Links Mentioned in the Episode
Learn more about the Living Midlife Well Member Community on Substack
Learn more about the Living Life Well Member Community on janinelattimore.com
I have two membership community platforms - one on Substack and one through my janinelattimore.com website. The benefits and content are the same for each of them:
* a weekly newsletter
* a weekly 20 minute wellbeing guided video or audio - this links to the content of the newsletter and is like an extended guided practice
* a monthly live group coaching call + replay
The difference is that the newsletter for the Substack member community is a long-form article whereas the newsletter for my website membership community is a shorter tips and highlights style email.
Transcript
What if the reason you’re exhausted has nothing to do with how much sleep you’re getting?
What if tiredness in your forties and fifties isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you — but a completely understandable response to decades of doing life at full intensity, with barely a moment to breathe?
Today I want to talk about something I think so many of us are quietly carrying but rarely say out loud: that bone-deep weariness that doesn’t go away, no matter how early you get to bed.
I’m going to share three types of midlife exhaustion that might explain exactly what’s going on in your body and nervous system right now — and then I’m going to give you a roadmap to three kinds of rest that can actually help. Not rest as in “do nothing and hope for the best,” but rest that works at a biological, mental, emotional and even spiritual level.
And I’m going to start by reading you something I wrote almost exactly a year ago.
For many years now I have been waking up tired, frequently feeling exhausted, falling asleep if I am sitting for a relatively short period of time and often feeling like I am living on a treadmill of to-do’s and I don’t know how to get off. I haven’t had a holiday of more than 2–3 days in about fourteen years, and that was to Auckland with the kids and I was pregnant with my son and had really bad morning sickness. It isn’t just that I haven’t had opportunity, the thought of stopping and having a holiday to “just relax” causes me to feel on edge. It would take several days for my nervous system to unwind even if I did go away.
Can you relate to any of that?
If you’re nodding along — even a little — then what I’m about to share is for you. Because that kind of tiredness? It’s not just your story, and it’s not just mine. It’s something that is showing up for so many people at this stage of life, and I think it’s worth understanding why.
Kia ora and hello, welcome to the Living Midlife Well podcast. I’m Janine Lattimore, a wellbeing writer and coach here to help people in midlife get off the treadmill of stress and exhaustion, rediscover their joy, and create a life that is aligned with who they really are and what they really want.
By their forties and fifties many people are starting to experience a deep weariness. It is connected to years of intense stress, demand, responsibility and also experiences of loss, heartbreak, unfulfillment, disappointment and failure. We are tired of our time being taken by things we don’t want to do and not being able to do the things we want to do. Many of us have carried the invisible load for decades — the unseen mental, emotional and logistical effort required to manage our relationships, families, and households. In our work and homelife we have been consistently required to do the non-stop exhausting labour of anticipating, planning, organising and remembering moving parts in the responsible role of adulting.
It is absolutely understandable that you are tired. Tired maybe even more than you know. It is not weakness. Modern life can drain the life out of any and possibly all of us. I don’t think that a longing for rest is something new, but I think that we are experiencing it in a new way due to the rapid development of technology leading to globalisation and almost constant lifestyle changes and updates. Those of us in our forties and fifties now lived through the dawning of the digital information age. We remember, not just in our minds, but also in our bodies, a slower, quieter, more personally connected life before personal computers, the internet, mobile phones and social media. I think that this adds to the impact of the fast-paced change and the weariness we feel.
And into all of this, gets thrown the turmoil caused by major hormone changes at this stage of life.
So that’s the backdrop. That’s the weight we’re carrying before we even get out of bed in the morning. And what I want to do now is get specific — because not all exhaustion is the same, and understanding which type you’re experiencing is the first step to knowing what you actually need.
Let me walk you through the three types of midlife exhaustion.
By midlife, chronic stress is affecting us in three main ways: fatigue, freeze and burnout; hyperstimulation — that wired-but-tired feeling; and what I call dis-ease, which is stress-related illness. Let’s look at each one.
Exhaustion Type 1: Fatigue, Freeze and Burnout — When Your System Has Simply Had Enough
Ongoing stress drains your energy — even low-level ongoing stress which affects you like apps constantly running in the background on your phone. This can manifest as fatigue, brain fog, procrastination, difficulty making decisions, forgetfulness, emotional flatness and loss of interest in socialising. Freeze, which is a second layer survival — or stress — response after fight or flight, can look like feeling numb, depressed, hopeless, disassociated and/or shut down. Burnout can happen when you experience too much emotional, physical, and mental fatigue for too long. You move beyond the overwhelm of stress into feeling depleted, used up, hopeless, cynical, and resentful.
Does that resonate? That flat, used-up feeling that goes beyond just being tired? Now let’s look at the second type — and this one might surprise you, because it doesn’t look like exhaustion from the outside at all.
Exhaustion Type 2: Wired but Tired — Why You Can’t Switch Off Even When You Want To
Hyperstimulation is the sensation of being constantly switched on and struggling with switching off — or in other words, feeling tired but wired. It can look like overworking, over giving, overthinking and over-functioning, all while being unable to stop or sometimes even sit still for long. If you have difficulty stopping and resting, then it is likely that your nervous system is stuck in survival mode. There are usually subconscious beliefs operating underneath this for you. Experiences you had when you were young that taught you that being still was somehow unsafe, that rest equals weakness, or that if you don’t perform, you don’t matter.
This second type is one I see very often — people who look busy and capable from the outside, but who are running on fumes underneath. And the third type is where the body starts sending the most urgent signals of all.
Exhaustion Type 3: When Stress Makes You Sick — The Body’s Long-Term Bill for Chronic Pressure
Long-term activation of your stress response system causes overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones which can cause inflammation and disrupt almost all of your body’s processes. This type of chronic stress can put you at risk for a variety of health issues including muscle tension and pain, headaches, infertility, heart disease, heart attack, weight gain, insomnia, auto-immune conditions and stroke. Long term stress keeps your body in a survival state where your body down-regulates systems not connected with fight or flight such as your immune system, your digestive system and your reproductive system. This can make you more prone to illness and slower to recover from it, stimulate or worsen digestive issues, and suppress your libido and sexual function.
You can experience issues from more than one of these areas at the same time. By midlife it is quite common to be experiencing all three in various ways.
So, we’ve named what’s happening. And I hope just having language for it gives you some relief — because when we can name something, we stop making it mean that something is fundamentally wrong with us, and we can start doing something about it.
Now, I want to talk about rest — but not in the way you might expect.
Midlife exhaustion is not just physical and therefore the rest we crave and need is not just physical. By this stage of life, a big part of rest is also experiencing inner peace — which is mental and emotional peace, and also spiritual. Not spiritual in a religious sense, but in the sense of self awareness and living in coherence with your values and what is important to you.
And here’s something I want to gently challenge — something I hear from peo
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About Living Midlife Well
I'm Janine Lattimore, a wellbeing coach helping people in midlife get off the treadmill of stress and exhaustion, rediscover their joy, and create a life that is aligned with who they really are and what they really want.
Living Midlife Well — helping you slow down, feel better and enjoy life more, one simple step at a time.
Reclaim your time
Restore your energy
Build meaningful relationships
Rediscover yourself
Janine Lattimore | Living Midlife Well | janinelattimore.com
