Lemons and Pineapples

S4-Episode 5: Why Stress Is Making Your Perimenopause Worse & How To Regain Control Of Your Health

• Emma O'Brien • Season 4 • Episode 5

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🎙️ Season 4, Episode 5 – Why Stress Makes Perimenopause Symptoms Worse (and What You Can Do About It)

In this episode of Lemons and Pineapples, Emma O’Brien and her co-host, functional medicine health coach Sam Shrosbree, dive into the powerful connection between stress and perimenopause.

Many women in their 40s and 50s experience joint pain, hot flushes, insomnia, brain fog, weight gain, and anxiety — often chalked up to “just perimenopause.” But as Emma and Sam reveal, chronic stress and excess cortisol may be the real culprits behind worsening symptoms.

Together, they explore:

  • 🔎 Why high stress levels throw hormones off balance
  • 🍰 The “baking analogy” that makes hormone production easy to understand
  • 🧠 How cortisol steal impacts sleep, mood, and brain health
  • ⚖️ Why weight gain, anxiety, and brain fog are often linked to stress, not just hormones
  • 🌿 Practical tools for calming your nervous system naturally
  • đź’¤ Why stress management is just as important as diet, sleep, and exercise
  • 🌳 The power of nature, breathwork, and boundaries in restoring balance


Emma also guides listeners through a short HeartMath heart-focused breathing practice, offering a taste of how simple nervous system regulation tools can create calm within minutes.

✨ If you’re tired of feeling frazzled, stuck, or told that HRT is the only option, this episode will empower you to take back control of your well-being — body, mind, and spirit.

🌟 Special Invitation: The Re-Calibration Course

Emma and Sam are launching a 6-week online course starting Monday, 1st September. 

Inside, you’ll learn:

  • Sam’s four pillars of health (nutrition, movement, sleep, stress management)
  • Science-backed nervous system regulation tools
  • Practical, doable strategies to balance hormones naturally
  • Simple daily tweaks that add up to lasting change

Learn more and sign up here 👉 www.emmaobriencoach.com/recalibration

📲 Stay Connected

Procrastinators, this will change the way you show up for yourself and help you make serious progress in just 7 days.

STOP putting your progress on the back burner

LEARN how to set effective boundaries

MAKE more progress in a week than you have in the last month

Get instant access to STOP Procrastinating in 7 Days here.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

If you know you want more from your life or career but you're totally stuck about where to start, I invite you to book a complimentary strategy call with me here.

We'll uncover what's holding you back from the goals you want to achieve and you'll leave the call with actionable steps to get you moving in the right direction.

For the tea on me, how I work, who I coach and the packages I offer, please visit my website - www.emmaobriencoach.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram @emmaobriencoach where I share an abundance of tools, strategies and brilliant content, you might also see the occasional dog.

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Emma O'Brien: Hi folks, welcome to Season 4, Episode 5 of the Lemons and Pineapples podcast with me, Emma O'Brien, and my co-conspirator, Sam Shrosbury, functional medicine health coach.

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Emma O'Brien: Today we're going to be talking about why stress makes perimenopause symptoms worse, and how you can start to take back control of your health.

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Emma O'Brien: You're in emotional and mental and physical well-being without being pumped full of Drugs.

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Emma O'Brien: So, you, we both know, Sam and I can both vouch for the fact that we're in our, you know, we don't look it, but we're in our mid-40s.

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Emma O'Brien: And lots of conversations happen with women who are our age about perimenopause, and all of the symptoms that people are having. Joint pain, hot flushes, insomnia, anxiety, irritability, brain fog, irregular periods, weight gain that won't go away, and just generally feeling

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Emma O'Brien: Out of sorts, and… I think all of these things are just

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Emma O'Brien: pinpointed and blamed on perimenopause. It must be perimenopause.

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Emma O'Brien: And… you and I both have talked about this, is there's something else at play here.

