The Art of Healing

How Chronic Busyness Hijacks Your Hormones And Energy

• Charlyce Davis MD Reiki Practitioner

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Ever feel wired but somehow exhausted, like your brain won’t shut off even when your body begs for rest? We dive into the hidden physiological price of being everyone’s go-to, especially for women in their 40s and 50s, and why chronic busyness silently derails sleep, mood, and metabolism. Drawing on real-world patient patterns, we connect the dots between nonstop demands and hormonal shifts that don’t show up as “willpower problems” but as progesterone dips, low DHEA, cortisol swings, and sluggish thyroid conversion.

We break down how the lizard brain flags late-night emails as danger, setting off survival mode that flattens your spark. You’ll learn the lived signs of low progesterone—irritability, restless nights, pre-period sensitivity—and how adrenal depletion pulls resources away from calm and toward stress chemistry. We also unpack the cortisol and DHEA partnership, what happens when DHEA declines faster than age alone would predict, and the overlooked link between stress and poor T4-to-T3 thyroid conversion that produces brain fog, cold intolerance, brittle nails, hair shedding, constipation, and weight creep despite “doing everything right.”

Most importantly, we map out a sustainable path back. Cycle intensity instead of grinding daily: swap some HIIT for walks, yoga, Pilates, mobility, or breath work to give adrenals a true break. Build protein-first mornings with healthy fats to stabilize blood sugar and support cortisol rhythms. Create real sleep boundaries by setting Do Not Disturb two hours before bed while allowing emergency contacts. Consider gentle adaptogens like ashwagandha, rhodiola, and holy basil, and move from guessing to clarity with targeted labs: DHEA-S, TSH with free T3 and free T4, and appropriately timed progesterone testing. You’ll walk away with a practical, compassionate toolkit to protect energy, restore mood, and feel grounded again without abandoning the people and work you love.

Start the free Harmonize Your Energy Workshop and destress during this 90-minute workshop:

Harmonize Your Energy



If this helped, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs permission to slow down, and leave a quick review so others can find it. Your next step: set your phone’s nighttime mode tonight and tell us how your wind-down changes your sleep.



