Courtney

Jun 20 · Replied

Community post

Thank you Carol, and everyone who replied. This is exactly why I posted. Reading these has made me feel much less ridiculous, and I am adding a few notes before my next appointment.

Jun 20 · Posted

Okay so I've been wanting to write this out for a while because my brain is full and maybe putting it here will help it make sense. I am 44. I have been staring at the supplement aisle at CVS for approximately six months. I have watched probably forty Instagram videos from women who are Very Confident about what I should be taking. I have a notes app full of things I've screenshotted and never looked at again. I have spent real money on things I took for two weeks and then forgot about. This is not a system. This is chaos with a credit card. So I decided to actually try one thing at a time and write down what I notice. Just one. Not a stack. Not a protocol. One thing. I started with vitamin D because my OBGYN mentioned my levels were low at my last physical and that felt like the most boring, least hype-adjacent place to begin. No one on Instagram is going viral about vitamin D. It felt safe from a noise perspective. What I'm tracking: sleep quality (just a rough 1-5 in my notes app each morning), how I feel around 3pm (the crash is real), and whether the low-grade anxious hum I walk around with feels any different. I'm not expecting miracles. I'm just trying to see if I notice anything after a few weeks versus the baseline I wrote down before I started. The baseline thing was actually useful. I spent three days just writing down how I felt before I changed anything, which sounds extremely boring but now I have something to compare to instead of just vibes. I'm also trying to eat actual protein at breakfast before I take anything because I kept reading that food context matters and also I was just eating half a granola bar and calling it a morning, which, no. I'm not going to tell anyone this is working or not working yet because it's been like two and a half weeks and I genuinely don't know. But I feel better about it than I did when I was buying four things at once and hoping something would stick. If anyone else is doing a one-thing-at-a-time experiment I'd love to hear how you're tracking it. Not what you're taking, just how you're keeping notes. My system is messy and I'm open to ideas. TL;DR: stopped trying to do everything at once, picked one thing, wrote down a baseline first, now actually watching for patterns instead of just hoping. will report back eventually.

Jun 9 · Posted

Okay so I've been down the supplement rabbit hole for about six months now and I finally hit a wall. My Instagram feed is basically one long ad for adaptogens and "hormone support" blends and I genuinely cannot tell anymore what's a real person's experience and what's a gifted post. So I'm done with that as a research method. What I'm actually doing right now: I picked one thing. Just one. Vitamin D, because my OBGYN mentioned my levels were on the low end at my last physical and I figured that was at least a real data point from a real clinician rather than a reel from someone with perfect lighting. Here's my extremely unglamorous tracking system. I have a notes app on my phone and every morning I write maybe two sentences. Sleep okay or not. Energy by 3pm, yes or no. Mood, one word. That's it. I've been doing it for about five weeks. What I can tell you so far: absolutely nothing conclusive. Some better weeks, some worse. I have no idea if that's the vitamin D, the fact that I started eating actual breakfast instead of just coffee, the weather getting slightly less depressing, or pure randomness. Probably all of it. Probably none of it. But here's the thing I keep coming back to. Before I started writing anything down I was convinced things were getting worse every single week. Now that I have actual notes I can see that's not true. Some weeks are genuinely fine. I just wasn't remembering the fine weeks because the bad ones hit harder. I'm not saying the tracking fixed anything. I'm saying it made me slightly less convinced I was losing my mind, which is its own kind of win I guess. I do have a question for anyone who's done something similar: how long did you track before you felt like you had enough to actually bring to your OBGYN? I want to go in with something useful, not just "I've been tired and weird for a year." I'm saving my notes but I don't know when there's enough of them. ETA: not looking for supplement recs, genuinely just curious how other people have structured this.

Jun 7 · Replied

Community post

Thank you Michelle, and everyone who replied. This is exactly why I posted. Reading these has made me feel much less ridiculous, and I am adding a few notes before my next appointment.

Jun 7 · Posted

Okay so I've been putting this off for months but I'm actually sitting down and writing out everything I want to bring to my next appointment. Partly because I keep walking in there and blanking, and partly because I've been doing this one-thing-at-a-time experiment with supplements and I want to be honest about it instead of just not mentioning it. Here's what I'm putting on the list so far. First, the symptoms I've been tracking. Hot flashes, mostly at night but sometimes mid-afternoon at my desk which is a whole thing. Brain fog that makes me feel like I'm reading the same sentence four times. Sleep that is technically happening but not doing anything. Anxiety that shows up for no reason around 3am. Second, the supplement stuff. I started vitamin D a few weeks ago because my levels came back low at a routine check, so that one felt more grounded than random. I want to ask whether anything I'm taking could interact with anything she might want to discuss. I genuinely don't know and I feel a little embarrassed that I started without asking first but here we are. Third, the questions I keep forgetting to ask. Like, is what I'm experiencing consistent with perimenopause or is it something else entirely. I'm 44 and my OBGYN has been pretty non-committal so far and I want to actually push on that this time instead of leaving with nothing. I'm also going to bring a note about what I've noticed changing and when, because I've been keeping a rough symptom log on my phone for about six weeks and I think it might actually be useful. Or at least it'll stop me from saying "I don't know, it's been a while" when she asks. Anyone else do this? Does it actually help or does the appointment still go sideways?

Jun 5 · Posted

Okay so. Rant incoming but also genuinely asking because I feel like I'm losing my mind a little. I am 44 and for the past eight months I have been in what I can only describe as a supplement spiral. It started because I was sleeping terribly, waking up at 3am completely wired, then exhausted all day. Brain fog so bad I reread the same email four times and still sent a reply that made no sense. Hot flashes that weren't even that dramatic but were just... constant and annoying. And the anxiety. God, the anxiety. Just this low hum of dread that I couldn't shake. So I did what any reasonable person does at 2am. I went on Instagram. And now I follow approximately nine thousand women who are all very confident that the thing that fixed them will fix me. Magnesium glycinate. Vitamin D. Ashwagandha. Seed cycling. Collagen. Some kind of adaptogen powder that costs thirty dollars and tastes like dirt. I have tried probably six of these things. Some overlapping. Some dropped. I have no idea if any of them helped because I started three things at once like an idiot and then my sleep got a little better but also I changed my coffee timing and also I started going to bed earlier so. Great data set, Courtney. My OBGYN is lovely but every time I bring up supplements she kind of smiles and says "some women find them helpful" and that is the entirety of the guidance I receive. I don't need her to prescribe me anything. I just want someone to help me figure out how to actually know if something is working or not. Do any of you track this in any structured way? Like actually track it, not just vibes? I started a notes app log but I'm inconsistent and honestly looking back at it is depressing because I just wrote "bad night" seventeen times in a row. I'm not anti-supplement. I'm not even that skeptical anymore, I've just been burned enough times by hype that I want some kind of method. Some way to separate the placebo from the real thing. Some way to walk into my next appointment with something more useful than "I've been tired and weird for eight months and I bought a lot of things on Amazon." If you have a system, please share it. Even a rough one. I will take anything at this point. ETA: yes I know I should probably just get bloodwork done. Working on it.