The symptoms overlap almost perfectly. Brain fog. Disrupted sleep. A flatness that doesn't lift. Both burnout and perimenopause arrive somewhere in the mid-thirties, and both are routinely missed.

The difference is biological. Perimenopause is the gradual, often turbulent retirement of your reproductive hormones — and it can begin a decade before your last period.

"Forty isn't the new thirty. It's the start of a hormonal decade we were trained to ignore."

There is no single test. But there are patterns: cycles that shorten, then lengthen. Sleep that breaks at 3 a.m. A new kind of anxiety that arrives without a story attached.