HSOS #41: Brain Fog, Burnout, and Low Energy in Menopause: The Estrogen Connection

I just got back from a coaches summit in Vegas and honestly? I came home feeling a little off. Tired, flat, not quite myself. And instead of just pushing through it, I thought, let's talk about this, because I know I'm not the only one.

This episode is for anyone who is doing all the right things and still feeling like something is missing. The workouts, the clean eating, the early bedtimes, and yet you wake up exhausted, unmotivated, and wondering who this person is looking back at you in the mirror. The answer, more often than not, comes back to estrogen.

We get into what estrogen is actually doing for your brain, your metabolism, your muscles, and your sleep, why its decline hits so much harder than anyone warns you about, and five real, practical things you can start doing this week to start feeling better. No fluff, just the stuff that actually helps.

Let's Talk.

Welcome to Her Season of Strength, where women over 40 reclaim their bodies, their energy, and their voices, without apologies. I'm Kim Duffy, registered dietitian, personal trainer, mom, and your biggest hype woman when it comes to aging like you mean it.

This show isn't about chasing skinny or counting wrinkles. It's about building real strength: physical, emotional, and hormonal. Each week, I'll share straight-talking nutrition tips, sustainable fitness strategies, and conversations that help you feel powerful in your skin once again.

Menopause is not an ending, it is only the beginning. This is your season of strength.

 What I Cover in This Episode:

•  Why Kim came home from Vegas feeling flat and what that has to do with estrogen
•  What estrogen is actually doing beyond reproduction, and why its decline affects your whole body
• The brain chemistry piece: how dropping estrogen affects serotonin, dopamine, and focus
• Why your metabolism and body composition are shifting even if you haven't changed a thing
• When perimenopause actually starts, and why most women are caught completely off guard
• Why the strategies that worked in your 30s aren't cutting it anymore
• How too much cardio and too few calories can make your symptoms worse
• Five practical resets covering food, exercise, sleep, stress, and mindset
• The one magnesium supplement worth trying if sleep has become a battle
• How to know when lifestyle changes aren't enough and what to ask your doctor

Links & resources for this episode:

Fit After 50+ Program: 8-Week Nutrition Coaching & Strength Program for menopausal women.  Join the interest list today for the best discounts, bonuses and updates about the next program coming Fall of 2026!

Free cheat sheet: "20 Tips to Crushing Menopause"

Join my free weekly newsletter list and get a new high protein recipe sent to your inbox every Thursday. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi there and welcome to Her Season of Strength, where women over 40 reclaim their bodies, their energy, and their voices without apologies. I'm Kim Duffy, registered dietitian, personal trainer, mom, and your biggest hype woman when it comes to aging like you mean it. This show isn't about chasing skinny or counting wrinkles, it's about building real strength, physical, emotional, and hormonal.

[00:00:24] Each week I'll share straight talking nutrition tips, sustainable fitness strategies, and conversations that help you feel powerful in your skin once again. Menopause isn't an ending, it's only the beginning. This is your season of strength. Hello. Welcome back to Her Season of Strength. I'm so glad you're here today and just taking a minute out of your day to listen in.

[00:00:46] Oh my goodness, I got back from Vegas here just a couple days ago from a real coaches summit conference I went to, and it was amazing. I don't know about you, but do you just get jazzed, like [00:01:00] learning new information or even just hearing information that you know already, but you are reminded about.

[00:01:07] And just such great information from everything from menopause to the best way to do the deadlift to lab values to just pain with exercise and the importance of staying active as compared to, when pain makes us wanna stop and sit on the couch and not do anything. And it's just so much great information and I just really loved it.

[00:01:34] But so Vegas was two hours earlier than Minnesota. And so I got back and this was after a couple days of just literally we were going from seven in the morning until six or seven o'clock at night. So it was really long days, full of just sitting and listening and understanding and talking to people and stuff.

[00:01:55] So then we got back really late on Tuesday night and I'm struggling a little. [00:02:00] I'm, I don't know if it's the time change, if it was just the busyness of everything or what, but I'm just a little kinda, I'm feeling a bit flat. I'm feeling a bit tired. I'm feeling my, motivation's a little bit lower than it should it normally is.

[00:02:15] And so I was thinking today of like I wanted to do a podcast episode and I thought, what should I talk about? And that very thing, I thought, you know what, I'm gonna talk about, what we do when we are feeling flat, when we're k- feeling burned out or feeling just that exhaustion that can come from life and from travel and from when so many things are going on in our lives and we're busy because frequently we are.

