“What happens when the woman everyone depends on quietly begins to unravel beneath the weight of hormonal shifts, mental overload, and years of silent overperformance?
In this powerful interview, Dr. Agena Davenport opens up about her deeply personal journey through perimenopause, burnout, depression, and a late ADHD diagnosis, and how those experiences transformed both her life and her work. Blending medical expertise with lived experience, she sheds light on the often-overlooked connection between hormones, neurodivergence, executive function, and mental health in high-achieving women. Through honesty, insight, and compassion, this conversation challenges narratives of self-blame and perfectionism while offering a more empowering framework for healing, leadership, and sustainable success.
What inspired you to focus your work on the intersection of perimenopause, neurodivergence, and mental health?
What inspired me, quite honestly, was living it. For years, I was a high-functioning physician, a mother, and a leader in academic medicine, holding it all together on the outside while quietly struggling on the inside. When I entered perimenopause, everything shifted. The systems that had always “worked” for me suddenly stopped working. My focus changed. My emotional bandwidth changed. My resilience changed. I found myself facing clinical depression and, eventually, an ADHD diagnosis that had been missed for decades.
What struck me most was not just my experience, but how invisible it all felt. As an OB-GYN, I realized we were not having these conversations in medicine, leadership spaces, or even among high-achieving women themselves.
So my work was born at that intersection: hormones, brain function, and the mental load women carry. When you understand how estrogen, dopamine, stress, and executive function interact, everything starts to make sense. More importantly, women can finally stop blaming themselves.
How does perimenopause uniquely impact mental health, particularly for high-achieving women in leadership roles?
Perimenopause does not just affect the body, it profoundly affects the brain. The fluctuation and eventual decline in estrogen impact neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, which are critical for mood, focus, motivation, and emotional regulation. For high-achieving women, especially those in leadership, this can feel like a sudden and disorienting loss of clarity, confidence, and control.
These are women who are used to being sharp, reliable, and composed. So when brain fog, irritability, anxiety, or decreased executive function show up, it can feel deeply personal, like a failure rather than a physiological shift.
Many of these women are also managing teams, families, aging parents, and high-stakes decisions, making the margin for error feel incredibly small.
What I often say is this: it is not that these women are no longer capable, it is that they are operating within a different neurochemical landscape, without the support or language to fully understand it.
Can you share more about your personal journey with burnout, depression, and your ADHD diagnosis, and how it shaped your current approach to coaching and advocacy?
My turning point came in 2021.
On paper, everything looked successful. But internally, I was depleted. I had pushed through years of stress, overperformance, and emotional suppression, which many high-achieving women are conditioned to do. Eventually, my body and mind forced me to stop.
Being diagnosed with clinical depression and later ADHD was both humbling and liberating. It gave context to patterns I had carried for years: the mental overload, difficulty with task initiation, and the need to overwork to compensate.
More importantly, it reshaped how I see my patients and clients. I no longer approach care from a purely clinical standpoint. I bring lived experience into the room. I understand what it feels like to sit in that space of asking, “Why can’t I just get it together?” I also understand how powerful it is when someone explains what is actually happening in your brain and body.
My work now is about bridging the gap between medical knowledge and real life, between diagnosis and practical, sustainable change.
What are some common challenges your clients face when navigating the mental load of career, caregiving, and hormonal changes, and how do you help them overcome these?
The most common challenge I see is overwhelm layered with self-blame.
These women are managing careers, children, households, and often aging parents. Then perimenopause enters the picture, along with shifts in focus, energy, and emotional regulation. Add in undiagnosed or newly unmasked ADHD, and the systems they once relied on begin to break down.
They are not just busy, they are cognitively overloaded.
Traditional productivity advice does not work well here. Planners, rigid schedules, and “just be more disciplined” approaches often increase frustration rather than relieve it.
My work focuses on three key areas:
- Reframing what is happening biologically and neurologically so women can release shame
- Simplifying systems to match how their brain actually functions now
- Building sustainable rhythms instead of perfection-based routines
I help them move from survival mode into a place of clarity and self-trust, where they can function effectively without burning themselves out.
What changes would you like to see within organizations to better support neurodivergent and perimenopausal women in the workplace?
We need to normalize these conversations at a structural level. Organizations must begin recognizing that hormonal health and neurodivergence are not niche issues, they are workplace realities impacting millions of talented, capable women. Too often, women are silently struggling in environments that were never designed with these experiences in mind.
I would like to see workplaces prioritize education around perimenopause and neurodivergence, offer more flexible and supportive work structures, and create cultures where women feel safe discussing mental health without fear of judgment or professional consequences.
Support should not begin only when someone reaches burnout. Preventative care, compassionate leadership, and psychologically safe environments are essential.
When organizations support women through these transitions, they do not just retain talent, they create healthier, more sustainable leadership cultures for everyone.
As more women begin speaking openly about the realities of perimenopause and mental health, conversations like this are not only timely, they are necessary. Dr. Agena Davenport reminds us that struggling does not mean failing and that many women are navigating profound neurological and hormonal shifts without the language, support, or understanding they deserve. Her work is helping redefine what care, leadership, and resilience look like for women in midlife and beyond. This interview serves as both validation for those silently carrying the mental load and a call to create spaces where women can be supported without shame, judgment, or burnout.”
Images Courtesy of Dr. Agena Davenport
Follow Us On Social Media!