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Emma O'Brien: And… It's quite stress-related.

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Emma O'Brien: And I don't think, well, we don't… you and I both agree, it's not being addressed. So, here we are.

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Emma O'Brien: To address it.

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Emma O'Brien: I'm gonna hand over to you, Sam.

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Sam Shrosbree: Thank you, Emma. Such a great introduction. I was even thinking this morning.

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Sam Shrosbree: I think you and I have spoken about this as well. I don't think our grandmothers knew about menopause, our mothers didn't know about perimenopause, and I don't know, we don't know about the things that the next generation are going to be talking about. Maybe it's periperimenopause, the extra….

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Emma O'Brien: Foxy!

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Sam Shrosbree: Maybe that's the loading, unless we break this cycle, it is… it's not okay. I think it's wonderful that we are speaking more about women's health and acknowledging these things, because I think, historically, women would have just been labeled as hysterical and problematic, so it's definitely great that people are acknowledging and addressing that there are these

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Sam Shrosbree: hormone changes.

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Sam Shrosbree: happening in our bodies, but I don't think we should be feeling the sort of diabolical

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Sam Shrosbree: Life… hugely life-changing effects of them.

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Sam Shrosbree: It is quite normal for our hormones to

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Sam Shrosbree: change and transition through the different course of… courses of life. We went through puberty, and we're gonna go through menopause, but the hormones should slowly be increasing and decreasing, just like a… like a quietly flowing river. But unfortunately, what we are seeing in people's bodies is their hormones are all over the place, and up and down, and spurting out, and not being produced.

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Sam Shrosbree: Because we are not utilizing the base ingredients to make hormones correctly.

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Sam Shrosbree: So, just a quick crash course and summary in hormones is that all hormones are produced by cholesterol in our body. Cholesterol then makes a base

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Sam Shrosbree: hormone ingredient, which we call pregnenolone. So we can think of pregnenolone as the mother hormone, or if we think of, sort of, baking, let's use a baking analogy, pregnenolone would be the flour.

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Sam Shrosbree: We can then combine that flour with a few other ingredients and make a batter, which is progesterone.

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Sam Shrosbree: And then the body needs to decide, what are we going to do with that batter? Are we going to keep it as batter and keep it as progesterone, or are we going to convert that batter into cakes and biscuits and muffins? And all the cakes and biscuits and muffins and different things we could bake represent the different hormones, like estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, etc.

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Sam Shrosbree: So, if your bakery in your body is being given information that you need to survive, survival is of utmost importance.

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Sam Shrosbree: That bakery is going to just produce cortisol. Cortisol is going to sell like hotcakes. We'll call the cortisol the hotcakes. And that's what the body's going to make. So then there's not going to be batter enough left to make things like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, which all have very important functions

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Sam Shrosbree: in the body.

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Sam Shrosbree: Most especially, I mean, you and I were talking earlier, about how amazing progesterone is in producing or boosting your neurotransmitters like GABA that help you sleep and help you relax, and, very important for, conceiving. I mean, I think even, you know, people

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Sam Shrosbree: earlier than the perimenopause stage, where they're struggling with infertility, it's often because there are not enough of these other hormones being made. …

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Sam Shrosbree: they even have a term for this process where too much cortisol is being made, and it's called cortisol steal. So basically, cortisol is stealing all the base batter, for itself, which has terrible detrimental effects on… on your body.

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Emma O'Brien: Yeah, I think this isn't, sorry, this isn't talked about enough, the dramatic effects that excess chronic stress has on us when we are living lives where we are on the go all the time, we're not sleeping enough, we're totally overwhelmed, and especially as women who are

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Emma O'Brien: of a perimenopausal age, so in theory, this should be somewhere between 45 and 55 that this is happening. I think it is happening earlier for people.

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Emma O'Brien: With use of hormones and all that sort of thing, but cortisol in excess, poor cortisol, gets a really hard time with us, but cortisol in excess is a massive problem for all of our bodily systems.

