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Welcome to The Modern Midlife Collective—where midlife isn’t a crisis, it’s a rebirth. Hosted by Dr. Ade Akindipe, DNP, and Dr. Jillian Woodruff, MD, this is the podcast for women ready to unapologetically own their power, thrive through the ups and downs of hormones, weight, and self-care, and show the world that thriving at 40 and beyond isn’t just possible—it’s your birthright.
Biweekly, we bring you science-backed insights on hormones, menopause, longevity, and sexual health—real tools to empower women in midlife and beyond. With a fearless blend of functional medicine, real-life wisdom, and no-nonsense empowerment, we’re here to challenge the norms, break through the barriers, and help you step into a life of vitality, confidence, and unstoppable strength.
Ready to rise? Let’s do this.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (00:27)
Okay, Jillian, real talk before we even start. Have you had coffee yet?
Jillian Woodruff MD (00:31)
Two coffees. And really historically that would have put me at about a four out of 10 on the energy scale. But here's what's interesting right now. I'm actually in Germany with my sister on holiday and I feel completely different. I have great energy. Yeah. I do not feel the same. Yeah, exactly.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (00:46)
You feel different. What's going on?
Good, well, yeah. And you're away from work and from all the other things that you have to do. Well,
because that's the episode we're talking about today. You just said something huge. You feel like a completely different person depending on your environment. And I think a lot of high achieving women don't realize that their energy is broken. It's responsive. So take us back. What was that season like for you?
Jillian Woodruff MD (01:07)
Yep.
Yeah, sure. So, like I said, I'm here in Germany with my sister traveling for leisure. I feel amazing. I have energy. I'm sleeping well. I feel positive, clear, present, like me, really. But...
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (01:32)
Yeah.
Jillian Woodruff MD (01:33)
There was a period where I didn't really feel like myself at all. I would get home from work. I would sit in my garage. I'm sure we've had conversations where I've been sitting in my car, right? In my home office. Home, I'm using my air quotes. I just couldn't go inside. And it wasn't because I didn't love my family and honestly, sometimes, usually they weren't even home yet. But it's because I knew that as soon as I walked through the door,
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (01:42)
Absolutely.
Jillian Woodruff MD (02:00)
my second shift was starting. Wife, mom, care coordinator, problem solver. And I just remember thinking, I just need five more minutes before I can be needed again. You know, I'm needed all day at work. I'm needed for different activities and I just needed some time for me before I could be needed again for somebody else. And that's the part I think a lot of women don't really say out loud.
You can deeply love your life and love your career and still feel completely depleted by it. And for a long time, I thought that was just what midlife felt like. You I'm a doctor who specializes in women's health and wellness, and I dismissed my own symptoms for more than a year.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (02:43)
Yeah, I can totally relate. felt the exact same thing. For me, this really hit back five years ago during COVID. And I chucked it off to stress, you know, during the pandemic. I mean, it was really stressful. And I was also in school completing a dual degree. And when I finished that, it only got worse. Then it became a daily thing where I was just done by 5 p.m. It's like, I cannot do anything else. I can't cook. I can't clean.
⁓ Then the kids and my husband started to notice this and of course that impacts everything that you do And you know, I'm a morning person as you know Jill and I love to exercise but I would wake up so fatigued that I would skip my morning sessions and say I'll do it after work But of course that never happens, you know, I had every tool at my fingertips I had all the workout stuff and I kept saying I'll deal with it later and You know, here's what I know though that you know
my body wasn't being dramatic, there was something going on, was definitely sending a clear signal that something needed to be addressed and ignoring it didn't make it better. It gave the root causes more time to compound on each other.
Jillian Woodruff MD (03:52)
And that's exactly why this episode matters, because if the two of us who really live and breathe this work, we dismissed our own fatigue, we know our listeners are doing the same thing. You know, today, hopefully, we'll change that.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (04:06)
Yeah, today is your permission to stop dismissing it. We've got six root causes and we're going to try to get through all of it, the research behind each one and a clear plan. So let's go.
Jillian Woodruff MD (04:17)
Let's do it.
Jillian Woodruff MD (04:18)
Well, before root causes, let's define what we're actually talking about because fatigue gets used pretty loosely. Everything from, had a late night, to I can't function as a human. And those are two very different things.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (04:30)
Yeah, tiredness is normal. You rest, you bounce back, you sleep. But fatigue is really persistent and it doesn't respond to sleep. It impacts you physically, mentally, emotionally. And the thing I always explain to my patients is it's disproportionate to what you're doing. So you didn't run a marathon, but you felt like you ran a marathon. You just lived your life and now you're running on empty.
