Menopause Sensory Overload: Why Busy Rooms Feel Unbearable

I Made It an Hour Into Breakfast Before I Wanted to Go Home

Some days I'm the woman I used to be. Some days the cutlery is too loud. I spent a long time assuming that made me difficult.

On Sunday I went out for breakfast with my husband. It was my idea. I’d been looking forward to it in the way you look forward to something perfectly ordinary, which is to say I hadn’t thought about it much at all. If this is your first time getting to know me, my husband is John, second marriage and together for 26 years, we love each others company, yes even after so long.

About an hour in, I was no longer there. Not in any dramatic sense. I was sitting at the table, chatting to John, nodding in the right places, and the entire operating capacity of my brain was taken up with working out how soon I could reasonably leave. Not because of the company. Not because the food was bad. Because of the noise, and the chairs scraping, and the smell of somebody else’s breakfast, and the low continuous demand of being a person in a room with other people in it.

I came home. I lay on the bed in the middle of a perfectly good Sunday, and I scrolled TikTok for a while, doing absolutely nothing, in a quiet room, with nobody requiring anything of me at all.

And the thing that made me want to write about it isn’t the hour of breakfast. It’s that three days earlier I’d have described myself, accurately, as a fairly sociable woman with a lot of energy.

I assumed this was a me problem

I made a video about it, I have a little TikTok account that I like to indulge in occasionally. I just said what had happened went out, seemed like a lovely idea, was home within the hour, lying on my bed wanting nothing except to not participate.

Within an hour it had over fifty thousand views and the comments are still arriving faster than I can read or reply to them.

That is not what happens when you describe a personal quirk. That’s what happens when you accidentally name something a great many people are already living with and haven’t had a word for.

“I was always a people person, but now I just don’t want to, I would rather stay at home.”

“56 here and so many of us are this way now, I’m like a different person, I don’t recognise myself, it’s the weirdest phase of my life, love to all my fellow menopause ladies.”

“This is so me, I’m 54 and I’m not sad or unhappy but I just can’t be bothered with anything or being sociable.”

Hold onto that last one. She’s done something in a single sentence that took me the best part of a year, which is to separate this from unhappiness. She isn’t depressed. She’s specifically told you she isn’t. She just has nothing left for the being-sociable part, and she’s noticed that those are two different conditions wearing similar clothes.

What struck me about the comments wasn’t sympathy, it was relief. And relief is a very particular signal. It’s what you get when somebody describes a thing you’d been carrying privately and slightly ashamedly, and the shame was doing more damage than the thing.

So: not a me problem.

The bit that makes you think you’re inventing it

Here’s what makes this so hard to get hold of.

It isn’t consistent. If I couldn’t tolerate a café, ever, I’d have worked this out years ago and arranged my life accordingly. But I can. Frequently. There are weeks where I’m out, switched on, talking to everybody, running two businesses and enjoying it, the same woman I’ve been since my twenties.

And then there’s a Sunday where an hour of a busy room empties me out completely, and the only thing I want in the world is my own quiet house and nobody’s face in front of mine.

Same woman. Same week. Occasionally the same day.

That inconsistency is the reason so many of us land on the worst possible explanation, which is that it’s a character defect with a variable severity. We decide we’ve become antisocial. Or rude. Or boring. Or that we’re depressed, or ungrateful, or that we’ve simply stopped being able to be bothered, which for a certain kind of woman is the most shameful diagnosis available.

I spent an embarrassingly long time on some version of that.

What’s actually documented, and what isn’t

I’m going to be careful here, because there’s a lot of confident nonsense written about midlife women’s brains and I’d rather not add to it. I spent years as a Consultant Midwife. This isn’t medical advice, and what follows is one woman reading about her own body.

Have a look at the NHS symptom list for menopause and perimenopause. It’s a long list and a good one. Mood swings, anxiety, brain fog, irritability, sleep problems, palpitations, joint pain, hair, skin, libido, teeth. Genuinely thorough.

Sensory overwhelm isn’t on it. Not under any name. Not noise, not smell, not the feeling of being got at by an ordinary room.

Now have a look at a 2015 review in Nature Reviews Endocrinology by Roberta Brinton and colleagues, titled “Perimenopause as a neurological transition state”. Their argument is that although we file perimenopause under reproduction, “the symptoms of perimenopause are largely neurological in nature.” And when they list the oestrogen-regulated systems that get disrupted, they name four: thermoregulation, sleep, circadian rhythms, and sensory processing.

Sensory processing. It’s right there, in a top-tier review journal, published over a decade ago.

So this isn’t a case of women imagining a symptom that science hasn’t found. The neuroscientists wrote it down. It just never made the journey from the review literature to the symptom checklist, or to the seven minutes you get with a GP, or to any of the material we’re handed at fifty.

Two honest caveats, because they matter. That paper describes a system being disrupted, not a specific experience of hating a café on an ordinary Sunday, the distance between those two things is real and I’m the one closing it, not Brinton. And sensory sensitivity has plenty of other causes that have nothing to do with hormones: exhaustion, illness, stress, ADHD and autism that went unrecognised for forty years, which is a whole other article and an increasingly common story among women our age. I can’t tell you which applies to you and neither can anybody else on the internet.

But I can tell you that “there’s nothing about this in the literature” is wrong, and that being told your nervous system is fine when it demonstrably isn’t behaving as it used to is its own particular insult.

Why the wrong name leads to the wrong fix

This is the part I actually care about, and it’s why I’m not writing a comforting piece about how it’s all fine.

If you decide the problem is that you’ve become antisocial, you will treat it like a character flaw. And the standard treatment for a character flaw is to override it.