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SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to the Art of Healing Podcast. I'm Dr. Shiv Charlise. And if we've met before, good to see you again. If this is our first time to meet, welcome. So nice to meet you. The Art of Healing Podcast comes out on a regular basis. Been a little rough lately. I've been a little busy and a little bit tied up for multiple reasons. But the podcast is here as well as a version of this will be on my website, HealingArts Health and Wellness.com. And I invite you to sign up for my newsletter where a copy of this and other valuable resources comes out once a week. Today's episode, I wanted to cover the hidden cost of having a busy life, especially after the busy holidays. For many of us women, especially in middle life in your forties and fifties, your life is go, go, go. You probably have multiple roles in your life: wife, mother, grandmother, sister, auntie, best friend, the interpersonal 911, the emergency call, the supporter. So more than likely for women in our age group, there are multiple places you need to be at any point in time. And this excludes, you know, probably your work or career life. So probably you've got responsibilities at work, meetings and task and supervision, and the list just never ends. So this is life, but sometimes we are so focused on being productive and making sure that we check off all the boxes, that we we don't notice the subtle changes that are happening, particularly at this stage in life where it's important to be aware that these subtle changes are happening, and we don't want the changes to stack up too much and catch us by surprise when we have a whole bunch of symptoms. So when you are the go-to person that's getting everything done, and then occasionally you take a moment to yourself, is this taking a toll on your health? Is there a hidden cost? And this is a good question to ask, especially after the holidays where you may have been even more busy. So women that are high performing who are getting it done, here's things that you might be noticing. You are wired but tired. So tired, you just feel like you can't stay awake. But when you lay down to go to sleep, you don't go to sleep. You're doing everything right, but your energy is still lacking. You still feel tired despite eating right and exercising. You used to feel like you were unstoppable, you were a superhero, you may have been your own version of the Avengers, and now you can barely focus. So if any of that sounds familiar, it may be that your go, go, go hero, shiro lifestyle is taking a toll on your hormones. So let's talk about what that looks like, how to think about it, and some possible next steps. So while it might feel really good to have all of those things on your plate and take care of all of those tasks, your body doesn't actually interpret it that way. Interestingly enough, when you are in that sort of getting it all done, highly productive mode, what is happening underneath is that your body, particularly what's called the lizard brain or the lower brain, the brain, part of your nervous system that surveys your natural environment, checks for threats, checks for harm. It might actually be interpreting that as that you're under constant threat. So, for instance, when you're checking your email late at night for work and you discover something's there, meaning you forgot about something like that. Although you might cognitively know that, hey, I'll take care of that in the morning, stressful, but it's not a threat to my life. Your nervous system might interpret that as a direct threat on your life, and then you're trying to lay down and go to sleep, and that email is out there, and lo and behold, you really can't relax, or you might fall asleep from sheer exhaustion and then wake up shortly thereafter, stressed and worried, and you can't even recall why. When you're in a state of chronic stress, your body feels that it has to go into survival mode. So why don't we talk about what effect that has on your hormones? The first is your progesterone levels, and I'm sorry, let me qualify. Hormones are important for both male-gendered and female gendered. The rest of this discussion primarily focuses on female-gendered, however, for male-gendered individuals, it's a similar reaction, although the reaction may not be as dramatic, but male-gendered also have a similar reaction to chronic stress. So for female-gendered women, the first thing that becomes altered and is gonna respond poorly to that chronic stress and being hyperproductive is your progesterone levels. Progesterone, when we are in our reproductive years, serves the function of improving fertility by supporting the release of a follicle and egg during ovulation and then supporting the implantation of the embryo and early pregnancy. We need a certain amount of progesterone for a number of functions. What we feel, what we feel from progesterone when our levels are adequate is that we feel rested, we feel grounded. Progesterone actually encourages sleep. That's why, as a hormone replacement therapy, it's often recommended to take at night because it can promote a feeling of relaxation or just frankly being sleepy. When you're under chronic stress, one of the first hormones that's going to take a hit that you're going to notice is that your progesterone levels might become very low. They may even become non-detectable. I've noticed in my own patients when we're working through that process and trying to figure out what their body needs, the progesterone levels become undetectable. Like we don't see it in their serum, I'm sorry, in their blood work, and we don't see it in their saliva testing. When your progesterone is low, what you'll notice is feeling anxious or edging. If you are having periods, that feeling may become even more magnified before the period comes. You will have trouble sleeping, and this may be night after night, and this can lead to severe exhaustion, which is terrible, so terrible to go through that. Your mood. So progesterone what you feel, the lived experience, is that it can be an emotional buffer against the world, life. When that level goes low, you may feel irritable, weepy, and very, very sensitive. What I've noticed in my own practice is that some women will say that before their period, they used to feel fine, but now they're noticing they feel almost like a completely different person. So this is because those progesterone levels have gone really low. They're not starting to go up like they need to, and this is a direct response of your body being under constant stress, the adrenal glands getting a chemical signal to divert the building blocks of progesterone into other chemicals, especially stress-related chemicals. One of those is cortisol. You can think of cortisol as your firefighter, fighting off inflammation, and you can also think of another important adrenal hormone, DHEA, as the fireproof foundation. Both are produced in the adrenal glands, but DHEA helps to buffer from the effects of chronic stress, reduce inflammation, support your energy as well as your mood. DHEA is also good for your skin and your muscle. We have a natural decline in our DHEA production with age. Then when you add on top of that chronic, unrelenting stress, your DHEA will be driven down even faster. So once your DHEA is low, things that you might notice include fatigue that doesn't get better even with sleeping more or napping, a decrease in your libido, increased susceptibility to colds, viruses, and even injuries, and having a hard time recovering from them, especially if you were someone who could typically recover from those pretty quickly. And then a flat feeling, sort of like your sparkle or your spark is not there. All of those are signs that your DHEA level may be becoming kind of low. DHEA, in my experience, is one that's easily overlooked as a hormonal imbalance. Particularly, DHEA is a form of a building block that helps you produce your other hormones that you do feel the effect of immensely. So being aware of your DHEA levels, especially if you're a busy woman who's on the go, is a must. And also, it's actually pretty easy to get it checked. It's actually something that your uh clinical team can easily order for you, or you can do at home with a horn saliva test. Next to these is your thyroid function. So your thyroid works is a multi-purpose hormone that I sometimes explain is like a metabolic thermostat. So it turns the heat up or down in your body. Thyroid hormones interact with pretty much every part of the body's skin, hair, digestive tract, nervous system, muscles, so kind of like almost every part of the body is affected by thyroid hormones. What you feel