Why am I so Irritable and Exhausted?

Why Am I So Irritable and Exhausted? (The Beliefs Keeping You Stuck in Stress)

If you're constantly wired, snapping at your kids or partner more than you'd like, and running on empty even though nothing's "technically" wrong — this episode is for you.

In this episode of Wellness Simplified, Kelly Nicholls unpacks six of the most common beliefs and identities that keep women stuck in chronic, low-grade stress: the need to feel important, comparison, the martyr/hero pattern, difficulty asking for help, weak boundaries, and perfectionism. For women 40+, this matters even more — chronic stress doesn't just sit alongside the hormonal shifts of perimenopause, it can amplify them.

You'll learn:

• Why chronic stress hits harder — and shows up differently — for women 40+, and how it interacts with perimenopause
• Why your nervous system can't tell the difference between a real threat and a perceived one
• Six specific beliefs — from people-pleasing and boundary struggles to perfectionism and burnout — that quietly drive chronic stress
• One simple, low-effort practice to start loosening the pattern that resonates most with you

Free worksheet: Want help identifying which of these six beliefs is driving your own stress? Download the free Beliefs & Identities Worksheet— it walks you through all six and helps you pinpoint exactly where to focus first.

Ready to go deeper? If you see yourself in these patterns and want to actually work through what's underneath your stress, book a free coaching Discovery Call. It's a no-pressure conversation to get clear on what's actually driving your stress and exhaustion and whether coaching is the right next step.

If this episode helped, hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening — and if you're on Apple, a quick rating goes a long way too.

