Midlife Fog, Fatigue, and Feeling Stuck: What Your Body is Trying to Tell You
- Lori Lisai
- May 20
- 6 min read
“I'm tired of feeling tired. I'm tired of feeling sad. I'm tired of my job. I'm tired of still doing what I know I don't want to do.”
Sound familiar? I feel like most women in midlife feel this way at some point or other. I once posted a Thread wondering how many women in midlife had gotten to this point in life and felt like this wasn't the life they had imagined. It got a lot of likes.
If you're feeling this way, just know that you are not alone, and if anything, look at those feelings as indicators that you're exactly where you ought to be.
I think one of the important questions to ask yourself after you've identified that you are totally over it, is whether or not you are burned out or maybe just misaligned.
Meet “Jennifer”: A Woman Just Like You Feeling the Midlife Burnout
I want to talk about Jennifer today, one of my clients who came to me because she wanted to learn how to use her Human Design to feel better. She had experienced the loss of a parent, was in a job she didn't love, and felt so entirely drained each day that she knew something had to change.
The trouble was that she was also mired in self-doubt, fear, and anxiety.
Oftentimes what finally gets you to seek support isn't necessarily a crisis, but relentless overwhelm.
In a free 15-minute Midlife Mapping Call, we’ll:
✅ Look at what’s draining you
✅ Pinpoint what your Human Design says you actually need
✅ Give you a personalized next step—without pressure
🎯 Click here to grab your spot—three spots available over the next few weeks.
What Human Design Revealed: Perimenopause and Self Worth
Let's talk about Jenny's chart and how we used it as a guide to dig into what was happening so that she could gain clarity on her next steps.
The first thing I felt needed immediate attention was addressing the self-doubt because if you don't believe you can change things, nothing is going to change.
This woman was a dynamo. She knew her work in finance and crushed it at work. A leader in the office, she would cry on her commute home, feeling like a fraud because she felt so entirely lost.
Enter, the open Heart center.
Open Heart centers have such beautiful capacity for wisdom about what it means to be worthy, to trust in yourself, to believe that you are everything you had hoped.
For Jennifer, her "worthiness" was clear at work, but it was leaving her drained and feeling totally unfulfilled ("worthiness" in quotes here because it's not tied to what we do, it's about who we be--but more on that later).
How could she care about the money she was making with and for her clients when she had just lost her beloved father? When she came home and had to clock in for "second shift" where it was racing to watch lacrosse games, planning how to get dinner for the kids, cleaning up the disaster of the house, folding a load or two of laundry before she passed out to get up and do it again...all of this took precedent over grieving her father and centering herself.
But the rides into work brought it to the surface, which was when she found the pod, Midlife by Design.
👉 Listen to this week's episode, Tired, Foggy, and Second-Guessing Everything? Here's What Jennifer Did About It, and What You Can, Too where I talk about Jennifer's story and how you can take what we worked on and apply it to your life.
So how do you work with the Open Heart center? For Jennifer, it was about building some routines (because she had Gate 5 in her Conscious Sun) that allowed her to start trusting herself.
That looked like mirror work, where for 2 minutes after work, when she first sat in that car, she would turn the rearview mirror to her face and look at herself right in her eyes and compliment herself.
This sounds simple, perhaps, but it wasn't easy.
There were plenty of tears, and over time, Jenny started to believe that she might be worthy of trusting herself. She created a body of evidence that highlighted her strengths and when she focused on them, she felt more comfortable about her abilities.
🤫 The work now centers on understanding that her worth isn't tied to what she accomplishes, but just in who she IS. It's ongoing. 😉
This is one example of where Human Design gives you the map, and in this case, we combined the Open Heart center with her Conscious Sun to design solutions to move her out of her stuckness.
And in combination with her Generator juiciness (which magnetized aligned opportunities when she was lit up) and her Channel 35-36, which longed for new adventures and experiences, we knit together a plan and pulled in specific tools to support her energy.
Working with your Human Design is like unfolding a deeply personal map—and I’m just your friendly guide along the way. I help you spot the road signs, notice when a route is closed, and point out the blooming poppies you might’ve missed while hustling down the highway.
Burnout vs. Misalignment: What’s Really Draining You
Jennifer was a powerhouse at work, and she was doing work that she's really good at.
The question was, was it aligned?
Here's the difference between your run-of-the-mill burnout and being out of alignment:
👉 standard burnout = exhaustion from doing too much, from going, going, going without breaks and recharge time
👉 misalignment = exhaustion from doing things that conflict with your values, with who you came here to be
👉 Burned out or just misaligned? Find out in our call.
Jennifer might have been really good at her work, but she fucking hated it.
She did not leave work feeling satisfied, which is CRUCIAL for Generator types.
She left work feeling like she could never catch up, that she was always putting out fires, and that she wasn't really living on purpose.
Midlife does this thing to you. It demands (through the journey of perimenopause) that you survey your life, to probe where you're out of alignment, and then DECIDE whether or not you will change.
You're losing estrogen faster than a bottle of rosé at book club.
And with it, you're losing the very last fucks you have to give about what other people expect or want from you.
How To Trust Yourself Again: What Changed for Jenny and Can For You, Too
Spoiler: Jenny left her job.
Here's the "crazy" part: she didn't have a plan.
What she did have? DEEP SELF TRUST.
Now, she is leaning into that sacral authority of hers and following breadcrumbs that fall in her path.
And she's trusting that she will know which ones to follow because she also built an iron-clad trust in her ability to feel into what her sacral was telling her. Interestingly, she's on a far more creative, artful path than what others might expect from her, but it will be no surprise to you, dear reader, that as a little girl, Jenny used to fill sketchbooks with doodles, repaint her room every year, and won all sorts of photography awards into her teens.
And now, she's following the path that she might have taken if she hadn't been so concerned with what everyone else thought she should do.
You Are Not Broken. Nothing is Wrong With You. You’re Just Waking Up.
This work didn't happen overnight, but the shift was powerful.
The change was undeniable.
And Jenny looks and feels like a different woman--one much happier, more centered, and feeling grounded.
If you're still reading, I invite you to ask yourself: what is your body, your energy, your inner voice trying to tell you?
Your Human Design is the permission slip to take action on it. If you need help navigating it, book a midlife mapping call and let's get you on the right road.
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