My Fitbit congratulated me on a good night's sleep. It was lying..

Hi Reader

The moment

I overslept by two hours last night. Restless night, no obvious reason on the surface; so I did what most of us do now and blamed my hormones.

Then I opened my wearable app. Ten hours sleep. High quality. Congratulations!!!.

I wanted to throw it across the room.

The gap nobody talks about

Most wearables infer sleep and recovery from movement and heart rate variability. Stillness reads as rest. But your nervous system has two very different modes that can look identical from the outside: genuinely parasympathetic, where the body has actually downregulated, and simply immobile, where you’re lying still while your system is still running high alert underneath. A wearable cannot currently tell these apart. Only the way you feel on waking can.

Why this shows up more now

This matters more in perimenopause than most conversations acknowledge. Oestrogen isn’t just a reproductive hormone. It has a direct relationship with sleep architecture, with how much time you spend in deep versus light sleep, with thermoregulation overnight, and with how efficiently your brain clears the metabolic waste that builds up during the day. As oestrogen becomes less consistent, all of that becomes less consistent too, even when total sleep duration looks unchanged on a graph. You can hit your ten hours and still wake up feeling like the work never got done.

This is also why I swapped long runs for weight training. Not because I stopped enjoying it, but because my ADHD brain responds differently to internal versus external load. Cognitive effort, the kind of constant background processing an ADHD nervous system does even at rest, draws on the same regulatory capacity as physical effort does. Running gave my mind space to wander, which for years was useful. But a wandering mind on an already overloaded nervous system just adds more internal noise. A barbell doesn’t. It asks for full attention and gives you a clear start and a clear finish, which is a completely different demand on the system.

The mistake I see most

The mistake most capable women make here isn’t lack of information. It’s the opposite. You have months of sleep data, HRV trends, recovery scores, and no real framework for what any of it should change about how you train, eat, or rest this week.

You become a scientist of yourself without ever being taught how to draw a conclusion.

The framework I actually use

First, separate the two kinds of load. Internal load is what you’re already carrying before you’ve done anything physical, the thinking, the managing, the holding it together that never shows up on a wearable. External load is a weight you can put your hands on and set down again. When a session or a day feels impossible, the question isn’t “am I tired.” It’s “which kind of tired am I.” Those two answers point to opposite strategies.

Second, notice where the tension actually sits. In my studio, I see three patterns most often in high-performing women. Tension held in the jaw and through the neck and shoulders tends to track with high alert, a system still braced for the next demand even when nothing is currently happening. Tension held through the chest, a slightly collapsed or guarded posture through the front of the body, tends to track with emotional load that hasn’t had anywhere to go. Tension held through the hips tends to track with anxiety, and shows up as restricted movement the moment you ask the body to do anything that requires driving through that area.

The movement that helps is rarely the same for all three. A nervous system braced through the jaw and shoulders generally needs the opposite of more intensity, something that lets the upper body soften before you load it. A body holding through the chest tends to respond to movement that opens rather than compresses the front of the body before any strength work begins. Tight, anxious hips need to be met with stillness and gentle pressure before you ask them to drive a lunge or a deadlift, not after.

None of this means diagnosing yourself from a blog post. It means noticing, honestly, where your own tension collects before you decide what kind of session you need.

Third, test capacity before you assume it. If you’re genuinely under-resourced, a light external load, a short walk, a few controlled lifts, will feel like effort but not like threat. If instead you’re mentally saturated rather than physically depleted, that same light load often brings relief within minutes, because it gives an overactive mind somewhere concrete to put its attention. The response tells you which one you’re dealing with. Guessing doesn’t.

Fourth, stop treating the data as the verdict. Use it as one input alongside what you actually feel in the first five minutes of moving. If they disagree, trust the body first and let the device catch up in your understanding, not the other way round.

Where this leads

That's the whole method. It isn't complicated. It requires knowing your own pattern well enough to read it quickly, which is exactly what most of us were never taught to do with all this information we're now sitting on.

If you want that pattern actually mapped for you, rather than guessed at, that's what a Somatic Audit does. It's the diagnostic step I use before any training decision gets made. Rather than assuming everyone starts from the same baseline, it reads what your system is actually carrying right now, where you're bracing, what phase of your cycle you're in, how your nervous system is currently regulating, so the plan that follows is built from what's actually true for your body, not from an assumption or a graph.

One session. A proper read on what your nervous system, fascia, and menstrual cycle phase are doing right now, so you're adjusting load by what your body needs, not by what a wearable suggests.

​Book a Somatic Audit​

You can also check out my free resources on my website, read deeper personal reflections on Substack or link with me on Linkedin.

Much love

Seema

xxx

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