Macbook pro casing on the bottom becomes very hot and my battery from full discharges in 40 minutes

DWRey wrote:

I have been using a VPN since February of this year without any issue.

Nevertheless I will try running for a period without the VPN and see if the problems continue.

Thank you for your suggestions.

Sometimes (often) software in the categories that Grant listed ("third-party speeder-uppers, Cleaners, Optimizers, or Virus scanners, Bit Torrent, or a VPN") work ok until you update to a newer version of the MacOS that those tools are not compatible with. Then havoc can result, many posts in Apple Discussions details these experiences.

"Running without the VPN" may not be enough, you should completely uninstall it to test to see if it is the culprit.

Another step you can take: boot into safe mode to see if the issues go away. If they do, it is almost certainly the case that something installed is not compatible with Sequoia 15.2.

When the Mac is heating up and battery rapidly discharging, use Activity Monitor to check which processes are responsible for using up "cpu" and "energy" and "network" resources. That may provide a clue.

By far the easiest way to cause poor performance, instability, overheating and crashing is to install ANY third-party speeder-uppers, Cleaners, Optimizers, or Virus scanners, Bit Torrent, or a VPN that you installed yourself.

¿Are you running anything like that?

As @Grant and @steve626 mentioned if your laptop is working hard, then it will heat up and drain the battery quickly. If you have the original battery, then the battery is 5 years old and most likely wearing out or even failing. So you have several things going on here.

As for using NordVPN, you need to ask yourself why. I suggest looking reading the information in the following links as it compliments @Grant's & @steve626's posts very well and even expands upon them:

Effective defenses against malware and other threats - Apple Community

Information about VPNs:

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

If it was mine I would have Apple look at it for a possible hardware issue.

A virtual private network, or VPN, is a private connection over the Internet from a device to a specific network.  VPN technology is widely used in corporate environments. If you need to be "present" on an institutional network, a VPN is a great tool for accomplishing this. it is generally issued and controlled by the institution.

Almost all other uses are a SCAM. There is generally no need for you to have a private connection to a VPN vendor's Network, except to make it easier for them to harvest your data to sell.

If VPN vendors just stopped there, it would be bad. But many of these packages also insist on scanning all your files, non-stop, -- nominally looking for viruses, but who knows for sure what data they are harvesting. Their non-stop file reading punishes your computer's performance in the process.

Some also break into your other secure connections so they can be FIRST to examine your data, often leaving your Mac MORE vulnerable to attack.

You're welcome.