12 - You’re Not Lazy. You’re Running on Empty. The real reason your energy has disappeared

You’re Not Lazy. You’re Running on Empty.

The real reason your energy has disappeared

In this episode:

There’s a difference between being tired and being depleted. Tired fixes with a good night’s sleep. Depleted is what happens after years of output exceeding input, and menopause is the moment the bill arrives. 

I cover the energy drains nobody talks about - decision fatigue, the cortisol tax of being permanently “on,” the physical cost of people-pleasing, and introduce the energy budget: treating your fuel like a bank account and auditing where it’s actually going.

Your One Thing this week:

Say no to one thing this week that you would normally say yes to. Just one. Notice how it feels to have that energy back in your account.

Links:

→ Grab the free 5 Riviera Standards Starter Guide: https://rivieramenopausemethod.kit.com/5-riviera-standards

→ Follow Riviera Menopause on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rivieramenopause/

If this described your life, send it to the woman who always says she’s fine. She might be fine. But she might also be asleep on the sofa with her shoes on.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A year or two ago, someone asked me how I was, and I said, Fine. And then I went home and fell asleep on the sofa at 6pm with my shoes still on and woke up at 9pm, creasing my face from the cushion, and no recollection of the previous three hours. Fine. And here's what I didn't say to the person who asked. I didn't say I'm so tired that I could cry. I didn't say I wake up exhausted and go to bed exhausted, and the hours in between are just various shades of exhaustion. I didn't say I've started to wonder whether this is just my life now. Instead, I said fine, because that's what we say. And then we go home and fall asleep with our shoes on. If that's you, if you're living in a permanent state of bone deep fatigue that no amount of sleep seems to fix, I need to tell you something. You're not lazy, you're not just aging, you're depleted. And those are different problems with different solutions. In episode two, we talked about blood sugar and the afternoon crash. That was one layer. Today we're looking at the whole picture because the tiredness that most menopause or women describe is not just a blood sugar problem, it's a depletion problem. And fixing it requires more than just changing your breakfast. See, there's a difference between tired and depleted. And I think it really matters. Tired is what you feel after a long day. Tired has a definite cause and a solution. You worked hard, you're tired, you sleep, you recover. Tired is transactional. Depleted is different. Deplete is what you feel after years of output exceeding input, of giving more than you receive, of running at full capacity on half the fuel, while telling everyone you're fine, while maintaining a career, a family, a home, a relationship, a social life, your own health. A menopause has just increased the cost of all of it while reducing your capacity to manage any of it. Depleted doesn't fix with a good night's sleep. Depleted doesn't fix with a holiday. Depleted fixes when you fundamentally change the ratio of what goes out to what comes in. And for most women, that's a much harder conversation than have you tried going to bed earlier. I want to sit with this for a moment because I think it needs saying the question is not how do I get more energy. The question is why have I been running this deficit for so long and what would it take to stop? The answers usually involve looking at the structures of your life, the commitments, the obligations, the habits, the expectations you've been carrying, and asking which of them are actually yours. Which ones did you choose and which ones just accumulated sort of like clutter in a spare room until one day you looked up and realised you couldn't move. Most women I talked to, and I mean most, this is nearly universal, have been running a deficit for years. They were managing it. Estrogen was helping, progesterone was keeping the nervous system calm, and their body was quietly compensating for the fact that they were doing too much and resting too little. And then the menopause arrived and the compensation stopped. The hormones that were propping up the system declined and the deficit that had been building for years became visible. Not because anything new went wrong, but because the safety net was removed. So where is your fuel going? Let me name some energy drains that are not on any symptom list but are emptying your tank just as effectively as poor sleep. The first is decision fatigue, the mental load, the constant relentless management of a household, a family, a career, and a life. What's for dinner, who's picking up the children, when the car needs servicing, whether the washing is going to get rained on. These aren't big decisions, but they are constant, and each one costs a tiny amount of cognitive energy. By 3 pm you've made so many micro decisions that your brain is running on fumes, and you think you're tired. You're not tired, your decision depleted. The second one is the cortisol tax of being permanently on. Your phone buzzes, your email pings, someone needs something, you respond, you manage, you organise, you're never fully off because the world has designed itself to ensure you never fully switch off. And every notification, every interruption, every moment of just quickly checking keeps your cortisol elevated. You're paying a stress tax all day, every day, and you're not accounting for it in your energy budget. The third is people pleasing. And