Jillian Woodruff MD (04:55)
Right, and it's incredibly common in midlife. It's almost never just one thing. It's multiple systems starting to dysregulate at the exact same time. So I think we should start there, where I believe every evaluation should start.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (05:11)
is that hormones. Okay, so yeah, let's go. Let's start with root cause number one. ⁓ So we talk about estrogen all the time, know, estrogen drops and you feel tired because there are specific mechanisms here that change how you understand your body and how you advocate for yourself.
Jillian Woodruff MD (05:13)
That's hormones, exactly. Always.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (05:33)
know, estrogen has receptors throughout your body, including inside the powerhouse of your cell, which is your mitochondria. So when your estrogen that's supposed to support your energy drops, of course, that's going to impact your energy production at the cell level. So when it drops, your cells make less energy. It's not in your head. This is happening inside your mitochondria.
You know, there was a research in 2024 that confirmed that 17 beta estradiol, which is your estradiol, estrogen, directly regulates mitochondrial biogenesis and cellular energy production. So as we said, as estrogen declines, energy or ATP production becomes less efficient. That contributes to the deep exhaustion.
that's so very common in perimenopause. So if you're exhausted and going through perimenopause, your cells may genuinely be producing less energy than they were five years ago. So it's not physiological. And it's physiological rather. It's not a mindset issue.
Jillian Woodruff MD (06:41)
Yeah, it's physiological. I think we need to say it clearly because I see this every single day in my practice, as do you. Women come in thinking that they're lazy, they're not motivated, they're not productive, they're burned out, when in reality, their cells are literally producing less energy biologically. And all throughout women's lives, I think we're just socialized to push through, you know, get it done.
I think that push through mentality when something's fundamentally physiologically an issue, this pushing through has to stop. It has to stop. And also the blame that we put on ourselves, you know, for body processes that are physiological, that also has to stop. So it's not even that, it's just we've been socialized to...
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (07:15)
Yeah.
Jillian Woodruff MD (07:32)
do more, do everything, but also we put so much pressure on ourselves and all of those things have to change, right? It can't just be, we've decided that we're gonna be good to ourselves. Yes, we need to, but also we have to work to change the way that we are seen by others and that's a very different, a very different thing.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (07:51)
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely agree.
Jillian Woodruff MD (07:53)
Well, estrogen, talked about progesterone. Okay, that's another soap box of mine. I'm not going to apologize. Progesterone is our calming sleep hormone, relaxing. It binds to GABA receptors in the brain, which is the same receptors that's targeted by anti-anxiety medications. So it makes us feel settled and settled enough so we can cycle into that deep sleep that we need. That's our restorative sleep.
And the progesterone begins declining in our late 30s, often years before estrogen actually drops. So, you know, we talk about estrogen up and down, up and down like this roller coaster and progesterone just starts declining. And so this is happening late 30s and then, you know, becomes steeper and steeper. So if you're waking at 2 a.m. and you're wired and you're anxious, you have all of these pervasive thoughts.
That's often not anxiety. It's not like, I'm newly diagnosed. It's usually not. It's usually a decline in progesterone.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (08:53)
Yeah, and that's why, and I totally agree about progesterone, you know, being your soapbox because often I'll see some, you know, women who maybe they've been started on a hormone replacement therapy, but then are told, oh, they don't need progesterone because they don't have a uterus. And I'm like, you absolutely do. Please, here's a prescription because of some of the other great
Benefits, know that they have, know, anti-anxiety medications that you may not need maybe that, you progesterone might be the key to that. And this is something that I see transform patients lives. Women who've been told they have insomnia and are on medications, sleep aids, they're on Benadryl, things like that, who've convinced themselves that they're just anxious people. But when you restore bioidentical progesterone, within a few weeks, their sleep is better.
So it's one of those clinical shifts that I think are missed sometimes.
Jillian Woodruff MD (09:51)
Exactly. Ambien, a sleep aid, you were talking about sleep aids. Ambien is one of those medications, or I should say zolpidem. ⁓ The zolpidem, when you're taking this, there are so many issues, especially that they've noted in women, especially in midlife who are taking zolpidem. Also, there are addictive qualities to these types of medications. There have been issues with sleep.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (09:55)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely.
