What Your Labs and Wearables Know About Your Ma... · Storyflo

What Your Labs and Wearables Know About Your Ma... · Storyflo

I used to wake up already tired, and for years I couldn’t explain it. I was a hormone doctor who had written books on exactly this problem, following every protocol I teach to the letter, meditating each day for 60 minutes, avoiding alcohol, and sleeping my eight hours, yet still I met each morning as if I’d been up half the night. I blamed my age, workload, aging parents, travel schedule. I felt stressed and not much seemed to reduce the tension. It took me far too long to see that the exhaustion had its roots in my own home.

My devices clocked it before I did. My Garmin watch gave me a Body Battery in the 50s or 60s — a number meant to estimate how much reserve your body rebuilt overnight, and one that never seemed to reflect the eight hours I’d slept. [1] The battery never filled. My husband at the time would sleep the same amount, but his body battery was consistently 95 to 100, and he was seven years older than me.

My Oura ring said the same thing in a different language: year after year, my Readiness score sat between 60 and 80. [2] For years, it was a head scratcher.

Then came the numbers I’d normally circle in red on a patient’s chart. My resting heart rate averaged 76. My heart rate variability, the beat-to-beat flexibility that tells you how easily your nervous system shifts into recovery, averaged 25. [3] My fasting blood sugar ran 105 to 110, which is prediabetes. And when I ran an epigenetic test, a DNA methylation analysis that estimates how fast your cells are aging, it measured my biological age as older than my birthday. [4] I repeated it, because I don’t trust a single data point. It said the same thing again. I was aging too fast.

I left my marriage in 2023, and my numbers turned. You’ll see every one of them below. In June I wrote about the drawn-out middle of divorce, the years when the legal clock and the nervous system run on different schedules, and one of you asked afterward how the rebuilding happens. Part of the answer is in this post. But I’m writing it for a different woman: the one who read my last post, looked down at her own ring, and thought, I’m not leaving, I don’t want to, so what am I supposed to do with this? Most of you are in that group. The research says you have more room to move than you think, because the physiology that recovered when I left can recover inside a relationship worth keeping.

In medical school I was taught to ask about sleep, diet, alcohol, and exercise. Nobody taught me to ask whether a woman feels safe enough at home for her nervous system to stand down. Until recently, I didn’t ask a woman about her nervous system regulation, and whether she symmetrically co-regulates at home with her partner. Now I believe the relationship belongs on the lab panel, right next to fasting insulin, cortisol, and high sensitivity C-reactive protein, and I want to show you how to read yours and more importantly, how to move it.

You don’t have to get separated or divorced to improve your regulation, and I’ve kept that framing for the rest of this post. But you do need to know when you’re in survival mode and new strategies are needed.

• Garmin Body Battery mostly in the 50s and 60s on waking, after a full night’s sleep.

• Oura Readiness around 60 to 80, year after year, on about eight hours of sleep a night.

• Resting heart rate averaging 76. HRV averaging 25.

• Fasting blood sugar 105 to 110 mg/dL.

• Epigenetic age about 20 years older than my calendar age, confirmed on repeat testing.

The year I went through the divorce, January through December of 2023, should have wrecked my data. I slept less, about 6 hours and 40 minutes a night. Yet my Readiness climbed into the 80s and 90s, and I moved more than I had in years. Readiness is scored against your own recent baseline, so it reads balance more than raw reserve. Even so, during the hardest year of my adult life, on less sleep, my body was telling me something I couldn’t yet say out loud. It had started to stand down.

• Resting heart rate 15 to 25 beats lower.

• HRV around 30 and climbing in 2024, into the 30s and 40s in 2025, and now, in 2026, consistently in the 50s to 70s, nearly three times what it was. Some nights it reaches the 90s, the highest I’ve ever recorded.

• Oura’s Resilience feature, which weighs your recent stress load against your recovery, began showing lower stress and higher recovery. [5]

• Oura Cardiovascular Age, an estimate of how stiff your arteries are compared with your calendar age, came in 4 years younger, then 5. [6] (Note: I served on Oura’s Scientific Advisory Board from 2023 to 2025, and helped develop this metric.)

• Epigenetic age 10 to 14 years younger than my calendar age, consistently from 2024 through 2026, and still moving in the younger direction.

• Fasting blood sugar 75 to 80 mg/dL. Prediabetes gone. Blood pressure 110/60.

• Desire more than I can handle. The best sex of my life. No wearable measures that, and it may be the most telling number of all.

A few caveats: This is one woman’s data from two different devices and a series of blood tests. It’s my n-of-1 experiment of post-divorce rehabilitation, and it included a lot of psychotherapy, psychedelic-assisted therapy (once per quarter with integration), microdosing, and a lot of other interventions. It was observational. I moved homes four times in 2023. I got older. I fell in love with a man who makes me feel safe, even when we disagree. Any of those could explain part of what you see in the graphic, and it’s impossible to tease them apart. Still, I got so much better. I felt so much better. There were a lot of dark nights of the soul and financial threats and dwindling bank accounts, but I was so much better.