[00:02:45] And I wanna talk about what we can actually do, like real tools, real strategies and things that, you could even start this week if you're feeling a little bit like I am. So first things first we have to talk about how this [00:03:00] relates back to, perimenopause and menopausal women and why this can be more prevalent.

[00:03:05] And that's just because of estrogen. Estrogen, it's just the root of all of our symptoms, right? It is dropping. And for some of us like me at 55, my estrogen is, has bottomed out. I'm doing an estrogen patch, which is is not replacement. It's just supplementing my hormones, helping to decrease some of those symptoms a little bit.

[00:03:26] But it's not replacing anything. It's just taken the edge off here. So how is it that estrogen affects us this way? Estrogen is this whole body hormone. It has receptors in our brain, in our bones, in our cardiovascular system, in our muscles, our gut, our skin. It's literally everywhere.

[00:03:44] So that means when it's starting to decline, the effects are felt everywhere as well, right? So in our brain, it's supporting the production of serotonin, which is that feel good, mood stabilizing neurotransmitter. It supports dopamine, which is our [00:04:00] motivation and reward chemical, and it has a direct relationship with acetylcholine, which plays a role in our memory and focus, right?

[00:04:07] So when estrogen drops, our brain is literally, it has less raw material to, to make these chemicals, and it's not a mindset problem. It's actually like chemistry that's going on. When it comes to our metabolism, it's helping regulate how our body uses insulin. So it's also telling our body where to store fat.

[00:04:27] So that's why we're seeing that fat storing in our abdomen and around our vital organs more that's why we can become a little more insulin resistant after menopause. And our body starts kinda ... And we can see how, we can start to have higher cholesterol, maybe higher blood pressure.

[00:04:44] Maybe we're seeing that we get type two diabetes or things. Our body composition is changing. And then when it comes to our muscles, estrogen actually has an anti-inflammatory role in our muscle tissue. It helps our muscles to recover after we have [00:05:00] those hard work, hard exercises. And it works alongside testosterone to help maintain lean muscle mass.

[00:05:07] So when we don't have that estrogen, it means slower recovery, more soreness, more difficulty holding onto that muscle that, we've worked so hard to build. And lastly, in our sleep, it, estrogen is helping to regulate our sleep architecture. It's, specifically in those deep stages of sleep where we restore and heal.

[00:05:28] So when we see that estrogen drop, our sleep can become broken up, right? We're waking up at three in the morning and we're wide awake. We're getting up to have to pee more often. We don't get into that deep sleep and broken sleep, we know obviously that's gonna make us feel more tired, the next day.

[00:05:46] So there's all these factors that can come together to, make us feel a little bit less motivated, make us feel a little bit more burnt out and emotionally flat and foggy. And it's [00:06:00] not weakness. It's just, this is what our estrogen decline looks like in real life. Here's something that I think shocks a lot of women, and that's, in perimenopause, which is that transition phase before menopause, which can start into our late 30s, even that early.

[00:06:18] For most women, it, it becomes somewhere between, or it starts somewhere between 40 and 44, but for some women it starts even earlier. And, our hormones are not decreasing in some straight predictable line. They're going ... Our estrogen, especially not necessarily our progesterone and testosterone, but it's fluctuating.

[00:06:37] It's up and it's down and that's, it's up and it's down and our periods are super heavy or they skip or you're, you just feel like you're on a little bit of a rollercoaster. And what does estrogen decline f- actually feel like day to day? And it might look like we wake up feeling tired even after a full night's sleep.

[00:06:57] We feel a bit emotionally [00:07:00] blunted, like I am a little bit right now, like things that, used to get us super excited, they just don't land in the same way. We noticed our anxiety has ticked up, especially, if you are still having a period in that second half of the cycle, we find that we have more of that brain fog and memory issues.

[00:07:17] Our motiv- exercise motivation can be a little bit less so if it's even around still. And when we do work out, we're not recovering like we used to, we feel irritable and short-tempered in a way that, it feels foreign to us. And sometimes, I feel like I look in the mirror and it's who is that person?

[00:07:36] Who is that person looking at me? But the important thing I want you to hear is these are symptoms of a hormonal shift, not of, any kind of flaws in our character or lack of motivation. We did not lose our drive. We did not become lazy. We just, our hormones changed and our body is changing, but I wanna spend a minute on something that I f- hear frequently from [00:08:00] women, especially in this community.

[00:08:02] And honestly it's what I feel myself as well. And it's the frustration of doing everything quote unquote right and still not seeing results. We're trying to eat the best we can, we're trying to get our workouts in, we're taking, we're replenishing our vitamins and minerals, we're getting enough water, we're trying to get enough sleep, but nothing is really moving or changing.

