Speaker 1 (00:20):
PMDD shaped my life for 17 years before I could name it, I spent those years searching for answers, questioning my sanity, and desperately seeking treatments that actually worked. My painful journey had an unexpected twist. Helping others heal from PMDD became my life's purpose. Hi, I'm Jess, a board certified nutritional therapist coach, the founder of her mood mentor and your host. This is PMDD PEP Talk, A weekly reminder that your suffering is real, your experience is valid, and your future is brighter than your symptoms suggest. Each week we're going to explore the truths about PMDD that nobody talks about, the kind of truths that shift something deep inside you and make you think maybe there's more possible than I imagined. Whether you're in the depths of luteal darkness or riding the clarity of your follicular phase, you're exactly where you need to be because here's what I know for sure.
(01:18):
Healing PMDD isn't just about managing symptoms, it's about transforming your life. This challenge, as brutal as it can be, is an invitation to know yourself more deeply and live a more joyful purpose filled life. PMDD might feel like your whole story, but it's just a chapter and you get to write what comes next. Welcome to PMDD, PEP Talk, quick pep talk, pause. Remember that everything we talk about here is meant to educate and inspire. Always team up with your healthcare provider for personal medical advice. All right, now let's get into it. And we're back. I'm so excited to have you here today. I want to talk about the topic of healing PMDD and get into what that means. That statement healing PMDD is quite subjective. When I ask women in our community what healing PMDD means to them, oftentimes they'll say never having any more symptoms, and that really reveals a lack of understanding of the female body.
(02:24):
So today I want to get into, when I talk about healing PMDD, what I mean, healing is not synonymous with cured. Healing does not equal cured when I speak of healing. So let's just start with a basic definition of what healing means. So when you look healing up in the Oxford Dictionary, it says the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again, you can be healthy and still experience premenstrual symptoms. So healing to me means living a completely different life than I lived before with symptoms. It means having reduced my symptoms and being able to manage my symptoms in a different and new way. And it also means changing my relationship with my body and changing my relationship with my symptoms over time. Of course, there's also an element of healing through grief and trauma that comes with long-term, severe premenstrual symptoms and what that has inflicted on your quality of life.
(03:39):
So it's complex, but I do want to reiterate, healing does not equal cured healing does not equal never experiencing another premenstrual symptom. Part of the healing journey for PMDD. And I think a really important place to start is looking at healing as restoring your health. And in order to do that, and in order to start changing the perception of these symptoms, we need to look at the reality of what symptoms are. So your body cannot send you a DM and say, Hey, your macronutrients are imbalanced, or Hey, you're dehydrated, or, Hey, you are on a blood sugar roller coaster. Hey, your sleep is not great. Hey, you are not managing stress well, you're not going to get that dm. What you're going to get are symptoms. So starting to shift our perspective of symptoms, because let's be honest, symptoms feel like an attack. Symptoms can make us feel like a victim in our own bodies.
(04:48):
So we need to work on starting to understand what symptoms actually are. Symptoms are messages from your body about things that are going on that need attention. Symptoms are a form of communication, and how does that feel when we start to shift our perspective and look at symptoms as a communication, as information rather than punishment, attack a source of suffering, just check in with yourself and see how does that feel? Does that feel different? Does that feel, do you feel any shifts there? That was a really big shift for me. Now, it might be hard to really dive into that shift and really ground into that shift without an understanding of how. So this is where education comes in and why I think education is so important. So something to know is that the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 2015 rated the menstrual cycle as a vital sign.
(06:00):
So right up there with your respiratory rate right up there with your body temperature, the menstrual cycle is being rated as a vital sign for health and menstrual cycle symptoms can be an early sign that something is not going well in your body, that something needs support, that we need attention. Just like a high temperature, say you went into the emergency room with 105 degree temperature, they would address you, yet you can go into the emergency room with severe psychological premenstrual symptoms or severe physical premenstrual symptoms and be treated very differently. So practitioners are not hip to the no that the menstrual cycle is a vital sign and they're not treating their patients, they're clients accordingly. So that's one piece of the puzzle to be aware of that menstrual cycle symptoms are telling you a direct communication about the quality and functioning of your body systems of your organs, and giving you information about how to move forward based on what those symptoms are.
