The science of “almost leaving”

Every month, around the same time, the same thoughts come back. The same feeling that this relationship isn’t working, that this situation isn’t right, that this job is not for me, something needs to change and it needs to change now.

And then a few days later, the narrative shifts. You look back at what you were feeling and wonder where that version of you even came from.

If you’ve been here, you know exactly what I mean.

It feels like a merry-go-round you can’t get off. Same ride, same stops, every single month.

Some women call it their premenstrual crazy.

Some call it being too emotional.

Some spend years apologizing for it.

I used to call mine a murder scene.

The chaos inside me during those days was something I had no language for and no tools to manage. Most of it stayed internal, but some of it didn’t.

The first time I sat with a therapist, he told me after one session that I didn’t allow myself to feel any emotion. And I remember sitting with that completely confused, because from the inside it felt like I felt everything. Just not in a way I could name it, locate it, or do anything with it.

I didn’t know where in my body I felt things.

I’ve come a long way from that.

You’ve probably noticed relationships have become a recurring theme across my content lately. I can’t separate myself from what I create. The themes in my life will always show up in what I post. That’s just how this works.

This article is one of them.

And if 9 out of 10 women experience the same pattern, in the same window, every single month, then this isn’t personal. It’s not just me. It’s collective.

What helped me finally name and locate my internal chaos was understanding what actually happens to us every month.

That’s what I want this article to do for you.

Your rage and the urge to leave that comes around every month is not a flaw in your design. It’s the actual design.

And like all good design, it has an explanation.

So let me give you the science.

Not to make this clinical but because understanding what’s actually happening in your body every month is what finally gave me permission to stop calling myself crazy.

I hope it does the same for you.

Your brain that week

It starts with a chemical called GABA

GABA is basically your brain’s off switch. The thing that sits between what you feel and what you do with it. The reason you can be annoyed at someone and not actually say every single thing that crosses your mind.

I call it the brake pedal.

And in the week before your period, it loosens.

Just enough that everything you’ve been quietly managing, the patience, the composure, the “it’s fine”, suddenly has a little less between it and the surface.

Then your amygdala joins the party

The amygdala is the part of your brain that scans for threats. And in the late luteal phase it becomes significantly more reactive. Which means things that didn’t even register 2 weeks ago now feel genuinely dangerous. A tone of voice, a text that didn’t come when you expected it, a comment that landed slightly wrong.

You’re not being sensitive.

You’re perceiving through a completely different neurological filter.

And then serotonin and dopamine drop too

These are the chemicals that make things feel good, manageable, worth it. So the same life that felt fine last week suddenly feels like not enough. Not because anything changed but because the chemistry that was making it feel fine is gone.

This is the chemistry behind the design.

But chemistry is only half the answer.

The other half is why…

Why all of this?

The veil lifts

Nothing created by nature is an accident.

So let’s start there.

If every month you get one week of loose brake pedal, intense emotions, and a nervous system with the filter completely off, there has to be a reason. Right?

There is.

Reality is always an interpretation.

You’re not seeing the world as it is. You’re seeing it through your own lens, your memories, your experiences, your associations. Your mood, your hormones, your energy, your history, all of it shaping what feels real in any given moment.

Most of the month you move through life with a soft haze over that lens. Just enough blur to make things manageable.

If you think about it from an evolutionary biology angle, the first half of your cycle is designed around reproduction. It’s the buildup to your fertile window. Nature literally needed you calm and open during that time. Imagine being this switched on around ovulation. You’d never reproduce. Nature didn’t want that.

But in the luteal phase the contrast increases.

What was always there, sitting quietly in the background of your days, suddenly becomes impossible to look away from.

Nothing in your environment changed.

You did.

And what you’re seeing isn’t distortion.

It’s clarity.

So why does it feel like rage instead of revelation?

Why do you want to leave your husband, quit your job, and tell everyone to just fuck off?

It’s because you didn’t arrive at this window empty.

You arrived carrying an entire cycle’s worth of things you never said. Frustrations you swallowed because the timing wasn’t right. Needs you set aside to keep the peace. Moments where something felt off and you closed one eye and kept moving.

One by one, they go into the bottle.

Then the brake loosens.

And the bottle opens.

That’s the murder scene.

Not the woman who lost control. It’s the woman who held too much for too long and finally, for one week a month, couldn’t anymore.

Don’t trust the voice. Not yet.

There’s a catch.

Just because what you’re seeing is real doesn’t mean you’re ready to act on it.

The luteal phase hands you truth. But it hands it to you through a nervous system that is flooded, depleted, and running without its usual buffers. And a true thing seen through a dysregulated body doesn’t look like truth.

It looks like an emergency.

And emergencies make us move fast.

We send the message we’ve been drafting for three days at 11pm on a Tuesday. We have the conversation we needed to have, but from a place so charged the other person can only hear the charge, not the content. We almost end something real because we couldn’t tell the difference between “this genuinely isn’t working” and “I haven’t slept, my serotonin is on the floor, and I’ve been swallowing things since day four”.

We quit.

We explode.

We confess.

We accuse.

And then the follicular phase arrives and we look at the wreckage and wonder what happened.

What happened is you trusted the voice before you were regulated.

There’s a second layer too.

If you don’t know what you actually want outside of this window, you have no reference point. You can’t tell what’s real from what’s amplified. The tone of his voice and the actual state of your relationship feel like the same sized problem.

They are not.

This is why the work doesn’t start in the luteal week. It starts in the weeks before. Learning what you want, what you need, where your real edges are separate from the chemical ones. Because when you know yourself that clearly, the window becomes useful instead of destructive.

So before you send anything, say anything, decide anything: regulate first.

Then write down what the window surfaced: the patterns, the needs, the gaps. Not to act on immediately. Just to have it when you’re clear.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed after years of doing this.

The same things keep showing up.

Month after month.

Same themes, same unmet needs, same patterns.

That’s not the merry-go-round tormenting you.

That’s your body saying the same thing on repeat until you’re finally ready to listen.

Feel in the luteal.

Act in the follicular.

That’s the system.

One last thing

The version of you who knows what she actually wants isn’t the one who “almost leaves” every month…

She’s the one who stopped apologizing for her worst weeks and started getting curious about them.

She figured out that the rage was never the problem.

The problem was the silence before it.

Love, Teo

PS: If you’re ready to take action, I have a free crash course for you (and your partner) that gives you (both) a language for what is happening in your body monthly. We use analogies drawn from his own body and his own experiences so he can actually feel what she goes through, not just intellectually know it. It’s free, and it lives inside of our Skool community. 🔗Come inside!!! (once you’re inside, go to Classroom and look for The Playbook)

← Back to all articles