Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary
Leading the change to better periods
The stress hormone cortisol plays a role in several women’s health conditions including premenstrual mood symptoms and irregular periods.
Thank you to my nutrition professor who first taught me about vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) for PMS. It is a reliable treatment for premenstrual mood problems including PMDD.
I still remember B6 as the eureka moment in how I thought about periods. Suddenly, I had much higher expectations of what a period should be like. Premenstrual mood symptoms are common, but they’re not normal.
As my patients can tell you, I prescribe magnesium for almost every hormonal condition including PCOS, insulin resistance, PMDD, migraines, and perimenopause.
Magnesium deficiency is common because modern soils are depleted and because your body dumps magnesium during stress. So, if you’re under stress, you probably need magnesium.
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.
Thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) was supposed to be a simple way to detect thyroid disease. Before its invention in the 1970s, doctors diagnosed thyroid disease by symptoms.