Ep 150: Decision Fatigue in Your 40s & 50s: Why You're Mentally Exhausted and What to Do About It

That moment when your partner asks what you want for dinner and it feels like an unreasonable question. The 17 browser tabs open for two weeks. The thing you reached for at 9pm that you told yourself you wouldn't.

This isn't laziness or weakness. It's decision fatigue — and it's hitting women in their 40s and 50s especially hard.

In this episode I break down what's actually happening in your brain, why this season of life makes it so much worse, and why the solution has nothing to do with willpower.

You'll learn why decision fatigue is a real physiological phenomenon and not a character flaw, what's making it harder for women in their 40s specifically (the mental load, the sandwich generation squeeze, perimenopause, sleep deprivation), how it shows up in ways you might not recognize, why you keep making the "wrong" choice at the end of the day, and five practical strategies to protect your mental energy.

But the bigger question this episode asks is this: decision fatigue isn't the problem. It's the signal. The real question isn't "why can't I make better choices at night?" It's "why am I so depleted by evening that I have nothing left for myself?"

Connect with Kortney: Instagram: @k.a.rivard | kortneyrivard.com

Work with Kortney: Wellness Wake Up intro program 

Transcript

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Welcome & What We're Talking About Today

0:51

Hello, friends, and welcome back to Real Brave and Unstoppable. I am your host, Kortney Rivard, and today we are getting into something that I know is going to hit home for a lot of you. At least I think it will. It hits home for me for sure, and I hear it constantly from the women that I work with. We are talking about decision fatigue. Now, before you think, "Oh, I know what that is," just stay with me, because I'm not gonna give you just the generic version. I'm gonna talk today specifically about why this is hitting women in their 40s and 50s so hard right now, why it's not a willpower problem, and why understanding this might actually change the way you talk to yourself at 9:00 PM when you reach for the thing you told yourself you weren't gonna reach for.

Does Any of This Sound Familiar?

1:39

Wanna start with a scenario, and I want you to honestly ask yourself if any of this sounds familiar. You open the refrigerator, you stand there, you stare at it, you close it, you open it again, you close it again, and you walk away without eating anything. Or I know some of you are thinking, "Wait a minute. Walk away?" Or maybe you eat more than you wanted because you couldn't decide, or you eat something that you really didn't wanna eat because it was right there and it sounded good in the moment. Or maybe you need to book a hotel for a trip you're taking in three months, and you have 17 browser tabs open. You've been thinking about it for two weeks, and you still haven't booked it. Or maybe your partner asks you what you wanna have for dinner, and you feel genuinely like that is an unreasonable question. You have zero idea. You just don't wanna think about it. You're like, "Why can't you decide? Why can't you just make a decision for once?" I know that resonates with some of you. Or maybe there's one phone call you've been needing to make, one email you've been needing to send. It's not really very complicated, and it doesn't really require a lot, and somehow it's still sitting on your to-do list. It's maybe been on your to-do list for 10 days. Does any of this sound familiar?

This Is Not Laziness — It's a Real Phenomenon

3:04

So here's what I want you to hear. This is not laziness. This is not you being dramatic or difficult or disorganized. This is a real documented physiological phenomenon called decision fatigue. And like I said, it's hitting women in their 40s and 50s really hard. Today I'm gonna explain why, and I promise by the end of this episode, you're gonna feel a lot less crazy and a lot more curious about what's actually going on.

What Decision Fatigue Actually Is

3:33

So let's start with the basics. What decision fatigue actually is. Making decisions it's a cognitive thing. It's a cognitive act. Some of you might be going like duh," but, really it uses mental energy. And that energy, just like physical energy, is finite. We don't have unlimited amounts of that. You only have so much of it in a day, and some days we have more of it than others. Research suggests the average person makes over 35,000 decisions a day. 35,000. That's a lot. Most of them are tiny. What to wear, what route to take, whether to reply to that text now or later, but they all draw from that same mental bank account. And here's what happens when the account gets low. The quality of your decisions declines. But it doesn't decline in a neutral, random way. It declines in a very specific direction. When your decision-making reserves are depleted, you do one of two things. Either you become impulsive, you just pick something, anything, just something to be done with it, or you avoid the decision entirely. You default to the status quo. You do nothing different. Neither of those is great for us, but both of them make complete sense from a brain efficiency standpoint. When resources are low, the brain's always gonna look for shortcuts. Impulsive choices and avoidance are both shortcuts. The symptoms you might recognize in yourself, procrastinating on decisions that really shouldn't take this long, making a hasty choice, immediately regretting it. Maybe it's avoiding a decision entirely and hoping it somehow just resolves itself. It might be the brain fog and the irritability that shows up seemingly out of nowhere in the afternoon, or, and I hear this one all the time, that feeling that you used to be sharper than this. What has happened? What is wrong with me? This is just what happens to old people. I have to just accept it. You know, I used to be more decisive, more on top of things, and now, yeah, you're not sure what happened. What the hell? What's going on? This sucks.

