the trigger nobody suspects.

Your One Thing this week:

Identify your physical warning signal — the thing your body does before the rage arrives. Heat, tension, jaw clenching, shallow breathing. Just notice it this week. Because the moment you can see it coming, you have a choice.

Links:

→ Grab the free 5 Riviera Standards Starter Guide: https://rivieramenopausemethod.kit.com/5-riviera-standards

→ Follow Riviera Menopause on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rivieramenopause/

If this described your recent behaviour, send it to someone. Preferably not while you’re still angry.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My husband was eating an apple, just sitting on the sofa eating an apple, and the sound of him biting into that apple made me want to leave the country. Not leave the room, leave the country. And we live in Monaco, it's a pretty bloody good country to want to leave. But I sat there looking at him thinking I've loved this man for years, he's kind, he's good, and if he takes one more bite of that bloody apple, I'm gonna say something I can't take back. He took another bite. So I went to my bedroom and I sat on the bed and I thought, what is wrong with me? Because this level of fury, this sort of white hot, disproportionate, genuinely alarming rage over a bloody apple? That's surely not normal. That's not me. Except right now it really is me. And if it's you two, we need to talk about it because the rage is real, it's common, it's physiological, and you are not becoming a terrible person. Your neurochemistry is having a moment. So we should probably take a moment and talk about it. The rage, the fury, the sudden, explosive, completely disproportionate anger that appears over absolutely nothing, and it leaves you feeling like you've been possessed by someone you don't recognise. Today we're going to talk about what's causing it, why it feels so out of character, and what you can actually do about it that doesn't involve moving to a remote island alone. Although honestly, some days that option really has so much appeal. So we've already said you're not becoming a terrible person, but what is actually happening? Let me explain the rage. It's progesterone again. Progesterone is your calming hormone. It enhances GABA, which is your brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter, the thing that puts the brakes on the emotional reactivity. When progesterone is at healthy levels, your brain has a buffer. So if something irritating happens to you, the buffer absorbs it, you respond proportionately. Annoying but manageable. When progesterone drops, which it does, often dramatically in perimenopause, and by the way, this isn't just a once-in-a-lifetime decline, it doesn't just drop, it drops, then goes back again, then drops again. Keeps you guessing because it's nice like that. But when it drops, that buffer thins, the brakes weaken, and the space between something irritating happens and I am incandescent with bloody fury shrinks to almost nothing. The stimulus is the same, the response is amplified massively because the chemical that was dampening your reactivity is no longer doing its job. Then add on top of that estrogen. So when that comes into the picture, estrogen supports serotonin production and serotonin regulates emotional stability and impulse control. When estrogen fluctuates, and in perimenopause, again, that doesn't just decline, it swings wildly up and down, serotonin fluctuates with it. One day you feel fine, the next day someone breathes in your direction and you want to set fire to something or stab them in the face. Then add cortisol. Because your stress response system is already running hot. Your threshold for stress is lower and your nervous system is way more reactive than it was before. Every minor irritation, the loud chewing, the cupboard left open, the email that could have been a sentence but was somehow four paragraphs, the car that cut in front of you on the daily commute, all of that registers as a genuine threat, not a mild annoyance, but a threat. Your body responds accordingly with fight mode, which feels from the inside like rage. So you're not becoming a terrible person. What you're experiencing is a reduced neurochemical buffer, fluctuating emotional regulation, and a sensitized stress response all at once. The rage isn't your personality right here, it's just your biochemistry. And it feels shameful, and there is a huge amount of guilt after the storm, and that's the part that makes it all worse. It's not the rage itself, it's what comes after. Because you snap at your partner over nothing, you shout at your children for something trivial, you send a sharp email to a colleague that you would never have sent six months ago. And sometimes when you're in that moment, it's like an out-of-body experience. You can see yourself doing it, you know that you're doing it, and you know that this isn't what you want to say or how you want to be, and you can't stop it. And then 20 minutes later, the neurochemical storm passes, the rational brain comes back online and you're flooded with a guilt and shame because that was not proportionate. You know it wasn't proportionate, and you're mortified. And now you've got two problems. The original hormonal dysregulation and a layer of shame on top of it that makes everything ten times worse. Because shame raises cortisol, and raised cortisol makes the next rage episode even more likely, and it's a cycle that just feeds itself. And the woman who screamed at her child last week and has been replaying it every night since, you're not a bad mother. You're a woman whose calming neurochemistry has been depleted, who is running on a fraction of the emotional buffer she used to have, and who's doing her best in a body that's making emotional regulation harder than it's ever been. That doesn't excuse the behaviour, but it does explain it, and explanation is the first step towards managing it. So what what actually helps? Like how do you reduce