The Hormonal Capacity Crash
The crash is not caused by having less estrogen. It is caused by no longer being able to predict what you will have.
Estradiol interacts with the dopamine system in the prefrontal cortex. That much is established. A simple dose relationship is not. The effect runs in an inverted U that depends on where your baseline sits, which means more estradiol improves working memory for some women and worsens it for others, and nobody has tested it in perimenopausal women specifically.
What perimenopause reliably does is remove the pattern. For thirty years your capacity moved in a shape you had learned to plan around without noticing. Then the shape went. The systems you built were calibrated to a rhythm that no longer runs.
That is the crash. Not a fuel gauge dropping. A schedule you can no longer read.
Read the full article: Perimenopause and ADHD