Hormonal hell at home
Many of my clients are perimenopausal. Many of my clients have teenage daughters going through puberty.
These are both extremely challenging life stages.
Common features of both puberty and perimenopause include:
heavy periods & flooding
irritability & anger
anxiety & reduced confidence
an inability to gait your emotions (despite your best efforts)
tiredness & poor sleep
stomach aches & bloating
period pains
acne
sugar cravings
headaches & migraines
missing out on the FUN (or worse, needing to take days off school or work).
What’s going on?
My diagram is rubbish, but illustrates the point that during puberty oestrogen levels are climbing and during perimenopause oestrogen levels are declining. Oestrogen is brilliant, but we need time to adjust to the amount of oestrogen which is available to us, when it is going up, as well as when it is going down.
Progesterone is oestrogen’s partner in the reproductive cycle. Progesterone is also brilliant, it’s often described as the calming hormone, it promotes sleep, it builds muscles and bones, it thins the lining of the uterus. Progesterone is made by your body following ovulation. Without ovulation, there can be no progesterone. It takes time to establish a regular pattern of ovulation during the teenage years, and ovulation then becomes more erratic during perimenopause, until it ceases altogether.
No ovulation = no progesterone. No progesterone = heavier periods, painful periods, increased anxiety, poor mood, poor sleep etc.
Unfortunately (massive understatement), these hormonal changes do not happen at a steady, predictable rate to which we can easily adjust. Hormone levels can fluctuate wildly, the symptoms listed above come and go, often with a vengeance, in a deeply frustrating, confusing and troubling way.
So, what can we do?
Work together.
Understanding what is happening with our hormones is powerful.
Understanding how to help our hormones out is powerful.
I’ve put together a 10 part series for Instagram and Facebook where I talk about simple things that both you and your teenager can do to help your hormones out, to ease your path through puberty and perimenopause. This will be a great place to start, so do follow along and feel free to ask questions.
It’s really worth putting the work in because what we want for our daughters are decades of healthy, regular, pain-free, PMS-free periods and, if and when the time comes, we don’t want fertility to be a struggle for them. It would also be nice to help ourselves out through perimenopause…
If you want to dive straight in and do as much as you can as quickly as possible, book a free Zoom call with me and we can discuss the best way forward:
