Hello my friend. Welcome to today's episode. I am wondering, have you ever looked at the clock seen seven 30, maybe earlier? 'cause let's face it, seven thirty's asleep in and thought, well, I slept. Why am I still so tired? Or worse, maybe you feel like you've been hit by a truck or you're wading through mud even though you were in bed by nine 30 and you got a full eight hour sleep.

Mm, hands up. I've been there before. Well, I want you to know that you're not being lazy, you're not some oddity who needs 10 or 12 hours sleep to function. And it's not just life. You certainly don't need to put up with feeling this way. Today I'm gonna be talking you through the real reasons you might be exhausted, especially if you're in your forties or fifties and perimenopause and what your body is trying to tell you with this symptom that is fatigue and exhaustion.

So stay tuned to the end because I'm gonna share with you the first step that you need to take if you want to get your energy back and how to do that. So most of the women that I work with come to me 'cause they're feeling tired or exhausted. They're doing all the right things and going to bed early and, trying to protect their sleep.

But they're still waking up and feeling really sluggish and exhausted and like one of my clients pick any one of them. She said, she thought that this was her new normal, this was just how it was, but within a couple of weeks of changing a few things that I suggested to her, she was waking up before her alarm.

Like she said, I feel like myself again. I say you feel like your old self again, but like not old age. Feel like your usual self. That's what I should say. Not old self. So, hi, I'm Sarah, the Perimenopause Naturopath, and I've helped hundreds of women over 40 navigate perimenopause with confidence so they feel great in their bodies and reclaim their mood and energy.

So if you are feeling like you are changing hormones or hijacking your mood, energy, and weight, and you wanna change that in a holistic way, then this is the place for you because each episode I share with you my views on what is happening in your body, why you're feeling the way you are, and how you can change that with actionable advice to help you move from chaos to calm and feel more comfortable in your body.

So welcome friend to episode number 90 of Chaos to Calm. I still can't quite fathom that I'm up to 90 episodes and yeah, you're here with me listening and I hopefully enjoying them and finding them very useful. I love it when you do give me feedback, whether it's positive or negative. I don't mind. It all helps me learn and make sure that the podcast is meeting your needs as the listener.

No point in me recording something I like the sound of, or I like to listen to if I'm making this for you and to help you. So today I'm asking if you are still tired after eight hours of sleep, because if you are, we are gonna be talking about what might be going on. So the answer is not necessarily just more sleep, because I do wanna be clear about that.

If you are already doing the right things so you're you're eating well or trying to look after yourself and, eat well most of the time. Getting to bed at a decent hour like you're in bed around 10, you're not staying up till one, not smashing back bottles of wine every night, but you're still feeling exhausted.

Then I'm talking to you and here for you today there as well, 'cause this isn't just about being busy, a busy mom or getting older and. I'm always amazed at what people will accept or put up with as part of being getting older and still that we hear that if you do present to your doctor, you'll quite often hear, oh well it's just 'cause you're getting older.

Well, yes, of course our bodies are aging. It's true. And as we age, we do it is a little trickier to get to sleep and I cover one of the hormones, melatonin, and how it changes as we age in my free training, the four hormones so I'll put that link is in the show notes. You can go and watch that anytime that you like, if you wanna understand a bit more how it changes.

But just because that is changing and just because it does maybe get a bit trickier sometimes to get to sleep or stay asleep, it's not, it shouldn't be normalized, feeling tired and exhausted all the time. So we are gonna talk today about the there's real things happening inside your body during perimenopause that change how you feel, how you function, how you recover, how you sleep.

So let's talk through them today. So some of the real reasons that you might be exhausted. First of all, let's cover off your hormonal fluctuations because yes, okay. Perimenopause can be a cause, but it's not necessarily always an isolated cause, or the only cause as well. So yes, you might be in perimenopause.

Yes your hormones are changing and it's not a gentle decline. If you've ever been to see a symphony orchestra playing it's like when each section's playing at a different tempo or they're all playing different things.

