Dr. Betty MurrayHelping Women Navigate Menopause | Speaker, Author, and Advocate for Women's Health Over 40

Unveil the Truth About Perimenopause vs. Menopause

19 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief explanatory segment, Dr. Betty Murray clarifies the distinction between perimenopause and menopause. She explains that menopause is technically defined as a single day—the point exactly one year after a woman's last menstrual period—after which she enters postmenopause for the remainder of her life. Perimenopause, by contrast, is a transitional phase often lasting about eight years on average (but ranging from a few years to up to 16 years), characterized by the onset of symptoms commonly associated with menopause. Some women experience many symptoms during this chaotic period, while others have few or none. The segment emphasizes the temporal nature of each stage and the variability of symptom experience.

Chapters

Can you tell me a little bit about the difference between what perimenopause and menopause are? So we've got to remember that menopause is technically one day in your life, and that is one year from the last time you had your period or your cycle. And so the symptoms that are associated with menopause is really what's occurring in perimenopause, which is on average 8 years of your life, but some women may experience 10 to 16 teen years, and some women may sail through most of this period without a lot of symptoms. But perimenopause is the age of chaos. That's where we're starting to experience all the things that we think about when we think about menopause. And then once you have that day, that single day of menopause, you're always in menopause. It— postmenopause, the rest of your life, rest of your life.