I sleep 10 hours a night but still need to nap constantly during the day. Even 400 mg of caffeine doesn't buzz me, it just makes me feel 70% close to my normal, high energy 20s self. My daytime fatigue is so severe I've been mistaken for being drunk (even though I don't drink), and I experience a dream like brain fog around friends unless I use caffeine pills to seem present.
I know this is part of normal aging for a woman in her 30s, but it's frustrating to constantly need naps when I haven't even done anything. Sometimes you just have to biohack. Still, I feel a bit jealous of how men age differently and seem to keep loads of energy.
You won’t be considered geriatric for about forty years. You might have a geriatric pregnancy, but that’s just the terminology. Like how an eighty year old can have juvenile diabetes, it doesn’t mean they’re a juvenile.
You probably haven’t yet reached your mental prime yet, but yes, you might be at a disadvantage sprinting against a 22 year old at the same activity level. That’s only really relevant at the highest levels of athletics though, and you can still be healthier than you were in your twenties.
I’m older than you are, and my sisters are more than a decade older than you are and none of us is experiencing this. None of our doctors (in three very different areas) prepared us for this. If it were normal, even if we didn’t personally experience it, wouldn’t our doctors warn us about it? All of the women in this thread are telling you that they didn’t have anything like this, isn’t that something to consider?
You might not have anything that is showing up on a test you’ve had done so far, but isn’t it worth looking further into whether you could have normal energy levels?
Even if they don’t find anything wrong, making your doctor understand that you’re not experiencing a normal level of fatigue might let them help you. I had a carpool buddy with idiopathic narcolepsy, which just means they don’t know what causes it. He was prescribed stimulants and worked with his doctor to figure out lifestyle adjustments that helped (like carpooling, so he could drive while alert in the morning, but didn’t endanger himself in the afternoon. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen be so tired that he sounded drunk while sober after a full night of sleep.