That's what it's kind of like with your hormones in perimenopause. We've got progesterone rushing sort of down but then estrogen is declining, but it's also up and down and clashing against the progesterone there. And testosterone's just sort of meandering along there doing its own thing as well. So those fluctuations I talked about it in the last episode, I've talked about it in lots of episodes. The fluctuations mess with more than just your period.

They mess with your mood, your sleep, your motivation, even your energy production, your gut health. Every cell in your body is impacted by these changes. So yeah, perimenopause, hormone fluctuations are a big part of it. Especially when we consider that estrogen and progesterone are deeply connected to your mood molecules, your neurotransmitters, like serotonin and dopamine.

So when they're unstable, those hormones, you might just not feel physically tired, but emotionally or mentally flat too. And so it's worth having a think about and differentiating for yourself, are you feeling, is your mood flat? Are you sort of more emotionally or mentally feeling flat and tired?

Or is it a physical exhaustion as well? So like I'm always all about finding the root cause and what's underlying, so you know, these real reasons that we're going through and talking to you about today. It might not just be one thing for you, it might be your own unique blend or cocktail of these different reasons.

About they're still it's important to understand them and know them so that you can address them or give your body what it needs to help bring back balance within itself. So speaking of hormones, I'm talking now about, another reason might be your cortisol rhythm is disrupted. And so cortisol is a hormone that helps you wake up in the morning.

So it starts to rise in the early hours of the morning and to get you up out of bed and keep your blood sugar level up so you don't go into a hypoglycemic coma after that big fast overnight. But it is supposed to then sort of in the afternoon and evening, decline again and taper off.

But you know, that constant chronic stress or exposure to stress that our bodies can have and our change in our female hormones that make us less able to deal with the stress or in our life, blood sugar issues can often mess with that cortisol rhythm. And so it can leave you feeling quite groggy in the morning if it's displaced and not rising in the morning as it should and wired at night.

So you might feel really tired, but you can't sleep, when it's bedtime and then you wake unrefreshed even if you've had eight hours because your cortisol rhythm might be dysregulated, but also the levels could be dysregulated if you've been chronically stressed for a long period of time and you are in burnout.

So I have done a past episode on burnout as well. Your cortisol levels will be quite low and flat, and that will leave you feeling really flat and exhausted and groggy too. So the other major hormone player in this in your exhaustion and fatigue is your thyroid. So your thyroid might be technically normal or fine depending on how your doctor wants to put it, and it certainly may fall within the ra normal lab ranges.

But if you are feeling exhausted, foggy in your head, you've got weight gain, it's really stubborn. You can't shift it. Maybe you are always a bit cold or your hands and feet are quite cold. Then it's they're, maybe you're losing lots of hair as well. They're all signs that you might not be functioning, optimally.

Iron levels might be stubbornly low as well. I've done podcast episodes on your thyroid as well, and I will link to that at the bottom of the podcast episode as well. But even if you're within the normal range, you can still be feeling all of those things and be impacted by your thyroid and it's slower function in that normal range.

The normal range is certainly not the optimal range there as well. And don't forget that change in progesterone, the lower progesterone in perimenopause definitely can increase your risk of autoimmune thyroid conditions as well. And I see a lot of undiagnosed thyroid conditions because they're mostly not tested properly or adequately.

And or women are told if they do have antibodies against their thyroid, so their immune system is seeing their thyroid as an enemy. Women are often told that they can't do anything about that. But I want you to know that you can reduce thyroid antibodies through what you eat, drink, and do for sure.

All right, so let's talk about your little energy factories inside your cells. if I had to pick something in the body that I thought was one of the most fabulously amazing, mind blowing things, it would be your mitochondria. So your mitochondria are the engines inside your cells, they make energy, your little energy factories. What's really cool about these is that they used to be bacteria, but we've incorporated them into our cells. So we have bacteria that are part of us. That's super cool. What's also amazing is that within one cell, you might have like a hundred thousand mitochondria.