Jillian Woodruff MD (10:18)
walking and even deaths due to things that people are doing when they're not in this fully awake state, but they're also not in this deep restorative sleep state. So it's, you know, jumping to certain medications when we can restore ourselves to a time, perhaps when we didn't have these sleep issues. there's, sometimes people need medications and the sleep issues may have nothing to do with hormones, right? Because
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (10:27)
Yeah.
Right.
Jillian Woodruff MD (10:44)
You can have sleep issues for many different reasons. But in midlife, they start specifically impairing menopause, and I know you have the same number of patients that I have, the biggest issues are sleep, fatigue, and weight gain, right, during this time of life. Typically, it's due to this hormone imbalance or hormone loss.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (10:47)
Yeah.
Jillian Woodruff MD (11:07)
And so rather than band-aiding it with medications that can have other detrimental effects, hormone evaluation seems to be something that we should think about doing, right?
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (11:17)
Especially
brain health, I find that some of these medications actually worsen memory and cause cognitive dysfunction. So that's just one thing, because these medications, they're on the label. They'll tell you that they cause other issues. So definitely, it's not a deficiency in zolpidem and all these other things. They have side effects. So why not replace hormones and see that might be? Maybe that's the problem. Maybe you don't need those medications.
Jillian Woodruff MD (11:41)
Thank you for bringing that up because now we are having more of a conversation about brain health and protection and prevention of ⁓ dementia and such. So yes, that's a great point to make. Okay, testosterone. testosterone, there's so many misconceptions about testosterone and I think those misconceptions cost women dearly. Testosterone is not a man's hormone. It's not a male hormone. It's a sex hormone.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (12:07)
Yeah.
Jillian Woodruff MD (12:08)
that women have in the most abundance. We have more testosterone than we do estradiol, and know you've heard us say it before. And testosterone is also, it's actually also a calming hormone, but it also drives motivation, our physical stamina, our cognitive drive. I always say that it gives us this overall sense of wellbeing.
It's hard to explain, but it's a feeling of being engaged with your life. So when testosterone levels are low, women describe this dimming or just not feeling like themselves, not quite depression, but a kind of flatness, like someone turned down a dial.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (12:46)
Yeah, and this is something that even with testing testosterone, I'm not surprised that they're low, but what's even really daunting is the reference ranges. And I'm sure you agree, Dr. Jill, it's like, you're supposed to have zero to two or whatever lab ranges you're using to test this. And it's like, how can that actually be true? Like you said, we have so much testosterone, even more than estrogen. So why is it normal for us to be zero to two?
Jillian Woodruff MD (13:03)
Yes.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (13:14)
So in every single workup, do check this and I'm consistently not surprised. Women, especially women that are chronically stressed have low testosterone or they have symptoms of testosterone deficiency. And of course it's extremely diagnosed, undiagnosed rather. So yes, get it checked, but just because it's within the normal range doesn't necessarily mean.
you're not experiencing those symptoms. So it could potentially benefit. fact, research consistently identified that unexplained fatigue as one of the most commonly reported symptoms of testosterone deficiency in women alongside reduced motivation, decreased physical capacity. know, patients describing themselves as, don't feel like myself. In fact, I had someone walk into my clinic the other day and just says, I don't know what happened. I used to be able to run six miles three times a week.
Now I need to force myself to get up, to run. What is happening with me? That's exactly what women are describing out there.
Jillian Woodruff MD (14:15)
Wow. Well, first of all, I need to work with her so I can run the... Can I run a couple miles a few times a week?
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (14:18)
Hahaha
six times six miles
three times a week I said well let's get you back there again because that's that's amazing.
Jillian Woodruff MD (14:28)
Yeah, and you know, let's get you back there. That is exactly what women should be hearing from their providers. Not, well, it's good enough if you can run a few ⁓ miles. If she was running six miles, why shouldn't she continue to run that three times a week? Right? I mean, we shouldn't settle.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (14:34)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's who she is. That's where
she needs to be. She needs to be better. That's what gives her the ability to do the things. It reduces the stress. It keeps her weight steady. But now she can't because of perimenopausal symptoms.
Jillian Woodruff MD (14:57)
Well, I'm glad she found you so that she can get to that. Now, on the treatment side, current consensus statements say the only evidence-based indication for systemic testosterone in women is hypoactive sexual desire disorder in postmenopausal women. And this is after proper biopsychosocial assessments. However,
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (14:58)
Yeah.
