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033 | The Double Load: Why You're More Exhausted Than You've Ever Been · Spacious Success

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Hi, it's Dr. Christy Goodwin.
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Welcome back to Spacious Success.
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There are two real reasons why you're possibly more exhausted than you've ever been.
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But until today, you've probably only ever heard of or even considered one of them.
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One of them is hormonal.
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One of them is entirely new and it has nothing to do with your age or your gender.
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Today, I want to name both of them properly because I think many women are carrying twice the load and have only ever been given language for possibly only half of it.
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Hi, I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuro-performance scientist, speaker and executive coach who learned the hard way that chasing success can come at a cost.
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After burnout landed me in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who are done trading their health and happiness for high performance.
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On Spacious Success, I share science-backed strategies and real stories to help you flourish as a female at work and beyond so you can stop paying the success tax.
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Here's a number that should be getting a lot more attention than what it's actually getting, getting in the media, getting in social media.
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When two separate studies this year asked women what they're actually experiencing physiologically and psychologically around the perimenopause and menopausal years, hot flushes weren't the number one answer.
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Fatigue was.
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Physical and mental exhaustion was.
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Both of them ahead of the one symptom that every one of us has often been fixated on looking for.
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That finding comes from a study published in 2026 in the journal Menopause, and it surveyed over 17,000 women across 158 different countries.
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Now, closer to home, Metloomers' 2026 Australian Menopause Experience Report, close to 1,500 women found pretty much the same pattern.
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Fatigue, not flushes, was sitting right at the top of symptoms that people were experiencing.
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The 2025 House of Wellness Women's Health Survey found that around 60% of Australian women reported feeling exhausted all or most of the time, driven heavily by stress, anxiety, and the invisible mental load.
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62% of women state that cognitive overload reduces their energy levels, whilst 53% say that it ruins their sleep.
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We all know that.
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When I first read these studies, it explained something that I'd been circling around for months without being able to actually land on it.
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I was hearing woman after woman in my coaching programs lament their exhaustion.
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During keynote Q&As and panel discussions, women, not men, but women were the ones asking why their fatigue wasn't lifting, why it felt denser than ever before.
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And if anything, why had it been getting worse over time?
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Because at the same time, I kept noticing something else in a completely different context.
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Women in my orbit, roughly my age, some younger, some slightly older, describing a level exhaustion that wasn't burnout, but a persistent, low-grade feeling of depletion.
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Not, I've just overcommitted this month tired.
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Not, this is the end of the financial year or a new launch kind of exhaustion.
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Something more like, my operating system has changed and nobody's told me why I'm so tired.
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Right?
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Brain fog that was never there two years ago.
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A shorter fuse that used to take a lot longer for it to light up.
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Waking up, feeling already behind.
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One executive that I coached told me that she now writes her most important decisions down and addresses them before nine in the morning because she knows by lunchtime she doesn't trust her own judgment and level of execution anymore.
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Not because she's less capable, but because something in her day is now costing and depleting her more than what it used to.
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I remember the exact moment it often collapsed into one thought for me.
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I was rereading my own notes from a coaching session, the ones where the executive and made her nine o'clock decisions.
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And believe it or not, directly underneath those notes in a different notebook was a report.
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My report notes.
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I had been reading same fortnight, same notebook,
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two different files apart.
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And I sat there thinking, these aren't two different problems.
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I'm tracking the same problem.
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This is one woman, most weeks, trying to carry both.
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I'll be honest, some of what I'm describing, I've recognized in myself too, in more recent times.
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And I'd like to talk about it.
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Not every symptom and not necessarily what you'd expect, but enough that when I started looking at it from my firsthand experience and then dove into the data, it explained far more than what I wanted to acknowledge.
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And I want to share it with you today.
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And here's what worries me the most about both of these.
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Almost every ambitious woman that I speak to defaults to blaming herself first.
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I must be getting soft.
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I used to be able to handle things so much more.
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Maybe I need better boundaries.
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Maybe I'm just getting older.
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Maybe I've lost my edge.
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Nobody's first instinct is to think that there might be other things, other measurable things that were happening to us.
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So we reach for a story where we tell ourselves we're the ones to blame.
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It's a personal failing.
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And where we ignore what might be biologically or cognitively causing this.
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Now, that's costing women time and energy that they just don't get back.
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And then in a completely different context, there was my laptop issue.
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My laptop is barely 12 months old.
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And most days in recent months, it's been flat by 11 in the morning.
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I've started plugging it in before lunchtime, which I never had to do.
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Now, I've checked.
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There's nothing wrong with the battery.
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I've checked.
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But I have been asking my laptop to run flat out since 9am.
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I'll often have two Claude design tabs open on my internet browser, the Claude desktop app running a task in the background.