So in your heart cells, the heart muscles they need lots of energy. They can have hundreds of thousands of mitochondria in them. It's just amazing. So that, yeah, these little factories pump out the energy for you. But if you are they need nutrients to do this. They need fuel. Things like B vitamins, magnesium, COQ 10, iron, without that, it's hard for them to do their job. 

So other things that impact the mitochondria too are stress, inflammation, that low grade immune response when you're ill, and certain medications can also damage them as well. And that means that your energy production is a lot less efficient. And if you've been told that your cholesterol is high and that you need to take a statin or a cholesterol lowering drug, it's quite likely that you'll be deficient in COQ 10 because the enzyme or the medication that they use to reduce your cholesterol production blocks, your body's production of COQ 10.

So that's why one of the side effects that's listed on the label of those drugs is muscle soreness and fatigue and tiredness. And you can also experience changes in your mood with those as well. So yeah, your mitochondria are best supported by providing them with the fuel that they need.

With those vitamins through your diet is adequate, or sometimes in some phases you might need to supplement. For example, if you are taking a medication, then like a statin, you might wanna consider taking COQ 10. Maybe your iron is low, if your thyroid is out of func, if out of whack, if your thyroid is hypothyroid are slow or low functioning thyroid. It's likely that your iron stores or your iron levels might be low. Let's say you eat vegetarian or vegan, then your make B vitamins, particularly B12 or could be low. So again, it's not something in isolation and with nutritional medicine and herbal medicine's the same.

So I guess in naturopathy, it's not like there's a pill for every ill-like, oh, okay, you are feeling tired, so you should take COQ 10 and B vitamins It. Isn't like that like we are not isolated systems. Your mitochondria are not isolated from the rest of your body. They're in every single cell that you have.

And so your thyroid hormones impact all of your cells as well. And I've talked so many times about estrogen, how these estrogen receptors on every single cell, so none of these things are isolated. And nutritional medicine, herbal medicine, it all works best when you consider yourself as a whole and really understand what's driving what's going on now.

That can be difficult to do objectively when it's you. And so that's where it can be much easier to have someone on the outside looking in, especially someone that's trained in nutritional medicine or herbal medicine and can see you as a whole and understands pathology testing and how to look at that from a functional or naturopathic perspective there as well.

So that's what I'm here for doing with my clients in the chaos to arm method. Looking through and looking at that full picture of what's going on for them. The first session that we spend together is an hour deep dive into me finding out more about their health history and putting the pieces together in my mind.

And then when I get the pathology, that deepens that as well, so I can explain it to them, but also so I can create a personalized nutrition plan for them. A metabolic balance personalized nutrition plan for them that's really going to help address what's driving, what's underlying, how they're feeling.

So your mitochondria are some of the coolest things in your body, I think for sure. But they do need nutrients. They need fuel, just like any other engine or factory in the world. It needs fuel. And we need to put the right fuel into it there as well. So just going deeper into that as well. Lower nutrient reserves.

So if we're eating well or you're if you're low in key nutrients, your body, it's harder for it to make energy in the mitochondria. But even if things like iron B12, B9, it makes it difficult for your red blood cells to carry oxygen around your body to your cells, because those mitochondria need oxygen to make energy.

So you know, it's all, again, it's all interconnected, beautiful systems working together. But if we're out of balance, if something is low, let's say we're not eating enough iron, or maybe our thyroid is not functioning well, and that's impacting our absorption of iron from our food. So our stores and our blood levels are low.

We're not getting enough oxygen around. Even if we're getting all the other B vitamins and COQ 10 and magnesium and things like that, it's difficult for our body or mitochondria to make the energy because they're missing that factor of the iron and they're missing the oxygen there as well. Other nutrients that can heavily impact your energy production and your neurotransmitters.