Jillian Woodruff MD (15:19)
There is compelling evidence, you mentioned some of it, that shows testosterone therapy in women, especially when initiated in the perimenopausal stages lead to significant improvements in fatigue and brain fog and energy, sleep even, and specifically mood. When perimenopausal women are saying, usually they're complaining or their family members are complaining of their irritability.
and that they're a little short tempered or things that didn't used to bother them now bother them. And testosterone in clinical practice I find is the thing that smooths that out. It's pretty much better, right? It can like.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (15:57)
I'm laughing.
I'm laughing because when your kids have to call you out and say, Mom, you know, there are certain things that just irritate you. just that's pretty embarrassing. I was just like, I'm so sorry, kids. It's not you. love you.
Jillian Woodruff MD (16:12)
yes, when you start
snapping at the kids, it's time for your testosterone.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (16:16)
It's time.
But let's be clear to our listeners, know, bio-adietical hormone replacement, especially I feel like after last year when the black box warning came off, I see so many things on social media about HRT and people want it for these different things. Or I want it to be, I want to be like a superstar, like Beyonce or something like that. It's not a cosmetic choice or luxury. It's great for a lot of different things, but...
When your labs show hormone deficiency or you have symptoms of hormone deficiency that's impairing your energy levels, your quality of life, it's medicine, it really is.
Jillian Woodruff MD (16:51)
Yeah, okay. Root cause number two, because we have a long way to go. Number two, thyroid dysfunction. Thyroid, your metabolic regulator. When thyroid output is insufficient, every single process in the body slows down. Your heart rate, your digestion, so people will say that they have more constipation. Temperature regulations, they may feel more.
like especially, you know, your finger hands and your feet are more cold, the skin is more dry, changes in mood, more down, decreased energy production, everything just runs in slow motion and the diagnostic misrate in women for thyroid dysfunction or suboptimal thyroid levels is genuinely troubling to me.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (17:34)
Absolutely. The symptoms of low thyroid and perimenopause are so identical sometimes it's hard to miss. It's easy to miss rather ⁓ fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, hair loss, mood changes, sleep disruption, feeling cold, cold hands and feet. You absolutely can't tell them apart without labs, which is why when a fatigued midlife woman
comes into the clinic, thyroid should always be on the workup. So there shouldn't be any exceptions to that.
Jillian Woodruff MD (18:01)
So here's where the standard of care fails women. And so your standard of care is like, is what any reasonable provider would check for, and would do in a specific situation. So the standard of care is getting a TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, and with a reflex T4, meaning if the thyroid stimulating hormone is abnormal, then the lab will automatically check T4, which is made in the thyroid.
The thyroid makes several different types of thyroid subtypes. You know, there's T1, there's T2, T3, T4. T4 makes the most of. The T4 then is converted in peripheral tissues to the active form, which is T3. So to back up, a complete panel is TSH and T4. Reflex, not even in all situations.
I just happen to disagree with this. TSH is a pituitary hormone. It's released in your brain and it's stimulating your thyroid to release hormone. So if you're just checking that, you're just checking to see if your brain is releasing T, you know, if it's sending a signal, the signal is being sent. TSH will be high, higher than the range. If it's sending a really loud signal because the thyroid's not listening. So this signal gets higher and higher.
And you assume that the thyroid level is going to be low because it's calling for more of it. And so if it's abnormally high, then they'll check the T4 and they may find that T4 is low. If the signal that's sent out of the TSH is really low, it's whispering, it's saying, I don't need any more
You expect that T4 to be high. So,
If the TSH is low, then they may check the T4 and then that may be really high. However, there's like a, your TSH range in most labs is like 0.45 to 4.5. That's a huge range. So if you're, say near the top of that range, that's still normal. And so you may not even check your T4. And we don't even know what your thyroid's doing. So you're just checking a stimulating signal. You're not actually checking what your thyroid is producing.
you need to check T4 to see what's producing. But then after that, what if your thyroid is producing T4, but it's not being converted into a form that actually works for our bodies, which is the T3. So if you're thinking about a complete panel, you need to check the actual hormones that your thyroid is making. That's what I suggest would be checking T4 and T3. Now there are also some antibodies that can work against your thyroid. So you may be making T4.