So you push through. You go to the thing. You stay for the whole dinner. Because everybody knows that you never regret going out, you feel better once you’re there, and the hardest part is getting in the car.

That advice isn’t wrong. It’s excellent advice, for low mood. When you’re flat and withdrawn and the world has gone grey, forcing yourself into company is very often the thing that shifts it, and I’d give the same advice to anyone.

But go back to the woman who’s 54 and not sad and not unhappy and just can’t be bothered being sociable. The world hasn’t gone grey for her. She’s told you plainly that it hasn’t. Handing her the low-mood prescription is answering a question she didn’t ask, and she’ll dutifully take it, because that’s what we do.

It’s just completely wrong for the other thing. If what’s actually happening is that your capacity for input is temporarily gone, pushing through doesn’t restore it. It borrows against tomorrow. You come home flattened, you’re useless the next day, and because you don’t connect the two events, you conclude that you’re deteriorating rather than that you spent something you didn’t have.

We’ve merged two different states under one heading, and the fix for one makes the other worse.

Which means the skill nobody teaches isn’t “learning to say no.” Every woman over forty has been told to say no roughly nine thousand times, usually by someone on Instagram with excellent lighting. The actual skill is much harder and much less marketable: telling, at eight o’clock in the morning, which kind of day this is. Because from the inside they feel nearly identical. Both of them feel like not wanting to go.

I’m not good at it yet. I’m better than I was, mostly because I’ve started paying attention to the day after rather than the day itself, which turns out to be where the information is. Monday tells you what Sunday actually cost. The day itself will lie to you in both directions.

There’s a second cost to all this that nobody bills you for, which is the admin. Managing your own capacity is a job. Working out whether you can do the thing, deciding whether to say so or invent a more socially acceptable reason, arranging the week so the two demanding days aren’t stacked, quietly building in a recovery afternoon that you’d never describe out loud as a recovery afternoon. It’s a background process running constantly, it’s invisible to everyone around you, and it’s added to a load that was not exactly light to begin with. Most of the women in those comments are doing that calculation several times a week and calling it nothing.

A word I don’t entirely trust

There’s a name going round for this now. Cocooning. I’ve been seeing it used for exactly what I’ve described, women taking themselves home and shutting the door and declining to apologise for it, and I understand why it’s caught on. It’s a relief to have a word. It makes the thing sound deliberate rather than shameful.

Two things about it bother me.

The first is where it came from. “Cocooning” was coined in 1981 by Faith Popcorn, a trend forecaster and marketing consultant, who defined it as “the impulse to go inside when it just gets too tough and scary outside. To pull a shell of safety around yourself.” She was describing consumers, for the benefit of people who wanted to sell things to consumers who’d stopped going out. Which is a very Gen X discovery to make about a word you’ve just started using for your own life. It also misdescribes it. Popcorn’s version is about the outside being frightening. There was nothing frightening about that café. The problem wasn’t out there at all.

The second is the metaphor itself. A cocoon is temporary and productive. You go in as one thing and come out as another, with better wings. That’s a lovely thing to believe about lying on your bed at two in the afternoon, and I’m not convinced I’ve earned it.

Which brings me to the bit I’d rather leave out.

The part I’m not comfortable with

Lying on the bed scrolling TikTok is not nervous system regulation. Let’s not dress it up.

Lying in a quiet room doing nothing, or reading, or being horizontal with your eyes shut, is a reasonable response to a system that’s had enough. Two hours on a phone, absorbing a thousand tiny bursts of noise and light and other people’s opinions, is not rest. It’s anaesthetic. It gets you through the afternoon without requiring anything of you, and it leaves you no better off than when you started, and I know this perfectly well while I’m doing it.

There’s a wider version of the same problem, and I think it’s the real risk for women our age. “Protecting my nervous system,” or cocooning, or whatever we’re calling it this month, is a true and useful idea that can quietly become the reason you didn’t go to anything for eight months. You decline the dinner, then the weekend away, then the thing with the women from work, and each individual no is completely defensible. And then one day you notice the invitations have thinned out, because people stop asking eventually, and the world you were protecting yourself from has obligingly got smaller.

I don’t have a clean answer to that. The honest position is that both things are true at once: the overwhelm is real and pushing through it costs more than it returns, and a life can shrink so gradually that you mistake the shrinking for peace. I’m holding both. Some weeks I hold them better than others.

What I’ve settled on, for now, is not a rule but a distinction. Coming home early isn’t the failure. Never going is. So I go, and I go having already decided that leaving after an hour is a completely acceptable outcome rather than a humiliation, which removes most of what made it unbearable in the first place.

A few weeks ago we were invited to a dinner out, we went, I went, knowing full well I would not stay long, my mind was in that space from the outset and I was okay with that. We arrived at 8pm and left at 10pm and had a fabulous time in those two hours.

The time before that, dinner out became late night drinks into the early hours with long conversations, laughter and fun, we stayed out for a full 6.5 hours and I loved every minute of being my old social self, and that was okay too, because I knew it was okay not to feel this way all of the time.

Sunday

I’d go for breakfast again this Sunday. I might last the full two hours and be the most entertaining woman in the room. I might make it 30 minutes in, and want my own kitchen after only a few bites of my avocado on toast because I need my own quiet and nobody’s cutlery but mine.

I still can’t tell you, at eight in the morning, which of those women is going to turn up.

What’s changed is that I’ve stopped trying to work out which one is the real me. They’re both me. One of them just has a nervous system that’s been doing this job for fifty-five years and the other one is slowly finding her feet in this new era.

If you feel this blog speak to you, or you are wondering if your symptoms might be perimenopause or menopause download our FREE Perimenopause Symptom Checker eBook here.