So your energy from that mental or emotional perspective. Things like vitamin D magnesium I've mentioned, and I kind of ironically, in the ironic twist. Our bodies are beautifully designed and have feedback loops all over the body. But one that doesn't go quite to plan is when our iron stores are low, we tend to have a heavier period and so we lose more blood, lose more iron, and then we have lower iron stores and heavier periods, and it continues in that way. So that can really deplete your iron. Of course, your hormone changes in perimenopause, particularly of estrogen and progesterone to some extent can increase your heaviness of your periods. You quite often in those early years or months of perimenopause, you might be experiencing heavier periods, shorter cycles, so periods coming more frequently.

Because of the hormone changes, but that can exacerbate your nutrient levels there as well. So it's important to have a full range of bloods done, and. Like I do that for my clients in the chaos to calm method, but in PerimenoGO, I teach them about what ones to ask for and, where they can get those done if they can't get them done via their GP.

So yeah, it's really important to know we need that data to understand where we're at. Otherwise we're just guessing and throwing spaghetti at the wall and that's when it gets expensive. And you are using a bunch of different supplements and nutritional supplements or herbal, but not sure what.

It's working or if any of them are in fact working because you don't have that baseline data. So tracking, tracking things like your period, your cycle, but also regularly having your bloods done, having full iron studies, a full thyroid panel that actually includes T3 and T4. Yeah, I was looking at a client's blood tests today and she has antibodies so, they're present when there's Hashimoto's, which is the autoimmune hypothyroid condition. And her TSH, the hormone that comes from your brain down to your thyroid, which is one of the three that should be tested. They just tested that one and it was in the normal range, the lab's normal range, which is very broad.

So they said she had a normal thyroid, but she had antibodies, so however, it wasn't in the optimal range, but they also hadn't tested her free T4 and her free T3, but they were happy to supplement with thyroxine with the free T4 without knowing those levels that kind of astounds me, blows me away that happens.

That there's not just that they don't test. And the reason they didn't test that at the lab was because the TSH, the thyroid stimulating hormone was considered normal, even though this client is experiencing symptoms like weight gain and brain fog and changes in their mood and their energy.

And yeah, so, ugh. I don't know. I think we deserve so much better. But it's such a battle and or it, you have to fund it privately and work privately with say some a naturopath like me, or maybe an integrative doctor might do that for you, but most of the time I observed that they're constrained within those normal ranges or they work within those normal ranges rather than what's optimal. 

I'll keep pondering the mysteries of the world. Let's move on. So yeah, nutrient levels is really important especially if you're feeling exhausted. Along with your thyroid hormones is very important too. And your female hormones. If you haven't already, go download my freebie, the perimenopause decoder that will help you understand if it is perimenopause for you, what phase you're in and you can have an idea of what your hormones are doing then, and also how much longer it's gonna go on for. So the link for that is also in the show notes, the perimenopause decoder. 

Now blood sugar. Okay, so again, you can be eating well or eating healthy. Eating clean. Any of the things that I hear. I'll save my thoughts on that for another podcast episode anyways. But if your feels aren't, if your feels, if your meals aren't balanced with enough protein and fat and fiber you, you can be riding that blood sugar rollercoaster all day.

So you get pushed up high, crashing low, driving your cravings, but also making your energy go up and down. And so skipping breakfast, living on snacks, that rollercoaster gets really worse, or I should say living off coffee as well, because a lot of you are fasting and using coffee to suppress your appetite.

And, but you know, when you have coffee it does stimulate your blood sugar level or a stimulated digestive response and your blood glucose level goes up. So, that's why you can feel a couple hour, couple of hours after eating if you're eating a very high carb meal. Or just having coffee as a meal, that you feel quite like that crash a couple of hours later, feel hungry again.

Feel your energy crash and start reaching for those higher sugar or higher carbohydrate or foods or more coffee again. So if you're doing that a long time and often enough, your blood sugar level, actually your resting blood sugar level elevates and so does your insulin. So it keeps you in that fat storage mode there as well.

