Hormones: 3 Easy Lifestyle Adjustments to Improve Your Mood and Libido
Women’s hormones are fascinating.
How do these tiny molecules, with levels that constantly change throughout the month, affect so many aspects of a woman's life? Hormones have a powerful influence on her partner and her family’s lives as well. Ultimately, hormones affect how that woman shows up in the world. They elude the best doctors, frustrate the smartest women and completely dumbfound the most caring males. Nearly every female patient, friend and acquaintance has some question or concern about their cycle, ie their hormones.
Female sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone and testosterone) are in a rhythmic interchange with three other hormones – melatonin, cortisol and insulin.
They are interdependent because they all require similar vitamins, minerals and proteins to be made. Therefore, if someone is constantly needing to create more cortisol due to stress, more insulin due to poor eating habits, or more melatonin due to poor sleep habits, the body will eventually become depleted of sex hormones. There simply are not any more building materials to form them. It is a quintessential example of robbing Peter to feed Paul. Peter, in this example, is a woman's mood, energy levels, and overall feeling of well being.
In the allopathic (Western) medical world, the standard solution to hormonal imbalance is to put a woman on birth control. Hormonal birth control is most commonly a primary estrogen replacement, with some progesterone, at high enough doses they largely override a woman’s cycle, essentially ‘covering up’ the natural rhythmic process. Fortunately, it has been my experience, working in the holistic medicine sphere, that as more women reclaim their feminine divine energy and wisdom about their bodies, less are turning to this approach for the solution for their hormonal imbalance.
In holistic medicine, women will most often turn to acupuncture and herbal remedies for balancing their hormones. And both can be remarkably effective. While I have zero qualms with either of these approaches, we must not forget the lifestyle adjustments that need to accompany these approaches.
What do balanced hormones look like?
When truly in harmony with nature, a woman will ovulate on the full moon and menstruate on the new moon.
Her cycle would be approx. 28 days (between 26-31 is consider normal)
She will have a medium flow. It will be heavier, with bright red blood, in the beginning and taper off gradually.
Her period will last 4-6 days.
It will NOT be preceded or accompanied by significant pain, mood disturbances and energy changes.
*It is normal to have increased sensitivity, enhanced intuition, a general desire to be more introverted, restful and reflective during your cycle.*
For women who are experiencing perimenopause/menopause, their period will not look like this anymore, and that is normal. Women in this age range will know if they need to improve their hormones because menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes, insomnia, night sweats, etc, are more than just mildly bothersome.
What is the ideal lifestyle to balance one’s hormones?
The body likes routine. Give it routine. One more time in case you missed it, give the body routine.
Follow the rhythms of nature.
Listen to your body and follow what it is telling you.
Let's break each of these down a little bit more.
Routine:
Here are 4 specific things that are helpful to add to a routine that will help balance hormones.
Go to bed early - you get bonus points if it is before 10:00 pm.
Wake up with the sun or at the same time every day - you get bonus points if you look at the sun when you wake up.
Drink water first thing in the morning - you get bonus points if you squeeze lemon into it.
Eat a protein rich breakfast.
Make sure you are having a daily bowel movement - you get bonus points if it is right when you wake up.
Live in tune with the rhythms of nature:
Do you wake up with the sun or at the same time everyday via an alarm?
Do you eat differently in the winter and the summer, or do you drink the exact same smoothie for breakfast year round?
Do you sleep roughly the same amount of hours each night or does it vary vastly between the week and the weekend?
Do you travel a lot and thus are frequently in different time zones?
Do you have a strict work schedule?
Do you have a child that wakes you frequently during the night?
Human beings are a part of nature and thus our health is negatively impacted when we live more aligned with modern constructs than the rhythms dictated by nature. Obviously, we have evolved to a point where it is extremely unlikely that any of us are going to return to sleeping on dirt, stop using electricity, etc, but the more you can mimic or honor the cycles created by the sun and the tilt of the Earth, the more your body will thank you.
Listen to your body:
Notice I didn’t say mind. I said body. Cultivate a daily check-in, and ideally start to check in with your body throughout the day. I cannot count how many people come into my office with an ache or pain and have not realized how exhausted or stressed out they are. Their body is screaming at them because they were too busy or felt bound by societal obligation to really check-in and give the body what it needed.
It’s simple. Listen and honor your body.
These concepts are not sexy or these concepts are not particularly new information; yet they are remarkably effective at optimizing these ethereal hormones that cannot be controlled or coerced but rather guided and encouraged. Embedded in the larger concepts of routine, living in tune with the rhythms of nature, and listening to your body are the specific goals of balancing the other hormones such as insulin, cortisol and melatonin.
No matter what, life is a dance. If your hormones are balanced, it feels like syncing with the rhythms of the music that is already playing, and you are able to dance through life with ease and grace.