Transcript

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Welcome to Wellness Simplified. I'm Kelly Nichols, and this show is for busy people who care deeply about their health, but are drowning in conflicting advice and don't know where to focus. Every episode, we simplify one area of health. One habit, one simple experiment, one clear next step that will actually fit into your life. Together, let's optimize our health. One simple step at a time. You constantly feel wired. You snap at your kids or partner far more than you'd like to admit. You ruminate about problems at work. You feel triggered easily. You're running on empty. Like so many people these days, you're stuck in a chronic state of low-grade stress. And it's costing you far more than you know. This kind of insidious stress impacts every area of your life, your health, relationships, work, and joy. And for Women 40, stress drives and amplifies the hormonal shifts you may be navigating at this stage of life. In today's episode, we're going beneath the surface to the beliefs and identities keeping women stuck in this erosive state of chronic stress. By the end of this episode, you will have clarity on the beliefs driving this state and a tool to start releasing it at its root. I'm Kelly Nichols, wellness and resilience coach to Women40 Plus, CEO of the health platform Bitopia, and host of this podcast, Wellness Simplified. Thanks for joining us. Let's jump in. Chronic stress is just some unpleasant feeling you push through. It's changing your biology in real time. Elevated cortisol disrupts sleep, drives craving, slows your metabolism, and keeps your immune system running in this low-grade defensive crouch instead of actually repairing anything. And if you're in your 40s and 50s, for many women it's worse because cortisol and your reproductive hormones are closely linked. So as estrogen and progesterone naturally decline, your body tends to lean more heavily on your adrenal system to keep things steady, which means chronic stress doesn't just sit alongside perimenopause for a lot of women. It can actually amplify it. Worse hot flushes, worse sleep, worse mood. So your breath work, yoga, meditation, all those things are great tools to help reduce stress. And I use them myself and I share specific strategies of those with my coaching clients. But they're not addressing the root of what is driving your chronic stress. And that's what we're looking at today. Your nervous system can't tell the difference between a genuine threat, you know, a tiger, an assailant, an accident, and a perceived one, which means if your subconscious is constantly seeing things in your everyday life as a threat, your body is literally responding accordingly. Your cortisol rises, your stress response activates, and it stays activated consistently because perceived threats are everywhere in your life. So today we're going to unpack what are six of the most common beliefs and identities that I see keeping women stuck in this ongoing cycle of stress. And so the invitation, as you listen, see which one you identify with the most. And that's where there's going to be an opportunity for you to gain the greatest growth and freedom. Let me start with one that took me a long time to admit to myself. So I was back then, I was director at an NGO. I was completely overwhelmed. I was barely getting my work done. I was going from meeting to meeting, this sector working group, this internal committee leading this, chairing that. I felt stretched in every direction and I couldn't figure out why. I tried all the pre-productivity hacks, the mini breastwork breaks, the executive coaching, all the things, but nothing was helping. And I constantly felt overwhelmed and stressed. So one day I sat down and I audited my calendar. Not for efficiency. I tried that a ton of times. But instead, I got honest with myself and asked one question for every single commitment on my diary. Is this critical to my actual job or am I doing it to feel important? Important in my sector, important to my boss, important to my peers, important in the room. The results were a little embarrassing. If I'm honest, so much of the time, so much of my stress was being driven by that one desire. The desire to be seen as significant, as someone who mattered. And once I saw it, I couldn't really unsee it. I started saying no to things, delegating more, genuinely delegating, not just offloading and hovering, letting people on my team take the spotlight and the decision making. And it freed up enormous amounts of time and energy, not just in the calendar, but in my nervous system. And the reason I'm sharing this is because I think this pattern, the need to feel needed, important, indispensable, is more common than we admit. The women who can't delegate because then what is what are, you know, what is their, are they actually fulfilling their role? The ones who take on one more committee because being asked feels like proof she matters. The person who needs to be in every meeting. So I want you to check in and ask, where might this apply to me? Where might I be saying yes to things because I want to feel needed, to feel important. So linked to this is the second one, which is comparison and the urge to keep up with what everyone else appears to be doing. Comparing yourself to the school mom who seems to have it all together, volunteering for everything, the colleague who just got promoted, the Instagram version of someone else's life that makes you feel like you're somehow behind. Both of these, underneath, are the same question. Am I enough? And the answer your nervous system reaches for over and over again is do more, do more, be more, prove it again and again. And this loop is exhausting and never resolves because the proof is never sufficient and it never lasts. Take an honest look at your life and see where are you comparing yourself to others? Where are you doing something, not because it's in true alignment and thus nourishing for you, but because you want to keep up with someone else? Do you really need to be doing everything you are for your work, your kids, your house? Or do you think you should because you're comparing yourself to others? What is this really costing you? The next one I think is almost like structurally built into how women are raised. The message, rarely set out right, but everywhere, is that to be a good mother, a good daughter, a good partner, a good colleague, you sacrifice your own need for theirs. Not just their needs, their wants, their comfort, their mood. I personally identify as a caring person, and that's a core value for me. I genuinely love taking care of people. But I've had to learn, and I'm still learning, that there's a difference between caring from a full cup and caring at the expense of yourself. The second one isn't love, it's martyrdom. And martyrdom breeds resentment. And resentment is one of the most chronically activating emotional states there is for your nervous system. Looks like I've done too much for my kids, said yes when I was already depleted, kept going when I needed to stop, and the result, if I'm honest, is that I've been less present, less patient, more staff, more snappy than if I just admitted that I needed a break and taken one. The hero or martyr archetype is seductive because it looks like a virtue. It is a virtue, sort of, just without the sustainability piece. The version we're aiming for is