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I'll have some other tasks running, constant context switching between presentation decks, drafts of emails, drafts of blog posts.
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Now, I mentioned this on stage a few times, and people often would come up afterwards and say, me too.
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Delegates telling me after the presentation that their laptop or their phone does the exact same thing.
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The same fatigue keeps surfacing in the coaching sessions that I offer too.
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Different language, but similar pattern.
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Capable, high-functioning people, men and women, who are running out of charge before the day was supposed to end.
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And pardon the pun, but that's when it clicked for me.
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My laptop had been tangibly showing me something the whole time.
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I know multitasking burns through glucose.
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It's our energy supply, the way that a battery burns through charge.
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And every single switch between tasks draws on the exact same resources that your prefrontal cortex needs to think about.
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My laptop was showing me in real time what my own brain had been doing all day.
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I was depleting myself.
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Neither my battery on my laptop or my brain was designed to run flat out, uninterrupted, oscillating between tasks for eight hours.
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And when I realized those conversations were joined, that's when things changed.
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Separately, the biology, the hormonal conversation about hormones and cycles has also intersected.
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They're not, I don't believe, unrelated.
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And hold with me.
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I think they're stacking on top of each other on the same finite resources that almost nobody is naming or considering.
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So I want to name the first layer properly, and I want to put the full data behind what I just told you, because it directly contradicts what most of us have been told to expect.
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We know that among women 35 and older, that in the menopause journal study that I mentioned at the start of this episode, the two most commonly reported experiences of symptoms were not hot flushes.
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They were fatigue and physical and mental exhaustion, both at 83%.
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Hot flushes came in well behind that.
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And among the women who specifically identified as being in perimenopause right now, it was even more pronounced.
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These women also reported physical and mental exhaustion.
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Irritability was at around 80%.
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Depressive mood was at around 77%.
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And sleep issues were related at around 76%.
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Now, I think there's a strong nexus between all of those, and they're not isolated symptoms.
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But hot flushes, flushes wherever you come from, sat at around 50% of self-reported symptoms.
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Now, think about what that means.
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The symptom that everyone's been culturally primed to look out for, the hot flush, is actually the dominant experience for many women.
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Not all women, but for many women.
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Exhaustion is.
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Fatigue is.
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And exhaustion and fatigue don't come with visible, nameable moments that the hot flush does.
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It just quietly becomes your new norm, your new way of operating, until you've forgotten what it feels like to feel good.
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I hear this so often with my coaching clients.
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It's not until they start to restore their sleep, increase their energy, or rejuvenate their focus that they remember and have lived experience of what it's like to function and feel at an optimal state.
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And because so much of the language around this menopausal transition
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still centres and fixates on hot flushes, many women have never thought to mention the fatigue or exhaustion to their GP or their health professional as a possible symptom at all.
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They instead just quietly conclude that they have become less resilient.
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The MetLuma report added two things that genuinely really surprised me.
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First, nearly one in four of the women in the study were under 44.
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This isn't reliably a 50-year-old's transition.
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Second, and this is the one that I want you to sit with, is what actually predicted how much a woman was struggling wasn't her age.
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It was her stage in the perimenopausal-menopausal transition.
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Whether her cycle was still regular, was it becoming irregular, or had it stopped altogether,
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It actually explained the symptom pattern better than how many birthdays she's had, her chronological age.
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And that same Australian report found close to a third of women say that menopause is affecting their work directly.
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And a similar proportion say it is affecting their primary relationships.
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This isn't confined to how you feel at 10 o'clock at night.
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It's showing up in the meeting room at 10 a.m. And it's following you home.
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So that's layer one.
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I think it's real.
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It's measurable.
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It's currently undernamed, especially compared to how much airtime hot flushes get.
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And here's why these two layers aren't just badly timed.
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I think, Christy hypothesis, that they might be mechanically related.
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If you heard episode two, where I talk about the stress superstorm, you already know that estrogen does far more than manage our cycle.
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It modulates dopamine.
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It supports our prefrontal cortex function.
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The exact region that gets taxed every single time you switch between tools, where you multitask, where you toggle.
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And when estrogen starts fluctuating, that region has less support to begin with.
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Now, add in our new digitally demanding environments that hammer that region of the brain all day.
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And you're not just having a hard week.
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You are asking your human operating system, your HOS, to do more, but with less reserves to do the work than what it has ever been asked to do before.
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Professionally, this isn't a private inconvenience or a productivity problem.
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When two of the most demanding decades of a woman's career, the ones where women are carrying all of this institutional knowledge and having to make the most complex judgment calls, is colliding with this digital load, that's an organizational risk.
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That's organizations potentially losing their sharpest thinking in women without knowing why.
