Hormone : Your period can be a breeze – Trust me on this!

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.

Today, I got a call from a patient of mine saying “Doctor Reid, my periods are terrible. They always have been. I’m on the pill, which helps. But my PMS remains so horrendous that for at least a week out of every month, I want to quit my job, divorce my partner and move to the other side of the world. And none of those things are sustainable. And so what can I do?”

And I thought, OK, well, you’re likely not the only person dealing with all of this, and none of it is normal. It’s become normal for you as it’s become normal for so many women. But it’s not normal to have cycles that are so incredibly horrendous that they completely disrupt our lives and the quality of our lives. In a nutshell, our bodies are designed to be well, and if we operate from that place our bodies know how to do what they need to do to stay in balance. And if they’re not doing that, it’s because they’re not getting what they need.

So our periods and our cycles being all over the map are a sign that underneath it all, our bodies are not getting what they need in order to balance our hormones. Well, so then the question becomes, what is my body not getting? Or if it’s getting everything it needs, why is it not doing its job? What is blocking the body from doing what it innately knows how to do?

So that leads us to look at then what are the components within the body that balance our hormones in order to keep those menstrual cycles level and mellow? And in an ideal world, which is absolutely possible for us as women, our cycles can come. They show up, they go. And yes, there may be a little bit of emotional reckoning, but I personally think that’s a really healthy thing. I think that when our emotions shift a bit around our menstrual cycles, it’s an opportunity to check in with ourselves, check in with our relationship, check in with our lives. What is serving me? What’s not serving me? Where have I been speaking my truth? Where have I been not speaking my truth and compromising ourselves? So I think a little bit of shift is good, and I think it’s really healthy.

It’s when that shift is too great and it’s going to topple your boat that we’ve got a problem. So we need to ask the question: What is my body not getting to adequately balance if it’s getting what it needs? Where is the block? So let’s look at the components of the body that are responsible for balancing our hormones. And there are many.

First: your gut. You can’t have healthy and balanced hormones if your digestive health and your gut health is off. And there are many reasons for that. But one big reason is that your gut is host to trillions of bacteria, and these bacteria have an incredible job in helping us balance the hormones for our menstrual cycles. So if the bacteria of your digestive system is off, it becomes quite difficult to adequately balance your hormones. That’s just one piece.

The second piece is with respect to our liver. Our liver is an organ that is where so many hearts, but in the context of hormonal balance, it’s a detoxification organ. It’s a metabolising organ for oestrogen. So it’s a big job to metabolise and reduce the oestrogen load in the body. Well, if the liver is not functioning optimally to do that, and that can be for various reasons, may not be getting the nutrition it needs, it may be overwhelmed with a whole bunch of other things going on.

There may be genetic factors, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if the liver is not metabolising or estrogens properly, we end up with imbalanced hormones, which then makes it very difficult to have a balanced menstrual cycle.

A third area is our stress response. Glands are called our adrenals and our adrenals. Ultimately, at the end of the day they are designed to keep us alive against a threat. Well, the problem is is that our bodies don’t know the difference between a true threat sabre tooth, tiger, warring tribes, starvation, poison or a perceived threat, a negative thought and negative emotion. Oh my god, here comes my PMS and I want to divorce my husband again. We fire out cortisol. Well, the minute cortisol is fired, we inhibit the optimal functioning of both our liver and our digestive system, which, now, all of a sudden, we’re not adequately able to balance our hormones. So far, we’ve got to look at the gut and the health of the gut, the microbiome, our digestive function. We need to look at the liver and the health of our liver. We need to look at our stress response. And where are we firing stress potentially unnecessarily?

A fourth area is what’s going on with our thyroid. Our thyroid gland is the motor in your car. It’s what determines the speed at which your cells metabolise the energy that’s produced. So the work of balancing your hormones has a lot to do with the energy that’s produced by the thyroid gland. Well, if the thyroid is off, your hormones may be off. The thyroid goes off because the adrenal stress gland goes off.

A fifth area is our sleep wake cycle circadian rhythm. So in a nutshell, there are all of these underlying factors that are going to contribute to why our cycles are out of balance, why our periods may be so horrendous. And yes, tools like a birth control pill can help to balance the pain, the heaviness, the level of flow, how long we bleed for. But they don’t always necessarily treat that underlying cause. The root imbalances of either digestive imbalances, microbiome imbalances, liver health, thyroid balance, adrenal health, sleep wake cycles.

If those things are out of balance at the foundation, then we’re going to see on the surface an imbalance of our menstrual hormones, resulting in these horrendous, horrendous cycles that make us feel so out of balance as women. And unfortunately, that’s become our norm, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. We can have cycles that are powerful. We can have cycles that serve us. We can stand in our truth as women and feel good each day of the month.

So, yeah, in a nutshell, there’s so much that we can do to regulate and balance and and improve the health of our menstrual cycle.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me and joining this conversation, if any of the things that you’ve heard today have landed with you moved, you resonated with you and you’d like to pipe in, I would sure love to hear from you. Some of the best conversations happen right in the medicine house with me and the easiest way to do that. Pop over to the website doctorschoiceintegrative.com. Book a discovery conversation with me – it’s called a discovery call – and it’s a complimentary 15 minute slot where we can explore health together. I’d love to do that with you. Hope to see you there.