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.
As someone with a medical background, I’m going to wager that you have allergies. When you hit your thirties, sleep apnea tends to show, and it doesn’t always manifest as snoring or your awareness of the issue. Therefore, a sleep apnea test is necessary to provide an accurate diagnosis.
You might also want to try requesting an allergy panel. If you don’t have insurance, that could make it harder and you might want to start taking daily allergy meds and sleeping mainly on your left side.
Get yourself to a doctor, sister.
Edit: after reading through your responses in this thread, you must be trolling.
I agree with literally everyone here that this is not normal aging and stimulants are not the solution.
How many 31 year olds do you know that had to start taking adderall to stay awake after sleeping 10 hours?
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TIL I’m a woman in my early 30s.
This is because caffeine is addictive. It’s actually caffeine that makes you feel this way. It makes you more tired long term and the caffeine starts to become less effective. Drinking caffeine brings you close to what non caffeine drinkers feel as normal, but overall you’re more tired more of the time.
Drink less caffeine, drink more water. Walk more.
You hijack the part of your body meant to deliver energy to your various bits by pumping a drug through your veins — what do you expect? To be able to continue doing that forever?
This is not OK. My Sister in Christ, please seek a medical professional.
Medical professional here!
…can it wait till I finish my coffee?
I have, multiple times, had every blood test, everything’s normal!
Can be solved, at least temporarily, with occasional high-dose of caffeine pills, but even 400 mg, even back when I was first trying caffeine pills when I never had coffee because I hate it, I don’t feel buzzed, just around 70% to 20-year old me. Which makes me think I need a stronger stimulant.
Maybe biased here but as a 30 year old man, i get more sleep now but am still more exhausted than when i was in my 20s. Life, work, and stress all take their tolls.
Some things that may help you as they help me when I’m low on energy.
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yoga or exercise. If I’m having a slow start to the day this can really get my blood pumping and wake me up better than sitting on the couch and drinking coffee. It also helps mid/late day. An early evening walk can counter intuitively increase my energy and motivation. The yoga is espcially nice on my days off where i just can’t get my day started.
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a healthy diet/eating regularly. If I eat like crap i feel lethargic. If i eat a lot of sugar the crash afterwards is rough. Regular meals made with real ingredients, even if I’m not feeling that hungry, helps a lot. Reducing processed sugar and increasing fruit in my diet helped a lot. Now a pack of strawberries will actually give me a bit of a sugar buzz.
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consistent sleep schedule. 8 hrs of sleep at a different time each week is not nearly as restful as 7 hours at the regular times. Sometimes im up late or up early due to how my work day or personal life went but most days i try to sleep and wake at the same time. If my alarm is set for 6:30 and i woke at 6 feeling okay, ill often feel better getting up at 6 than i would snoozing til 6:30. If I’m not tired but my bedtime is 9, i try to go to bed anyway. I’ll read a boring book or something to help me get to sleep.
From your other comments I’m also thinking you may have fried your bodies natural energy levels and homeostasis from excessive caffiene intake. It will suck for a few days/weeks but i would try to quit cold turkey and see what comes of it. You can work your way back up to caffeine if you feel comfortable later on.
A different drug but similar effect, i will often take tolerance breaks from marijuana as i find the benefits i get from it diminish with excessive use, the same is true for many drugs.
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Homegirl, full respect here. I don’t know you, but I want you to love life. This just seems like a lot of caffeine and a lot of sleep and no result. Which, to me, indicates something not OK.
I respect that you want to manage this yourself. Get specialist perspective, please. Maybe going the other way is the solution. Less might be more. Or maybe try that out and see if getting down to 100mg a day as one cup of coffee is better.
I’ve been to several specialists who did every test under the sun and they all came back normal. I got a second, third, and fourth opinion. All normal, at this point I’ll just be wasting doctor’s time.
It’s just something I need to get on with. I don’t like coffee. I take caffeine in the form of pills.
Have you done a sleep study?
Before I got my CPAP I had more energy on 2h of sleep than 10
I’ll second this. My girlfriend’s 38 and very much like this. A couple months ago she did a sleep study and learned she’s a narcoleptic. The good news is, she’s now given time to nap at work.
Sounds like she has cancer or needs to see a doctor. If I’ve learned anything is that sleeping 10 hours is an indicator of so many bad things
I’m 31 and I have not had cancer since I was approaching my thirties. Additionally, I have yearly ca-125 tests just to be on the safe side, and the one I had 2 months ago was fine.
by time you test positive on those tests it’s too late. would seriously look into a doctor, look up all the negative side effects of sleeping 10 hours a day plus it sounds like you’re drunk? yeah something is wrong
This thread is a shit show. Abandon ship!