Why It Hits Women in Their 40s & 50s So Hard

6:04

And I'll tell you what happened. This is where it gets specific to us. Here's the thing, decision fatigue is not a new thing. The research has been around for decades, but most of it was done on populations that were not us. And when you look at the specific circumstances of women in their 40s and 50s, there are layers here that make this experience different, harder, and actually more understandable. Which I think anytime we can understand something that's frustrating or hard, it helps us feel a little less hard on ourselves about it. But let me walk you through them.

The Mental Load Nobody Counts

6:38

So the first one is the mental load that nobody counts. So there is research, and it's good research, on what's called the mental load, the invisible cognitive work of managing a household, a family, a life. Not necessarily only the tasks themselves, but tracking the tasks, knowing that you're almost out of something before you run out of it, keeping track of the appointments and the deadlines and the things that need to happen for everyone around you, anticipating needs before people even voice them. It's a lot to carry. Most women in their 40s have been doing this for 15 to 20 years. And here's the thing about the mental load: it doesn't stop when you sit down at your desk. It's running in the background all the time, just constantly, like 17 open browser tabs you can't close. You're not starting the day from zero. You might be starting it already depleted just from that standpoint.

The Sandwich Generation Squeeze

7:32

Okay, so another reason it hits us differently is the sandwich generation squeeze. A lot of women in this season of life are getting hit from multiple directions simultaneously. So you might be managing your own career at a pivotal moment. You might be up for a promotion, a transition, a reevaluation of whether you want to even keep doing what you're doing. At the same time, you might have kids who still need significant support. At the same time your parents are aging, and that comes with its own set of decisions that are heavy and complex and emotionally loaded. A lot of people I work with, their kids are going to college, and their last, their youngest, their baby is about ready to fly the nest, and they're, like, faced with this, "Whoa, what does this mean for me now?" There's a lot in all of this. High-stakes decisions on multiple fronts with no end in sight. That is a cognitive load that's almost unparalleled in a person's lifetime. And you're being asked to carry it while also being expected to show up fully at work, at home super tiring, right? It's kind of an understatement, really.

The Perimenopause Piece Nobody Talks About

8:44

Okay, so the next thing. Oh, this one is huge. The perimenopause piece nobody tells you about. Okay, so this one is important, and I don't think it gets talked about enough. I mean, we're talking about it more and more all the time, but estrogen plays a direct role in cognitive function, and it specifically affects the prefrontal cortex, which is exactly the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, planning, and impulse control. So as estrogen declines in perimenopause, you can experience real, measurable changes in how your brain processes information. The brain fog that so many women describe in their 40s, it's not imaginary. It's not weakness. It's not us becoming stupid. It actually has a physiological basis. I know a lot of you listening are gonna resonate with this brain fog thing. I think it shows up a little differently for everyone, but I'll share a little bit about my own experience. I used to remember everything. Like, I didn't used to need a calendar. Just remember things, could remember people's phone numbers, all the things, right? And these days I forget stuff all the time, and it can be a source of a lot of stress, especially, like, if you have a partner who gets annoyed by it. In my last relationship, which ended about two years ago, first of all, I hated that I didn't remember things, but this wasn't like I didn't try. And my ex would tell me I never listened, or he'd get upset that I forgot to get something that he wanted at the store. And to him, you know, he said, "Oh, you're so inconsiderate. You don't even think about me." And of course that makes me feel bad, you know? So that kind of stuff adds a lot of stress to our lives. And then on top of being frustrated, we can't remember things anyway, now we're feeling like terrible people because we're not paying attention or we're not being considerate, even though we're trying to be. And stress adds to the brain fog. Or another thing I notice is my tendency to be really scattered. Sometimes I joke that I must be ADHD. I don't know if I am or not, I've never been diagnosed, but sometimes I feel like my brain is just all over the place. Focus is really hard. I, you know, go in one room to get something and I'm like, "Why am I even in here? I totally forgot." I'll go to another room to sit down. I'm like, "Oh, that's why I went to go get that thing." And then I'll go into the room again and I'll forget again. It's just, it's frustrating, right? But this also can create a lot more mental fatigue when we're not being as efficient, and some of us get frustrated with, with ourselves. Self-criticism can creep in and c- even create more mental fatigue, and therefore it all adds up to decision fatigue or impacts our ability to make good decisions or quick decisions. This all matters because if you're walking around thinking, "I just need to try harder," or, "I just need to be more disciplined," you're fighting with your own biology, friends. The solution is not more willpower. There's nothing wrong with you. It's just something going on. And God knows there's enough stuff in perimenopause that is just going on that impacts how we're able to function in our life. So the solution actually has to account for what's happening in our bodies. The next reason it might hit us differently is sleep deprivation. Perimenopause

