The many reasons you may be fatigued in Menopause

Feeling really exhausted by normal daily life is not an unusual experience for many women during the perimenopause and menopause. Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms reported during the menopause. This can be both physical and psychological.

You can feel simply exhausted – some women describe a bone deep type of fatigue like you are wading through cement and feel physically heavy and unable to move. You could also feel “tired but wired”, a type of fatigue that is driven by fatigue and anxiety combined – you might feel exhausted but at the same time anxious and on edge and unable to sleep.

In a recent study conducted in the UK of over 3,000 women, 67% said they were suffering from fatigue and felt a lot more tired than in the pre-menopause years.

Many different factors add up and deplete your energy levels every day, but in menopause your changing hormones are a huge factor and can make you physically exhausted. Additionally changing hormones can disrupt your sleep, which will leave you feeling tired and lethargic with brain fog. If you experience low mood, which can be a menopausal symptom for many women, this can also make energy levels drop.

Another physical cause of fatigue in menopause is joint pain and declining muscle strength, which is caused by declining estrogen. This makes it harder for you to mobilise and affects your functional capacity and can make you tired at the end of the day as you have had to work harder throughout the day to do your normal activities.

Fatigue affects your motivation and drive to eat well, exercise and also do other things that are good for you such as socialisation and connection. There can also be many other calls on your time and energy. Juggling work and caring for children and older relatives can be all part of busy schedules, and lead to you feeling worn out.

Other menopausal symptoms like anxiety, overwhelm or brain fog, can also erode your usual levels of resilience and ability to manage a hectic timetable.

It is common for perimenopausal and menopausal women to also have an underactive thyroid. Your thyroid is a gland which releases hormones to helps regulate metabolism, which controls how much energy you release from food. If you are excessively fatigued beyond what you might have been 6-12 months ago, it is worth seeing your GP and having a blood test which covers your thyroid, blood glucose levels, iron and immune markers and anything else your GP recommends. We can’t attribute everything to hormones, and it may be another cause or something else contributing to menopause fatigue.

Bottom line on fatigue is that it is not in your head. There are very physical and real reasons you are fatigued in menopause which can affect you both physically and psychologically.

Stay tuned as over the coming weeks we will add ways to manage fatigue to our library.

Reference:

Harper J.C. et al (2022), ‘An online survey of perimenopausal women to determine their attitudes and knowledge of the menopause’, Womens Health (Lond). 18:17455057221106890. doi: 10.1177/17455057221106890