I know this sounds soft, but the physical cost of saying yes when you mean no is enormous. Every time you agree to something you don't want to do, you spend energy on the doing, the resentment, and the self-criticism afterwards. Three withdrawals for the price of one, and most women in midlife are doing this multiple times a day without even noticing. And finally, the one nobody wants to hear, doom scrolling at 11 pm, if you make it that far, obviously. I know I do it too sometimes, but 30 minutes of blue light comparison and low-level anxiety before bed is not rest. It is stimulation disguised as relaxation, and it's sabotaging the sleep that would actually help to restore you. So what's happening in your body? Beyond the lifestyle drains, there are the physical reasons your energy is lower in menopause. And these are probably worth knowing, not so you can diagnose yourself, but so you can have an informed conversation with your GP if the fatigue is severe. So your mitochondria, the tiny engines inside your cells that produce energy, are affected by declining estrogen. Estrogen supports mitochondrial function, and when it declines, your cells may produce energy less efficiently. You're literally making less fuel at the cellular level. That's not laziness, that is biology. Your iron levels are also worth checking, particularly if your periods have been heavier than usual in perimenopause. Iron deficiency is one of the most common and most overlooked causes of fatigue in women. It's easily tested and easily addressed. Another one is thyroid function. It's worth a conversation if your fatigue is extreme, persistent, and not improving with lifestyle changes. The thyroid and menopause symptoms overlap significantly. Fatigue, weight gain, brain fog, mood changes, and it's worth ensuring that one is not being mistaken for the other. I'm not diagnosing anything here, I'm saying if your fatigue is profound and nothing seems to help, ask your GP to check these things. It's a reasonable request, and ruling them out is useful even if the answer is everything's normal. This is menopause, at least you know. So here's the concept that I want to leave with you. Treat your energy like you would a bank account. Every day you have a finite amount of energy, and everything you do either deposits into that account or withdraws from it. Deposits look like quality sleep, protein at every meal, movement, particularly walking in daylight, time alone, time in nature, doing something that's genuinely enjoyable, not performatively enjoyable, saying no, resting without guilt. And the withdrawals look like overcommitting the mental loads, skipping meals, excessive cardio that spiked your cortisol, staying up late, scrolling, saying yes when you mean no, other people's emergencies that are not actually emergencies, perfectionism and guilt without resting. Most women have never audited this. They've never actually sat down and honestly assessed where their energy is going. And when they do, the picture is usually stark. Massive withdrawals, tiny deposits, and a balance that has been overdrawn in the red for years. Here's what an honest audit might reveal. You spent 45 minutes scrolling your phone before bed. Withdrawal. You skipped lunch because you were too busy. Withdrawal. You said yes to organizing a thing you didn't want to organise. Withdrawal. You spent 20 minutes composing a reply to an email that didn't actually require a reply. Withdrawal. And your deposits for the whole day? A cup of coffee and a sandwich you ate standing up. The maths is brutal. The radical act is not finding more energy. The radical act is spending less of it on things that don't matter and spending more of it on things that do. And that starts with being honest about where it's currently going. Most women don't actually have a full-on energy problem. They have an energy allocation problem. The fuel is finite. Where you spend it is a choice. And right now, most of those choices are being made by default, by other people's expectations, by habit, by the endless to-do list that nobody's audited for years. It's time to audit. So your one thing this week. Say no to one thing you would normally say yes to, just one. The committee meeting you don't need to attend, the favour you don't have the energy for, the social plan you're dreading, pick one. Say no. Notice how it feels to have that energy back in your account. I'm not asking you to become a hermit and certainly don't do something like replace the social plan with doom scrolling. I'm asking you to make one withdrawal less this week and notice the difference. I am giving you here explicit permission to rest. Not as a reward for productivity, not after you've earned it, now right now. Rest is not lazy, rest is maintenance, and a machine that never stops for maintenance eventually breaks. You are not a machine, but the principle holds. Your energy is not limitless, your body is telling you that loudly. And the intelligent response is not to push harder, it's to listen. Next week we're going somewhere that every woman will recognise. We're talking about the 9pm biscuit tin. Emotional eating. Why you eat your feelings, why it's not a character flaw, and what to do about it without adding shame to the pile. No judgment, just honesty. If this episode on energy describes your life, send it to the woman who's always says she's fine. She might be fine, but she might also be asleep on the sofa with her shoes on. And she deserves better than fine. So do you. I'm Laura, this is the Riviera menopause, and you're not lazy, you're running on empty, it's time to refuel. But for now, that's me signing off with love from Monaco.