[00:08:26] And in fact, some things are getting worse. We're finding that we might see the scale going up, we'll see that our energy is lower, our mood's a bit more flat. And here's why that happens. The strategies that, worked for us in our 30s, they were designed for, different hormonal environment.

[00:08:44] So when our estrogen was higher, our metabolism ran faster, we recovered more quickly, our body handled stress better, and our brain had those chemical support that it needed to feel motivated and feel energized. [00:09:00] So now with our estrogen shifting, those same strategies are gonna produce different results.

[00:09:04] In some cases, the things, we think are helping crazy intense daily cardio or restricting our calories can actually, make things worse by driving up our cortisol, which is that, stress hormone that, that we need that's very important. It's typically higher in the morning and it gets lower as the day progresses, but that can just disrupt, disrupt that nice balance we have to where, our cortisol is lower in the morning, making us feel more tired and not waking us up, we're not feeling rested.

[00:09:35] And then it can be higher in the evenings before we're trying to go to bed when which is gonna make us struggle to go to sleep and feel more w- tired but wired. So let's talk about five practical resets that can work with us when it come ... And some things that I'm walking through here as I'm feeling a little off and getting y- you know, a body used to the [00:10:00] time change and everything.

[00:10:01] So remember how I said that estrogen was helping our brains produce serotonin and dopamine. So when we, that support drops, we need to give our brain kind of those building blocks that it needs from food. So that means prioritizing protein because amino acids, especially like tryptophan and tyrosine, are those precursors to serotonin and dopamine.

[00:10:24] So we're trying to shoot for, trying to get in at least 30 grams of protein at each meal, not just at dinner, but at every meal. And that includes breakfast, which can be a little more challenging getting that much protein in, but I know you can do it. It also means supporting our guts, because about 90% of our serotonin is actually produced in our guts.

[00:10:43] So trying to get high fiber, veggies and grains, fermented foods, and trying to cut out a little bit of those ultra processed foods that's gonna help to support a healthy gut brain connection. And then lastly would be those omega-3s that are so good for our brains where [00:11:00] we're gonna get those in our fatty fish and our walnuts, our flax seeds, chia seeds, and we're gonna try, try to get those daily.

[00:11:07] Next would be shifting how we exercise. If we are doing that intense cardio every day it's time to kinda reconsider that approach, right? So we know that chronic high intensity exercise can increase cortisol levels, right? And we know that elevated cortisol can compete with your already declining estrogen and progesterone, which can really make our hormonal picture a little bit worse.

[00:11:32] So what our body now needs now is strength training, lifting weights. It's just one of the most powerful tools that we have in perimenopause and menopause. It helps gonna build and it's gonna preserve that lean muscle, which helps our metabolism. It can improve insulin sensitivity, it supports our bone density, and it, the research on strength training and mood is really impressive.

[00:11:55] And I have heard many doctors, when somebody is coming in [00:12:00] with a little more anxiety or depression, and I'm not saying they're not prescribing medications, but they are also prescribing exercise and strength training, because it definitely can have a strong impact on our mental health. Shooting for at least two to three strength sessions per week, trying to hit the, all those muscle groups, lower body, upper body, but then also really important to just get in the lower impact, getting outside for a walk with the sunshine, maybe yoga, maybe gentle cycling or something like that.

[00:12:33] We, we need those things too, because those are also therapy. We don't constantly need hard and heavy and whatnot, but we need to incorporate in just that daily movement in general. And next is sleep. We really need to protect sl- our sleep like it's our jobs. Because when we're sleep deprived, our hunger hormones like gorelin and leptin, they can get off balance.

[00:12:59] Our [00:13:00] cortisol rises, our insulin sensitivity drops, our mood tanks, and that all can move together to, create a decreased motivation, and every symptom, sleep is that basis, right? Every symptom can be amplified by poor sleep. So what do you do when, when we're already struggling because our estrogen has dropped and that we're finding that we're seeing some insomnia, we're waking up in the middle of the night.

[00:13:30] What we need to do is we really need to work on our nighttime routine, right? We build a fortress around our sleep hygiene. We keep our room cool because night sweats and hot flashes, they're gonna make ... They are incredibly worse by a warm sleeping environment. We're gonna try to limit our alcohol because I know you guys would admit this, but I know for me, when I have glass of wine or two, it significantly s- [00:14:00] affects my sleep.

