How the Mastering Menopause course started

Have you blanked on a colleague's name — someone you've worked with for years? Watched your body change shape in ways that feel completely out of your control? Found yourself becoming angry, tearful or anxious in ways that don't feel like you? Or quietly, privately, noticed a loss of desire that you haven't mentioned to anyone?

If any of this resonates — you are not alone. And you are not falling apart.

This is perimenopause. And almost no one talks about it honestly.

Why this generation is different

Women have always gone through this. But your mother's menopause and yours are not the same.

You are living it in a faster, louder, more demanding world — one that wasn't designed with you in mind at this stage of life. Less supported, more isolated, and expected to perform at full capacity while your body is quietly staging a revolution.

Your mother may have simply endured it. Many women of her generation did — without language for it, without community, without the evidence-based tools that now exist to help, and with a shame that silenced so many women before, robbing them of their own honest acknowledgement and understanding.

You don't have to do it that way.

What is actually happening

Perimenopause is not a single event. It is a transition — sometimes spanning a decade — during which oestrogen and progesterone, hormones that have been quietly governing your brain, your metabolism, your mood, your sleep and your desire, begin to shift.

The symptoms that follow — physical, emotional, relational — are not random or unrelated. They are separate expressions of the same hormonal shift, landing in a life that already has its own pressures, demands and history. Biology and life circumstances weave together. It is rarely possible — or necessary — to separate them.

The frightening part is not the symptoms themselves. It is not knowing what is happening — or where it can potentially lead if not recognised and addressed appropriately.

And here is something most women are never told: menopause is not the end of the story. The hormonal, neurological and psychological changes that begin in perimenopause continue well into your 60s, 70s and possibly beyond. We are only beginning to understand this territory.

But what we do know is this: this is not a decline. It is transformation.

Why I created Mastering Menopause

In my late 40s, without fully understanding why, it felt like my world was falling apart.

I was a doctor. I should have known what was happening.

I didn't.

Nobody had connected the dots for me between what was happening in my body, my brain, and my life. I was living through perimenopause without even recognising it — and navigating one of the hardest periods of my life without the two things that would have made the most difference.

Knowledge. And tools. The what and the how.

Not knowledge that would have taken the pain away. Some of that pain was necessary — it led me here, and to understand myself in ways I never would have otherwise. But so much of the suffering was unnecessary. It came from not understanding what was happening — why I felt the way I felt, why I reacted the way I reacted, why my body, my mind and my environment seemed to be working against me.

For many women, perimenopause doesn't arrive in a calm, stable life. It arrives alongside demanding careers, ageing parents, growing or leaving children, relationship changes, and a world that keeps accelerating. It is impossible — and unnecessary — to untangle which symptoms come from hormones and which come from life. They weave together.

What matters is understanding the internal part — your physiology, your psychology, how your brain and body are changing — because that is the part where knowledge actually gives you some background.

That is what I want to share.

Not a promise that this will be easy. But a 6-week evidence-based program — grounded in CBT and aligned with the British Menopause Society, Australasian Menopause Society and NICE guidelines — that gives you the knowledge and tools I didn't have.

Who I am

I'm Dr. Ivana — GP and Lifestyle Medicine Physician, practicing in Melbourne's inner west. I am also a woman who is navigating this herself right now. Because Menopause is not a finish line. It is a continuing story — one where your brain, your hormones, your psychology, and your sense of self keep shifting and evolving well into your 60s, 70s, and beyond. A woman is in Menopause all her post-reproductive life — every day after her last menstrual period, for the rest of her life.

We just don't talk about that part yet.

But we are starting to.

If this resonates, follow along on Facebook and Instagram @doctorivana. The conversation has only just begun.