How Bad Should PMS Be? Is Mine Normal?

Hello. Welcome. You’re listening to Dr. Martha Reid at Doctor’s Choice Integrative Medicine in Downtown Vancouver, a space where I bring passion, inspiration and nourishment to the conversation of your health.

So at the time of recording this episode, we are in cold, wet, rainy November here in Vancouver, and Wednesday night was a particularly brisk, rainy, wet night and the last patient visit of the day I got a really great question.

How bad should my PMS be? Is what I’m dealing with normal like, is this just the way it is?

And the reason I told you about it being the last patient visit in my day on this cold, dreary, brisk November Vancouver night was that this particular patient got the raw and real Dr. Martha Reid answer, which sometimes kind of happens by the end of a day. You just get it how it is, right?

So I looked at her through the virtual screen and I said no. Absolutely not. It shouldn’t be that bad. In fact, it shouldn’t be bad at all. So caveat to that. Yes, indeed, there is a thing called PM’s premenstrual syndrome, for sure. For sure. OK. But I think in so many ways that’s actually meant to be a blessing. And this is going to be more of an honest energy episode versus a scientific episode, so I’m going to speak to the more integrative art side of natural medicine versus the science side of natural medicine. So scientifically, yes, PMS is a thing. But what can you do about it? Well, from a scientific point of view, not all that much. When we look at it more from an energetic point of view, a whole lot. So the way I look at PMS and this is the raw and the real is that for the vast majority of the month, I think many women tend to suck it up. We hold and take on and compromise and back up and step over. And and and so for example. one of my pet peeves is the lid on the peanut butter jar being left off in the knife on top of the jar drip drip dripping the peanut butter all over the counter right? It doesn’t matter how many times I simply scrape up a knife and put the lid on the jaw and put it away. It doesn’t always happen. So you know what? Most of the month I just step over that. Oh, here we go. There’s peanut butter on the counter again, and I put the lid on and I put the knife way and off we go. Well, when I am in my quote unquote PMS, you know what? That lid and that knife and the drip drip drip is a big problem. And you bet everybody in the house hears about it at the time. I’m speaking. I feel so valid in what I’m expressing. Those around me may not hear it that way because it probably seems like I’m being way over the top, irrational, far too emotional. And “honey, is there anything going on down there that I should know about?”

Well, that’ll just send me to the Moon, right? And what it really is is the fact that I have not spoken my truth all month long.

The line for me regarding that peanut butter jar is the same all month. I just happen to be the one that continues to suck it up. So I think when I speak with my female patients, I hear this often, right, so that the little things we pick our battles all month long. But I think if we were to speak our truth, as things are happening, and we can find gentle ways of speaking truth, right, we don’t have to hold a boundary with anger or force or vitriol. And perhaps we’ve had the experience in our lives that we do, that we have to fortify and defend in order to speak truth. But if that’s the case, that’s a deeper layer to be worked on. And if that’s going on for you, by all means, come in and see me and we can start to peel that back a little bit.

But if we speak our truth throughout the month that, “hey, this actually doesn’t work for me, is there a way that we can work on that together?” Or, “Hey, this bothers me, and I’m going to pick it up anyway, because I can, because I’m able to support you in that” or whatever language you choose that is gentle and kind, but honors your truth. Then when it comes to the time when your hormones are shifting because, absolutely scientifically and energetically and all of it, our hormones shift before we bleed, and when those hormones shift, it’s like high tides coming up the beach. There is going to be a change on that shore, so there’s going to be a change in how you show up. And that’s not a bad thing. But if we’ve been damning our truth and not the damning as in heaven and hell, but damming like damming water, right?

Damming that truth all month long. All of a sudden, the dam breaks and the water becomes more destructive. Then constructive. So when those hormones shift, if we had been speaking truth all my month long, perhaps our volume would be more tolerable to both ourselves and those that listen. Perhaps our tone would be more tolerable to ourselves and to those that listen. So that’s sort of the skinny on the energetic side of PMS.

OK, so I think if we learn to speak truth in a gracious and gentle and courageous way for ourselves throughout the month, that level of volume as our hormones are shifting won’t be quite so severe. Now, if we do go into the more sciencey side of what’s going on, so in a nutshell, and this would need to be an episode all of its own. What are the hormones of my menstrual cycle and where do they go and how do they flow and what’s going on?

That’ll be a whole other episode, so stay tuned. But in a nutshell, the skinny on at all is you have really two sides of the menstrual cycle. You have the first phase called the follicular phase of your menstrual cycle, and it actually starts with your bleed.

That’s not the end. That’s the beginning. The bleed starts, and as you’re shedding that blood oestrogen is beginning to rise in the body as oestrogen is rising. It’s working in concert with a hormone called follicle stimulating hormone to literally, it’s the hormone that stimulates the follicles.

So much in medicine is written backwards, I’ll be honest with you. So it’s a hormone that stimulates your follicles, your little eggs in your ovaries to get ready and when one of them is going to be ovulated. The strongest horse is going to be the one that’s going to go racing out the stall door down the racetrack of the fallopian tube at ovulation that is timed by the level of oestrogen. So the first half of your cycle starts with a bleed. Oestrogen is rising. The horses are being trained. Who’s going to race when oestrogen reaches a threshold level in the blood? The hypothalamic gland in the brain goes, “Oh, we’re there”. That means that a horse is ready to race.