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Now, here's layer two, and this one has nothing to do with hormones at all.
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This is the digital load and the digital intensity of our workdays.
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Professor Gloria Muck has spent years studying attention spans, and her findings are uncomfortable to hear.
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On average, Gloria's work suggests that we now spend 47 seconds on a screen before our attention is fractured.
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And it can take more than 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption.
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23 minutes per interruption.
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Boston Consulting Group looks specifically at what happens when people add AI tools into their work days.
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Now we might expect productivity climbs when we adopt these tools and it also can drop.
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We know that when we're adding multiple tools, our output doesn't always multiply too.
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We're often multiplying our toggling.
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It's called the toggling tax.
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And here's what's happening.
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Two different mechanisms.
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One is hormonal.
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One is digital.
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But they draw on the exact same finite resource.
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Your attention.
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Your energy.
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Your prefrontal cortex's ability to think clearly.
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Neither of them are your fault.
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Neither one is something that you could have simply...
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done differently or wheeled your way through.
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But nobody has been naming them together, which I believe is why the exhaustion can feel so much bigger than any single explanation accounts for.
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Now, one more thing that I want to say very overtly and plainly.
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Not every woman listening is in perimenopause or menopause, but the digital load layer applies to every single one of you, regardless of your age, stage, or gender.
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So what do we actually do?
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How do we deal with these two mechanisms when one of them, the biology, isn't something that we can switch off or on on command?
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Well, I think we can start with the one thing that we can influence today.
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Consider it the fourth tool rule.
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Look at your next work block and count how many tech tools, tabs, AI systems are you actively switching between.
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If it's four or more, maybe even three or more, you're sitting where Boston Consulting Group's data shows productivity reverses.
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It goes backwards.
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Pick your essential three.
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close everything else and just for a 90 minute block a digital dash see if you can get through some work this is just one block second and this one's about your biology name it don't ignore it or numb it
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If fatigue, if brain fog, if mood has been unusually persistent for more than a few months, stop calling it just tired and start writing it down.
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Use apps like Ovum or MetLuma to track some of your symptoms.
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Keep this data.
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Look for trends over time.
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Things like which mornings you wake up and you're exhausted, whether it's your concentration and your focus dipping at a certain time in the day, whether your patience is shorter two weeks before your period, or whether it doesn't follow your cycle at all anymore.
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That granular level of specificity is what turns I'm just tired into something concrete that your GP or health professional can hopefully act on.
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Now, remember, your stage and pattern predicts what's happening in the data far more than what your chronological age did.
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Now, both of these protocols share the same underlying move.
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You're not trying to override your human operating system.
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You're not trying to outwork your inbox through will.
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You're reducing the number of things that draw on the same depleted resource at once.
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So whatever capacity you do have can hopefully start to go further.
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And if only one of these lands for you right now, that's fine.
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You don't need both mechanisms operating to make either of these worth considering.
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If you're nowhere near perimenopause, the fourth tool rule will still apply to you.
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If you're a male listening in, the fourth tool rule applies to you too.
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If your work is already lean and focused, the second one still matters.
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Okay.
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Neither of these will fix everything overnight, but they're specific.
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I think they're doable and achievable.
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And they're the difference between managing two very invisible loads and finally being able to see them for what they actually are.
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So here's today's takeaway.
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You are not more fragile.
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You are not broken.
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You are carrying two very real documented loads that didn't exist together in this combination until this point in time now.
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And naming both of them is not indulgent.
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It's not a privilege.
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It's just accurate.
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Your power up this week is simple.
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Pick one of today's two protocols and actually implement it.
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Implement it just once this week.
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Document your exhaustion.
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Refuse to adopt more than three tech tools.
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Exhaustion doesn't mean you're failing at something.
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And it doesn't mean that women before you manage with more ease.
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You are facing unique digital demands that no one has experienced in the years leading up to this.
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Next time on Spacious Success, we're going to stay close to this thread and we're going to discuss and interview another ambitious and accomplished woman who is going to share her wins, her anecdotes and experiences.
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I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuroperformance scientist, speaker, author, and executive coach who uses biometric data from wearable devices.
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Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Spacious Success.
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Before you go, I want to tell you about something new.
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I've recently launched the Powered Up Table, and this is an executive keynote for female leaders delivered around an actual physical table.
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a lunch or a breakfast built on the science that I've talked about today.
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If you lead a team of senior women or you have a leadership event and you want to give them something real weight but with tangible takeaways, please visit drchristigoodwin.com forward slash speaking and look for the Powered Up Table button.
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I'd love to be able to bring this information and some solutions to your female colleagues.
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If today resonated, share it with a friend whose laptop and whose body have both been trying to tell her something recently.
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Slow down, release the load.
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Thank you for listening.