The Body That Runs Empty
Do you know that particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't respond to sleep?
The tiredness that doesn't resolve after rest or a weekend off. You might try harder, plan better, manage your time more carefully, but still, there is this persistent sense of being drained in a way you can't quite understand.
Most women I work with have been living in this state for a long time. That was also my state! And most of us have tried to solve it the same way: by doing more, managing better, pushing through.
What very few women were ever told is that their body has a rhythm. And when we live against that rhythm for long enough, the body runs empty.
More than one single rhythm
We are all familiar with the 24-hour cycle. Wake, work, rest, repeat. It is the rhythm our world is built around, and it is the rhythm most health advice is written for.
What most women were never taught is that the female body also runs on a second, longer rhythm: the infradian cycle, which spans roughly 26 to 34 days and shapes, in measurable ways, how energy, metabolism, cognition, stress tolerance, recovery, and emotional capacity move through the month.
Men's hormones follow a 24-hour cycle. Testosterone peaks in the morning and gradually declines through the day. The same approach to food, training, rest, and work can be applied every day with reasonable consistency.
Women's bodies work differently. Estrogen and progesterone rise and fall across four distinct phases, each creating a different physiological environment. That leads to changes in energy requirements, needs for rest, stress tolerance, food intake, movement routine etc.
This is not weakness. It is a different operating system.
And the problem is that almost nobody taught us how it works.
What happens when we ignore the rhythm
When we don't know about the infradian cycle, we treat every day of the month the same way. We hold ourselves to a consistent standard of output that doesn't account for the very real shifts happening inside us. We interpret lower energy in the inner autumn phase as laziness. We push through the fatigue that arrives before menstruation as though it is a character failing. We eat the same way, train the same way, sleep the same way, and wonder why some weeks feel impossible when others feel effortless.
Chronic stress makes this worse. When the body is under sustained pressure, cortisol rises and is sustained above healthy limits. In situations like that, ovulation can be delayed, progesterone might be suppressed, sleep disrupted, inflammation increased, impacting the hormonal symphony the cycle depends on. The body reads chronic stress as an unsafe environment and begins to downregulate the very processes that would support us.
What follows, over months and years of living this way, is a more fundamental kind of depletion. The body has been asked to keep giving without being given what it needs in return. And at some point, it starts asking louder.
The body has been trying to tell you
The fluctuations that women are taught to push through are not problems to be managed. They are the body's communication system.
The phase where everything slows down, where social energy drops and the need for quiet increases, is our inner autumn phase doing exactly what it should: preparing the body for menstruation, asking for rest, signalling what needs to change. The week following menstruation is the inner spring, when energy is returning, estrogen is building and the body is genuinely moving into a different gear.
These are not moods. They are physiology.
When you understand this, the question shifts from why can't I just be consistent to what does my body actually need right now. And that question is the beginning of something different: a relationship with your body built on listening rather than overriding.
Menstrual Cycle Education matters
Learning more about your physiology is the first step in this journey of living a life aligned with your inner rhythm. It's not about a set of rules to follow, but a way of understanding what the body needs across the month.
Because nourishment, movement, and rest are not fixed categories. What supports the body during inner spring is different from what it needs in the inner autumn, for example. What the body asks for in the days before menstruation is different from what it asks for at ovulation. Learning to read those differences is one of the quieter, more powerful things a woman can do for herself.
Join me in an online or in-person workshop! Details at www.atmantouch.com/women.
With love,
Tarsila.