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Emma O'Brien: We… we're not going to be talking about it today, but for women in their 40s who are prepping on the path to go into menopause, which is effectively when your reproductive cycle comes to a final close.

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Emma O'Brien: Too much cortisol as a result of being chronically stressed, not only does it disrupt your hormones, and we were talking about progesterone's really important. It's the kind of calming hormone compared to estrogen. If we don't have enough of that, we don't sleep well, which is why the insomnia appears.

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Emma O'Brien: We… we don't… we can't calm ourselves well, so it's why the anxiety appears, and all of these wild symptoms that make life really difficult, and then exacerbate that stress.

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Emma O'Brien: The other thing that's really important to mention here, for women's health is that not only does cortisol affect your progesterone and your estrogen, it also affects bone density.

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Emma O'Brien: And it also affects blood sugar as well, and your insulin production, and it can lead to insulin resistance, which is why you'll find a lot of people, women of middle age.

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Emma O'Brien: Complaining of weight gain, complaining of sudden weight gain, they're not eating anything differently, but suddenly there's loads of… there's fat appearing where it wasn't before, and they can't get rid of it. It's all related to too much cortisol, which is related to stress levels that are just too high.

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Emma O'Brien: This is something you and I are both incredibly passionate about, is helping people to naturally and holistically start to get a handle on and get control of

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Emma O'Brien: what's happening internally. My work comes a lot from the kind of nervous system regulation and mindset side. You come from the functional medicine side. I mean, you've, you know, hours of training to do your functional medicine health coaching course.

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Emma O'Brien: I'm a HeartMath-certified coach. You know, this stuff is all science-backed that we're talking about, Bit… Why are we….

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Sam Shrosbree: not being told this by GPs when we go. You know, lots of women that we speak to are on HRT.

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Emma O'Brien: When it's probably not necessary.

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Sam Shrosbree: 100%. I mean, I think, as far as the doctors go, I mean, doctors that I have spoken to and

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Sam Shrosbree: just, even on my functional medicine course, they were all… they were all medical doctors that lectured on the course, and this is just stuff that's not taught in medical school. So unfortunately.

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Sam Shrosbree: medicine is about treating an illness, so they… they are trained to go and look for something that's wrong, and then

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Sam Shrosbree: give you a drug for that thing that's wrong. They're not trained, they don't even have a good understanding on talking to you about your stress levels, and asking you how you're sleeping, and, what your diet's like, and what kind of movement you're doing, …

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Sam Shrosbree: They… it's jarring. And…

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Sam Shrosbree: I mean, I think there's also a thing where doctors like to just quickly churn people out 5 minutes in, 5 minutes out, so what's your problem? Here's a script, next. So definitely there is a gap where we need to be spending more time looking at our bodies holistically, and I think this is where, like you say, the work that you and I are doing is starting to…

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Sam Shrosbree: Come to the fore, and we're realizing how important it is to constantly be checking in with our bodies, and

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Sam Shrosbree: And listening to when our bodies are out of balance or dysregulated, because there's… we've said this before, nobody gets cancer or some terrible disease out of the blue. They will always have known that there were little signs along the way before that happened, and

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Sam Shrosbree: Things… things like having very unbalanced hormones could be one of those signs.

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Sam Shrosbree: You know, any of… we… we're talking about the changes that people are seeing in terms of weight gain and those kinds of things, but there's definitely going to be, effects and changes, like you say, the osteoporosis, then we start getting fractures. Cortisol also needs energy, so it eats away at muscle and brain tissue to give itself that energy, because it feels like it needs to

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Sam Shrosbree: to run away. So then, this is where a lot of the…

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Sam Shrosbree: the cognitive decline, we speak a lot about brain fog. People are like, oh, I've just got such brain fog, it's just my perimenopause, but it's… it shouldn't need to be like that. It's, again, it's part of your body just using the incorrect hormones and not able to…

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Sam Shrosbree: send enough blood supply and information to the brain tissue. … So, there's… this is…

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Sam Shrosbree: not even just for perimenopause, I think for how you feel now, and how you're going to feel for the next 30, 40, 50 years.

