What IKEA Taught Me About My Perimenopausal Nervous System

I went to IKEA recently with my family.

IKEA Is a Nervous System Obstacle Course

Fluorescent lighting. No natural light. Thousands of products. Crowds of unpredictable people. No clear exit. A thousand micro-decisions packed into one meandering path. Nonstop herding of my children (and husband).

For a lot of women in perimenopause, especially those of us who are easily overstimulated, that kind of environment isn’t just annoying. It’s genuinely dysregulating.

And the frustrating thing is that so many of us feel like we’re the problem. Like we should be able to handle a furniture store. Like everyone else is fine.

But what you may not yet know is that this isn’t a character flaw. It’s neurobiology.

What Perimenopause Does to Your Sensory System

Estrogen and progesterone are not just reproductive hormones. They modulate your entire nervous system, including how you process, filter, and respond to sensory input.

As progesterone declines in perimenopause, GABA activity in the brain decreases. GABA is your primary calming neurotransmitter. Less progesterone means less of that natural buffer between you and the world.

This is why things that never used to bother you suddenly feel like too much. Why the grocery store leaves you exhausted. Why you snap at your kids over the sound of the TV, and why you can’t handle the oven timer going off as you’re in the middle of feeding the dog. Why a shopping trip with no exits and a hundred decisions feels genuinely overwhelming.

It is not (always) anxiety, and it’s not weakness. It is a real, physiological shift in how your nervous system is operating.

Your Sensory Blueprint

We all have a sensory blueprint. The unique way our individual nervous system takes in and processes the world. Some people are highly sensitive to sound. Some to light. Some to texture, temperature, or social interaction. All a unique combination. 

I discovered my own sensory blueprint about five years ago and have been using it to work with my nervous system, rather than running on a hamster wheel chasing the next nervous system hack that floods my Instagram feed. I recently completed a four-month deep dive into nervous system mastery, covering the ins and outs of our sensory systems: proprioception, interoception, vestibular processing, auditory and visual sensitivity, and more. It was one of the most clinically valuable things I’ve done in years, and knowing how it’s changed how I understand myself, it’s fundamentally changed how I work with patients.

My own blueprint? I have a strong need for proprioception.

Proprioception is your sense of body-in-space – the feeling of weight, pressure, and resistance that tells your nervous system where you are and that you are safe. It’s the deep calming signal that comes from being held, from pushing against something, from heavy work and intentional movement.

When I don’t have enough proprioceptive input, I’m more reactive, more scattered, more easily overwhelmed. When I do, I feel grounded and present even in hard environments.

What I Actually Did at IKEA

Knowing this about myself, I went in with a plan. Here’s what proprioceptive preparation and recovery actually looked like for me:

Before: I did a qigong right when I woke up, and went for a walk in the woods after breakfast.

During: I wore high waisted leggings to provide a little compression. Intermittently checked out spaces that weren’t as crowded, leaning my back against the wall for a couple of breaths to give myself a quick proprioceptive reset.

After: A 30-minute hike on my treadmill. 

None of this is magic. All of it is nervous system science applied to real life.

Why This Matters for Your Care

This is the kind of work I do with patients in my comprehensive programs: as part of our work together, we can map your sensory blueprint together. We identify what regulates you, what dysregulates you, and what your nervous system is actually craving.

We also look at the whole picture: your hormones, your functional labs, your sleep, your movement patterns, your stress load, your nutrition. Because none of these things exist in isolation. Your sensory sensitivity is connected to your progesterone levels. Your overwhelm is connected to your sleep quality. Your nervous system is connected to everything.

I bring together my clinical training as a certified menopause practitioner, a certified lifestyle medicine provider, and my work in nervous system regulation to create care that’s genuinely comprehensive. Not just hormone management, not just supplements, but a real understanding of how your whole system works and what it needs.

Because when you understand your nervous system’s language, you stop fighting yourself. You start working with yourself instead.

You don’t have to white-knuckle your way through your perimenopause years. Your nervous system has been speaking to you and it has its own language. Let’s learn it together.