@drgreghealth: Here's why your burnout in your 50s and 60s might be a lot more physiological than you think. I've been a functional medicine doctor for more than 25 years, and I need you to hear this. It is not a character flaw, and it is not just getting older. Your HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis that produces cortisol, does not operate in isolation. Estrogen directly affects how your body metabolizes cortisol. Progesterone, which normally has a calming effect on your nervous system, becomes erratic and unreliable as its production declines through perimenopause and menopause. So the exact same stressors you used to shake off at 35 now land on a stress response system that has lost some of its own built-in buffering. That is what produces the specific, miserable feeling so many women describe. Wired but tired. Exhausted but unable to actually rest. Then it becomes a loop. Poor sleep raises cortisol further, which lowers your resilience to the next stressor, which disrupts sleep again. This is a hormone and nervous system problem, not a willpower problem. Treating it like one is exactly why just relax more has never worked. Does wired but tired describe your evenings? Find the root. Heal the whole.

Dr. Greg

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Thursday 15 October 2026 15:06:55 GMT