I can also tell you the sequence of the rehabilitation. My nervous system markers moved first: Readiness during the divorce year, then resting heart rate and HRV in the year after. The slower numbers, blood sugar and the epigenetic clock, followed and kept going. That sequence matters, because if you do the repair work that I describe later in this post, the fast numbers are where you’ll see it first.

**Bottom line: **My nervous system recovered first and my metabolism followed, and every number I track moved in the same direction once my body stopped living on guard.

Researchers call the mechanism coregulation: two people in a close bond tune each other’s physiology, so that one partner’s steadiness becomes something the other’s nervous system can borrow. [7] It runs in both directions. When it works, it may be the cheapest longevity intervention there is — no prescription, no copay, just two nervous systems that have learned to take turns holding steady while the other one wobbles. When it runs one way, it costs you, and the cost is measurable.

In one study, 30 married couples spit into tubes four times a day for three days while rating their moods. [8] When one spouse’s cortisol ran higher than usual, the other’s tended to run higher too, even after the researchers accounted for cortisol’s normal daily rhythm. Their moods moved together as well. Then came the part I keep thinking about: the linkage was strongest in the couples who were least satisfied with their marriages. You might expect the happiest couples to be the most in sync. They weren’t. My reading, and the authors raised the same possibility, is that in a strained marriage stress ricochets between two people like a ball in a squash court, while in a good one each partner absorbs some of the other’s and hands back something calmer.

Janice Kiecolt-Glaser’s team admitted 42 married couples to a hospital research unit twice, made small blister wounds on their forearms, and asked them to talk about a disagreement on one visit and offer each other support on the other. [9] The wounds healed more slowly after the conflict visit. Couples who were hostile across both visits healed at about 60 percent of the rate of couples who weren’t, and after a fight they showed bigger rises in inflammatory cytokines, the chemical messengers that, when they stay high for years, feed heart disease, diabetes, and the rest of the diseases of aging.

Women carry more of this. In a landmark review of marriage and health, Kiecolt-Glaser and Tamara Newton found that marriage protects men’s health more than women’s, and that women’s bodies respond more strongly to the quality of the marriage, including its conflict. [10] If you’ve ever felt an argument stay in your body for days while he seemed fine by dinner, that asymmetry has data behind it.

Researchers at Brigham Young University strapped blood pressure monitors on 303 adults and recorded about 72 readings over 24 hours, including through the night. [11] People in high-quality marriages had lower blood pressure, less stress, and less depression. People in unhappy marriages had higher blood pressure than single people. A wedding ring did nothing for the heart unless the marriage was good.

This is the finding that made me write this post for you rather than for the woman halfway out the door. In a national study that followed about 1,600 midlife adults for roughly a decade, women in the very lowest-quality marriages who divorced ended up with the highest life satisfaction of any group with similar marriages. [12] Women in higher-quality marriages who divorced ended up with the lowest. Men showed no such pattern. Life satisfaction isn’t a lab value, but the message for a woman in a strained, workable marriage is clear: leaving can cost more than it gives, and the better bet is usually a better marriage.

**Bottom line: **Your stress hormones, inflammation, and blood pressure are partly set by the relationship you live in, and its quality matters far more than whether you’re in one.

Here’s the question I considered for years, and the question I hear from readers: how do you tell a marriage that’s costing you from a marriage going through a hard season? Every long relationship has stretches of strain. A new baby, a sick parent, a layoff, perimenopause itself, a cancer diagnosis. Your HRV may dip through all of them, and that’s normal physiology.

I read my wearables but drew the wrong conclusion for a long time. I treated my numbers as something to fix, so I added supplements, cut carbs, ran more trails, and tightened my sleep — a hormone doctor following her own protocols carefully, reading her own labs the way she’d read a patient’s, and yet missing the most obvious variable. Every arrow stayed where it was because I was treating the wrong patient.

There’s a pattern that separates the two questions. It shows up in a handful of numbers you can measure, it shows up on a timeline you can track from your own bed, and it’s the pattern almost no clinician looks for.

Paid subscribers, keep reading. Below the line: the eight markers I order when a woman’s numbers won’t improve despite a good protocol, the cortisol and HRV pattern that points to the relationship rather than to her, the two-week test you can run on your own ring starting tonight, and the four-week repair protocol that moves resting heart rate and HRV first. It’s the panel I wish someone had run on me ten years before I read my own labs that day. Women’s bodies register strain in a marriage more than men’s do, [10] and every year that strain goes unread, it compounds in the markers that set the pace of your aging.