Dear fellow neurodivergent woman,
It's 2.47pm. You've had a perfectly respectable lunch. A sandwich, some crisps, maybe a flapjack because you're a grown woman and you're allowed.
Ten minutes later your eyelids weigh a kilo each. The sentence you were reading has gone soft at the edges. Your limbs feel like wet sand.
All you can think about is crawling under the covers, if only it was bedtime.
You've probably been told to sleep more. Drink more water. Go for a walk. Or that you're just a busy woman in her forties and this is what tired feels like.
That's not it. Your cells are having a bad afternoon.
What's happening in your body
When you eat carbohydrates, your body turns them into glucose. Your blood sugar goes up. Your body sends out insulin to bring it back down.
For a lot of us, that insulin does the job a bit too well. Blood sugar swings down into the basement. Your brain, which was running on that glucose, suddenly goes short of fuel.
Your brain reads that as an emergency. It sends out adrenaline and cortisol to get you moving again. That's the fog, the heavy limbs, the snappiness, the sudden need to lie on the kitchen floor.
It's chemistry, not character.
Why it hits us harder
A neurodivergent brain is expensive to run. We spend energy masking, filtering noise, planning, and recovering from the planning. There's not much spare.
And in perimenopause, as estrogen falls, our cells can become more insulin resistant. That means we lose some of our buffer against these swings. What you got away with in your twenties can flatten you now.
This is also why you can feel fine on Tuesday and wrecked on Thursday after the same lunch. Your margin is thinner than it used to be.
The part nobody tells you
I'm not going to tell you carbs are evil. I eat bread. Last time I ate it on purpose, I wanted the stone-baked pizza and the blueberry cheesecake and I got them.
Three days later I couldn't write. I couldn't focus. My thoughts had gone tangly and a little worry had moved in that I couldn't put a name to.
That's the point. It isn't about being good or bad. It's about finding out what your body does with what you give it. And you can only find that out by paying attention, without shame.
What I'd try first
Keep a very boring note for a week. Not a food diary full of numbers. Just three things: what you ate, what time, and when the wall hit.
You might see a pattern. You might not. Either way, you'll know something you didn't know before, which is more than the "eat balanced" advice ever gave me.
You don't need to go strict keto. You don't need to count a single macro. Plenty of women get a big change just from eating less refined sugar and less beige food, and noticing how they feel afterwards.
If the pattern is strong, or it's wrecking your days, that's worth taking to someone who can test your blood sugar properly.
If this one landed, you might also like Why You Crash After a Good Day and 7 No-Cook Snacks to Stop a Blood Sugar Crash.
I hope you have a gentle week,
Love Hannah xoxo