Sleep Deprivation & Major Life Transitions

13:36

frequently disrupts sleep. Night sweats, waking up at 3:00 a.m., the racing mind that won't quiet down. Sleep deprivation is one of the most well-documented impairments to decision-making quality that we have in the research. One bad night meaningfully affects your cognitive performance the next day. So you have declining estrogen affecting your prefrontal cortex and disrupted sleep compounding that effect, and they're both happening at the same time. So of course your brain's not operating the way it used to. It's working under conditions it's never had to work under before. And if we think about this from, like, a broader perspective, like imagine that you're trained to be a barista at Starbucks, and all of a sudden somebody says to you, "Oh, you are going to go and design bridges." Probably not gonna go so well. Conditions you never had to deal with before. It's going to be stressful. That might be a little bit of an out there example, but you get the idea. So next, layer on top of all of that the major life transitions that often happen in this season. Divorce, kids are leaving home, career changes, people have health scares, relationships are shifting. These are all huge, high-stakes decisions that require real cognitive energy to navigate. So here's what happens. Your brain allocates its limited decision-making resources to that big stuff, the real stuff, the stuff that really matters. And by, by the time you get to the small stuff, what to make for dinner, what gym class to sign up for, which brand of yogurt to buy, there's just nothing left. The tank's empty. So yes, you're standing in front of the refrigerator paralyzed by a simple decision, or in front of the yogurt door in the refrigerator section at the grocery store. Do I get Chobani or do I get Fage or do I get Oikos? And it's not because you're incapable of deciding. It's because your brain spent the day working on things that actually deserve a high level of attention, so now it's done. It's like, "I don't care." And this last one, this is the one that doesn't show up in the research, but I see it a lot in the women I work with, and I see it in myself a little bit sometimes too. Many women in their 40s and 50s have spent decades making decisions based on what everyone else needs. What their kids need. What their partners need. What their employers need. What their parents need. The practice of knowing what they want and making decisions from that place is genuinely just an underdeveloped skill because they haven't had a lot of practice at it, and that makes every decision harder. Because there's not a clear internal compass to check in with. So when you don't know what you want, even those small choices feel enormous, and a lot of times that's accompanied with a lack of confidence in the decision, which makes them feel even bigger. You don't have a reference point. You're not really sure what you're optimizing for, so you kind of freeze. Okay, so the obvious version of decision fatigue is paralysis on big decisions or even

