Many women start struggling with sleep once they hit mid-life. Hormonal changes, life stress, and changing rhythms can combine in a perfect storm of less quantity and less quality sleep.
When you wake up after a poor night’s sleep, your instinct is likely to take it easy. Rest. Go slow. Maybe skip the gym and do something low impact and low intensity.
I’m no stanger to poor sleep.
I can’t remember a time in my life when I regularly got a full 8-hours. And my sleep quality usually isn’t great.
But I’ve found that my instinct to take is slow and sleep more usually doesn’t help my fatigue. In fact, it often makes it worse and leaves me dysregulated.
Here’s what does help: intensity.
Even if I have to drag my feet out of bed and drag myself to the gym, once I start moving with more intensity, all the brain fog clears and the cloud of fatigue lifts.
I’ve come to understand that this feeling of fatigue I feel is actually a depleted dopamine state.
Moving with intensity helps get my heart rate up and gives my system a challenge that helps it produce dopamine.
It’s counter-intuitive, but it works.
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