(07:12):
Something else I want to point out, and I fall into this trap so commonly is thinking that when there's a problem, I immediately need to take action. When there's a symptom, I immediately need to take action. When we're working to reduce and manage symptoms, the first step actually isn't action. The first step is awareness. So let's do a little metaphor here. So say that my bike is broken, I want to ride my bike, but it's broken. In what world would I who have no education, no understanding of bike mechanics, go over to my bike and say, okay, my bike is broken. I'm going to fix my bike. I don't know what the parts are, I don't know what they're called. I don't know how they connect to each other. I don't know what tools I need, and I don't know how long it's going to take me to do this bike mechanic fixing project here.
(08:09):
Would I ever do that? Probably not yet. We're doing that every single day with our bodies and then we are getting frustrated. We are feeling victimized by the results that we're getting when we're throwing random things at our symptoms when we are trying to take action without any awareness. So the first step when it comes to healing PMDD symptoms is not action. It is awareness. And I think education is a really important piece of awareness because how do you become more aware if you don't have the education about your body, if you don't have education on how to draw awareness to your symptom patterns, how to identify what are these symptoms saying specifically about the quality of my vital sign, my menstrual cycle from the education comes awareness from the awareness we can take targeted action. Now, I think testing is really important piece of the puzzle in there in healing PMDD, of course, and we'll do a separate episode on that.
(09:26):
But the first step is non-action. It's awareness and education is really tied into that. Something we need to think about too here is when we're thinking about healing PMDD and we're shifting our perspective from these symptoms are our communication, we have to understand that we will experience symptoms with the menstrual cycle. So this urge and this desire and this want for a cure again, reveals another misunderstanding about the female body. So we are on an ian rhythm, a 28 ish day biological rhythm that follows our hormones shifting and changing throughout about four weeks, depending on how long your cycle is, of course it's individual for each of us. You're going to feel differently between those different phases. So if the goal is to cure premenstrual symptoms, we're really setting ourself up for disappointment there because that's just not how the body works. There are so many complex factors that impact our menstrual cycle, each phase, and not only each phase, but each entire cycle, and not only each phase or each entire cycle, but over a 90 day period.
(10:47):
So it's not just the choices that you make and the things that happen in your life this month that impact your menstrual cycle. It's the things that happen over 90 or even more days than that that can impact your menstrual cycle because your follicle is developing over about a 90 to a hundred day period of time. So interesting, and this is again, where you're starting to see that awareness and that education play a big role here in shifting your perspective. Another thing is we don't want to disappear symptoms because symptoms are the way that your body is communicating to you about what's going on. You can think, and Lisa Henderson, Jack talks about this in her book, the fifth Vital Sign, an amazing resource, if you haven't read that book yet. She talks about the menstrual cycle as being a report card. So at the end of the month, you're getting a report card or the beginning of your cycle.
(11:43):
Technically you're getting a report card of how your body is doing without vital sign. The report card is giving you information and communication about the state of your health. You want the report card, even if you're getting a D, you're getting an F. You want that information. You don't want to turn that communication off because that communication is how you get awareness, and that awareness is how you take action to support your menstrual cycle. It's also important to know that we are, again, another sign of a lack of education around the female body. We're focused on the menstrual cycle. How is our menstruation when really our menstruation is only our menstruation based on our ovulation. So we really need to draw our focus back to the quality of our ovulation, which creates the quality of our menstruation.
(12:44):
So when we're looking to heal PMDD, you're seeing it's a bigger topic than maybe you thought starting out in this conversation. But the way we approach this at her mood mentor, my virtual premenstrual clinic is we really dive into this model that I have created and I call the seven core areas of hormone health. Now, don't get overwhelmed. Seven is a lot of core areas of hormone health. But again, that education and awareness is important in understanding what is impacting the quality of our ovulation, what is impacting the quality of our menstruation and thus what is impacting our symptoms, that communication from our bodies about what is going on and how we are doing. So those seven core areas of hormone health, and you can see this if you're watching on YouTube, but those seven core areas are nutrition, movement, our environment, and there we're really looking at endocrine disrupting.
