E5: How Do I Get My Energy Back? (Natural Ways to Fight Menopause Fatigue & Burnout)

Episode 5

If you’ve ever thought you were failing, let me tell you—you’re not. There are several factors that could be causing the low energy! And laziness is actually NOT on the list!

Today we dive deep into what our different hormones do, how they get out of balance, and how much havoc inflammation brings to the party. You'll finish with some practical things you can do to reduce your inflammation and improve your energy levels.

To learn more about the Energy Rescue Pack I mentioned, visit here.
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Transcript

Hello my friends!

I'm just gonna say it right now. It's not about pushing harder. It's about restoring
smarter.

Welcome to the Unmute Your Midlife podcast, where we take you from foggy and
forgotten to focused and lit up. I'm Joyce, your nurse-turned-midlife-resurrection-
strategist, and the cheerleader in your back pocket. And I'm here to remind you,
your next season in life is your power era. 

All right, let's get started. This is something I actually hear from a lot of women. They don't want to be lethargic, but they feel like their get up and go has got up and gone. Exhaustion is probably the number one complaint I hear followed closely by weight gain, which we'll talk about on another episode. One thing I had really shared is how much exhaustion was doing me in. I would have days where I didn't even bother getting out of bed until lunchtime. I would wake up and think I'm just too tired. I didn't sleep well, I'm gonna sleep some more. Or I would feel like, well, what's the point? I don't know what you think going on today. Or I'd think about, what am I gonna wear today? Well, nothing fits. Everything is like, yeah. So I would just stay in bed, cuddling the dogs if they were there, or scrolling, doom scrolling on my phone, which I'm gonna say is a really big energy drainer. I'll pondering, you know, the meaning of life and they said, "Eh, it's not really worth getting up for."

And then if I had to be at work I would get up and get ready, but that drive to work was so hard. I just felt miserable the whole way. I mean, because I was tired and nothing was sitting well on my stomach. I was just zapped! And if you know me, I am one of those people. I'm like an energizer bunny. I go 90 to nothing from sun up to sun down. I'm always starting a new project. I'm always learning something new. I'm always investigating an adventure I might want to do. And I was none of those things for a couple of years there. In hindsight, I now know that my body was in this extreme state of inflammation. Most of it was probably brought on by hormone changes. Some of it was brought on by lifestyle. But after today, you're going to know a lot about how inflammation works, how hormonal balances work, and you should feel a little better equipped to prevent it if you're not there yet, or to fix it if you're already thick in the battle with it. 

Now if you've ever thought to yourself that you're failing, let me tell you, you're not. There's several factors that can be causing that low energy. And laziness is
definitely not one of them. So let me take a few minutes and kind of go do a
deep dive on the problem. And if you're watching the YouTube version of this, I
have a treat for you today: I've got visual aids. If you can see the screen, I've
got an outline of a female body and some little arrows pointing to where the
different hormones live and a list of bad things that happen when inflammation runs rampant. But if you can't see the screen, if you're listening, then don't worry,
we're gonna explain all of it. 

First, let me just say, energy doesn't just come from calories. Your energy levels are impacted by your hormones, the amount of rest that you've been able to get, and your nervous system regulation. The first hormone that I wanna talk about is your thyroid hormones. They regulate your body's metabolism, which dictates how quickly you burn calories. You have the thyroid here at your neck and the parathyroid around that. Next, we've got the sex hormones, which are usually located in your reproductive organs. You have progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone. Even though you're female, you have testosterone. Women have a little bit of testosterone. Men have a little bit of estrogen. So the estrogen and progesterone, those are the hormones that influence your mood, your sleep
quality, and your energy metabolism. So fluctuations that happen during your menstrual cycle or during perimenopause and menopause can cause fatigue and low energy and mood swings or mood dysregulation. Then there's also testosterone. Even though we have just a small amount compared to men, when those levels drop, it can lead to a significant drop in our energy, in our motivation, in our muscle mass.

