She isn’t fading. She is evolving

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My friend showed me her smartwatch over coffee last week. The screen was glowing with that smug, bright green circle that fitness apps use to tell you you've done a good job.

"Look at this," she said, tapping the glass. "It says my recovery is excellent. Sleep quality: 90 percent. Heart rate: completely normal." She looked exhausted. "I was awake from 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m.," she told me, staring at her coffee. "I was sweating so much I had to change my shirt. My heart was racing for absolutely no reason. But my watch thinks I had the sleep of a teenager."

She laughed, but it was a dry, hollow sound. If the data says you are perfectly fine, and you feel like you are slowly losing your grip on reality, who are you supposed to believe?

For the first time in history, we are living in the gap between what our bodies feel and what our screens report. And nowhere is this gap wider, or more isolating, than in a phase of life we still barely know how to talk about: perimenopause.

I spend my days looking at artificial intelligence, algorithms, and the future of technology. But lately, I have been looking at the women around me - colleagues, friends, family - and realizing that the high-tech future we are building has a massive blind spot.

For generations, the turbulent years leading up to menopause were just called "the change." It was a whispered secret. Women were expected to simply grit their teeth, wipe the sweat from their necks, and keep the house and the office running. Their symptoms - crushing fatigue, sudden rage, joint pain, and a brain fog so thick it makes brilliant women forget their own passwords - were routinely dismissed by doctors as "just stress" or "normal aging."

Today, we are supposed to be in the age of data. We wear devices that track our every breath. The great promise of the tech industry is that if we collect enough numbers, we can understand the human body perfectly.

But perimenopause breaks the machine. Algorithms are designed to find patterns. They love stability. They want your heart rate to look like a gentle wave and your sleep to be a predictable cycle. But a woman's body in her late forties is not stable. It is going through a massive, chaotic physical transition. Hormones like estrogen don't just quietly fade away; they spike and crash violently. They behave like a faulty tube light in an old Irani café.

When an AI looks at this chaos, it gets confused. It tries to smooth out the jagged edges. It throws out the "bad data" to make the daily graph look pretty. That is exactly why my friend's watch told her she was sleeping beautifully while she was actually staring at the ceiling fan in the middle of the night, drenched in heat.

The machine isn't broken. It's just entirely unequipped to understand what a transition looks like. This is the hidden danger of our new digital age. When we trust the dashboard more than the person, the old medical gaslighting just gets a high-tech upgrade. If a woman goes to a clinic and says she feels terrible, and the doctor looks at her wearable data and says, "Well, your numbers look fine," we haven't solved the problem. We have just automated the dismissal of women's pain. We are building state-of-the-art AI models on top of a medical history that completely ignored the female body for decades. But there is a different way to look at this, one that doesn't require a screen.

If you live in Mumbai, you know exactly what the last week of May feels like. The air is so thick and heavy you can barely breathe. The heat makes everyone irritable. You look at the grey sky over the Arabian Sea, waiting for the rain, but it just won't break. It feels like the weather itself is malfunctioning.

But it isn't a malfunction. It is the necessary, uncomfortable buildup before the monsoon washes the city clean. Perimenopause is exactly that. It is not a disease. It is not a decline. It is not a machine running out of fuel. It is the difficult, heavy transition into a completely new phase of life. In some cultures, they call the years after menopause the "Second Spring." I love that idea. For decades, a woman's energy is directed outward - building a career, raising children, keeping the world spinning for everyone else. But when the reproductive years end, that energy turns inward.

The hot flashes and the sleepless nights? They aren't signs of a system breaking down. They are a refining fire. The brain is actually rewiring itself, clearing out old pathways to make room for a sharper, more focused intuition. The static is just the sound of the old station fading out so the new one can tune in.

As men, we need to understand what is actually happening in the room. When a woman is going through this storm, she doesn't need us to "fix" it, and she certainly doesn't need us pointing to a smartwatch app to tell her how she should be sleeping. She needs us to recognize the magnitude of what her body is doing.

We need to demand that the technology we build actually serves the people using it. AI should be a tool that helps a woman validate her experience, not a judge that tells her, her reality is statistically incorrect.

The next time you see the mist settling around a woman you care about, don't look away. And don't look at the data. Look at her.

She isn't fading into the sunset. She is walking through the fire. The heavy air is going to clear, the rain is going to come, and she is going to step into the second sunrise of her life. And it is going to be brilliant.

Nishant Sahdev is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, AI Advisor and the author of the forthcoming book The Last Equation Before Silence. [Clinical context provided by Mumbai based psychologist Pallavi Arur].