(13:39):
Chemical exposure are relationships. Spirituality don't cringe when it comes to spirituality. We're really looking at your values and beliefs about yourself, and we're looking at a sense of purpose and meaning in your life, which if you're living with a cyclical reproductive mood disorder, you probably are confused about what your values and beliefs are because you feel like two different people throughout the month. You might not have a sense of purpose and meaning because of the self-sabotage, because the way that the symptoms are holding you back from being the version of yourself that you know can be and you want to be. So yes, religion, yes, spirituality, practices play in here, but we're really looking at it through the lens of your values and beliefs and your sense of purpose and meaning. Then we have our sixth core area sleep and our seventh core area of hormone health resilience.
(14:28):
And here's where we're looking at stress and the impacts of stress on our endocrine system, on our mental health, and on our ability to cope and use relaxation as symptom reduction in management tools. So if we're looking to heal PMDD, we need to zoom out and we need to look at the body as a whole, and we need to consider the complex factors in our environment that are impacting our healing and impacting our menstrual cycles. Now, this is where I want to get into kind of the modern paradigm of a pill for an ill or one solution per one symptom that we run into in conventional medicine. And this is very common and this is pervasive. So meaning you're probably not trying to have this mentality. You're probably not trying to live within this paradigm, but this is what we were raised in most likely, and this is how we think.
(15:34):
I have a headache. I will take an ibuprofen or a Tylenol or something like that, one for one. Now, when we're dealing with more acute conditions, that makes sense and that's where western medicine and conventional medicine excels. So within Western and conventional medicine, we love them for treating acute or life-threatening death issues. Conventional medicine and professionals are like firefighters to put out fires and they're the first to respond to an emergency. So we love them for that. That is the best use of, in my opinion, in my experience, the Western medical system. But when we're dealing with more chronic health conditions like severe premenstrual symptoms and many other long-term chronic conditions, western medicine can kind of fall short here for us because there's a complex amount of factors and that pill for an ill, one solution per one symptom doesn't lead us to where we want to go.
(16:48):
And many of my students and clients are facing this when they seek support for PMS and pmm DD symptoms, and they're offered SSRIs or birth control, and those medications make their symptoms worse or the side effects make the symptoms, make the medication unbearable to stay on. Lots of complexity there too. I'm not going to get into that, but it's not addressing the underlying drivers behind your symptoms. It's more of an a bandaid approach to treating the symptom rather than addressing what is driving the symptom, which we can find that more through testing. We can find that more through evaluating those seven core areas of hormone health. And if you want to know what my testing recommendations are, you're chomping at the bit for that. Head it into our PMDD community where I have those listed out for you. And like I said, we'll do another episode on testing for PMDD, but when it comes to healing PMDD, we really need to look at the body as a whole. So in integrative medicine or functional medicine, different word for the same kind of thing, we are working with chronic health conditions in a way to heal the body as a whole. You can think of integrative medical practitioners like carpenters we're well trained at rebuilding and supporting the body through foundational health rather than treating a symptom. Love a metaphor there. You know me.
(18:22):
So I want to wrap this P-P-M-D-D PEP talk up with a quote that I think is so powerful when we're looking at what does it mean to heal PMDD for you? And as you're maybe shifting your paradigm and shifting your thoughts around what that looks like and what that means and your expectations there. Now that we've had this conversation, and the quote is from Brianna Weiss, I think I'm saying her name right? I hope so. She is a lovely, lovely writer, and this quote is, your new life is going to cost you your old life when you're working to heal PMDD. Your new life is going to cost you your old life. That is going to require changing the way you're thinking about PMDD, most likely your mindset that is going to require you taking some action. But before you take action, remember we need education and we need awareness so that you're taking targeted action towards your specific symptoms, towards your specific symptom pattern, and you're actually healing on a deeper level rather than just throwing random things at your symptoms, becoming very frustrated and hopeless, giving up feeling like a victim in your own body when those symptoms are really a communication from your body about the quality of your ovulation and your menstruation and your overall health.
(19:54):
So think about this quote and how this fits into healing PMDD for you, your new life is going to cost you your old life. Let me know what you think about this conversation. Let me know if you've had any shifts around your idea of healing PMDD, zooming out, seeing it as a more complex and nuanced topic, rather than equaling a cure or a fix, you do not need to be fixed. Your body is communicating with you through symptoms. You need to learn how to listen to those symptoms. You need to learn how to develop the awareness around those symptoms, and you need to learn how to target those symptoms so you can reduce and you can manage your PMS and PMDD symptoms and live a fuller and happier life. And that is absolutely 100% possible for you.
