We’ve come to accept PMS as an inevitable part of our menstruating years, but ladies let me tell you, it’s not. It’s a sign of a hormone imbalance.
PMS encompasses many symptoms and can vary in severity from mild for a day or two prior to your period to severe, incapacitating and lasting up to half your cycle. Symptoms can include mood changes (sadness, irritability, anxiety), inflammation and soreness, breast swelling and tenderness, bloating, sleep disturbances, migraines and headaches, acne and cravings.
When symptoms last half the cycle, this is half your menstruating life! And it tends to be those we love the most that take the brunt of our emotional symptoms, so let’s talk about what’s happening, what we can do about it and accept that this is not an inevitability of being a woman.
Most PMS symptoms are due to a hormone imbalance, but what does this mean?
By far the most common imbalance that yields PMS symptoms is a state of high estrogen and low progesterone. Before I get into how this affects how we feel, let’s talk about why this happens. There are 3 common reasons:
- Stress: our stress hormone cortisol has the same building block as progesterone, so as women, the more stress we are carrying the more she shuttle pregnenalone into cortisol leaving less around to produce progesterone thereby lowering our levels.
- Poor estrogen clearance: there are several enzymes that help clear estrogen out of our bodies and it is remarkably common to have genetic defects in these enzymes yielding a decrease speed and efficiency of estrogen clearance and a build up of residual estrogen in our bodies.
- Having excess hormones in your body: whether from birth control, hormone therapies for IVF/IUI, other hormone related drugs or pregnancy, all these can throw off the balance of our natural hormones.
Having high levels of estrogen will typically cause:
⁃ Acne
⁃ Heavy and/or cramping periods
⁃ Bloating
⁃ Breast swelling/tenderness
⁃ Irritability
⁃ Migraines
Low levels of progesterone will typically cause:
⁃ Sleep disturbances
⁃ Low mood and anxiety
⁃ Cravings
Other hormone imbalances can certainly exist and the relative balance of estrogen and progesterone can differ between women. When we want to really nail down what your exact pattern is, we do hormone testing. This helps us identify the levels of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA and cortisol giving us a very clear understanding of the hormone imbalances underlying your symptoms.
And the best news? There are fast, easy and effective ways of correcting hormone imbalances through lifestyle changes, dietary modifications and supplementation. We can use therapies to help your body clear out estrogen like DIM and I3C, we can use herbs to boost up your progesterone levels like Vitex and Wild Yam and we can help subdue those cortisol levels through supplementation as well. There is no one size fits all, but your symptoms and/or testing will guide which tools will work best.
Along with the physical symptoms, PMS can cause debilitating mental emotional health challenges and can wreak havoc on our close and romantic relationships.
Please reach out if you need help with hormone imbalances including PMS/PMDD. We are here to help!