Now, let's look at how your thyroid drops, and not everyone's going to experience
low thyroid. I mean, I'm 53 and I have not experienced low thyroid, but I know a
lot of women do struggle with that. Low thyroid can slow your metabolism, and so
your body will consume less energy and feel sluggish. Changes in your sex hormones can lead to insomnia and night sweats. So insomnia is when you You can't fall asleep. Night sweats are gonna wake you up, and those both can contribute directly to ongoing fatigue. When your hormones get out of balance, it can affect your mood. It can make you feel a little more irritable or depressed, and both of those things can drain your energy. And then having dysfunctional cortisol levels can impair your ability to handle stress, which can lead to chronic Now I'm going to throw another wrench into the machine and that's inflammation 

Depending on what kind of websites you follow, or what corner of the TikTok universe you you live in, you may or may not see a lot of information about inflammation. But it's it's a pretty damaging condition That is preventable that is treatable, that is reversible, most times. If it's caused by lifestyle choices, definitely preventable, definitely treatable. If it's caused by a chronic disease, then you can reduce it but maybe not get rid of it completely. This will make more sense when I go through this list. So inflammation can impact your hormones by jacking up your cortisol. When that happens, it disrupts your thyroid hormones and it converts your androgens to estrogens, which promotes insulin resistance. Now a lot of women going through perimenopause see, if they do their annual labs, they'll see that their fasting glucose is slowly rising or their A1C is slowly rising. That's a sign of insulin resistance. You want to catch that and correct that before you get full blown diabetes. But either way, this hormonal shift can lead to symptoms like fatigue, weight changes, usually weight gain, very rarely weight loss, and anxiety because the body is diverting energy to fight the inflammatory response. 

Now aside from how inflammation affects your hormone balance, let's talk about some other things it does. When your immune system is fighting inflammation, it uses a significant amount of energy which leaves less for your body to use for daily activities. The inflammatory response can interfere with your sleep wake cycle which causes poor sleep. You're already struggling with sleep because the hormones can cause insomnia and night sweats, and then you've got the
inflammatory response also messing with your sleep wake cycle. Without good sleep your body does not get a chance to go through that nightly repair and restore process that it was meant to go through. 

The next thing inflammation can do is affect these certain brain regions that are involved in your motivation and effort. So this makes it harder to exert effort both physically and mentally which explains why you feel this lack of drive and lack of engagement. For instance, when I was saying I didn't want to get in a bed and be around other people, that was those two areas in my brain were causing this lack of drive and this reducing this desire for engagement. It's kind of a natural response because your body is trying to conserve energy. It says I need to conserve energy so that I can fight this inflammatory response that's happening and I need to keep you from being around people who have cooties because you can't fight an illness right now. So it's kind of a protective mechanism but It's not healthy for you in the long run, so we don't wanna stay in that state. 

Inflammation can also affect your muscles. It causes pain and weakness in your muscles. Well, who wants to get up and work out when your muscles hurt or when your muscles are lethargic? And then the last thing that I'll mention today is that it can modulate neurotransmitter systems. It'll inhibit the normal synthesis that's supposed to happen, and then that's when you start to get central fatigue that's actually coming from your central nervous system. A lot of times people that are at that stage they get diagnosed with fibromyalgia or one of those type of unexplained chronic fatigue syndromes. So to sum it up, the hormone imbalances and the inflammation that your body is going through cause your body to use up the energy stores fighting that perceived distress that the the body's going through which leaves you less energy available to expend on you think you could want or need to do. 

If you need a word picture let's say you've got a bank account and it's got some money in it but then oh we got an emergency car repair and then we have a tax bill Uncle Sam is not going to wait for their money and then you had a stressful day you were speeding got pulled over and got some tickets got to pay those oh now your bank account does not have enough money in it to buy food or pay for your house payment or your rent payment. Does that kind of paint a clear picture? Hopefully. 

I share all that just so you know the background of what's happening so that it don't make sense to you but I just want you to know that all hope is not lost. I feel like so far this episode has been a little bit doom and gloom but I just wanted to understand why you're feeling so fatigued if you're in that state and now I'm going to share the good news about how to reverse it. I followed four pillars to restore my energy. Hydration, food, movement, and boundaries. 

You have to drink your water. If you want to flavor it with some lemon juice or some lime juice you can. You can infuse it with some strawberries or other fruit or some mint leaves. Maybe throw in some cucumbers, if you don't like plain water, or you can add something healthy, like element or LMNT, however you say it, electrolytes or some Arbonne Fizz. I'm going to suggest that you steer away from the commercial energy drinks, and I'm going to talk about those in just a second. 

