1
00:00:05.697 --> 00:00:07.118
Hi, it's Dr. Christy Goodwin.
2
00:00:07.158 --> 00:00:08.859
Welcome back to Spacious Success.
3
00:00:09.139 --> 00:00:13.202
There are two real reasons why you're possibly more exhausted than you've ever been.
4
00:00:13.762 --> 00:00:19.226
But until today, you've probably only ever heard of or even considered one of them.
5
00:00:20.583 --> 00:00:21.604
One of them is hormonal.
6
00:00:22.085 --> 00:00:26.710
One of them is entirely new and it has nothing to do with your age or your gender.
7
00:00:27.330 --> 00:00:39.063
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.
8
00:00:39.543 --> 00:00:49.330
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.
9
00:00:50.091 --> 00:01:00.178
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.
10
00:01:00.838 --> 00:01:15.033
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.
11
00:01:19.299 --> 00:01:27.728
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.
12
00:01:28.348 --> 00:01:42.162
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.
13
00:01:42.943 --> 00:01:43.744
Fatigue was.
14
00:01:44.405 --> 00:01:46.607
Physical and mental exhaustion was.
15
00:01:47.247 --> 00:01:54.534
Both of them ahead of the one symptom that every one of us has often been fixated on looking for.
16
00:01:55.335 --> 00:02:05.184
That finding comes from a study published in 2026 in the journal Menopause, and it surveyed over 17,000 women across 158 different countries.
17
00:02:08.587 --> 00:02:21.496
Now, closer to home, Metloomers' 2026 Australian Menopause Experience Report, close to 1,500 women found pretty much the same pattern.
18
00:02:22.097 --> 00:02:27.701
Fatigue, not flushes, was sitting right at the top of symptoms that people were experiencing.
19
00:02:28.401 --> 00:02:45.122
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.
20
00:02:45.963 --> 00:02:54.091
62% of women state that cognitive overload reduces their energy levels, whilst 53% say that it ruins their sleep.
21
00:02:54.431 --> 00:02:55.172
We all know that.
22
00:02:55.873 --> 00:03:03.060
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.
23
00:03:03.680 --> 00:03:08.363
I was hearing woman after woman in my coaching programs lament their exhaustion.
24
00:03:08.963 --> 00:03:20.149
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.
25
00:03:20.790 --> 00:03:24.291
And if anything, why had it been getting worse over time?
26
00:03:25.052 --> 00:03:30.135
Because at the same time, I kept noticing something else in a completely different context.
27
00:03:30.981 --> 00:03:44.389
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.
28
00:03:45.029 --> 00:03:47.271
Not, I've just overcommitted this month tired.
29
00:03:47.751 --> 00:03:51.433
Not, this is the end of the financial year or a new launch kind of exhaustion.
30
00:03:52.153 --> 00:03:59.298
Something more like, my operating system has changed and nobody's told me why I'm so tired.
31
00:03:59.318 --> 00:03:59.858
Right?
32
00:04:00.058 --> 00:04:02.540
Brain fog that was never there two years ago.
33
00:04:02.560 --> 00:04:06.864
A shorter fuse that used to take a lot longer for it to light up.
34
00:04:07.425 --> 00:04:09.987
Waking up, feeling already behind.
35
00:04:11.028 --> 00:04:25.662
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.
36
00:04:26.262 --> 00:04:34.353
Not because she's less capable, but because something in her day is now costing and depleting her more than what it used to.
37
00:04:35.525 --> 00:04:39.126
I remember the exact moment it often collapsed into one thought for me.
38
00:04:39.886 --> 00:04:47.589
I was rereading my own notes from a coaching session, the ones where the executive and made her nine o'clock decisions.
39
00:04:48.189 --> 00:04:54.951
And believe it or not, directly underneath those notes in a different notebook was a report.
40
00:04:55.671 --> 00:04:56.612
My report notes.
41
00:04:57.192 --> 00:05:00.913
I had been reading same fortnight, same notebook,
42
00:05:01.413 --> 00:05:03.294
two different files apart.
43
00:05:03.894 --> 00:05:06.915
And I sat there thinking, these aren't two different problems.
44
00:05:07.616 --> 00:05:09.816
I'm tracking the same problem.
45
00:05:10.057 --> 00:05:14.858
This is one woman, most weeks, trying to carry both.