14:27 The Sneaky Ways It Shows Up Every Day

16:59

smaller decisions, but it can be sneakier than that, and I wanna just talk about how to recognize it in your everyday life. So we can watch for these things. First, defaulting to the same choice every time, not because it's the best choice, but because it's the one that doesn't require any thinking. This can look like a routine. It can look like consistency, but if you're being honest with yourself, it's kind of avoidance dressed up as a habit. And let me just be clear. There's nothing wrong with choosing the same thing every time, but, like, when people start to go, "Mom," you're like t- you're eating the same thing at this restaurant every single time. Don't you wanna branch out?" And you think, "Well, yeah, I do wanna branch out. There might be a better choice, but I don't feel like thinking about it," this is what I'm talking about. You know, making a choice that requires more thinking or more discernment is hard when we're mentally fatigued. So in order to avoid adding more of that to, to our brain, we just take the easy way. And since we always make it, it's a safe, habitual choice, easy to justify. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. But Is that decision, is that choice something that we're enjoying? So just questions to ask ourselves. The second one is letting someone else decide, and then we resent the outcome. I worked with a client who would do this. She's just like, "I don't wanna decide." And then other people would decide, and she'd be pissed off about the thing they chose. And she knew that she shouldn't be pissed off, but she still was. You know, you asked your partner, your friend, your kid. You deferred it, and now you're kinda annoyed by what they chose even though you just handed them that decision. I wish I could see hands 'cause I'd love to see how many of you that sounds familiar to. Uh, the third thing is doom scrolling. Or just scrolling. I don't know. I think doom scrolling is such a funny word, but that's just me. But not because you're interested in what's on your phone, because scrolling doesn't require any decisions. It's pure passive consumption, and your depleted brain is relieved to not have to choose anything for a few minutes. You're just checking out. You're kinda just, uh, oblivious to things. You're just... You're not there. You're numb. The next thing is you snap at people, not because anything big or dramatic happened, but because you kinda have nothing left. Your fuse is short. Your reserves are on empty, and the smallest things tip you over. And here's another way that this shows up, and the one I really wanna talk about in this section is reaching for the thing that gives us the fastest relief. The food, the drink, the scroll, the skip the workout, not because you don't know better, but because knowing better requires cognitive energy you don't have right now. And I do also wanna be clear. Skipping the workout or having a cocktail or having a piece of cake or whatever, there's nothing wrong with that at all. It's just we're just talking about, like, sometimes the why of, how this decision fatigue shows up. For example, if it's 9:00 PM and I'm craving something sweet, not really hungry, I might remind myself that eating sweets at night is something that I'm actively working on changing because when I do that, I get a headache in the morning. And that's- it's important to me to not have that. Just doesn't feel good. If my mind is clear and alert, I might not have a hard time choosing the option that is ultimately going to make me feel better. But if I'm already tired and depleted, this becomes harder. In the moment, ice cream, for example, just sounds good. I might start down the road of, "I had a hard day. I deserve this." It- and it gives me a little hit of dopamine. That's great. On top of that, it's the end of the day, and I've been making a million little decisions, some big, all day leading up to this. So choosing the option that's better for me gets to be a harder choice to make. Now, not choosing the ice cream becomes uncomfortable because I'm saying no to a reward for a hard day, and also that little hit of dopamine that makes me feel good. So if I want to avoid how it feels to deprive myself of that, I have to choose really intentionally. I have to be willing to feel a little uncomfortable. So if we're already tired and low on resources, that's just not an attractive option. So eating the ice cream, just easier. We've made the choice of the dopamine hit so many times before, it's just habit to give into it. Maybe. But it's also avoiding the discomfort of not getting what feels good short-term. I mean, let's face it. Everyone wants to feel good. That's why these things are hard decisions. So let's move on to the piece that I really want you to sit with because I think this is where a lot of women carry

