Hey,
If you've had a baby in the last year or two and you're still waiting to feel like yourself again, I want to name something this week that doesn't get talked about enough.
It's not just "new mum tired." It's not something an earlier bedtime fixes. It's postpartum depletion, and it's physical, measurable, and common.
Here's what's actually happening. Pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding raid your stores of iron, zinc, vitamin D, B vitamins, magnesium and more to build a baby, expand your blood volume, and then make milk. Add blood loss at delivery and months of broken sleep, and you're running on empty before you even factor in the hormones.
And the hormones are their own event. Oestrogen can rise up to 50-fold during pregnancy, progesterone around 10-fold. Within 24 to 48 hours of birth, both crash back to baseline. That's the single biggest hormonal drop a woman will ever go through, and it hits brain chemistry, sleep regulation and mood directly. Most women are never actually prepared for it.
I think of it like a phone that spent nine months on maximum brightness, downloading huge files, never properly charged. Iron, vitamin D, magnesium, B vitamins and omega-3s are the battery chemistry. The hormone crash is a power surge on top. Sleep helps a little. But if the battery itself is depleted, rest alone won't restore full function.
That's why the fatigue doesn't lift with a nap. Why the brain fog sticks around. Why hair falls out, mood swings, and small things suddenly feel unbearable. These get written off as "just motherhood." They're not inevitable, and a lot of it is measurable.
I wrote up the main drivers (hormone crash, iron and ferritin, thyroid shifts, nervous system dysregulation, blood sugar) and the actual markers worth checking rather than guessing.
Read: Postpartum depletion: why you're exhausted in a way sleep doesn't fix
 |
You grew a human. You may still be feeding one. Your body is allowed to need serious rebuilding, and figuring out what's actually depleted is the fastest way to start.
See the Functional Blood Analysis
https://www.georgiapageosteo.com/blood-analysis
More next Sunday,
Cheers
Georgia
Responses