Her Signals | Why Don’t I Feel Like Myself?

There’s something we hear from women all the time: “I just don’t feel like myself.”

It can be hard to explain because there may not be one big symptom you can point to. You’re still functioning. You’re going to work, taking care of your family, seeing your friends, getting things done, but everything feels a little harder than it used to. Maybe you’re more tired, your patience is shorter, or you can’t find words as quickly. Your body feels different. You don’t recover from things the way you used to, or you’re suddenly anxious when you’ve never thought of yourself as an anxious person. Your period has changed, your sleep is weird, your sex drive has disappeared, or you’ve gained weight without really changing anything.

Individually, any one of those things can be pretty easy to explain away. You’re busy. You’re stressed. You’re getting older. You haven’t been exercising enough, or maybe you’ve been exercising too much. You probably need more sleep. So you adjust. You start going to bed earlier, drink another cup of coffee, change what you eat, or try a new supplement. You tell yourself you need to get back into shape. Maybe you even make an appointment, but when someone asks what brings you in, you realize you don’t really know how to answer. “I don’t feel like myself” doesn’t sound particularly medical, but it matters.

We’ve both spent a lot of years working with women, and one thing we’ve learned is that women often notice a change in themselves long before they have the language to explain it. You know your body because you’re the one living in it every day. That doesn’t mean you’ll always know why something is happening, and it doesn’t mean every change is a sign that something is wrong. But noticing that something has changed is useful information.

This is one of the reasons we talk so much about symptoms at HealHer. Not because every headache or bad night of sleep needs to be investigated, and definitely not because we want women walking around worried that every little change means something is wrong. We want you to understand your body well enough that you can tell the difference between a rough week and a pattern that deserves a closer look.

The tricky part is that bodies don’t organize themselves as neatly as healthcare does. Fatigue could be connected to your thyroid, iron levels, blood sugar, sleep, stress, hormones, medications, nutrition, or something completely different. Brain fog isn’t automatically estrogen. Weight gain isn’t automatically cortisol. Anxiety isn’t automatically an anxiety disorder. There’s a lot of overlap, which can be frustrating when what you really want is one clean answer, but it’s also why the details matter.

Instead of trying to diagnose yourself, start with what you already know about your own body and ask what has actually changed. Maybe your periods used to come every 29 days and now they’re showing up every 23. Maybe you used to sleep through the night and now you’re awake several times. Maybe the afternoon crash is new. Maybe you’ve always been someone who handles a lot, but lately the smallest things make you feel completely overwhelmed. Maybe your hair has been thinning for a year and you didn’t think much of it until the exhaustion started too.

You don’t need to track every bite of food, bowel movement, mood shift, and hour of sleep from now until eternity. Start by noticing the things that are different from your normal. Timing can tell you a lot too. Think back to when you first noticed the change. Was it gradual or sudden? Did it happen after a pregnancy, illness, medication change, particularly stressful year, or a change in your menstrual cycle? Does it happen all month or only at certain times? Has it been getting worse? You’re not trying to solve the whole thing yourself. You’re gathering better information.

That information can make a huge difference when you talk to your provider. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I just don’t feel like myself,” but being able to add some specifics gives both of you more to work with. Saying, “For the past six months my periods have gotten shorter, I’m waking up several times a night, and I’ve started having anxiety the week before my period” paints a much clearer picture of what has actually been changing.

From there, you and your provider can decide what makes sense to investigate. That might include lab work, but it might also mean looking more closely at sleep, medications, nutrition, stress, mental health, menstrual patterns, or other pieces of your health history. Sometimes the first round of testing provides an answer, and sometimes it comes back normal. We know how frustrating that can be, especially when you were hoping the lab work would finally explain why you feel the way you do. But a normal result doesn’t erase the changes you’ve been experiencing. It simply tells you what that particular test did and didn’t find.

This is what we mean when we talk about learning your body’s language. It isn’t about becoming your own doctor or analyzing every sensation until you drive yourself crazy. It’s about becoming a better observer of your own health and having enough information to participate in the conversation about it.

Most of us were never really taught how to do that. We learned how to manage a period, prevent pregnancy, lose weight, and maybe perform a breast self-exam. We weren’t taught much about noticing changes in our energy, cycles, sleep, digestion, mood, or recovery, or how those things can connect to each other. So it makes sense that when something starts to shift, a lot of women know they feel different but have no idea what to do with that information.

You don’t have to know exactly what your body is saying before you start listening. Sometimes “I don’t feel like myself” is enough to start paying closer attention.

– Dr. Liane + Lena

Ready to Understand What Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You?

If you know something has changed but you’re having a hard time putting the pieces together, Her Signals was created for you.

Inside Her Signals, Dr. Liane and Lena help you make sense of the symptoms and patterns you’re noticing, understand what may be worth a closer look, and turn “I just don’t feel like myself” into useful information you can actually do something with.

You don’t need to diagnose yourself. You just need to know your body well enough to recognize when it’s asking for your attention.

– Dr. Liane + Lena

Explore Her Signals and start making your body make sense.