Caffeine is drug and like all drugs you start to become immune and start needed more. For those of us in cannabis we have what is called a tea break. A tea break is when you stop using your drugs for a month or two to reset your drug tolerance. I would suggest not using caffeine for at least a month and see if that helps before having to go to a doctor if you are in the US.
Male here, so might not be applicable: I felt like you described about a year ago. That was shortly before the big crash. I don’t like the word burnout, but two naps per day, three to five cups of coffee and loads of sugar just to function is a good indicator your tanks are empty and you are running on fumes and stress alone. Its been a year and slowly reducing sugar and getting off caffeine for a month let me feel the deep tiredness again. I’m slowly gaining back the ability to even sleep through the night. If you can, reduce stress, keep sleeping as much as you can and cut off caffeine slowly. I stopped cold Turkey and it gave me a migrante so hard I nearly called an ambulance. What you describe is not normal and please take care of you.
Also way back in reddit times, there was a poster that had somediseases they only found because he started to nap constantly. I don’t remember the details but I thought I might have that. 9 months of reduced work and stress and lots of sleep, I’m slowly coming back to my senses.
This reads like undiagnosed sleep apnea to me. You should really talk to your doctor about getting a sleep study done. You don’t need to be overweight or anything to be affected by sleep apnea and it can get worse as one gets older. I hope it’s nothing too serious/just some fatigue!
Yeah, I had an old boss who was diagnosed with it while he was still in college. Slim, healthy, even on a full night’s sleep he’d been falling asleep in class. The common risk factors aren’t the ONLY risk factors
I don’t even snore. My boyfriend’s watched me sleep.
You don’t have to snore to have it.
I rarely snore but mostly I just don’t breathe for very long periods of time. So yeah. Get that shit checked.
I have sleep apnea and I don’t snore, but ultimately it’s your body and health. I hope you’re able to get restful sleep!
Snoring doesn’t mean sleep apnea. And your bf just watching you sleep is 1. creepy and 2. not a diagnosis.
It’s not creepy to be aware of the sleep patterns of someone who sleeps next to you, especially 10 hours a day.
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.
As an older woman, this is not normal. Please see a doctor!!
I have an autoimmune disease that comes with chronic fatigue. I understand the struggles. This is far beyond normal.
It’s normal. I’ve had every blood and hormone test under the sun and they’ve come back normal. Seen lots of doctors including female ones. I’m not going to waste their time any further it’s just one of those things you have to get on with as an older woman I’m not in my prime anymore.
These symptoms aren’t normal. Stop trying to project that on the literal billions of women who have also reached the age of 30. The overwhelming majority of them are not experiencing what you’re describing.
I have been extensively tested and everything came back normal. I get that people like to be in denial about ageing, but at least in my case, it’s related to my age. It started slowly, when I was approaching my 30’s.
You can claim all you want that the test results are normal; I’m not arguing that.
The symptoms you describe are not normal. Not for women in their 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, or past that.
Being sleepy to the point of acting drunk is not a normal older woman thing. It simply isn’t. I’m sorry.
Also jesus christ. Early 30s IS your prime. Or at least not so far from your prime that you should be resigned to feeling this way forever.
Yeah, I’m with Velma here. This is absolutely not normal for women in our 30s. I’m older than you and it sounds like I have a lot more energy than you.
I’m 42 and sleep 9pm-4am, drink a cup of coffee in the morning, one more just after lunch (because I love coffee), and I never need a nap. Even on days that I’m highly active, no naps. When my partner didn’t realize he was brewing decaf for a week, I didn’t get abnormally tired, just minor caffeine withdrawals. I honestly don’t think I’ve taken a nap since my late 20s when I was working overnight shifts.
Maybe consider a device that monitors your sleep. I do have some restless nights and my Apple Watch catches it. Usually I just take a melatonin the next night and I sleep like a baby.
I have a fitbit and it says my sleep’s fine. No abnormal oxygen variations.
Also it’s possible you age slower than most women. Not all old men are as lucid as David Attenborough, for example.
And women are clinically considered to be geriatric at 35 or older. Geriatric. I’m 31, so I’m not in my prime anymore. https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/geriatric-pregnancy
In the medical world, a geriatric pregnancy is an old term that was used to describe a pregnancy in a person over the age of 35. Nowadays, doctors use the term advanced maternal age (AMA) instead.
