Worth an appointment
When exhaustion is worth taking to a doctor
The signs that suggest this needs a person rather than a self-help list.
3 minSource: NHS
Commonly given reasons to get it looked at
Tiredness that has lasted more than a few weeks and is not explained by an obvious change in sleep or workload.
Exhaustion alongside breathlessness, a racing heart, or unusual paleness.
Tiredness with heavy periods, which together often point at iron.
Tiredness with weight change, feeling cold, or hair and skin changes, which is the combination usually taken to the thyroid.
Low mood alongside it that has lasted more than a couple of weeks, which deserves its own conversation and not a supplement.
What Narrated will not do
Nothing here tells you what is happening in your particular body, because that cannot honestly be done from a page. It gathers what is commonly reported and what is commonly checked, and leaves the decisions with you and your clinician.
Energy is the thing every other change in these years is paid for out of. Protecting it is what makes the rest possible.
General information, not medical advice. Narrated never diagnoses.
More in Narrated Energy
Why am I this tired?
Exhaustion is the most commonly reported change of this stage, and the least talked about. What sits behind it.
6 min · Narrated
The things commonly checked when tiredness will not lift
What a doctor often tests when exhaustion is the main complaint, so the appointment starts further along.
5 min · Narrated
The afternoon crash, and what is usually under it
Fine until two, then flattened. The most common shape midlife tiredness takes, and the levers that reach it.
5 min · Narrated
Get the weekly letter
One useful email a week on perimenopause and menopause. What the studies say, in plain words. Free.
Or find out what is happening to you, free, in two minutes.