The Brain Science Behind Why the Easy Choice Wins

21:47

some unnecessary shame. Why we keep making the, quote-unquote, "wrong choice." So when our decision-making resources are depleted, our brain doesn't become neutral. It becomes biased. So specifically, it becomes biased towards whatever requires the least effort and delivers the fastest reward. Kinda like what I just talked about. So here's the science of it. The prefrontal cortex, which is the rational, future-thinking part of our brain, is the part that says "I know this salad is going to make me feel better tomorrow." But it's also the part of the, that burns the most energy. So when resources are low, it goes a little quiet, and that older, more primitive part of our brain, the part that's really good at finding immediate relief, is the one that starts running the show. So you're not choosing the wine over the water because you're weak. You're choosing the wine because your rational brain is offline and your reward-seeking brain is driving the bus, and that brain is very, very good at finding the- fastest path to feeling okay. So think about when this happens. It's almost never at 9:00 AM. When you're fresh. It's at 6:00 PM when you've been on calls all day and dinner still needs to happen. It's at 9:00 PM when you just want your brain to stop. It's that moment when the choice is between cooking something and ordering the thing you always order, between the glass of water and the glass of wine, between the walk you told yourself to take and the couch that is right there with a perfectly great episode of Schitt's Creek. Are you with me? And here's what the research shows, and this matters, is that choosing the healthy option in that moment, it's not just harder, it requires meaningfully more cognitive effort. So you have to actually override the habit. Then you have to evaluate the options. Then you have to think about how you'll feel tomorrow, and then you actually have to make yourself do the less immediately rewarding thing. That's a big lift, and if the tank's already empty, that lift just... it's not available or it's hard to access. So your brain does the math pretty quickly, but it still does the math, usually on a subconscious level. It picks that easier path, the faster hit, the familiar thing. And then what I hear y'all say is that you blame yourself. You call yourself weak. I've been there, too. You call this a lack of discipline. You decide it's proof that you can't be trusted around food or alcohol, or that you'll never change, or that you just don't want it badly enough. And that story, my friends, is wrong. And it's also not very motivating. Not because you're off the hook, not because it doesn't matter, it's because you're diagnosing the wrong problem. Willpower is not the issue, like I said before. Capacity is the issue. So I'll share a little example to illustrate this. My earlier example about ice cream was kinda also like this, but I have a different one that's not food related, and I think a lot of people do this. In my past, I had a really difficult time not reacting when I was really upset. So for example, my ex would push my buttons, and it was usually over a text, and I would get really, uh, like angry or feel really bad or whatever it was. And then so instead of pausing with that, you know, thinking about, "What do I wanna do with this?" I would immediately text something back real quick that really wasn't helpful. It just perpetuated the whole thing, you know, snarky or whatever. But the choice to do that was really automatic, especially if I was tired because when doing that, briefly took the edge off of anxiety or anger or whatever emotion I was feeling. It was almost that like, "I'm gonna get you back," and then, "Yes." So to not respond would mean I'd have to sit with whatever that emotion was without taking the edge off of it, and that can be really hard, especially if we're already really tired. We don't have the capacity to, like, pause and really choose a harder thing. When I finally realized this was the pattern and why I would do it, I started to work on skills to change it. And what I learned is that when I didn't respond to it, things felt pretty edgy, like this kinda anxious feeling. So I would notice the urge to, you know, respond back with something snarky or mean or whatever and kind of a way of leveling that playing field. I'll show you. But to make the choice not to respond meant feeling that edgy feeling and in the moment, my brain judged that as, "It's just harder. That's too hard." And a tired brain needs a pretty good reason to take the harder path, and it's not really set up well to ask those questions when it's overloaded 'cause it doesn't wanna answer those questions either. So hence, a decision to do a behavior that isn't really all that helpful. So your brain is not failing you. It's doing exactly what a depleted brain does. It's finding the fastest exit from discomfort. And the real question, the one that I think is really the one worth asking is, is not why can't I make better choices in the evening? The real question is why am I so depleted by the time the evening comes that I have nothing left for myself? And that's the question that leads somewhere. So now we can actually start to solve a real problem. And What do we do? How do we do that? What are some... so I'm gonna give you some real specific things, not generic practice self-care advice, which is, that's fine

