Annabel Rivkin on Perimenopausal Stress & the Impact of LYMA on her Life

Listen, this is not my first rodeo. ‘Seasoned’ is an elegant way of framing it. ‘Weathered’, less so. When you’ve been kicked about a bit, bruised by hard-won wisdom (most of which you can’t remember), you know the difference between depression, anxiety-disorder, anger problem and just…mood. Between diagnosable illness and just…low-level personality dysfunction. A tether so short that a traffic jam or a ‘printer not recognised’ can send you into a day-ruining rage. A skin so thin that the tiniest trigger can inspire an existential crisis. A draining of delight. An itch of hopelessness.

Because we all get used to the stress. It is our unwelcome and unhelpful housemate. Unhelp-mate, if you like. Oh, the excuses we make: ‘My job, my kids, my finances, my parents, my body, my relationship…no wonder I feel deranged. No wonder I seem to have developed a horrible personality. Clearly this is just me now.’ It’s frightening to believe that we will forever be just a little strained; resigned to the idea that if we can just get through this week then there is one more week before we have to get through the next week. I think it was the airlessness that I resented most; the sense that life was so heavy even though these were, supposedly, the good times. No one was ill or dead. The roof was over my head. And yet I felt the flickerings of grief. The pull of unnamed dread. I was obviously ungrateful and bad.

LYMA is powerful but also subtle. I only noticed the emotional oxygen-mask effect when I stopped taking it. I let myself run out. I got a little bored, perhaps. Maybe there was something shinier out there; something cheaper. I had been taking LYMA for a year and had failed to recognise that the day-to-day had got easier. That my reactions felt more proportionate. That my teenage lizard brain had taken its deranged foot off the accelerator and was no longer running me quite so brutally. But once I gave up on LYMA, my life, once again, started to feel like an unreasonable employer who refused to give me a job description. With no opportunity to take it to tribunal I had to have a little think. Why did I feel worse again? What had changed? And then it dawned. Was it possible that a supplement had transformed my stress-levels? Well, it was the only differentiator.

A couple of months after restarting LYMA, that powerful but subtle change has shifted my stress-levels once again. It’s an odd thing: If you have a few drinks, you get drunk. If you exercise hard, you ache. If you have Botox, your forehead freezes. But with LYMA, it’s the long game. I shan’t be walking away from it again.

THE LYMA SUPPLEMENT