[00:14:01] I'm waking up, my heart's pounding, a lot of times I will fall asleep quickly, but then I'll be wide awake in the middle of the night. Next thing is trying to turn off those screens. So your phone, your iPad, your tablet, try to turn those off at least 60 minutes before bed. And then another one is magnesium glycinate can be a helpful supplement before bed.

[00:14:22] Usually the recommendation somewhere between, 200 to 400 milligrams at bedtime, it really can help with sleep and improve sleep quality as well. The number four reset is gonna be managing stress because, I'm not gonna say, "Oh, just relax," because life is crazy. Life is full, it's complicated, and we have a to- do list that is just nonstop, but I do need to make the case for stress management, because that is non-negotiable, because cortisol and estrogen, they have that [00:15:00] inverse relationship, right?

[00:15:01] So when cortisol is chronically high, it suppresses the hormones that are already declining. So if you're under that constant stress, you're essentially accelerating those symptoms of postmenopause. It's d- it's gonna be suppressing that estrogen further. So how can we deal with this even 10 minutes of intentional stress reduction like breathing practices, journaling, saying no to, one thing that does not actually need to be on your plate, and the form matters less than just the consistency, all right?

[00:15:36] So it doesn't need to be this perfect practice. It can be five minutes of breathing exercise at some point in your day. There's loads of apps out there that you can, that will walk you through even a five minute meditation or breathing exercise, like Calm app or the happier app. So important. I know you might go, "Oh, I'm fine.

[00:15:56] I'm not stressed," but then you look at your schedule and you look at [00:16:00] everything going on in your life and you're like, "Okay, maybe I just am pushing it down, right? I'm not really realizing exactly what this is doing." And the number five in the final reset, and I think it's the one that matters the most, it's one of the most challenging to talk about because a lot of us came into this decade with a complicated history with our bodies.

[00:16:25] We, a lot of us have done decades of dieting, of trying to shrink our bodies, of measuring our worth by the number on the scale, and now our bodies are changing in ways, we can't control fully, and it's super easy to interpret that as failure. But here's what I want to offer to you instead.

[00:16:43] What if this decade is one where you finally stop fighting your body and you start working with it? So focus on strength over shrinking, function over thinness, energy over aesthetics. When you shift your [00:17:00] goal from looking a certain way to feeling a certain way, everything can really change and your motivation can become more sustainable.

[00:17:08] Your relationship with food becomes less fraught and your workouts feel more purposeful rather than punishing. That mindset shift is not soft. It's one of the most powerful things that, that we can do for our long-term health. Got it? But before I wrap up, I want to just briefly talk about when these lifestyle strategies aren't enough on their own and you need to have a conversation with your doctor.

[00:17:34] So if your symptoms are significantly affecting your quality of life, like your relationships or your work, your ability to function on a day to day, that warrants a real medical conversation, okay? You shouldn't have to white knuckle your way through menopause, post-menopause, perimenopause. Hormone therapy, it's come a long way.

[00:17:56] The research has evolved significantly from the early [00:18:00] 2000s, and for many women, it is safe and effective option. So I would encourage you to find a provider who's specifically knowledgeable about menopause care, ideally someone certified by the Menopause Society, and have an honest conversation about, what are your options?

[00:18:16] Because you deserve individualized care, not a brush off, not being told this is just part of getting older, but, having a real conversation with a provider who takes your symptoms seriously. So let's bring all this together. So when we talked about what estrogen actually does in your body, way beyond just, production and having babies and stuff, we covered how its decline affects our brain chemistry, our metabolism, our muscles, and our sleep, and we talked about why doing all the right things might not be producing the results you expect anymore, and why, that's not your fault.

[00:18:53] And then we walk through those five practical resets that we can start implementing right now. So eating to support our brain chemistry, [00:19:00] shifting our exercise approach towards strength training, protecting our sleep, managing our stress, and shifting our mindsets from fighting our, from, sorry, fighting our body to working with it.

[00:19:17] And here's what I most want you to hold onto after this episode. You haven't lost yourself. You're in a transition here, a significant one, and transitions can be disorienting, especially when nobody tells us what is going on and why it's going on, but you aren't starting over, you're actually starting from, a place of experience and of wisdom and of knowing exactly what you have already survived.

[00:19:43] And that's, pretty powerful place to stand. So if this episode resonated with you, I would love it if you would share it with another woman in your life who might need to hear it, text it to a friend who's been feeling a little off lately and cannot quite figure [00:20:00] out why, and leave a review if you're listening on Apple Podcasts.

[00:20:03] It really helps more women to find this show and that's the whole point. And remember, this is about progress over perfection. We're in this for the long haul and this is your season of strength.