And you have lots of glucose in your bloodstream, but it's not necessarily getting into your cells to the mitochondria. So they're essentially starving and they can't make energy. And if you don't have metabolic flexibility to be able to use fat as a fuel, they're not gonna get any energy that way either.

So we really need to when I say blood sugar imbalance, I'm talking also about insulin as well. And again, if you wanna learn some more about that, you can go back through my past podcast episodes, but also the four hormones free training. I talk in depth about that as well. So the last thing that I'm gonna talk about today is gut issues and inflammation.

So if our gut and digestive system isn't working well, and if you are having things like bloating or your bowels are irregular, like maybe sometimes you're a bit constipated, sometimes they're quite loose, maybe you're burping more or you have more wind, then those are all signs that your gut and digestive system isn't working well.

Did I say reflux? Reflux is another common one for women in perimenopause. They're all signs that your digestive system isn't working as we want it to, and you might not be absorbing your nutrients well. So again, you could be eating the most beautifully perfect diet in the world, but if your gut and digestion aren't working well, you are not gonna get much out of that meal, you're not gonna get the most out of it and absorb all the nutrients from it there as well. 

So we know that weight and adiposity, so weight and fat mass around the middle and your hormones, they all influence your microbiome in your large intestine. And that influences your immune system, your fat storage your digestive function and capacity and your immune system. I can't remember if I just said that or not, but if it is out of balance, it will increase that inflammation. And when we have inflamed gut there's inflammation right through our body and particularly in our brain there as well.

Inflammation is very draining for us. It's a bit of an energy zapper because it does impact how your mitochondria work. So, yeah, if you are in inflammation, you have a gut inflammation. If you have other pain and inflammation in your body as well yeah, think about how you feel when you're sick or if you do have joint pain or muscle pain, you tend to feel kind of tired and flat and that's your mitochondria are less, making less energy there as well.

And so just a quickie, like with your mitochondria, one of the easiest ways to stimulate them into making more energy is actually to move your body. And when I say that, I don't mean go out and do a spin class or a an F 45 workout or something like that. Just go for a little walk outside and also get the benefit of breathing some fresh air. But yeah, a five or 10 minute walk will clear your head and get your mitochondria making some more energy for you there as well. So this, I find that especially useful if I am at my desk or have been at my desk for quite a while. Just go outside, do some deep breathing and walking and pumping my arms around and stuff.

I don't have to get super hot and sweaty, but just that movement is really helpful there as well. So yeah, just to summarize lots of different reasons why you might be feeling tired or exhausted beyond, apart from sleep hygiene and making sure you're going to bed at a time that gives you the opportunity to have at least seven to nine hours sleep each night, depending on we're all a bit different with what we need and it does change as we age, but still.

So if you're doing all of those things but still feeling really tired or exhausted, then you know, these are the areas to check in around your hormones and your nutrient levels and supporting your mitochondria and a healthy blood sugar and insulin levels it's really important there too.

So if you're thinking, yep, alright, that sounds like me. I think I've got the thyroid or my blood sugar or blah blah, blah, whichever your special, unique blend is, your next step is might be to get some support to uncover what's really driving your fatigue. And so yeah, as I've mentioned, it's what I do for my clients in The Chaos to Calm Method, but also, but also it's what I teach people to do inside PerimenoGO. So I help you learn how to un sort of fuel your body properly and understand what your symptoms are trying to tell you so that you can move through and shift that low energy or shift those energy blocks or drains and yeah, get back to feeling more like your old self again.

So that is all from me for today, my friend. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode and why you might be still tired after eight hours of sleep. If you found this helpful, then please make sure to follow the podcast so you don't miss future episodes and tips. And while you're there, if you could rate the podcast, leave a review or message me and let me know what you'd like to hear more of on the show.

I would love that. Thank you so much. Your reviews help more women get shown or discover the podcast and transform their perimenopause from chaos to calm. So that my friend is all, thank you again for sharing your time with me today. Until next time, keep transforming your perimenopause from Chaos to Calm.