46
00:05:15.679 --> 00:05:21.161
I'll be honest, some of what I'm describing, I've recognized in myself too, in more recent times.
47
00:05:21.821 --> 00:05:24.003
And I'd like to talk about it.
48
00:05:24.544 --> 00:05:38.216
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.
49
00:05:38.696 --> 00:05:39.917
And I want to share it with you today.
50
00:05:40.658 --> 00:05:43.160
And here's what worries me the most about both of these.
51
00:05:43.840 --> 00:05:48.964
Almost every ambitious woman that I speak to defaults to blaming herself first.
52
00:05:49.605 --> 00:05:50.726
I must be getting soft.
53
00:05:50.986 --> 00:05:53.428
I used to be able to handle things so much more.
54
00:05:53.668 --> 00:05:55.129
Maybe I need better boundaries.
55
00:05:55.610 --> 00:05:56.791
Maybe I'm just getting older.
56
00:05:57.471 --> 00:05:59.192
Maybe I've lost my edge.
57
00:06:00.053 --> 00:06:06.139
Nobody's first instinct is to think that there might be other things, other measurable things that were happening to us.
58
00:06:06.659 --> 00:06:10.603
So we reach for a story where we tell ourselves we're the ones to blame.
59
00:06:10.623 --> 00:06:11.864
It's a personal failing.
60
00:06:12.605 --> 00:06:18.290
And where we ignore what might be biologically or cognitively causing this.
61
00:06:19.030 --> 00:06:23.675
Now, that's costing women time and energy that they just don't get back.
62
00:06:24.622 --> 00:06:29.326
And then in a completely different context, there was my laptop issue.
63
00:06:30.227 --> 00:06:32.670
My laptop is barely 12 months old.
64
00:06:33.250 --> 00:06:37.354
And most days in recent months, it's been flat by 11 in the morning.
65
00:06:38.015 --> 00:06:41.518
I've started plugging it in before lunchtime, which I never had to do.
66
00:06:41.538 --> 00:06:42.639
Now, I've checked.
67
00:06:42.819 --> 00:06:44.140
There's nothing wrong with the battery.
68
00:06:44.160 --> 00:06:44.741
I've checked.
69
00:06:44.821 --> 00:06:49.603
But I have been asking my laptop to run flat out since 9am.
70
00:06:50.104 --> 00:06:56.907
I'll often have two Claude design tabs open on my internet browser, the Claude desktop app running a task in the background.
71
00:06:57.187 --> 00:07:06.192
I'll have some other tasks running, constant context switching between presentation decks, drafts of emails, drafts of blog posts.
72
00:07:06.912 --> 00:07:13.336
Now, I mentioned this on stage a few times, and people often would come up afterwards and say, me too.
73
00:07:14.236 --> 00:07:19.679
Delegates telling me after the presentation that their laptop or their phone does the exact same thing.
74
00:07:20.359 --> 00:07:24.722
The same fatigue keeps surfacing in the coaching sessions that I offer too.
75
00:07:25.342 --> 00:07:27.583
Different language, but similar pattern.
76
00:07:28.084 --> 00:07:36.148
Capable, high-functioning people, men and women, who are running out of charge before the day was supposed to end.
77
00:07:37.028 --> 00:07:39.250
And pardon the pun, but that's when it clicked for me.
78
00:07:40.250 --> 00:07:44.114
My laptop had been tangibly showing me something the whole time.
79
00:07:44.854 --> 00:07:48.357
I know multitasking burns through glucose.
80
00:07:48.558 --> 00:07:52.441
It's our energy supply, the way that a battery burns through charge.
81
00:07:52.942 --> 00:08:00.789
And every single switch between tasks draws on the exact same resources that your prefrontal cortex needs to think about.
82
00:08:01.469 --> 00:08:08.091
My laptop was showing me in real time what my own brain had been doing all day.
83
00:08:08.652 --> 00:08:09.912
I was depleting myself.
84
00:08:10.752 --> 00:08:18.075
Neither my battery on my laptop or my brain was designed to run flat out, uninterrupted, oscillating between tasks for eight hours.
85
00:08:18.955 --> 00:08:23.577
And when I realized those conversations were joined, that's when things changed.
86
00:08:24.598 --> 00:08:30.822
Separately, the biology, the hormonal conversation about hormones and cycles has also intersected.
87
00:08:31.563 --> 00:08:34.184
They're not, I don't believe, unrelated.