it may be converted to T3, but it may not be working in your body because you have these antibodies that are kind of, I say fighting against the thyroid. And so, and they may be increased due to other factors that you don't even know about unless you're actually looking for them. So I think the way that we're checking the thyroid and then especially if someone's on medications, that signal is going to be different. If you're on medication for your thyroid,
that signal is going to be decreased from, you you're taking the medication. So you don't really need to send out signals. And so then if you're checking to make sure your thyroid is doing well by just checking a signal that's being falsely manipulated by a medication, to me that just makes no sense. It seems very obvious that you should actually check the hormones your thyroid is making. But clearly it's not common practice.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (21:26)
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And from a functional medicine standpoint, think realizing that there are external things or epigenetics that impact the thyroid. So you can have a clinical where your thyroid isn't functioning well. You can have a conversion issue like you talked about. You're not converting your inactive to the active thyroid hormone where you need at the tissue level, but stress can mess with your thyroid.
you know, paramedic symptoms, know, the foods that you eat, chemicals, lifestyle choices, processed foods can mimic, you know, issues that are telling your body, hey, we need to attack that thyroid. There's something on there we don't like. So like Dr. Jill just said, you could have what's called Hashimoto's disease, which is an autoimmune issue, but it could be genetic, it could be gut dysfunction, it could be a leaky gut where...
All the bad stuff in our gut is leaking out into the bloodstream and attacking your thyroid, which is why, like Dr. Jill said, the TSH is just never enough. If your TSH is within normal limits, your lab says, okay, we don't need to check your other, it doesn't reflex to check everything else. That's why it's often missed. Women are tired, but at the cellular level, your thyroid tissue doesn't have what it needs to make sure that your metabolism is running.
So hopefully this is all starting to click ladies as you're listening to this conversation. So we're going to move on to root cause number four.
Jillian Woodruff MD (22:55)
I will just add iron deficiency. You know, another thing that affects that thyroid, right? You have suboptimal levels when you have low iron. When you have low estrogen, you have suboptimal levels. So everything's connected, right? Root cause number four, adrenal fatigue. you know, it's not recognized as a real thing, but I would say adrenal dysregulation.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (23:08)
Absolutely.
Jillian Woodruff MD (23:18)
Right? And I want to be precise about what the science actually says because the concept points at something real, even if the terminology is a bit inaccurate.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (23:19)
Yeah.
Absolutely, so your adrenal glands sit on top of your kidneys and what they do, it's really important, small, but really important. They help us regulate our stress, so they produce cortisol. What we actually see in research and in clinical practice is what we call HPA axis dysregulation. This just means that there is a disruption in the loop that between your brain,
your pituitary and your adrenal glands. So this governs the whole entire stress response. So when you're stressed, your cortisol is supposed to rise in response to that stress. So it's not that those glands, the adrenal glands are broken, it's just that there's a rhythm that's kind of off in some way.
Jillian Woodruff MD (24:11)
Yeah, and the pattern matters because the cortisol pattern, because it looks different. You can have cortisol that spikes too high in the morning and never properly declines. You can have a flat curve with no morning peak. And then you're dragging all day from the moment you wake up.
or, and this is the one I see most in midlife women, cortisol that is elevated at night when it should be at its lowest. So how can you possibly sleep when you have a second peak in the evening?
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (24:40)
Yeah, that last one, the wired but tired. Yes, women say they just feel awake at night time. So I'm exhausted, but I can't turn off my brain at night. I lie there for an hour before I can sleep. So it's not anxiety. This is a measurable cortisol rhythm problem. So checking your cortisol, and there's different ways, different providers will check them. There's the four-point salivary panel that can be checked. There's blood tests that can be checked. It really depends on.
Some people even go as far as checking the urine. But in general, the research, there's one that was published in 2025 review of the American Journal of Medicine that confirmed that HPA access dysregulation as a clinically distinct syndrome driven by chronic stressor load. So, you know, have abnormal cortisol rhythm. You're not able to respond to stress very well. You're tired, but you can't sleep. You're irritable.
So this study really shows that if you're able to calm the nervous system by doing things like taking adaptogens like ashwagandha, example, relieving stress, yoga, lifestyle can really help support the nervous system so you're not so exhausted.