That also means the uterus has a thick enough lining so that we could support a pregnancy. Because whether you want it or not, your body wants a pregnancy from a reproductive health point of view. So once that oestrogen reaches a threshold level, it’s like a light switch, and keeping your hypothalamus sends out the signal for the ovulatory hormone called your luteinizing hormone. And so Kabam, you ovulate and bang goes again in the horse races out of the stall and the little jacket that was keeping that horse warm while it was sitting in the stall. So your eggs have jackets around them from the moment they’re formed in utero. Your little eggs have jackets, and those jackets feed and nourish your eggs and keep them warm. Well, when a horse is racing on the racetrack, it doesn’t need its jacket and booties. It would be way too hot and it wouldn’t be able to perform. So bang goes the luteinizing hormone and out races this egg, and it’s racing down the fallopian tubes and it’s tossed its jacket off. It hoped a jacket would land on the stall door. It didn’t. It landed in the mud on the racetrack, and it’s slowly getting trampled and it’s degrading as that jacket – it’s called the corpus luteum – is degrading it’s releasing progesterone, and now we’re in the second phase of your menstrual cycle.

And by the way, ovulation doesn’t just happen on day 14. Yeah, that’s a myth. We’ll talk about that at another time, too, but we are now in the second half of the menstrual cycle. The progesterogenic or the luteal phase. And so progesterone starts to rise because this corpus luteum jacket is releasing it as it’s degrading and the progesterone does many things. Number one, it holds the blood in the uterus while the egg is racing down the fallopian tubes. That takes about four or five days from your body’s perspective, hopefully finding sperm, hopefully being fertilized. But you’re still not pregnant from your mind or your body’s point of view. It doesn’t even know that this has occurred, right?

So, the egg’s racing down the fallopian tubes progesterone is holding the blood in the uterus. HOLD THE DOOR. HOLD THE DOOR. And then the egg gets down into the uterus. If it’s fertilised, it’s looking for a place to embed for the entire gestational period of nine and a half to ten months – 40 weeks, right?

So, it’s looking for a place to embed. It finds where it wants to live in the uterus penthouse suite basement rear window, like where does it want to go? And it buries through that uterine lining until it gets to the tissue wall of the uterus that takes several days. Your body doesn’t even know you’re pregnant yet. So think of it as a canoe coming up onto shore. You haven’t hit the sand or rock underneath your boat yet. You need enough progesterone to anchor that blood until the boat comes up onto shore until that egg implants. If you get pregnant. If you don’t get pregnant, the jacket that was being destroyed eventually is gone. When it’s gone there’s no more progesterone, so “bing” your period starts, there’s nothing holding the blood. The progesterone dropped, so there’s no one. “Hold the door”. No, the blood starts to drop and your period occurs.

Well, on the mental emotional side, the second thing that progesterone is doing is binding to very specific receptors in the brain, and I believe they’re called the moon receptor, which is an opioid type receptor, which has us feel calm. Hormone progesterone steps on that pedal and we now have the calm notes cruising through the body. So after ovulation progesterone on the rise, we tend to feel great, balanced, productive, calm on top of our game, able to hold the things in our lives with grace and compassion and ease. But as that boat, the canoe is coming up on to shore, the progesterone is dropping because this jacket is dying. That pedal of calm is not being pressed down to the same degree. So now the progesterone drops off and up comes irritability. Anger, frustration. What might seem like intolerances. All of these things. We don’t have those receptors being tapped in the brain to keep us calm when progesterone is not there. Our sleep goes funk. Your body temperature goes off. We start to see the spotting, and now we’re biting and snapping at the people in our lives.

That has a lot to do with the progesterone. But again, back to that more energetic side of the conversation from the beginning of this episode. If you’ve not been speaking your truth all month long, the volume on that level of irritation as the tides are coming up to high shoreline are far greater, right?

So, I think mixing and melding both the science and the energy… PMS is a very, very real thing, but it does not have to be as bad as you’re experiencing it. I said to this patient, I said what we would obviously want to ensure is that there aren’t any other underlying things going on, right. We want to rule out that you don’t have what’s called PMDD, which is premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and that is like PMS on steroids. And there’s a lot of factors that contribute to that. And PMDD actually has a very real impact on serotonin, which is mood hormone, right? And there are genetic components to PMDD. So we would want to take a look at that, make sure that’s not what’s going on. But then in terms of if the volume is high on our hormones, is it just an issue of not speaking truth? Or perhaps we have underlying hormonal imbalances because a) we might not be eating the foods that are right for our body, or b) the microbiome of the gut that has so much role to play in metabolising hormones isn’t in the right balance for our body. C) perhaps our adrenal hormones and stress hormones are impacting the way that we sleep and impacting our mood, all of which can impact our oestrogen and progesterone balance in the body.

So in a nutshell, no PMS does not need to be bad. It should be there, I think, because it’s an opportunity to speak the truth. It’s an awareness that we are, as women, connected to nature that we cycle the same way the moon cycles and changes her face every day of the month, how the tides move up and down the beach. We don’t rail against those things and tell Earth and nature that she shouldn’t happen. So the same with us. We cycle, we shift. We are not static creatures. We are dynamic, we are flowing creatures. And I think that’s a really important thing to remember. All of us, all men and women , we as women just have the gift of being able to see our flow and to be able to connect that to our bodies and our minds if we choose to.

So in a nutshell, if your PMS, the volume is way too high for you and the people in your life to be able to manage well, then let’s talk about that. Let’s check into that. Let’s help and support that volume to be something that you can be with so that you can celebrate the change that happens in you day by day, week by week and throughout the course of a month so that your cycle can be something of power. Because I truly believe it can be, it’s something I see in my life. I see it in my patients. When we get things balanced, our women can feel truly great.

If you need further support in this in any way, please pop down to the clinic or even just book a discovery call with me and we can talk about this further for you. I’d sure love to hear from you. Have a really great day.