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Emma O'Brien: Yep, 100%. And I think it's…

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Emma O'Brien: really empowering people to take responsibility for their own wellness, because I think we give a lot of power away to medical doctors, so not rubbishing anybody, and I think what you said about GPs, I think here in South Africa, if you're lucky enough to be on a private healthcare.

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Emma O'Brien: Super, you're actually going to have more time at a GP. You're still not going to be asked questions about your stress level and your sleep level and everything, I can more or less guarantee it.

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Emma O'Brien: But you'll have a bit more time. Somewhere like the UK, where people are getting… literally, the GPs are so overrun, you can't get an appointment, you do literally get 2 minutes, there isn't the time, so…

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Emma O'Brien: We have a responsibility for our own wellness, and this is… what we're sharing here is

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Emma O'Brien: The tools that you can have at your disposal to be able to… to really start doing that.

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Emma O'Brien: Just share a little bit from a functional medicine perspective.

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Emma O'Brien: because we've shared a load of bad news. Sorry, guys, we've just, like, dropped. Here's all the awful things, but here's what you can start to do, and here's what it looks like from a functional medicine perspective of some of the things that you can start to take control of that will naturally balance your hormones and help you feel better.

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Sam Shrosbree: Mmm.

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Sam Shrosbree: I mean, I think I always say…

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Sam Shrosbree: I mean, we always speak about the different pillars of health, so your diet, your exercise, your sleep.

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Sam Shrosbree: And your stress management. I suppose the easiest and most accessible things to do is to be mindful and conscious of what you… what you're consuming.

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Sam Shrosbree: But that being said, I have always said that you can be, sort of, eating all the spinach and kale and, and trying to have a clean diet and, go for your runs every day, but if you're not managing your stress.

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Sam Shrosbree: It is going to be futile. I… I truly believe that stress is the…

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Sam Shrosbree: can be the biggest game changer in all of these things. So, anything where we just try and calm the nervous system down, movement practices that are mindful and slow and connect you to your breath, and, deep breathing exercises that tell your body that you are safe.

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Sam Shrosbree: Really trying to prioritize sleep. I mean, are we not sleeping because our hormones are unbalanced, or are we not sleeping because we're sitting doomscrolling Instagram till midnight, and …

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Sam Shrosbree: And not prioritizing going to bed and sleeping. So, yeah, I think my top things will be to find something every day that feels calming and relaxing to your nervous system, whether it's deep breathing, some kind of mindful movement, even if it's just a walk outdoors, you and I,

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Sam Shrosbree: speak a lot about outdoors and nature. I think that's something we both love, is just getting outdoors, just…

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Sam Shrosbree: Smelling the trees, listening to the birds, just things that are constantly trying to calm your nervous system and get you off that freight train. Be on that freight train if you have to, but make sure that it pulls into a station every now and again, that you can just catch your breath.

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Emma O'Brien: Yeah, and I think I make a point of going outside twice a day to go and sit in my garden. Now it's, it's springtime here, it's not arctic temperatures anymore, so it's a little bit more pleasant sitting outside now, but it's… I feel a lot better

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Emma O'Brien: forced just spending 5-10 minutes in the morning, in the evening, sitting outside, listening to the birds, and just… just being calm. And I live in, you know, we both live in… in cities, we're not living, unfortunately, we're not living on a plot of land with no traffic noise, but it's just being able to tune into

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Emma O'Brien: the birds, the trees, the breeze coming through the trees, and just to sit really quietly. Nature is mostly free, and it's a really, really powerful, healing tool.

