I was chatting to a client recently and she looked at me with complete frustration.
“I don’t get it, Teressa. I go to bed around 10 o’clock, I sleep until nearly six, yet I wake up feeling like I haven’t slept at all.”
Maybe you’ve said something similar….
Or perhaps you’ve found yourself wondering why you’re so exhausted during the day, only to find that when your head finally hits the pillow, your brain suddenly decides it’s time to wake up.
It’s such a common conversation in my clinic, particularly with women in their forties and fifties. They often tell me, “I know I’m sleeping because the clock says I’ve been in bed for eight hours. So why do I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck?”
It’s a fair question….
Because we’ve all been taught that if you sleep for seven or eight hours, you should wake feeling refreshed. It sounds simple enough.
Except our bodies aren’t quite that simple. One of the biggest misconceptions I see is that sleep is all about how many hours you’re in bed. In reality, your body is doing an enormous amount of work while you’re asleep.
Some stages of sleep are light. Others are where your brain files memories, your immune system repairs tissues, your hormones rebalance, and your nervous system finally gets the opportunity to settle.
If you spend most of the night drifting in lighter stages of sleep, you’ll often wake feeling as though someone quietly unplugged your battery overnight.
I sometimes explain it to clients like this……
Imagine plugging your phone into the charger before you go to bed. You wake up the next morning expecting 100%, but instead it’s sitting at 28%. ( I have done this so many times.) The phone was plugged in all night, but something interrupted the charging.
Your body can do something very similar. You’re asleep… but you’re not necessarily restoring.
That’s where so many women become confused. They think, “Maybe I just need to go to bed earlier.” Or they buy another sleep supplement.
Or they assume it’s just their age. (I hate that assumption – age does not define us)
Sometimes those things help…. Quite often they don’t….. Because the real question isn’t, “How many hours did you sleep?” The better question is, “What stopped your body from repairing while you were asleep?” That’s where things become really interesting. Over the years, I’ve found there usually isn’t just one answer.
Sometimes it’s stress hormones quietly ticking along in the background, even though life doesn’t feel particularly stressful anymore. Sometimes it’s blood sugar rising and dipping through the night without ever fully waking you.
For some women, it’s the hormonal shifts of perimenopause changing the way the brain settles into deep sleep. For others, it’s a nervous system that’s simply never been given the chance to switch off after years of running on go.
And very often, it’s not just one of these — it’s two or three working together. This is why I rarely believe in quick fixes.
If poor sleep were simply caused by a magnesium deficiency, we’d all be sleeping beautifully by now. Our bodies are far more intelligent—and far more complex—than that.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that many women have become so used to feeling tired that they’ve forgotten what waking refreshed actually feels like.
They tell me they need two coffees before they can think straight. That the afternoon slump is “just normal.” That everyone wakes a few times through the night. That forgetting words is simply part of getting older. (Oh, it is not!!)
None of those things are necessarily normal. They’re common—but common and normal aren’t always the same thing.
Your body is usually trying to tell you something long before it starts shouting. Sometimes waking exhausted isn’t the problem at all. It’s simply the clue.
And once we understand why your body isn’t getting the deep restorative sleep it needs, we can stop guessing and start supporting it in the way it actually needs.
That’s exactly why I’ve created my Tired But Wired Masterclass
I want to help you understand what your body has been trying to tell you all along, because when you understand the physiology behind why you’re exhausted yet can’t switch off, everything starts to make a lot more sense.
Warmly,
