Why can’t I make myself do anything anymore?

Is it just me? I don’t think it’s just me. Lord, I hope it’s not just me. My dear friend Donna and I have these animated conversations while we’re on neighboring treadmills next to each other during our ill-fated “scheduled” gym sessions. We commiserate about the fact that we have the absolute best of intentions about meeting up with each other regularly and about our nutrition. But it rarely works out that way. Why can’t we just stick with it? Why is it so daunting? It almost never fails, we’ll stick to our plans for 2-3 days in a row and then on the 4th day, one of us will text the other and say “I can’t get out of my pj’s today” or “I have no desire to move off my couch.” We both feel the same lethargy, the same apathy. And now that the summer has arrived and I’ve hightailed it to the beach for the season, I’ll only see her sporadically when I’m back in Pennsylvania. But during the fall and winter when we try to prioritize our fitness routines, our most common conversation is “Why is this so hard?” When it comes to both exercise and nurtition, we KNOW what we need to do, but why is it so hard to make ourselves do it?

I have literally nothing but time on my hands these days and I can’t seems to make myself do anything productive at all, whether it’s fitness related or anything else. I’ve seen articles (ok, to be fair I’ve seen TikToks which leads me to look up articles) about executive dysfunction or other such buzzy terms that they say are a symptom of perimenopause and menopause. If this is true, someone please tell me when I’m going to come out of the other end of this tunnel. I’m not trying to use it as an excuse to be lazy and read - I honestly truly can’t seem to function. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had been on HRT for several years but due to abnormal bleeding I’ve been off of everything for the last 4 months. And I think I’ve never felt worse, honestly. I have an appointment within the next month to re-evaluate my hormone situation now that everything is clearly out of my system and to see what my base levels are now at age 57. But if estrogen and progesterone can bring back some level of “giving a crap” about anything in life, I’m so interested in starting them back up again.

I go to bed each night with the full intention of getting up in the morning to go for a nice walk and listen to an audio book. But when morning comes, I absolutely can’t drag myself out the door to make it happen. Or I’ll have paperwork I have to do for Ross’s business, knowing exactly what I need to do and that it will take me about 30 minutes - but I can’t make myself sit down and focus on the task at hand. It’s a legitimate problem. My brain absolutely can’t handle anything that requires structure. Sitting down to type this newsletter was literally unplanned and is basically a brain-dump activity so it’s ok. But if I had to sit down and say “what am I going to write about?” my brain would freeze and it wouldn’t have happened. The level of procrastination and avoidance is unparalleled, and that is unlike me - I’ve always been a task-oriented and goal-driven person. I always thrived on completing a checklist. Now, however, checklists stress me out because I can’t manage to complete anything and that just stares at me in the face as a huge blinking FAILURE sign.

All of this fogginess isn’t new for me, but I do think it’s worse since I’ve been off all my hormones. And then last week while Ross and I were driving home from the beach, we listened to a fascinating podcast. It was The Drive Podcast with Dr. Peter Attia, episode #348. His guest was Dr. Rachel Rubin who is a urologist and they were talking about women’s sexual health, menopause, and HRT. I’ve attached a link below and I highly recommend the episode to all women, regardless of your age - Dr. Rubin was so informative and it was so refreshing to hear a medical professional agree that women have had nowhere to turn for decades to get answers to any questions they may have about HRT and healthy aging. But it was this podcast that got me thinking more and more about the link between estradiol and my brain issues. Of course there aren’t really any studies on this because all of the connections between female hormones and female health and weight gain and brain health and cardiac health in women and the correlation between all of it is considered “new” medicine.

So go listen to that and educate yourselves on the pros and cons of HRT. And be prepared to advocate for yourselves when your doctors say “you don’t need that” or “HRT isn’t good for you.” Because once you hit perimenopause, you’ve still got half a lifetime to go! And a half a lifetime of wading through mental mud and feeling like you’re just existing instead of living is no way to live. We’ve got to do better.

Love, Karen