88
00:08:34.585 --> 00:08:35.365
And hold with me.
89
00:08:36.046 --> 00:08:45.352
I think they're stacking on top of each other on the same finite resources that almost nobody is naming or considering.
90
00:08:46.827 --> 00:09:00.262
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.
91
00:09:01.475 --> 00:09:15.348
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.
92
00:09:15.949 --> 00:09:20.613
They were fatigue and physical and mental exhaustion, both at 83%.
93
00:09:22.375 --> 00:09:24.656
Hot flushes came in well behind that.
94
00:09:25.437 --> 00:09:34.042
And among the women who specifically identified as being in perimenopause right now, it was even more pronounced.
95
00:09:35.122 --> 00:09:39.345
These women also reported physical and mental exhaustion.
96
00:09:40.085 --> 00:09:42.346
Irritability was at around 80%.
97
00:09:42.726 --> 00:09:44.287
Depressive mood was at around 77%.
98
00:09:44.327 --> 00:09:45.968
And sleep issues were related at around 76%.
99
00:09:50.911 --> 00:09:55.254
Now, I think there's a strong nexus between all of those, and they're not isolated symptoms.
100
00:09:55.875 --> 00:10:02.560
But hot flushes, flushes wherever you come from, sat at around 50% of self-reported symptoms.
101
00:10:03.200 --> 00:10:04.581
Now, think about what that means.
102
00:10:05.102 --> 00:10:14.268
The symptom that everyone's been culturally primed to look out for, the hot flush, is actually the dominant experience for many women.
103
00:10:14.308 --> 00:10:15.749
Not all women, but for many women.
104
00:10:16.390 --> 00:10:17.171
Exhaustion is.
105
00:10:18.011 --> 00:10:18.891
Fatigue is.
106
00:10:19.452 --> 00:10:24.594
And exhaustion and fatigue don't come with visible, nameable moments that the hot flush does.
107
00:10:25.334 --> 00:10:33.397
It just quietly becomes your new norm, your new way of operating, until you've forgotten what it feels like to feel good.
108
00:10:34.157 --> 00:10:37.040
I hear this so often with my coaching clients.
109
00:10:37.641 --> 00:10:50.053
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.
110
00:10:50.813 --> 00:10:54.036
And because so much of the language around this menopausal transition
111
00:10:54.917 --> 00:11:05.803
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.
112
00:11:06.723 --> 00:11:11.025
They instead just quietly conclude that they have become less resilient.
113
00:11:11.766 --> 00:11:16.308
The MetLuma report added two things that genuinely really surprised me.
114
00:11:17.008 --> 00:11:21.450
First, nearly one in four of the women in the study were under 44.
115
00:11:22.711 --> 00:11:26.032
This isn't reliably a 50-year-old's transition.
116
00:11:26.752 --> 00:11:34.395
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.
117
00:11:34.975 --> 00:11:38.976
It was her stage in the perimenopausal-menopausal transition.
118
00:11:39.596 --> 00:11:44.598
Whether her cycle was still regular, was it becoming irregular, or had it stopped altogether,
119
00:11:45.258 --> 00:11:50.960
It actually explained the symptom pattern better than how many birthdays she's had, her chronological age.
120
00:11:51.740 --> 00:11:59.242
And that same Australian report found close to a third of women say that menopause is affecting their work directly.
121
00:11:59.762 --> 00:12:04.343
And a similar proportion say it is affecting their primary relationships.
122
00:12:05.406 --> 00:12:08.267
This isn't confined to how you feel at 10 o'clock at night.
123
00:12:08.868 --> 00:12:13.890
It's showing up in the meeting room at 10 a.m. And it's following you home.
124
00:12:14.531 --> 00:12:15.871
So that's layer one.
125
00:12:16.191 --> 00:12:16.992
I think it's real.
126
00:12:17.172 --> 00:12:17.852
It's measurable.
127
00:12:18.353 --> 00:12:23.555
It's currently undernamed, especially compared to how much airtime hot flushes get.
128
00:12:24.295 --> 00:12:27.457
And here's why these two layers aren't just badly timed.
129
00:12:28.157 --> 00:12:32.500
I think, Christy hypothesis, that they might be mechanically related.
130
00:12:33.465 --> 00:12:41.511
If you heard episode two, where I talk about the stress superstorm, you already know that estrogen does far more than manage our cycle.
