Why we built Notice: making sense of perimenopause, one symptom at a time
By Kate, co-founder
A note before you read: this is my story, not medical advice. Every body is different. If you are struggling, please talk to a provider you trust.
The headaches that wouldn’t quit
About six years ago, I started getting debilitating headaches.
I had been eating Paleo and felt good about my health while my kids were little, but over time I drifted, went more keto, and leaned hard into my favorite food group: dairy. I started fasting and loved the energy it gave me. Then something changed. When I broke a fast, almost no matter what I ate, a headache would show up. If I fasted longer than 48 or 72 hours, a headache would hit and put me down for a day. I tried to keep my blood sugar steady through the day, and even that started to stop working.
I needed a nap almost every day, sometimes two. I would nod off in the school pickup line, which is not exactly safe. I had sinus pain for nearly two years that I could not explain. An MRI finally found a large abscess from a rushed root canal that had almost broken through to the bone. Thank God for the ENT who ordered the scan.
But it made me start asking a bigger question. What is going on in my body that keeps creating these headaches? Can I do anything about them? What am I doing that might be feeding them?
Two years of chasing the wrong thing
There was more. I had been cold for five years, so cold I dreaded the grocery store without a jacket. My fingers and toes would go numb. My energy was gone, and the hangry edge made me snap at the people I love.
So I went looking. I dug into the gut microbiome, did the Zoe program, ate vegetarian for almost a year. Nothing really shifted, and I slowly started putting on weight, which was my worst nightmare. Then I found carnivore, an elimination style of eating built around animal foods. I was eating butter and loving it, realizing how much years of low-fat diet culture had messed with my head, and how much better I slept just from eating fat.
The word no one had said to me: perimenopause
I also decided to find a hormone specialist. I finally got real testing done. I was anxious in a way I never used to be, I had a bout of frozen shoulder, and I learned I was in perimenopause. I started testosterone and got my energy back, and the cold and the numbness eased. This time it was a real deep dive, not just one or two markers like TSH or A1c but a full thyroid panel, and sure enough, it came back off. But getting that medication prescribed correctly took over a year of trial and error. Eventually I started to feel kind of normal again.
The notebook my doctor couldn’t read
The headaches, though better, still came and went, sometimes with Advil, sometimes with sumatriptan, which left me woozy and gave me dry mouth. I started recording my morning blood sugar for about six months, and my headaches, in a little notebook. When I brought it to my doctor, she could not really read it, and with no period, or only a sporadic one, I had no way of knowing what was happening in my body. It helped me know I wasn’t crazy, but it didn’t do much to help her find a pattern, a treatment, or a way to help me navigate them.
You are not crazy. You are not imagining things.
Why we built Notice
This painful journey is why we built Notice.
All of these findings needed to go somewhere. Somewhere that could turn them into something I could actually hand to my doctor, and she could read, so we could see what was going on and do something about it. I did not want to just take Advil for 48 hours straight, which helped about 20 percent of the time, or a sumatriptan that left me foggy and usually cost me a nap to fully kill the headache. Who has time for that? White-knuckling through the pain left me exhausted and, honestly, a mean mommy and wife.
I wanted a tool that could finally help me when I sat down with my doctor.
That is what Notice is. You track your symptoms, it shows you the patterns in your own body, and it turns them into something you can hand your doctor to actually read. It is private. All the analysis happens on your device, and we never see your health information. This is a journey, and you get to navigate it on your terms as a woman. You are not crazy. You are not imagining things. Trust yourself, track it, and get some answers, so you can live your life and maybe even love it again.
If any of this sounds like you: you are not imagining it, and you are not alone.
Notice is on the App Store, free to download.
Notice is a tracking and pattern-finding tool. It does not diagnose, treat, or replace medical care. Always talk to your healthcare provider about your symptoms.
Frequently asked questions
What are some early signs of perimenopause?
It varies a lot from person to person, and the list is longer than most women are told. Alongside hot flashes and changes to your cycle, women commonly report headaches or migraines, broken sleep, anxiety that arrived from nowhere, brain fog, and joint pain. Symptoms often turn up scattered across months rather than together, which is part of why the connection is easy to miss. Only a provider can say what is behind yours.
Can perimenopause cause headaches or migraines?
Headaches and migraines are commonly reported during the perimenopause transition. Estrogen does not hold steady in perimenopause. It swings, and for many women those swings are a headache trigger. Headaches can get worse, or show up for the first time, in the late thirties and forties. Recording when they happen alongside your other symptoms is what makes a pattern visible.
Why is perimenopause so hard to get diagnosed?
There is no single blood test that diagnoses perimenopause. FSH, the hormone most often measured, moves around enough that one draw is a snapshot of a single day, and combined hormonal birth control suppresses it. There is also no appointment dedicated to it. A well woman visit can absolutely be the place to raise perimenopause, but it is not booked for that purpose and nobody puts it on the agenda for you, so in practice you usually have to bring it up yourself.
What is worth tracking before a doctor's appointment?
Symptoms with dates, how often they happen, and how bad they are. Those are the questions a provider will ask, and they are the hardest ones to answer from memory. If you have a cycle, or a hormone-free week on the ring, pill, or patch, where symptoms fall relative to it is a specific and concrete thing to show.
Does keeping a notebook help with perimenopause symptoms?
It helps you trust yourself, which matters more than it sounds. What a notebook cannot easily do is surface the pattern. It is a pile of days, and finding what repeats across months of raw notes is not something anyone can do quickly in the few minutes an appointment gives you. That gap is the reason Notice exists.
What is Notice?
Notice is a private iPhone app for perimenopause. You log a hot flash, a headache, a period, or a rough night in a couple of taps, and it finds what repeats: when symptoms cluster, how they line up with your cycle or your hormone-free week, what your nights actually look like. All the analysis happens on your device, there are no accounts and no cloud sync, and we never see your health information. It is on the App Store for iPhone, free to download, with the full doctor report and advanced patterns part of the paid Notice Signature subscription.
How does Notice help at a doctor's appointment?
An appointment gives you a few minutes, and raw notes hand your doctor a pile of days to decode in that time. Notice does the analysis beforehand: how often each symptom happens, how bad it is, what it lines up with, laid out as clear pages a clinician can read on the spot. Your visit gets spent deciding what to do about the pattern instead of hunting for it. Notice tracks and organizes what you report; it does not diagnose, and what the pattern means is a conversation for you and your provider.