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Emma O'Brien: From my perspective, when it comes to nervous system regulation, there are quite a lot of tools that we can implement. HeartMath has an amazing set of tools, which we're going to be teaching in the recalibration course that we've got coming up very soon. I'm going to share one tool before we close the podcast, just to give everybody listening a bit of a taster of a couple of moments of

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Emma O'Brien: Of real soothing calm.

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Emma O'Brien: Other things that we need to be looking at when it comes to stress management in life is

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Emma O'Brien: Setting good boundaries, having good boundaries around time, having good time management, are you taking on too much?

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Emma O'Brien: And can you taper back on your responsibilities? I think, oftentimes, if I reflect with my coaching clients of why their plates are so full, it's because they can't say no, or don't feel they can say no. So.

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Emma O'Brien: actually, are you a people pleaser? You're going to be super stressed out with that, so how can we start to get a handle on changing your behavior?

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Emma O'Brien: So, we limit the stress.

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Emma O'Brien: can you taper back on external stressors? That's an interesting one to have a look at, and sometimes it requires making life changes as well to reduce our stress levels, but it's kind of this…

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Emma O'Brien: these… Set of things that have to happen, really, in concert, to…

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Emma O'Brien: have a less stressful life overall, which is what we're looking to do. When that cortisol is at a vaguely normal level.

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Emma O'Brien: The majority of the time, let's be real here, we know we all live… life is stressful for us, but if you're able to move in and out of that stress response, as opposed to being stuck in it, you're going to feel a lot better, your body's going to function better, your cognitive functioning is going to be better, and it doesn't have to involve

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Emma O'Brien: being covered in testosterone cream, you know, or… or… I don't know, whatever else is handed out, HRT that's handed out.

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Emma O'Brien: Yes, that for some people is a necessity, so obviously you need to get your, you know.

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Emma O'Brien: Good advice on that, but it isn't necessarily the first port of call. There's lots of things you can try and do and change before it gets to that stage.

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Emma O'Brien: I am going to…

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Emma O'Brien: give us a little taster of, of heart-focused breathing. So, if you are listening and driving, please come… well, please come back to this, or just don't close your eyes whilst you're doing this. But ideally, if we're using this as a tool for calm, you want to be somewhere where you're not going to be interrupted.

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Emma O'Brien: And the first thing to do here is to really just tune into and drop into your body, and start to place your focus on the area around your heart space.

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Emma O'Brien: And then start to imagine, when you're breathing, that you're breathing in and out of your heart space.

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Emma O'Brien: And you're just gonna slow your breathing down, so you're breathing in for a nice slow count of 5, and you're breathing out for a slow.

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Emma O'Brien: Count of 5.

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Emma O'Brien: And it really is as simple as that. So we're just gonna do that together for…

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Emma O'Brien: A moment or so, just to really get a taste of what it feels like to be Calm.

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Emma O'Brien: So, close your eyes if you can, place your focus on the area around your heart. Imagine you're breathing in and out of that heart space, and breathe in for a slow count of 5, 1…

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Emma O'Brien: to… Sweet.

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Emma O'Brien: 4.

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Emma O'Brien: Five.

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Emma O'Brien: And out, for a count of 5. One.

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Emma O'Brien: 2.

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Emma O'Brien: 3.

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Emma O'Brien: Bull.

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Emma O'Brien: 5.

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Emma O'Brien: An in for a count of 5? 1, 2.

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Emma O'Brien: 3.

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Emma O'Brien: Bull.

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Emma O'Brien: And out for 5. One.

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Emma O'Brien: Sweet.

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Emma O'Brien: Full.

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Emma O'Brien: 5.

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Emma O'Brien: You can count for yourself, we're just going to do that for a couple of moments together.

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Emma O'Brien: And I hope that gives you a real taste of what it feels like just to sit in a moment of

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Emma O'Brien: calm.

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Emma O'Brien: we should do this on an episode with the… I've got a sensor to do this, and you can actually see, with looking at your heart rate variability feedback, actually how this changes your internal system.