is your energy, uh, how hot or cold you feel? Because uh sometimes we think that's in our head, but if your thyroid levels are off, you may actually be cold. Your temperature may be too low. Digestion, being overactive, sluice stools, not absorbing your food, or the other way where you're not able to eliminate, you're constipated in the brain. How well you think, your memory, your cognition, all of that heavily affected by thyroid. When you're under chronic stress, your body's ability to convert the form of thyroid that it uses as the stored, which is called the T4, into the active, which is the T3. So under stress, your body has trouble making that conversion, meaning that the amount of T3 you have that your body might actually need is not appropriate. And what you might feel is just sluggishness, fatigue, brain fog, forgetful, skin is dry, nails are breaking and brittle, hair loss, weight gain, even when you're doing all the right things in life. So understanding that these hormones are directly impacted by having an overly busy life is very important. Now that we've explored this link between stress and these hormones, let's talk about what we can do so that we don't have to go through the burnout. So let's explore how we can stop this before it starts. So the first bit of advice you might think is quit everything, change your name, live under an assumed identity, and move somewhere else to start over. So, well, that wouldn't be very much fun. It might be fun for about 72 hours, but you love your life, you love the people in your life, you love what you do for them. So we don't necessarily have the luxury of dropping at all and walking away. We probably wouldn't want that. But what we can do is take a few simple steps to protect our energy. One of those, one of the most important, I had to remind myself recently, is give your adrenal glands a break. So the high-intensity workouts, weights, and and structured cardio and circuit training, so very important, especially in the perimenopause and menopause state where we don't want to lose muscle and gain fat. And we need those, but there are times, especially if you're recovering from the holidays, you got to travel and shop and cook and all of that stuff, that you might have to slow it down. So you might want to try a different form of movement like mindful walks, yoga, Pilates. You might even want to step things down to just doing some breath work on some days. When you do this, of course, you're not getting the sweat-inducing workout. However, it's letting your nervous system reset in a gentle way, and that may be what your body is asking for. Next, eat like your hormones depend on it because they do. So for women, especially in the perimenopausal transition or menopause, starting your day with a high quality protein and high quality fats, keeps your blood sugar stable, keeps your energy high, it supports your brain and your muscles, and that can support normal cortisol rhythms. So you may want to get away from the higher carbohydrate things like just cereal or just drinking coffee by itself. Prioritizing your sleep is if there is just no other option. This is kind of a hard one, but this really just involves you acknowledging that you need at least seven hours of sleep. You may need up to nine hours of sleep. So things like understanding when the evening's coming that maybe you aren't as accessible, so you aren't on as many screens. You may have to start turning off some devices, disconnecting, logging off, even social media, and some of those things. So it's easier to do that. For instance, if you're listening now, this is a good chance right now. If you're on the podcast, I'm just gonna take a guess that you're listening on your cell phone to go under your settings. Uh, I think it's pretty similar on Android or Apple to look for a do not disturb or nighttime setting, I believe it's called. Go into there and make sure that you set it for about two hours before you would go to bed. I think most of these phones now might even just look myself while we're we're talking about it. I'm actually going into my cell phone, but under your settings, I think most of ours uh do uh nighttime or do not disturb. So I have an Android, for instance. So mine's got an eye shield setting, and I've got mine to follow the um natural sunrise and sunset. So my phone will start dialing down the blue light towards the evening time automatically. But under notifications, and I'm on an Android, I have a do not disturb, and I have mine set every night. Um, and honestly, I could do better. My do not disturb starts from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. for me. But if you want to have a look at your phone, your settings now, and you can automatically set up your do not disturb also under your phone. I do this with my patients, so please forgive me, podcast listeners, but you're busy folks, and so we're just gonna take a moment do this now. Um, you also can set up your do not disturb to give yourself some peace of mind. So for mine, my do not disturb a lot allows for calls and messages. That way I don't miss an emergency, but it turns off app notifications, and those might be like the social media and those kind of things that not really that important. So I don't need to see them at night necessarily. Uh, and then I allow for my alarm to wake me up during the morning. So on your phone. Um, and even if you didn't do it now, just make a note to yourself to do it later to go into that setting and automatically set it, especially for busy women. No point in trying to remember to do that at some other time. But that will train you and your body and everything that night is truly for winding down and you can uh respect your sleep. The next thing we want to do is support your stress response. So, adaptogens that we take in in the form of herbs, ashwagandha, rhodiola, and holy basil. You can find those in herbal teas or maybe even in supplements. It's good to start including those in terrinthimetrest. And it's I'm talking about this now. I think I'm probably gonna do a little shopping in my own full script store and get stocked up on those. And my final tip is testing, and don't guess. So, testing your TSA, your thyroid levels, your DHE levels is actually very simple. It can be done with an at-home saliva test, it could be ordered with your doctor. There's a number of ways to do that. So I will put in your show notes a few resources that you can get the test on your own, or the terms that you would ask your doctor for so that you could find out what those levels are. So, for women, we are just powerful. Women are amazing for the women in my life. I know, I'm amazed at what they get done. But we want to make sure we honor what our bodies need. And the way that life is now, sometimes we don't have an advocate to do it. So we have to make sure to do it for ourselves. So I hope your takeaway from this episode is that although it is great to be all things to all people. That there's times that you should wind down, and it's for your health and for your body. Before you go, if you'll check your show notes, I will put a link to one of my favorite resources. It's called the uh Harmonize Your Energy Workshop. So when you sign up, the uh link is going to take you to a free online course, and it's a recording of this workshop that was really popular several months ago. You will have a chance to deeply explore major hormones in your body, and you'll also have a chance to learn about how these hormones line up with your energy centers. This training's totally free. There's some resources within the training that you can print up that you can use. And most importantly, during the training, you'll have a chance to really be with your own energy. The experience was quite relaxing. The attendees that did it just love the experience because it was interactive. And it's also a preview for an event that's coming that I'm going to tell you about fairly soon. We're going to be getting together live for a few days in a row, and we're going to do a deep dive of the hormones. More to come on that, but if you want to make sure you're the first that's notified, you'll definitely want to sign up for my newsletter. So thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. As always, on Dr. Charlie's, if you have questions for me, send me an email. Wherever you're listening to your podcast, you have a way to just shoot me a message right there. And you can find me at Dr. Charlie's under any major social media or just even Google that, and that'll take you to me. All right. Until next time. Thanks so much.

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Dr. Charlyce

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