131
00:12:41.952 --> 00:12:43.253
It modulates dopamine.
132
00:12:43.293 --> 00:12:45.634
It supports our prefrontal cortex function.
133
00:12:46.155 --> 00:12:54.201
The exact region that gets taxed every single time you switch between tools, where you multitask, where you toggle.
134
00:12:55.001 --> 00:13:00.466
And when estrogen starts fluctuating, that region has less support to begin with.
135
00:13:01.146 --> 00:13:07.710
Now, add in our new digitally demanding environments that hammer that region of the brain all day.
136
00:13:08.590 --> 00:13:10.551
And you're not just having a hard week.
137
00:13:11.051 --> 00:13:20.797
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.
138
00:13:21.637 --> 00:13:26.861
Professionally, this isn't a private inconvenience or a productivity problem.
139
00:13:27.441 --> 00:13:45.194
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.
140
00:13:45.734 --> 00:13:51.821
That's organizations potentially losing their sharpest thinking in women without knowing why.
141
00:13:52.381 --> 00:13:55.845
Now, here's layer two, and this one has nothing to do with hormones at all.
142
00:13:56.506 --> 00:14:00.410
This is the digital load and the digital intensity of our workdays.
143
00:14:01.131 --> 00:14:07.217
Professor Gloria Muck has spent years studying attention spans, and her findings are uncomfortable to hear.
144
00:14:08.098 --> 00:14:16.308
On average, Gloria's work suggests that we now spend 47 seconds on a screen before our attention is fractured.
145
00:14:16.909 --> 00:14:22.056
And it can take more than 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption.
146
00:14:23.077 --> 00:14:25.800
23 minutes per interruption.
147
00:14:26.703 --> 00:14:33.747
Boston Consulting Group looks specifically at what happens when people add AI tools into their work days.
148
00:14:34.427 --> 00:14:42.632
Now we might expect productivity climbs when we adopt these tools and it also can drop.
149
00:14:43.572 --> 00:14:48.975
We know that when we're adding multiple tools, our output doesn't always multiply too.
150
00:14:49.516 --> 00:14:52.017
We're often multiplying our toggling.
151
00:14:52.297 --> 00:14:53.578
It's called the toggling tax.
152
00:14:54.213 --> 00:14:55.494
And here's what's happening.
153
00:14:55.814 --> 00:14:57.515
Two different mechanisms.
154
00:14:58.255 --> 00:14:59.176
One is hormonal.
155
00:14:59.696 --> 00:15:00.617
One is digital.
156
00:15:00.917 --> 00:15:04.379
But they draw on the exact same finite resource.
157
00:15:04.919 --> 00:15:05.699
Your attention.
158
00:15:06.200 --> 00:15:06.940
Your energy.
159
00:15:07.400 --> 00:15:10.282
Your prefrontal cortex's ability to think clearly.
160
00:15:11.122 --> 00:15:12.483
Neither of them are your fault.
161
00:15:12.763 --> 00:15:15.105
Neither one is something that you could have simply...
162
00:15:15.945 --> 00:15:17.987
done differently or wheeled your way through.
163
00:15:18.728 --> 00:15:29.618
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.
164
00:15:30.595 --> 00:15:34.578
Now, one more thing that I want to say very overtly and plainly.
165
00:15:35.219 --> 00:15:47.128
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.
166
00:15:48.176 --> 00:15:50.457
So what do we actually do?
167
00:15:50.878 --> 00:15:58.983
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?
168
00:15:59.543 --> 00:16:03.866
Well, I think we can start with the one thing that we can influence today.
169
00:16:04.826 --> 00:16:06.548
Consider it the fourth tool rule.
170
00:16:07.168 --> 00:16:14.715
Look at your next work block and count how many tech tools, tabs, AI systems are you actively switching between.
171
00:16:15.536 --> 00:16:24.604
If it's four or more, maybe even three or more, you're sitting where Boston Consulting Group's data shows productivity reverses.
172
00:16:24.784 --> 00:16:25.685
It goes backwards.
173
00:16:26.465 --> 00:16:27.947
Pick your essential three.
174
00:16:28.627 --> 00:16:43.295
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
175
00:16:43.835 --> 00:16:54.460
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.
176
00:16:54.920 --> 00:16:58.722
Use apps like Ovum or MetLuma to track some of your symptoms.
