There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't show up on a blood panel. It lives in the heaviness of your limbs when you wake up, in the fog that sits behind your eyes by midmorning, in the way your body stopped feeling like yours somewhere along the way & you can't quite name when it happened.
For most women, it creeps in slowly. A little weight that won't budge no matter what you do. A cycle that starts acting strange. Sleep that doesn't restore you the way it used to. Emotions that feel too big, too close to the surface, too hard to explain to the people around you.
& almost always, somewhere along the way, a doctor who tells you that you need to eat better, stress less, maybe lose some weight.
My mom heard that for seven years.
Seven years of something being deeply, undeniably wrong in her body. It started in her early twenties. Weight gain that made no sense given what she was eating. Fatigue that didn't match her life. Strange purple stretch marks from skin that was thinning without explanation. Her body was whispering. She listened, but the people she turned to for answers weren't ready to hear it yet.
Then in her thirties, a traumatic experience. & everything her body had been quietly signaling turned into a scream.
The symptoms that followed were relentless. Hair loss. Memory loss. Days without sleep because her cortisol was so high her nervous system couldn't settle. Mood swings that felt violent & foreign, the kind where you're angry all the time & you know it's not you, but you can't stop it. Weight that gathered in her stomach, her face, her back. Bones thinning. Muscles weakening. Pain that lived everywhere & had no name.
She was put on 17 different medications. She was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, then rheumatoid arthritis, then fibromyalgia. A therapist once told her to eat more fish, as if her suffering was a nutritional oversight.
What she actually had was Cushing's disease. A condition caused by chronically elevated cortisol, in her case driven by not one but two tumors. One on her adrenal gland. One on her pituitary. It was found almost by accident, when a doctor finally ordered a CT scan for stomach pain my mom had waited a full year to even mention, because she was so used to being dismissed.
She had brain surgery. She had her adrenal gland removed. & slowly, over the course of about a year, her body began to find its way back.
I'm telling you her story because it is an extreme & visceral example of something that is actually happening on a spectrum. In bodies everywhere. Maybe in yours.
Cortisol is your primary stress hormone. It's not inherently bad. It's what wakes you up in the morning, helps you respond to danger, gives you the energy to meet a deadline. But your body was designed to produce it in short bursts, not as a baseline state.
Chronic cortisol is when your body goes into an overactive state with no signal to turn it off. Think of it like a fire alarm going off in your body. Your body is signaling to you there's a threat, but the source of the threat is unknown & it is constant.
& when stress becomes chronic, when it gets so woven into daily life that it stops feeling like stress & just starts feeling like Tuesday, that alarm never gets switched off. Cortisol stays elevated. & elevated cortisol does not stay in its lane.
It suppresses your thyroid function, which is why chronic stress can look like hypothyroidism. It disrupts your progesterone production, which throws off your entire cycle. It raises your blood sugar & promotes fat storage, particularly around the abdomen. It interferes with sleep, & poor sleep raises cortisol further, & the loop tightens. It dampens your immune system, sharpens your anxiety, flattens your mood.
It can make you feel like a stranger in your own body.
My mom described her experience like this. It was like having a party where five people showed up, but my body thought hundreds of people were there. Her system was in full emergency response, all the time, for years. Not because anything catastrophic was happening in her daily life. Because her physiology had lost the ability to stand down.
Most of us will never have Cushing's disease. But many of us are living with a nervous system that doesn't fully know how to stand down either. The stressors are different. Work. Relationships. Grief. The relentless pace of modern life. The pressure to hold everything together. But the hormonal consequences rhyme.
I'm letting you in on all of this to tell you, your symptoms are not in your head. Your exhaustion is not laziness. Your cycle changes, your weight shifts, your mood swings, your brain fog. These are not character flaws or failures of willpower. They are your body communicating, in the only language it has, that something needs attention.
The women who come to this work, to somatic healing, to nervous system regulation, to the slow & patient practice of coming home to themselves, are often women who have spent years being told their bodies are the problem. Women who learned to distrust what they feel because the people around them kept offering explanations that didn't fit.
I want to offer you something different. Not a diagnosis. Not a protocol. Not a five-step plan. Just this. Your body is not working against you. It is working overtime trying to protect you. & it is worth listening to.
My mom's advice, after everything she's been through? Trust yourself. If you feel like something is wrong, don't ignore it. We know our bodies.
She's right. We do.
The nervous system practices I share, the breathwork, the body scans, the gentle somatic tools, are not going to cure a hormonal condition. If you are experiencing unexplained symptoms that feel serious, please advocate for yourself with a doctor. Push for testing. Get a second opinion. Keep pushing until you are heard.
But for the everyday, chronic, low-grade stress that most of us are swimming in, the kind that slowly, quietly dysregulates our hormones without us even realizing it, there is something you can do. You can begin to tend to your nervous system like it matters. Because it does. Because you do.
If any part of this landed, Remembrance is a free guide & a gentle place to start listening to your body. & The Soft Landing is a 7-day return built for the woman who is done waiting to feel like herself again.
Your body has been talking to you. It's not too late to listen.
Stay close,
Jess