and manage the rage without suppressing it? And I don't want you to suppress the rage. Suppressing the rage just turns it inward, and inward rage then becomes depression, resentment, or a chronic tension that eats you from the inside. The rage needs to go somewhere. It hopefully though just not at the people that you love. So first recognise the early warning signs. Rage doesn't arrive without any warning at all. It builds. There's usually a physical sensation before the explosion. There's a heat in your chest, a tension in your jaw, a tightening in your fists, a shift in your breathing. Learn your warning signal because the gap between the warning and the explosion is where your power lives. It might be three seconds, but three seconds is enough to choose a different response. The second thing is when you feel the warning, leave the room. Not dramatically, not with a door slammed, just go. Walk to another space, even the bathroom. Give yourself 60 seconds of separation between the stimulus and your response. In those 60 seconds, your prefrontal cortex has the chance to come back online and offer you something other than destroy fucking everything. And third is a physical discharge. So the destroy everything bit. Rage is energy and it needs to go somewhere. So walk fast, squeeze something, a stress ball, a roll-up towel, a pillow, do 10 squats, scrub the kitchen counter aggressively. My favourite thing is scrubbing all of the watermarks off the shower door. And when I do that, my husband knows stand back, be quiet, try and make yourself invisible. But anything that moves energy through your body and out of your nervous system is going to help. It sounds silly, but it works. It really does. Your body doesn't know the difference between productive physical exertion and fight or flight energy. Use that to your advantage. Fourth, name it out loud. So say I'm experiencing rage that's disproportionate to the situation. My hormones are amplifying my emotional response. I'm going to let this pass before I respond. Saying it, even if you say it silently to yourself because you don't want to sound crazy, it engages your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that can override the emotional hijack. Naming the emotion reduces its power. It's not suppression, it's narration. And narration gives you back a kind of sense of the steering wheel. The fifth point is address the underlying physiology. So everything we've talked about in this podcast that supports nervous system regulation, protein to stabilize blood sugar, morning light to reset your cortisol rhythm, sleep quality, reducing alcohol, movement, all of this reduces the frequency and intensity of the rage episodes. You cannot eliminate them entirely while your hormones are in flux. But you can reduce how often they happen and how intense they are. That reduction is the difference between a woman who occasionally gets frustrated and a woman who's living in fear of her own anger. And I want to add one more thing here that I think is underappreciated. Blood sugar crashes trigger rage. We talked about this in episode two with the afternoon crash, but it applies to emotional regulation too. When your blood sugar drops, your body releases cortisol and adrenaline to compensate. Both of those things make you more reactive, more irritable, and more likely to explode. If you find that your rage episodes tend to happen in the late afternoon or in the hour before dinner, the trigger might not be emotional at all. It might be that you haven't eaten in five hours and your nervous system is running on emergency fuel. Eat something with protein before you reach that point. It's the least glamorous anger management strategy in existence, but it works more often than you would expect. The final piece to this puzzle is the conversation that you have after the storm and how to repair things with without any shame. And I think this is kind of really important because when you do lose it, and you will because you're human and your neurochemistry is working against you, repair it. Go back to the person and say, I'm sorry, that was disproportionate. I'm going through hormonal changes that are affected my emotional regulation and you didn't deserve that. Short, honest, you're not justifying it, there's no lengthy explanation on it. It's just ownership and apology, and then let it go. Don't replay it for days, don't add it to your internal evidence file of ways I'm failing. Repair it, release it. That's the standard. So your one thing this week identify your physical warning signal, the thing that your body does before the rage arrives, and it will be there. So it might be heat, tension, your jaw clenching, shallow breathing, whatever it is for you, just notice it. Name it because the moment you can see it coming, you have a choice. And the choice is different between being controlled by the rage and managing it. Now, this does take some practice, but start. Just start trying to notice what is your physical warning signal. If you've been living with the rage and thinking it means that something is fundamentally wrong with you and this is just who you are now, I hope this episode has given you a different explanation for that. You're not broken, you're not unkind, you're not losing your mind, you're experiencing a neurochemical event that's temporary, manageable, and shared by millions of women who are also quietly horrified by how angry they have become. You're in good company, and the apple-eating husbands of the world will survive, probably. Next week we're talking about something you're probably doing right now or will do tonight, the 10pm scroll. Why your phone is specifically measurably making your menopause worse, and what to do about it that doesn't involve becoming Amish. I'm Laura, this is a Roviera Menopause, and if this episode on Rage describes your recent behaviour, send it to someone, preferably not while you're still angry. But for now, that's me signing off with love from Monica. I'll see you next week.