Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary
Leading the change to better periods and hormones
How hormonal factors such as PMDD, perimenopause, and hormonal birth control influence mood and sleep. Articles explore the role of mast cell activation, histamine, and body-identical progesterone.
Ovulation is beneficial because it’s how women make hormones.
Every month, as the ovaries get ready to release an egg, they pump out estrogen. Estrogen, in turn, stimulates serotonin, which is why women can be more outgoing and energetic in the few days leading up to ovulation.
Every month, after ovulation, one of the ovaries releases a huge amount of progesterone—the calming, soothing, anti-inflammatory hormone.
Our stress response system—the HPA axis—is calibrated for intermittent, severe threats such as lions. Not for the incessant, trivial threats of modern life, such as difficult phone calls. We don’t want our hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to charge up and release cortisol every time we drive in heavy traffic, but it will do so.
If you’re like me, you’re trying to ease up on the HPA throttle. I practice yoga. I take magnesium. I switch off my computer in the evening like a good naturopath. I sternly instruct my HPA axis to power down, but I must say that it does not always listen. If I could only be more Buddha-like, then I would not need to coax my HPA axis with a herbal medicine like Rhodiola.
Eight hours of continuous sleep is a modern and artificial rest pattern. Some people are fortunate to have adapted to it fairly well, but for many of us, our bodies remember a different time.
Night used to be longer. Before electric light and Facebook, people went to bed earlier. Our ancestors didn’t need to condense sleep into an efficient eight hour bundle, so they enjoyed segmented sleep, or divided sleep.
We must not fear estrogen—our own queen of hormones. With all the current talk of estrogen dominance, plus the 2002 HRT scare, estrogen has acquired a bad reputation it does not deserve.