The Book That Made Me Realise My Hormones Were Talking – I Just Wasn’t Listening
I am forty-six.
I have three children. I went keto in December 2025. I train at the gym three times a week. I do my best to sleep seven to eight hours and to protect the morning routine that holds everything else up.
And still – there are weeks when the irritability arrives without warning. When the sleep that has been solid for months suddenly fragments. When the brain fog comes back despite the diet and the exercise and the everything else I am doing correctly.
For a long time I attributed these weeks to stress, to overload, to not doing enough of the right things. Lara Briden – a naturopathic doctor who has spent over two decades specialising in women’s hormonal health – offered a different explanation. One that was more specific, more useful, and considerably less self-blaming.
My hormones are in transition. The symptoms have mechanisms. And most of them are addressable.
Table of Contents
Who Is Lara Briden?
Lara Briden is a naturopathic doctor based in New Zealand who has worked in women’s health clinics for over twenty years. She is not anti-medicine – her approach is integrative, evidence-based, and notably precise in its use of research. She also writes in a way that is accessible without being condescending, which is rarer than it should be.
The Hormone Repair Manual is her second book, specifically for women in perimenopause – the transitional period that can begin a decade or more before the final menstrual period, typically in the early to mid-forties, and that most women are entirely unprepared for because no one discusses it in adequate detail.
The first thing the book does is name things I had been experiencing without being able to explain.
What Perimenopause Actually Is
Perimenopause is not the run-up to menopause in the way many people assume – a gradual, linear decline of hormones ending at a clear stopping point. It is considerably messier, more fluctuating, and more variable than that.
Lara Briden describes it as a second puberty in reverse – a period of hormonal flux in which oestrogen levels can spike irregularly before declining, progesterone drops significantly earlier than oestrogen, and the predictability of the cycle that most women have relied on for twenty-plus years begins to change.
The symptom picture that results from this is wide. Sleep disruption. Mood changes, particularly in the second half of the cycle. Irregular periods. Changes in cognitive clarity. Hot flushes in some women, but not all, and not necessarily at the stage most people expect. Changes in body composition, particularly around the abdomen, that do not respond to the same things they used to.
All of this – every symptom – has a hormonal mechanism. None of it is inevitable, in the sense of being unchangeable. And almost none of it is simply “getting older” in a way that requires acceptance rather than attention.
The Progesterone Piece
This was the insight from the book that rearranged how I understood my own cycle.
Lara Briden explains that progesterone – the calming, sleep-supporting, anti-anxiety hormone produced after ovulation – begins to decline before oestrogen does. In the years before perimenopause becomes obvious, this decline is often the first hormonal shift that produces symptoms.
Low progesterone looks like: anxiety and irritability in the second half of the cycle, particularly in the week before menstruation. Disrupted sleep, specifically in the luteal phase. A shorter cycle. A sense of feeling emotionally “thinner” – less buffered against difficulty – in the days before a period.
I had attributed all of this to external circumstances. To a busy week, a difficult situation, the cumulative weight of parenting three children while building something. These things were real. But the timing – reliably cyclical, reliably worse in the second half – was a hormonal signal I had been interpreting as a character problem.
Progesterone, Lara Briden explains, can be supported through diet (magnesium, zinc, vitamin B6), lifestyle (reducing excessive exercise load, prioritising sleep), and, for women whose symptoms are significant, through bioidentical progesterone.
Sleep, Mood, and the Hormonal Connection
This section of the book connected directly to Matthew Walker’s sleep research.
Sleep disruption in perimenopause is not simply a symptom to endure. It has a hormonal mechanism (low progesterone and fluctuating oestrogen both impair the deeper stages of sleep) and it creates a feedback loop: poor sleep raises cortisol, which further suppresses progesterone, which worsens the sleep disruption.
The mood piece is similarly mechanical. Progesterone converts in the brain to allopregnanolone – a neurosteroid that modulates GABA receptors in the same way that anti-anxiety medications do. When progesterone drops, this calming neurological effect drops with it. The anxiety and emotional reactivity that many women in perimenopause experience is not imaginary and not a sign of weakness. It is a change in brain chemistry with a direct hormonal cause.
This reframe – from “I am not managing stress well enough” to “my hormonal environment has changed and my nervous system is responding to that” – is one of the most practically useful things in the book.