177
00:16:59.522 --> 00:17:00.563
Keep this data.
178
00:17:00.703 --> 00:17:02.224
Look for trends over time.
179
00:17:02.804 --> 00:17:18.375
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.
180
00:17:19.321 --> 00:17:30.049
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.
181
00:17:30.929 --> 00:17:38.475
Now, remember, your stage and pattern predicts what's happening in the data far more than what your chronological age did.
182
00:17:39.281 --> 00:17:43.744
Now, both of these protocols share the same underlying move.
183
00:17:44.424 --> 00:17:47.887
You're not trying to override your human operating system.
184
00:17:48.127 --> 00:17:51.049
You're not trying to outwork your inbox through will.
185
00:17:51.669 --> 00:17:57.253
You're reducing the number of things that draw on the same depleted resource at once.
186
00:17:57.833 --> 00:18:02.556
So whatever capacity you do have can hopefully start to go further.
187
00:18:03.697 --> 00:18:07.461
And if only one of these lands for you right now, that's fine.
188
00:18:08.041 --> 00:18:12.865
You don't need both mechanisms operating to make either of these worth considering.
189
00:18:13.626 --> 00:18:18.450
If you're nowhere near perimenopause, the fourth tool rule will still apply to you.
190
00:18:18.811 --> 00:18:22.134
If you're a male listening in, the fourth tool rule applies to you too.
191
00:18:22.894 --> 00:18:27.318
If your work is already lean and focused, the second one still matters.
192
00:18:27.338 --> 00:18:27.619
Okay.
193
00:18:28.139 --> 00:18:32.122
Neither of these will fix everything overnight, but they're specific.
194
00:18:32.602 --> 00:18:34.343
I think they're doable and achievable.
195
00:18:34.783 --> 00:18:44.430
And they're the difference between managing two very invisible loads and finally being able to see them for what they actually are.
196
00:18:45.859 --> 00:18:48.620
So here's today's takeaway.
197
00:18:49.300 --> 00:18:51.100
You are not more fragile.
198
00:18:51.400 --> 00:18:52.580
You are not broken.
199
00:18:53.141 --> 00:19:03.463
You are carrying two very real documented loads that didn't exist together in this combination until this point in time now.
200
00:19:04.083 --> 00:19:06.103
And naming both of them is not indulgent.
201
00:19:06.403 --> 00:19:07.264
It's not a privilege.
202
00:19:07.544 --> 00:19:08.764
It's just accurate.
203
00:19:09.504 --> 00:19:11.264
Your power up this week is simple.
204
00:19:11.804 --> 00:19:16.085
Pick one of today's two protocols and actually implement it.
205
00:19:16.285 --> 00:19:18.006
Implement it just once this week.
206
00:19:18.626 --> 00:19:20.066
Document your exhaustion.
207
00:19:21.406 --> 00:19:24.187
Refuse to adopt more than three tech tools.
208
00:19:25.167 --> 00:19:27.968
Exhaustion doesn't mean you're failing at something.
209
00:19:28.508 --> 00:19:31.689
And it doesn't mean that women before you manage with more ease.
210
00:19:32.289 --> 00:19:38.750
You are facing unique digital demands that no one has experienced in the years leading up to this.
211
00:19:39.960 --> 00:19:53.547
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.
212
00:19:54.810 --> 00:20:04.552
I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuroperformance scientist, speaker, author, and executive coach who uses biometric data from wearable devices.
213
00:20:05.233 --> 00:20:08.453
Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Spacious Success.
214
00:20:09.034 --> 00:20:12.414
Before you go, I want to tell you about something new.
215
00:20:13.035 --> 00:20:22.557
I've recently launched the Powered Up Table, and this is an executive keynote for female leaders delivered around an actual physical table.
216
00:20:23.037 --> 00:20:27.499
a lunch or a breakfast built on the science that I've talked about today.
217
00:20:28.339 --> 00:20:44.765
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.
218
00:20:45.585 --> 00:20:50.987
I'd love to be able to bring this information and some solutions to your female colleagues.
219
00:20:51.847 --> 00:20:59.576
If today resonated, share it with a friend whose laptop and whose body have both been trying to tell her something recently.
220
00:21:00.457 --> 00:21:02.839
Slow down, release the load.
221
00:21:03.440 --> 00:21:04.261
Thank you for listening.