The pregnancy was called geriatric, not the woman. What you describe is not normal. Every women over 60 I personally know, sleeps less and is less tired than you seem to be. You may not be infected with something, but this is not normal, and if you are annoyed by it, you should do something about it.
Get a real sleep study done, not just your boyfriend watching you. It has nothing to do with aging slower, but if you are so tired you get mistaken for drunk after a full nights sleep, there is absolutely something going on that you need to look into.
You can have all the normal blood tests in the world and that doesn’t mean there isn’t something wrong. It took a couple years of blood tests and scans coming out normal for doctors to find out it was cancer causing my dad’s skin rashes, they only found it because of a chest x-ray for something entirely unrelated.
I’m nowhere near as smart as I was when I was 15. This thing with mispronouncing words and getting sentences wrong happens to me all the time now and I find it so much easier to communicate via text than actually speaking. Most of the time I feel like I don’t know what’s going on and I actually thought today was Wednesday! Hooray for ageing! I miss teenage me.
Looking at your other posts, you seriously need to see a doctor. Something is wrong.
Everything’s normal! I’ve seen multiple doctors and had every blood, vitamin, and hormone test under the sun, and then some. Everything comes back normal. I’m just not in my prime
You’re acting drunk, mispronouncing your words enough that you have to text and can’t speak properly, and need constant naps.
Come on now. I know it sucks to push doctors for answers, I know it sucks to have to stop and take care of your health, but this is serious.
I really don’t believe this is actually a woman and I fucking hate saying that. There is too much “not in my prime anymore”. Like every single comment has that, it so reads as a guy making fun of women getting older.
I’ve seen multiple doctors for years. This is just something I need to get on with. Every blood test came back normal. And, like the meme I posted suggests, caffeine does wonders.
And women are clinically considered to be geriatric at 35 or older. Geriatric. I’m 31, so I’m not in my prime anymore.
For pregnancy It says it right in your link.
Yes, as in, a geriatric woman being pregnant. It’s risky having children at or past that age, because a woman’s DNA has took a beating from ageing.
This is untrue.
LOL 30’s is not older woman. Girl get help. Like honestly. Everyone here is telling you that you aren’t normal and you are either lying to yourself or delusional (oh, it’s both).
https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/geriatric-pregnancy
At or after the age of 35, a woman getting pregnant is clinically considered a geriatric pregnancy. I’m not yet considered geriatric in the medical world, but I’m not in my prime anymore, and that’s okay.
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.
I know this is part of normal aging for a woman in her 30s
Is it?? I’m not saying you don’t lose energy as you age, but what you’re describing sounds closer to a medical problem than the norm. If you’ve had conversations with your doctor and had bloodwork done then it might be normal for you, but if you haven’t checked for vitamin deficiencies you might want to. I felt similarly shit when my vitamin D was through the floor.
It’s normal! I’ve been checked up, I’m not overweight, all my bloods are fine.
Get a second opinion, please. Doctors will often not really believe women when we communicate our symptoms.
I’ve had a second, third, and fourth opinion. 3 of those doctors were women.
This was me. Turned out I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I literally passed out during meetings and when driving home. Literally dragging myself out of bed and through the day semi conscious, running on stimulants and grit
I just kept slowly going downhill until one day I had a severe neurological event that I never recovered from, but forced me to address the issue and get it properly looked at. Most doctors told me it was in my head and I was just depressed or something. I had to see more than 20 types of doctor and specialist and it took years
Not saying this is what you have, there’s a bunch of things that can cause chronic exhaustion, but this is not normally. Please don’t ignore it
Women doctors also disbelieve women patients. It took 4 years and upwards of 20 different doctors for me to get my diagnosis.
Being sleepy to the point of acting drunk is the most concerning that I read from your description. That’s really what made me reach out. Just concerned for you!
I’ve been told I was normal… right up until they decided I was anemic and horribly vitamin D deficient. Now I’m on iron infusions and 50,000mg vit D pills once a week.
My iron and Vitamin D levels are fine. They were checked recently along with various other things.
Sounds to me like they haven’t found what’s wrong yet, not that there’s nothing wrong.
Have you had a sleep study? Sleep apnea can cause literally everything you’re saying. The way you’re feeling is not normal or healthy at all. I’m 30, my wife is 29. She’s chronically ill with a connective tissue disorder, is constantly in pain, and suffers from fatigue and brain fog and she doesn’t even feel like that every day, nor does she get so exhausted she seems drunk
Normal for you I guess, unfortunately, but no-one else.
Drinking warm water in the morning might be a nice start to the day. Also, if you’re not consistent with your caffeine, you go through withdrawal symptoms that sound a lot like that.