Jillian Woodruff MD (25:49)
You know, that's right. And I do have people that come and they know about cortisol and they want to have a cortisol test. And I will say, you know, some of these things are difficult to test for. And so sometimes, you know, a provider may not be, they're not really holding back something that would be helpful, but traditional testing.
you're doing a cortisol, a spot test isn't that helpful. I don't find it that helpful. You know, you could do one where you're testing a morning cortisol level, but you really need the pattern. So just having one early morning, especially if you do not have a true like adrenal dysfunction or, you know, an adrenal crisis or something, you're not going to get anything that meaningful from a spot test.
because you would have had such overt symptoms leading you to already know that it would be abnormal. I don't know if I'm making sense with that, but having a test like you mentioned, the salivary one, where you're doing several throughout the day, so you're doing an early morning one, an afternoon, a pre-dinner, post-dinner, and night time, the pattern is what really is gonna be important when we're talking about something like this, which is...
the dysregulation that's leading to fatigue, not necessarily like an adrenal, a congenital adrenal disease or adrenal crisis or something, right? Yeah. This midlife woman that we're talking about is often working. She's raising children. She's managing aging parents simultaneously. Research called our generation, the sandwich generation, you this is the time at midlife.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (27:07)
Right?
Jillian Woodruff MD (27:23)
where you're getting stressors, know, family stressors from above and from below, from your parents, from your children and things. And the mental load just doesn't turn off. There's this sustained, relentless psychological stress is exactly the input that dysregulates this HPA axis that you mentioned over months and over years. And, you know, I'll add something personal here. Looking back at that, you know, time in my garage.
It wasn't just hormones or lack of sleep or nutrition issues that led to this fatigue. It was, you I think I had normalized a level of stress and responsibility that my body was never designed to sustain. And I was constantly anticipating and managing and planning and just always on, you know? And so when that becomes your baseline, you don't even realize how much energy it's costing you.
Ade Akindipe, DNP, APRN (28:16)
Right,
right.
Jillian Woodruff MD (28:17)
And what's interesting is being on holiday, on vacation, with that layer removed, my body does feel completely different. But I want to be clear that although I do love to be on holiday, I don't have to be on holiday or be traveling to feel this way. Because what I've learned is that it's not just about escaping your life, it's about changing how your body experiences your life.
There's a concept I've been reading about recently how some of us get so used to being in a constant state of anticipation and responsibility that calm actually feels very unfamiliar. And not because we want to be stressed, but because our nervous system has learned that on is normal. And I think a lot of high achieving women don't realize they're just not tired. They're never actually off. So yes, hormones matter. Very important. Sleep.
Very important nutrition, very important. But if your nervous system never gets a break, your body never gets a chance to recover. And sometimes it's not just what's wrong in your labs, it's what's never turning off in your life.
Jillian Woodruff MD (29:20)
That right there, I think so many women are going to hear themselves in that because it's not just, it's not that you don't love your life. It's that you're carrying so much of it. And when you're constantly in that role of anticipating, managing and being needed, your body never actually gets a chance to recover. And that's where this stops being just about stress and starts becoming something physiological.
One connection I do want to make here because this is where things get really important is that chronic stress can impact how your body regulates multiple systems at once. It can affect sleep. can affect your metabolism and it can influence how your body uses in response to hormones. So you can feel off even when your basic labs look quote normal.
And that's why we always have to zoom out and really take a good lens and look at the full whole picture, not just one number or something within your reference range.
Jillian Woodruff MD (30:18)
Everything talks to everything. And that's actually the opportunity here because when you start supporting one system, you often start improving others at the same time. And I think that's the biggest takeaway from everything we've talked about so far today. So if you're listening to this and thinking, this is me, I just want you to pause for a second because you're not lazy. You're not unmotivated. You're not unproductive. And you're not imagining this. Your body is responding to real physiological changes.
hormones shifting, sleeping disruptive, stress that never fully turns off. And for so many women, it's not just one thing, it's all of these layers happening at the same time. And the biggest mistake we see is trying to push through it instead of actually understanding what's driving it. And here's the truth, we've only covered part of the picture because in the next episode, we're going to show you exactly how to figure out what's actually driving your own fatigue. Not in theory, but in a way you can take to your provider or doctor or start acting on immediately.
We're going to break down blood sugar, nutrient levels, inflammation, and more importantly, exactly what labs matter, what most providers and doctors are missing, and what actually moves the needle when you're exhausted. If you've ever been told your labs are normal, but you still feel terrible, that's the episode you don't want to miss. Because the goal here isn't just to understand why you're tired, it's to actually fix it.
So if today's episode made you feel seen, send it to a woman in your life who keeps saying they're tired because chances are she thinks it's just normal aging and it's not. And make sure you're following the show so you don't miss part two because that's where we actually start fixing this.
Jillian Woodruff MD (31:56)
We'll see you next week in part two because your exhaustion is not your destiny. So thank you for listening. Goodbye.