I’m “Not Feeling Like Myself” (NFLM): The Real Clinical Term You Might Recognize

I don't feel like myself anymore.

You might have said it out loud to a friend who immediately said "oh my gosh, me too." Or maybe just in your own head at 11pm, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out who replaced you with this foggy, weepy, short-fused woman with your mother’s waistline.

You probably assumed this is all just a feeling. A vibe. Maybe you knew you were hormonal and you'd eventually snap out of it once you slept better or finally got around to that yoga retreat.

Here's what almost nobody tells a woman in her 40s: that sentence “I don’t feel like myself anymore” has a clinical name. A real one, with a study behind it and an acronym and everything.

It's called NFLM for Not Feeling Like Myself. And it is, officially, a documented clinical phenomenon, not a energy slump you're failing to manage your way out of.

Let’s talk about it.

The study that finally gave this feeling a name

Researchers asked over 1,600 women a simple question: how often, over the past three months, have you just not felt like yourself?

The answers, published in the journal Menopause, were not subtle. 63.3% of participants reported NFLM at least half the time over the previous three months,(1) with only 12% saying they hadn't experienced it at all.(2) Run that math and you get a number that should be on a billboard: 88% of women in this study spent real chunks of their last three months feeling like a stranger in their own body.

The symptoms most strongly tied to NFLM were fatigue, feeling overwhelmed, low mood, anxiety, irritability, and trouble concentrating,(1) exactly the lineup most women describe and most doctors wave off as "probably just stress."

Here's the curveball nobody saw coming, the part that should make you sit up. NFLM was barely associated with hot flashes and night sweats at all.(3) The symptom everyone associates with menopause, the one in every pharmaceutical commercial with a woman fanning herself dramatically while sweating through her blouse, isn't the one actually driving this experience. The fog, the fatigue, the feeling of being unrecognizable to yourself, those are running on a completely separate track. Which means if your doctor's entire perimenopause checklist is "any hot flashes?" and you say no, you can walk out with a clean bill of health while still quietly losing your grip on who you are.

Why the hotflash detail matters more

NFLM isn't officially a diagnosis you'll find in a manual. It's a name for a pattern, a way of helping clinicians and researchers finally talk about something women have been describing to each other for generations without anyone writing it down. But informal doesn't mean imaginary. The hormonal shifts of the menopause transition touch nearly every organ system, brain included, which is exactly why brain fog, mood swings, and a sudden loss of mental sharpness aren't a personality change. They're a body doing something measurable.

If you've spent decades being the sharp one, the calm one, the one who remembers the dentist appointments and the school forms and which kid is allergic to what, and now you're standing in the kitchen forgetting why you walked in, that gap between who you were and who you feel like now is not a glitch. It's disorienting enough to make a woman question her sanity, which is its own kind of cruelty given everything she's actually managed to hold together for everyone else.

And the system was slow to even hand her the vocabulary for what she’s experiencing. This research was first presented at a medical conference in 2023 and only reached full publication in 2024,(4) which means this "well-known" phrase women have been saying to each other forever only got an actual peer-reviewed name within the last couple of years. That's a gap medicine left for her to fall into.

Antidepressants instead of a hormone panel

Boston-area gynecologist Marcie Richardson says she hears “I don’t feel like myself anymore” from patients constantly, and that the symptoms have historically been dismissed.(5) That's a very old habit of filing women's midlife experiences under "emotional" or “anxiety” then prescribing antidepressants or anxiety medication and calling it a treatment plan.

NFLM gives you something sturdier to bring into that appointment than a vague feeling. It gives you a name, a study, and a reason to ask better questions than the ones you got asked.

Recognition, not relief

A shiny new clinical term that names what you’re feeling doesn’t change much, though. NFLM explains why the symptoms hit the way they do but that’s all it offers: recognition, not relief.

For now, just know that what you've been feeling isn't a flaw, and it isn't something a green smoothie was ever going to fix.

But at least it's documented, and now you know what to call it.

Before you go

If this article spoke to you or answered questions you don’t have answers to, leave me a comment below, I respond to every comment. You might inspire other women who are struggling.

Melissa

Sources

1. Coslov N, Richardson MK, Woods NF. "Not feeling like myself" in perimenopause — what does it mean? Observations from the Women Living Better survey. Menopause. 2024;31(5).

2. Public Health Madison & Dane County. Why don't I feel like myself? It may be perimenopause. September 2025.

3. Richardson M, Shen W, Faubion S. Not feeling like yourself? It could be perimenopause. Women Living Better / The Washington Post. 2024.

4. Hillard T, et al. Women's knowledge and attitudes to the menopause: a comparison of women over 40 who were in the perimenopause, post menopause and those not in the peri or post menopause. PMC. 2023.

5. Cardoza J. Midlife burnout recovery: the weight of menopause, trauma and invisible labor. 2025.

6. Carr D. Midlife and mental health. In: Encyclopedia of Mental Health, 3rd ed. Academic Press; 2022.