Five Practical Strategies That Actually Help

27:24

too, but here are some specific things. The first one is work on reducing your daily decision load. The research on this is solid. The fewer decisions you have to make, the more mental energy you preserve for the ones that matter. This is why some famously high-functioning people wear the same thing every day. They're not being weird. They're not. They're just being strategic. They're optimizing. You don't have to go that far, but look at your mornings. How many small decisions are you making before you even leave the house? Meal planning for the week eliminates seven "what's for dinner" decisions. Laying out your clothes the night before eliminates a morning decision. A default breakfast eliminates another one. Every routine you can put on autopilot is a small deposit back into the account. Meal planning, for example, has been a game changer for me in this. On Sundays, I plan out meals for the week. I make a grocery list. I know each day of the week what I'm making for lunch and dinners, and I have a loose plan for breakfasts. They're kind of a couple default options. I do as much prep as makes sense because if I don't have those easy options sometimes when I don't feel like cooking and maybe there's a lot of chopping or meat has to get thawed or whatever, I'll just give up and order Uber Eats. And that's not great for my budget or the waistline. Even if we try to order healthy. The second thing is protect your morning decision-making. So our cognitive capacity is highest early in the day. This is when your prefrontal cortex is freshest and most available. So don't spend your first hour on email or on other people's requests or social media. Make the decisions that actually matter to you first when you have the most to give. And as I say this, I think I might have just solved a problem in my own life. I've been trying to decide where to take my younger daughter on summer vacation, uh, but I've been trying to do this research and make a decision at night right after dinner. And by this time my brain is just fried. I w- I coach people all day, all day back to back except for one hour at lunch. And so by the end of that, like, yeah, I'm just fried. So it's hard for me to bring myself to really dive into it deep. You know, it's like looking at flights and looking at what there is to do for different places and how much lodging costs so that I can try to make good decisions. That's a lot. It's a heavy lift. So I guess I'll have to try working on that in the morning. It's funny, I just thought of that now as I'm doing this episode. So if there's something you've been avoiding, you know, maybe it's a conversation you need to have or a big decision or a thing you keep putting off, do it in the morning, not the evening. Not right before bed. Do it in the morning. Uh, the third thing is naming the decision you're actually avoiding. So here's something I've noticed working with clients. Sometimes what looks like decision fatigue is actually avoidance of one specific thing. There's a decision that feels too big or too scary or too loaded, and so the whole system just comes to a screeching halt, not because you're overwhelmed by all the choices because, but because one of them is carrying a lot of weight. So if you're experiencing persistent paralysis, it's worth asking, "Is there one decision I keep not making?" Write it down. Name it. Sometimes just naming it out loud can change your relationship to it, and then sometimes the avoidance is actually about fear, not fatigue, and fear and fatigue need different things. So maybe I should do an episode on that. So the fourth thing is give hard decisions to your morning self. So that means if you get to the end of your day, if it can wait till tomorrow, let it wait. Your 9:00 PM self is not your best decision-maker. She's depleted, she's tired, and she's gonna take the path of least resistance a lot of the time. That's not a character judgment. That's just working with our biology. So stop asking your 9:00 PM self to do the heavy lifting. It's not really fair. And the fifth thing, and I think this is a bigger thing, because all of those strategies I just listed will

The Root Cause That Tips Can't Fix

31:31

help, but I wanna be honest with you that none of them will actually fix the root problem. Chronic decision fatigue, the kind that's there every day, the kind that's been building for years, is almost always a symptom of a life that's just asking more of you than you have the capacity to give. The tips help you manage the symptoms, but managing symptoms isn't the same as addressing what's underneath them. So remember that question I said earlier that we should ask? Is it, it's not, "Why can't I make better choices in the evening?" The real question is, "Why am I so depleted by the time evening comes that I have nothing left for myself?" So that's what I'm talking about here. So what's underneath all of this though, for most women I work with, is a life that's been structured around everyone else's needs for so long that there's really nothing left for their own. A pace that was never sustainable, the habit of saying yes when they mean no, or a way of moving through the world that looks like strength, but maybe it's really just powering through and running on fumes. So this is the bigger conversation, and that's not a quick fix, but it is the one that actually changes things. So you might wanna start asking yourself, "How can I give back to myself? How can I balance things a little more?" Putting other people's needs first for so long is, it becomes habitual. And also, a lot of times, uh, the people I work with, when they think about not doing that, it feels really selfish, but we need to really examine those thoughts because they're not facts, and we need to kinda look at poking holes in them 'cause they ultimately that, that train of thought is not helping us be healthy humans with high sense of wellbeing. So let's wrap this episode up. I wanna come back to where we started, the woman standing in front of the refrigerator, the

Pulling It Together + Work With Kortney

33:25

one who ordered takeout again last night and felt bad about it, the one who still hasn't made the phone call, the one that's snapping at people she loves and isn't totally sure why. She's not broken. There's nothing wrong with her. She's not bad. She's just depleted, and she's depleted for real, documented, understandable reasons that have nothing to do with weakness or willpower. The first step is naming it. Just call it what it is. It's not a character flaw. It's a resource problem. The second step is take it seriously, not just reaching for tips, but actually looking at the structure of your life and asking what needs to change. And the third step, if you're ready, is getting curious about what's underneath that. Because here's what I've come to believe through working with women in this season of life and being one as well. Decision fatigue isn't the problem. It's the signal. It's your nervous system communicating clearly that something needs to change. The question is whether you're willing to hear it. If this resonated, if you heard yourself in any of this today, I would love to know. Uh, you can find me on Instagram at k.a.rivard, uh, or you can come find me at kortneyrivard.com. And if you're ready to look at the whole picture, not just the tips, but what's actually going on and what you actually wanna do about it, I work with women exactly on this. So there's a link in the show notes where you can learn a little more about that. Finally, if this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend or, uh, leave me a rating and a review. It just helps more people find the show. It means a lot to me. So, thank you. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you being part of my community, and I will see you next time