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Emma O'Brien: Right in the moment, so it is literal, you'll feel calmer, and everything in your body starts to drop into a state of calm as well. And that means your hormone systems, your respiratory system, all of it just starts to…

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Emma O'Brien: Come back from the edge of frazzle.

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Emma O'Brien: And it just gives everything a bit of relief.

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Emma O'Brien: your mind, your body, everything, and that's what we need to… to be able to do on demand, which is what we're going to be sharing in our recalibration course. So, we start on Monday the 1st of September. This is a six-week online course that Sam and I are running, where we're going to be

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Emma O'Brien: taking you through Sam's four pillars of Health, we're going to be talking about nervous system regulation tools, we're going to be… Sam will be talking about nutrition and how you can support yourself better.

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Emma O'Brien: As long as some functional medicine insights into how we can balance hormones, how we can… things we can do to eat better, live better, feel better. And because we know we're aiming this at people who are busy and stressed.

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Emma O'Brien: It's simple, powerful little tools that you can start to factor into your day easily. It doesn't take up loads of time. It's about small tweaks that add up to big changes over time. So you can find all the information about that in the show notes.

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Emma O'Brien: Over to you for a moment, Sam.

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Sam Shrosbree: Thank you, Emma. I think I just wanted to add to what you were saying, is that I think what

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Sam Shrosbree: we really love about this course is that I think people have a lot of awareness and information and knowledge, but not necessarily a lot or enough of the practical tools and things that they can actually do. I think people know that cortisol is a thing and know about nervous system dysregulation, but then what?

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Sam Shrosbree: So, I think we are both quite passionate at sharing some of these tools, like you just did now, with this beautiful heart-focused breathing, and I think this is just an example. I mean, what, that probably took a minute or two of our time, and hopefully everyone listening to this, even without your monitor, showing the effects. I mean, I think you and I are fairly well rehearsed at these kinds of practices. We're certainly not perfect, and have our

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Sam Shrosbree: our meltdowns and all our things ourselves. Just sitting here

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Sam Shrosbree: doing this, like, I felt myself get all lovely and tingly and relaxed, and… I mean, I thought I was fairly relaxed going into this podcast, and I was like, there's… there's even more. So I think it's really fun to… to share these things with people, and just see how we can all be…

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Sam Shrosbree: kind of…

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Sam Shrosbree: Happier and more relaxed, together as humans, and like you like to say, we can human better.

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Emma O'Brien: 100%, we can human better, and enjoy the experience better, enjoy our bodies, enjoy our…

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Emma O'Brien: minds better, and enjoy the people that matter, because really, that's what life is about, experience, and if we're not present and too frazzled, it just becomes like a white-knuckle ride to the end, and really, it's about more than that. So…

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Emma O'Brien: If you would like to find out more about the recalibration and being able to spend some time with us once a week for 6 weeks, lucky people.

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Emma O'Brien: Go to the link in the show notes, you can also find it at emerobryancoach.com forward slash recalibration, if you're not able to look at the show notes.

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Emma O'Brien: You can go and check it out. A reminder that if you've got any questions, you can pop me an email, you can get in touch via the podcast page, you can also get in touch on Instagram, you can send me a DM, it's at EmmaOBrienCoach on Instagram, or you can get in touch with Sam, she is Zenroom underscore at underscore thewoods on Instagram. I'll put both of those in the show notes as well. And we're really excited to take you on this

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Emma O'Brien: Journey?

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Emma O'Brien: So, for those of you who are keen to join, we start on Monday the 1st of September, and you can literally go to the link here and sign yourself up, so we can't wait to, … can't wait to take you on that journey.

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Emma O'Brien: All right, folks, thank you for listening. Sam, thank you for being my partner in crime, as always. I'm loving having a co-host, it's great.

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Sam Shrosbree: Loving it too!

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Emma O'Brien: We will see you for some more shenanigans very soon. Bye for now.