Dr. Giulia Enders has built her career around what happens when we actually listen to our bodies.
The bestselling author and star of Netflix's Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut gained international acclaim by demystifying the role digestive health plays in our overall wellbeing. Her first book, Gut, has sold over 4 million copies worldwide.
In her new book, Organ Speak: What It Really Means to Listen to Our Bodies (HarperCollins), Dr. Enders takes a wider view, exploring what our inner workings can teach us about wisdom, resilience, and human connection.
For women leaders, these lessons carry real stakes. Major health transitions often coincide with the most demanding years of their careers, layering symptoms from perimenopause and menopause on top of chronic stress and burnout: On average, CEOs are hired at 54 years old. The average age of menopause is 52.
“Dr. Enders has an uncanny ability to take a familiar yet mysterious subject like our own bodies and to show us how our organs function practically and meaningfully as the internal engine that works so hard for us every minute. She’s made me think twice before assuming fault with my body when in fact it is the only thing in our lives dedicated to supporting us 24/7,” says Chief Member Judith Curr, President and Publisher, HarperOne Group at HarperCollins, now retired. “Her work reminds me to be grateful to my immune system for keeping me healthy and functioning.”
We asked Dr. Enders, who joined us at Chief’s New York City Clubhouse earlier this year, about what our organs can tell women about navigating senior leadership in midlife. Read on for her insights on establishing a real dialogue with your body, recovering from burnout, and what it really means to thrive.
Peak performance culture often glorifies pushing limits. Many high-achieving women have spent decades overriding their body's signals — hunger, fatigue, pain. Is it possible to rebuild that communication channel? If so, what does that process look like?
For me, the first step to almost everything is understanding. When high-achieving women override their body's signals for years — sometimes decades — it's rarely from carelessness. It happens because they believe in something deeply and want to give everything to support it. And the body goes along with this! It compromises, adapts, pushes through. Years and years of quiet loyalty. So the first real step isn't regret, and it isn't health anxiety. Those would only create a relationship built on guilt or fear — and that’s not a good foundation for genuine communication. But appreciation is. Really pausing to feel how much your body has generated toward your goals, your ambitions, your people. That kind of recognition, in my experience, creates a shift.
From that place, a very natural question arises: You've done so much for me: What can I do for you now? And then the real dialogue begins. Not with resolutions, but with curiosity. How do I actually want to feel when I wake up? What do I notice after different kinds of meals? Which movement genuinely feels good in my body, not just virtuous in my head? Real communication lives inside honest questions.
Many women are operating at the highest levels of leadership while experiencing perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms like brain fog, mood changes, and disrupted sleep. What can organs tell us about how to maintain leadership performance during these life transitions? What signals should we be paying special attention to?
It is a strange experience — acquiring something like a new body after an entire lifetime with the previous one. Hormones influence so many processes that almost every organ has to adapt when this shift happens. The brain, the gut, the cardiovascular system, the bones — all of them are renegotiating. The honest thing to say is: yes, low progesterone has real negative effects. Sleep becomes more fragile, mood less stable. But there's another side to this that we rarely talk about: Progesterone makes GABA receptors in the brain more sensitive — the very same receptors that sleeping pills and sedating anxiety medications act on. With less of it, women in this phase often become sharper, less willing to accommodate unnecessarily, less inclined to smooth things over for the sake of others. That's not a symptom. That can be a genuine asset in leadership, if the woman herself understands what's happening and how to navigate it.
To balance and care for this new body, I’d focus on sleep and the gut, because that is where so much hormonal, metabolic, and cognitive recovery happens. With less progesterone, the brain suddenly needs different strategies for relaxation and with less mucosal stimulation, women become more sensitive to food additives and certain shifts in the microbiome. So new rituals and sometimes eating habits could be of help.
For leaders navigating professional setbacks or burnout, what does the body's healing process teach us about what's necessary for real recovery?
What we know from physiology is that true recovery requires alternating between activation and rest. In sleep, for example, we will need a phase of true harmony and the calming down of all measurements, but also adventurous dreams full of abstract concepts and without any real responsibilities or duties. In muscles we see something similar: Rest is not only necessary but it’s also where most of the active growth happens! I think we need to see various and reflected ways of rest as one of the drivers of achievement.
Recovery from burnout, too, isn't just rest. It involves renegotiating the inner story — what success means, what enough looks like, what the body is actually being asked to perform for. Without that, rest becomes just a mode of standby.
Beyond professional performance and wellness trends, what does thriving actually mean from the body's perspective — especially for women?
Thriving is not the absence of symptoms, and it's not peak output. It's more like coherence — a sense that what you're doing, how you're living, and what your body is actually capable of are roughly in conversation with each other. How often are we on genuinely good terms with our own biology rather than in a constant negotiation against it? Experiencing our body’s signals not as obstacles to manage, but as precious and wise information. The body of a woman is extraordinarily dynamic. It changes across the month, across decades, across life phases. Thriving, from the inside, often looks like having enough understanding of that dynamism that you can move with it rather than against it.
For a woman who wants to achieve peak health but has genuinely limited time, how and what would you prioritize?
We already know the big five: sleep, food, exercise, stress management, and real joy with life and others. I don't find that answer particularly interesting or helpful on its own — not because it's wrong, but because it seems like a list of to-dos. Without the right relationship to each point, they don't really change anything. Just as if you see your partner as a service provider, you can do all the “right” things and it will still probably not go well. It's not just about the actions — it's about the angle from which you're coming. So what I like to do with my writing, is change the relationship first.
At Chief, we like to quote: "If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together." What role can community play in helping us listen to our bodies and achieve better health overall?
Community works on several levels. The most immediate is co-regulation. Human nervous systems are designed to operate in community — we literally regulate each other's physiological state through presence, voice, eye contact. Being in the company of people we trust and feel safe with is not a soft benefit. It directly influences cortisol levels, immune function, and the activity of the vagus nerve. And there's a deeper level too. We learn to listen to our bodies partly by watching others listen to theirs. Sometimes being with a group of wonderful people is much like medicine, I would say.