As far as the food pillar, you want to try and follow an anti-inflammatory diet or a Mediterranean diet. If You can get it from a speaker poll, I .e. drive through, it's  probably not on your list of healthy things to eat. And if it's full of sugar, again, no, no. Sugar is very inflammatory. Sugar, I could do a whole episode on sugar, and maybe I will later. I was a sugar hound. I was living on sugar. I love Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I love sugar. And the thing is, your body will get to where it craves it. It's almost like a drug like it's addictive. The problem with sugar or easy carbs is you eat it, your blood sugar spikes, you get that energy rush and then you crash and you just repeat this cycle over and over. The sugar is inflammatory so your body is grabbing all that sugar and tucking it away in fat cells. Fat cells are there to protect you. When you have something floating around in your bloodstream that the body can't process or doesn't know what to do with or can't use it yet, stores it away in the fat cells. It's a little factory storage area that keeps it from going around pinging off all of your cells and organs and blood vessels causing damage. Now, if you don't know how to do an anti-inflammatory diet, don't worry, there's
resources on my website. There's resources all over the internet. You can do a
Google search and find some really good recipes and tip sheets. 

That third pillar was movement. Don't discount the benefits of walking. If you walk 10 minutes after every meal, you're gonna help speed up your digestion. If you have a sedentary job, get up once an hour and do a circuit through your office or go up a flight of stairs and back down. Just spend five minutes moving around and then go sit back down and get back to work. You give your eyes rest too, it gives you a break from the screens. You don't have to do heavy, hard workouts. You don't have to go join CrossFit. You don't have to run marathons. Gentle movement, gentle cardio is great. It counts. It has benefits. If you can do strength training, you get a huge bonus for that because strength training helps prevent bone and muscle loss. But gentle movement does count. 

The fourth thing is learning to set boundaries. I will say as women and especially as moms, we are not really encouraged to set boundaries in our society. We are encouraged to put everybody else first, to juggle way more than we can handle, and to pretend that everything is awesome. But now is the time in your life for you to learn how to set them boundaries, for you to learn how to do some mindset reset so that you can have a better handle on the stress that you go through. And the whole goal is to protect your peace and ensure longevity for your body. It's not selfish, it's self -preservation. And you are worth taking care of. You deserve to be allowed to take care of yourself. So me personally, I follow like the 80 /20 rule. I would like to get to 90 /10. Some weeks I'm better at it than others. What I mean by that is 80 to 90 % of the time I adhere to my health principles. I follow my eating plan, I take in my hydration, I take my supplements, and I do all the things that my body needs to thrive. And then 10 to 20 % of the time, I loosen my health standards so that I can partake of a celebratory meal at somebody's birthday or restaurant food when we're on vacation. So I try not to partake of things that are gonna make me feel crappy or cause damage to my body. I try not to partake of those 80 to 90 percent of the time because I want to be able to do it guilt -free when there is a special occasion that I want to participate in. And I'm not going to ask my friends and family to pick a restaurant that suits my needs or to make a meal that checks all my boxes. I save that for when I'm cooking at home. 

So for me, I get up in the morning and I drink a glass of water. It's great for your organs. Then I take my medicine and I make my breakfast shake. And I usually add in some fiber and I add in my gut health and I add in some collagen powder and I drink that slowly. I used to guzzle them and that would cause really bad upset stomach. So now I drink it slowly. I drink it while I'm getting ready for work or I  drink it in the car ride to work. Either way, I take about 30 minutes to drink my breakfast shake. Then I usually pack my lunch or if I don't have anything to pack then I can run over to Sprouts or Whole Foods and I can pick up something there. And then for dinner we like to cook at home. I have a whole list of anti- inflammatory recipes I can pick from and I have taken some of our favorite recipes that we've eaten over the years and I've modified them to make them more healthy. And my goal is not to try and hit a calorie count. My goal is always to hit the nutritional needs and to avoid the offensive food additives, the ones that offend my body on the inside that cause me pain or cause me damage. Now, I will say if I want a candy bar or a Starbucks drink, I go ahead and have it. And then what usually happens is an hour later, when I feel like crap, I make a mental note to not do that again anytime soon. 

I said I wanted to talk about energy drinks. I made a resource that you can get on my website about things you can swap to increase your energy. It's free. It's a PDF you can download. It has a couple things on there for energy leaks. Overcommitting yourself: don't say yes to everything. Learn how to say :no, I can't
do that right now." Try to avoid the temptation to doom scroll. Especially at night
when you're trying to fall asleep because that blue light on your screen is going
to keep you awake, or chances are you're going to see something on social media that gets you riled up. Again, you're not going to sleep well. So try not to doom scroll. Instead, if you're doom scrolling because you're bored or because you need like a dopamine hit, if it's during the day, go outside and get some sunlight. If it's at
night, then cop a squat on the floor and do some stretches, or even rest your legs
up the wall and let the lymphatic system drain a little out of your lower legs and
read a book, or read a magazine article, or go through your junk mail. Skipping meals is a huge energy drain. I know that it's tedious to plan out your meals,
but if you do that, then you're less likely to skip meals. You're less likely to
grab empty calories the backfire on you. 