caring deeply and having enough left to actually enjoy it. Giving and caring without sacrifice and depletion. So where in your life are you overgiving? Where are you depleting yourself in order to take care of others? Where do you feel resentment? That last part is a key. Which brings me to asking for help. Somewhere along the line, a lot of us picked up the idea that needing help means you're not capable. That if you were really on top of things, you'd manage it yourself. That asking is a weakness. I've managed and coached many women who feel like this. I've seen how much additional, unnecessary work they do just because they were uncomfortable to ask for help. It was painted as a positive trait, being highly capable, which is great, but not when it comes at the expense of your well-being. The idea that asking for help is a weakness is a lie and it costs an enormous amount of energy to maintain. Because maintaining the appearance of not needing anything from every from anyone is a full-time job. And if you're running that at work and at home, you're driving yourself to burnout. So have a look. How often do you actually ask for help? What is your perception about the even the idea of asking for help? And what's, if you're really honest, the impact of not asking people for help. The next two that I'm going to talk to are about control. And underneath control is fear. Personally, I've had a really complicated relationship with boundaries. And I know I'm not alone in this. Because here's what I used to tell myself, and I sometimes tell myself. If I say no, what will people think of me? If I tell someone I won't engage with them when they're angry, will they pull away? If I hold a line professionally or personally, will I lose the relationship? Those fears kept me in situations that were draining me, conversations I didn't want to have, commitments I'd outgrown, dynamics that weren't good for me. Not because I didn't see them, but because the imagined cost of doing something about it felt higher than the real cost of staying. We only half share our truths. We shy away from holding strong boundaries, we overextend ourselves, we allow in energy and conversations that drain us. However, what I've learned and still learning and trying to embody is that this fear is almost always worse than the reality. Most people actually respect a boundary when it's held with clarity and consistency. Some people don't, and that's information, important information too. The energy you spend managing relationships without boundaries is enormous. The anxiety of anticipating every possible reaction, softening every message, being available to everyone at all hours, that's a chronic low grade stress state. It's not one big thing. It's the accumulation of a thousand small capitulations. So where in your relationships are you not upholding clear, consistent boundaries? What is the impact of that? Where at work are you not upholding boundaries? And what does that cost you? Finally, perfectionism. Perfectionism is not just about high standards. High standards are great. Perfectionism is the belief that if something isn't done perfectly, it reflects on your fundamental worth as a person. And that belief means you can never rest because there is always something that could be done better. There is always a reason the work isn't finished. There is always a reason to keep going, keep checking, keep worrying, keep improving. A perfectionist nervous system is never off duty because there is always something that hasn't been done right yet. I see this consistently in the women I coach. The report that's ready but gets read again and again, the email that gets rewritten because the tone isn't quite right, and I have to try again and again to make sure it will be received just right. None of that is really about the report or the email or whatever it is. It's about proving something. And past a certain point, perfectionism doesn't make the work better. It just makes it slower and it makes you more stressed while you do it. So where are you redoing something that was already good enough? Where are you holding back at releasing something that is probably perfectly good enough? Where do you feel like things you do are never good enough? And importantly, what is this costing you? So there you have it. Simple. Six of the most common beliefs driving women to chronic low grade stress. Now I want to hear from you which one resonated the most for you. Now, here's what I don't want you to do. I don't want you to go away from this and try to fix all six. That urge to build a whole new protocol, to tackle the whole list is itself a little bit of some of the patterns we just talked about. The need to do it all, to do it perfectly, to prove to prove something. So here's um the one thing I want you to do this week. I want you to pick the one that I of the six um identities and beliefs that we just discussed, I want you to pick just one, the one that resonated the most with you. And for the next seven days, I want you to notice every time it shows up. Not to fix it, not to judge yourself, just to notice. Could look like, uh, hmm, there's the need to be in the room or the meeting. Huh, there's that guilt about saying no, there's that fear about upholding boundaries, there's that perfectionism thing driving me. Just notice, name it and move on. Because you genuinely can't change what you can't see. And most of us have been living inside these patterns for so long that they just feel like us, just who we are. But they're not who you are. They're what you've learned, and what you've learned you can unlearn. That's the work. It's slow, it's not super glamorous, it's not dramatic, and it's probably the most important health habit that you've ever built because it's what's driving this chronic low-grade stress, and that chronic low grade stress is impacting everything else to do with your health. Now, if you'd like help identifying the patterns and going deeper, I created a simple worksheet to accompany this episode. You can download it in the show notes. And if you see yourself in any of these patterns and you know that you're ready to actually look at what's underneath the stress and start to dissolve it, I'd love to talk to you. I offer a free coaching discovery call. It's a chance for us to talk through what's actually driving your stress and figure out together whether coaching is the right fit for you right now. The link for that is also in the show notes. And if you're not ready for that, that's fine too. Start with what I said before, just noticing. If you got value from this episode, I'd be super appreciative if you could rate and review the episode or leave a comment. And that really makes a big difference in helping us reach more people. Thank you so much for your time today. I hope it was valuable, and I can't wait to see you next week. Thank you. Now it's your turn. Take what you've learned today and put it into action. Try the habit, run the experiment, and actually track how you go. I'll be doing it right alongside you and sharing on socials. So come find me there. Links are in the show notes. Tell me what's working, what isn't, and what questions are coming up. I genuinely want to know. And if today's episode helped, share it with someone who needs it. And if you haven't already, hit subscribe so we can keep optimizing our health together. One simple step at a time. Take care. See you next week.