What Lara Briden Recommends
Lara Briden’s approach prioritises lifestyle and nutrition first, supplements second, and hormonal therapy as a well-supported option for women whose symptoms are significantly affecting quality of life.
Her key recommendations throughout the book:
Nutrition: Adequate protein at every meal (particularly important for maintaining muscle mass and blood sugar stability during perimenopause). Sufficient dietary fat – she is supportive of approaches that prioritise fat-soluble nutrients, which aligns directly with the keto approach I already follow. Reduction of sugar and refined carbohydrates, which amplify hormonal fluctuations. Magnesium, which supports both progesterone production and sleep.
Movement: Strength training specifically (not endless cardio). Dr. Stacy Sims’s research and Lara Briden are entirely aligned here – resistance training is the most important form of movement for women in this phase of life, supporting muscle mass, bone density, insulin sensitivity, and mood.
Sleep: Priority, not aspiration. The lifestyle changes she recommends throughout the book are, in aggregate, changes that support better sleep – because sleep is the single most powerful hormonal regulator available.
Stress: Not as a vague recommendation to “reduce stress” but specifically: reduce the chronic, low-grade stress that keeps cortisol elevated. Because cortisol competes with progesterone for the same biochemical precursors, chronic stress directly suppresses progesterone production.
What I Changed
I read this book two years before I went keto – and when I finally made the move in December 2025, the reasoning was already there. Lara Briden had already explained why: the blood sugar stability from lower carbohydrate intake reduces the hormonal volatility that comes from glucose spikes and crashes. The dietary fat supports hormone production. The reduction in processed food reduces the inflammatory load that worsens perimenopause symptoms. The book planted the understanding. The keto switch followed.
What I added after reading: magnesium glycinate in the evening (supports both sleep and progesterone). More intentional protein intake. Greater awareness of the second half of my cycle as a period requiring more rest and less pressure – not because I am less capable, but because the hormonal environment makes recovery more important.
The shift from “why am I struggling this week?” to “where am I in my cycle and what does my body need right now?” is, in practice, a more useful and considerably more compassionate question.
Practical Takeaways
- Learn your cycle. Track it – not just the obvious signs, but mood, sleep quality, energy, and cognitive clarity across the whole month. The pattern becomes visible quickly, and visible patterns are addressable.
- Prioritise magnesium. Magnesium deficiency is extremely common and affects progesterone production, sleep, and mood. Magnesium glycinate or citrate in the evening is the first supplement Lara Briden recommends for almost every perimenopausal symptom.
- Strength train. This is the clearest crossover between Lara Briden and Dr. Stacy Sims: heavy resistance training is the most important form of exercise for women in this phase of life. Not optional, not just nice to have.
- Attend to blood sugar. Hormonal volatility is amplified by blood sugar instability. Adequate protein, adequate fat, reduced refined carbohydrates. This is the dietary foundation.
- Take the symptoms seriously. Sleep disruption, mood changes, and cognitive fog in your forties are not character issues or signs of failure to cope. They are hormonal signals. Treat them as information rather than personal inadequacy.
Why This Belongs in Body
Body on this blog is about the physical foundations that make everything else possible – energy, health, and the science behind how to support both.
The Hormone Repair Manual belongs here because hormonal health in midlife is one of the most under-discussed topics in women’s health – and one of the most practically important. The symptoms are real, the mechanisms are specific, and most of them respond to targeted interventions.
It sits alongside Dr. Stacy Sims on strength training, Matthew Walker on sleep, and Georgia Ede on brain nutrition as the Body framework of this blog – the research that has changed how I understand and care for my physical self.
None of these are about looking different. All of them are about functioning well, feeling clear, and having the energy to show up for the things that matter.
I am still in the middle of this particular transition. But I understand it better now. And understanding it makes every difficult week a question rather than a judgement.
Et toi? Are you in perimenopause or approaching it (or your partner is) – and have you found resources that helped you understand what was happening? Come and share in the Notes from Soph community on Skool or leave a comment below. This conversation needs to happen more than it does.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Book Details:
Hormone Repair Manual: Every Woman’s Guide to Healthy Hormones After 40 – Lara Briden
Published 2021 | Greenpeak Publishing
📚 Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0648352234/?tag=websitenote0f-21
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