I know we have a tendency to reach for energy drinks or coffee to try and give us a quick pick me up for energy, but I want to caution against that. And here's why. One, too much caffeine can cause some hormonal havoc. Did you know Celsius drinks have 200 milligrams of caffeine? That's more than a double espresso. I had no idea. When when Celsius first came out, I thought they were healthy because they were marketed as healthy. They said they had this natural fat burner in them and they were sugar -free and I did zero calories or 10 calories. They had all these amazing flavors, and they had their own fridge for them at the hospital, and I was buying them by the case off Amazon, and my husband and I were drinking them every day. Two to three a day! And I started having heart palpitations and horrible headaches. I mentioned it to my neurologist, and he was like, "don't drink those, those are not healthy." Had no idea! 

When you're in midlife, that kind of a jolt will spike your cortisol, and I just talked about what happens when our cortisol spikes. When your cortisol spikes you are
in fight or flight mode. Your body goes into a primal phase, and when you're in
that primal phase, A: you don't think straight, B: you cannot burn fat, so you won't
lose weight if you're trying to, and C: you're putting a lot of stress on your
heart. Too much caffeine causes anxiety, irritability. It can trigger hot flashes, and
as you may have discovered, it can give you a little cortisol belly. So, read the
ingredients on anything that you're trying to drink. If it's got sucralose, citric acid,
synthetic quote -unquote "natural flavors," or anything that you can't pronounce,
then you probably will have trouble detoxing that out of your body and therefore
stress out your liver. A lot of the compounds that are in these energy drinks can
irritate your gut and trigger inflammation, and we already know inflammation is going to increase our fatigue, it's going to add to our brain fog, it's going to add to
weight gain, it's going to add to hormone imbalances. So, it's going to give you
exactly the opposite of what you want. It's going to contribute to your fatigue
rather than relieve your fatigue. 

The other thing that happens with these energy drinks is it overstimulates your adrenal glands. They're already working over time during perimenopause and menopause. And then when you drink those energy drinks, you get wired and then wrecked. And that constant stress loop, it's going to lead to burnout. It's going to lead to the kind of fatigue that no nap can fix. Plus, a lot of those energy drinks have no nutritional value. There's no fiber, there's no adaptogens, there's no real support. It's just a big slap to your system pretending to be productivity. And you're so full from drinking those that you don't have room for nutritious food that would give you energy. So, I'm sorry if I just burst your bubble and took away one of your favorite drinks. I really am sorry because I've been there because I loved my Celsius drinks, especially that Apple Fuji pair. But it's for your good, I promise. 

So, today's takeaway. Ask yourself, where is your biggest energy leak right now? What is draining you the most right now? What do you think it is based on what we've talked about today? Decide on one thing that you can shift this week to try and help resolve that. Because even if you could feel 10 % better, that's 10 % better. And then next week you can pick something else to work on, and all these small shifts will accumulate until overall, one day you wake up and you're like, "huh, I'm kind of starting to feel like my old self." Your mojo, it isn't gone, it's just been crowded out, but we're gonna bring it back. 

Now, if you're the kind of woman who needs to hear things multiple times before it really sinks in or you like to have something tangible, like a checklist or a chart. You need to go check out my energy rescue pack. You can buy it on my website. It's one whole dollar, one dollar. It has a list of the top 10 things that drain your energy and then how to reverse that. And then it has a bonus of, I think it's five workouts that are 10 minutes long. And these are like no equipment necessary things. These are just quicky little movement workouts or movements, plans to get you going, to get those happy hormones moving your serotonin in your dopamine, and to help boost your energy. And then the second bonus that it has is like a mini workbook with mindset worksheets to help you cope with stress better, to help you prevent burnout. It's really good. It's small package. It's just small changes that you can make. And The reason why it's a dollar is because people don't value things. A lot of times if it's free, they might download it and never actually read it or never actually print it out and use it. So if you spin something on it, then suddenly it has some value for you. And I wanted everybody to be able to have just a little taste and see how good they could feel with just small changes. And so I wanted it to be affordable for everybody on the planet. So there you go. That's why it's a dollar. But I'll put a link on the podcast page if that's something you want to look at. 

Okay my friends, that's today's dose of midlife truth. Remember you're not foggy, forgotten, or finished. You're just getting lit up for your next season. And if today's episode hit home, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with a sister who needs some help unmuting her own midlife. Until next time, keep unmuting, keep rising, and remember, Your midlife resurrection starts right now.