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 PepTalk. 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.
(01:56):
Hello and welcome back to PMDD Pep Talk. If you're new, welcome. If you've been hanging out with me here for a while. Thanks for being here. It's great to have you back. Today we are going to be diving into the number one mistake. I see women making that's keeping them stuck in the PMDD cycle. We want to break this damage control cycle and we want to start to change your PMDD story. So I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today and I'm really curious to hear your takeaways. So first I want to walk you through the PMDD damage control cycle that I've lived through, you might be living through. This will sound very familiar if you've been dealing with symptoms and not finding relief for a long period of time. And this can lead to complex trauma, to terrible things that you have to work through when this goes on and on and you go through the cycle every cycle.
(02:59):
I'm going to say cycle a lot because this is a cycle you're stuck in and it's actually tied to your menstrual cycle. So there is a real cycle to it as far as that 28-ish day cycle, your different cycle phases where your symptoms are presenting and then you're caught in a cycle within the cycle. It's like an inception situation. So you have a symptom, you maybe try a random supplement you saw on Reddit that's supposed to help with mood swings. Maybe you feel a little bit better, you're starting to feel, "Maybe I'm not broken." You're researching for hours about what to do. For PMD, you're buying things, you're implementing things. You then come around to your luteal phase, your symptoms increase and you get hit. Maybe you have an episode that's p psychological or maybe your physical symptoms increase and you're calling out of work, you're getting in another fight, you're ending another relationship, whatever your escalation pattern is going to be, then you are getting caught in the emotional downfall from that.
(04:03):
You're feeling like a bad friend, a bad wife, a bad parent or daughter. You are dealing with the shame and guilt, and then you're back at the beginning. Maybe you're feeling back to yourself because your menstrual cycle has started and your symptoms are reducing. And then here we go on another round of you're living your life, your symptoms are increasing, you're reacting to the discomfort of symptoms and you're acting out because of that. And then it's cutting your life down cycle after cycle. And this is why we feel like we can't catch up. We feel like we're always behind. We look at people who are our age and they're farther along than us. They've achieved more. They are seemingly more functional and more together because they're not getting cut down menstrual cycle, menstrual cycle after menstrual cycle and having to play catch up, having to recover, having to apologize, having to start over.
(05:10):
There is a very famous analogy on the internet about PMDD where it's like building a sandcastle every month and the luteal phase comes along and washes that sandcastle away and you're starting back over. Whereas the average woman without PMDD isn't quite dealing with that same degree of destruction from the wave each cycle. Not that there aren't aspects of female biology that play out in PMDD that other women are experiencing, but it's to the severe degree with the amount of symptoms, the severity of symptoms, the duration of symptoms. And if you want to learn more about the distinction between PMS and PMD, because it's reported that over 90% of women experience PMS symptoms where they're estimating closer to five to 8% experience PMDD symptoms. Now, I do think that's a gross misrepresentation because I think there's a lot of undiagnosis and misdiagnosis that comes along with PMDD, but still there's a huge difference between how many women are dealing with severe premenstrual symptoms versus PMS symptoms.
(06:19):
And we have an episode on that episode two, four differences between PMS and PMDD, great episode to listen to. We also have an article on our website if you prefer to read about this, but this damage control cycle is really causing trauma. It's causing a perpetuation and shame and guilt. It's causing a perpetuation of low self-esteem, low confidence in your sense of self because every cycle you have the opportunity to perpetuate those negative beliefs because you're getting cut down, you're behaving in ways that aren't aligned with your core values, you're carrying that guilt and shame, you're trying to catch up, you're just ... It's such a burden to bear. So we really want to break the PMDD cycle and the number one mistake I see women making that's holding them back from breaking that damage control PMDD cycle is waiting until you're symptomatic to start addressing PMDD.
(07:23):
That's the biggest mistake. If you only work on your PMDD symptoms when you're symptomatic, you're not reducing and managing your PMDD symptoms, you're simply doing damage control, you're in damage control mode. So it's ironic that the best time to address your hormonal mood symptoms is actually when you feel good, but that's exactly when most of us stop doing the work, check out, just want to live our lives, totally forget even the PMDD is a thing. We can get into PMD denial, we can get into PMDD amnesia, which we're going to break all of that down. But today our main focus is diving into that one mistake that I see women making and why a whole cycle approach is actually key to long-term symptom reduction in management, breaking the cycle and actually healing rather than just dealing with PMDD, PMS, and hormonal mood symptoms.
(08:25):
So back to that damage control cycle, what most women are doing is they're waiting until the luteal phase when symptoms hit. Now you may have some fear, you may have some bracing before that that's impacting your quality of life, but then oftentimes women are waiting and scrambling to implement every strategy at once once the symptoms come on, then you're feeling overwhelmed, you're trying to fix everything. While you're already in survival mode, you're already dysregulated and your symptoms are already starting to peak or rise. When we approach symptoms like this, we could experience some temporary relief with these strategies, but usually we're not fully experiencing the relief until the period starts or ends when the symptoms subside naturally and then what's happening, you're completely abandoning all healing practices at that point in time. Now there's no judgment here. Look, I did this for 17 years. So if you're like, "Oh, this is me.
(09:29):
She's talking about me. " This is so exciting for you because this can change the entire trajectory of the rest of your life. Most women are dealing with PMDD symptoms that come into our practice six months of the year. When we break down how many days per cycle they're experiencing moderate to severe symptoms, we break down how many cycles per year they're having. It comes out to six months because the average is two weeks per month per cycle, right? So you're going to get a lot of your time back. You're going to start to be able to build consistency. You're going to be able to recoup your sense of purpose and meaning, your self-confidence. So much can change when you start to break this damage control cycle, but if you're not breaking it, it's repeating month after month. It's degrading your confidence, your sense of self, you're perpetuating the beliefs that are coming out of that luteal phase brain and that negativity bias while I am worthless because here I am again in my luteal phase and I can't go to work.
(10:33):
I can't keep up with my kids. I can't maintain healthy relationships. So you prove through your behavior cycle after cycle that the negative beliefs that you have about yourself are true and that is super damaging. It's holding you back. It is majorly problematic, but how do you break it? Yes, reducing and managing the symptoms is one way, but it's so much more nuanced than that. And then when you're in that damage control cycle all the time, you start to wonder, why does nothing work? What is fundamentally wrong with me as a human being that I am experiencing these symptoms and this low quality of life due to my menstrual cycle, whereas so- and-so has a doctorate degree, owns a home, has been married for however many years, has kids, whatever your comparison, natural comparison that you're making, your upward comparison to those around you. So this does not work and we want to break this pattern.
(11:40):
You can build a foundational system.
(11:49):
You cannot build a foundational system while you're symptomatic. While you're peak symptomatic, you can't. Your nervous system is already dysregulated, your hormones have already shifted, your brain is already highly inflamed in your body. You do not have the capacity for change when you are at your lowest. So this is why. This is why it doesn't work to wait until you're symptomatic to address symptoms. You're reactive versus proactive. When you are in that damage control cycle, it's keeping you in a perpetual stress response state. You're not thinking clearly you're not able to strategize, plan, implement. It's not the time.
(12:41):
This is the time for management strategies that help you cope, but those do not create lasting change in your symptom presentation. So if you want to see a graphic of the PMDD cycle, we made one for you. So you can go to the show notes, you can click on that PMDD damage control cycle. You know it. I talked you through it. You know how it's playing out for you, but sometimes the visual is really helpful and that is what we're trying to break. Now, we guide you through this in our one-to-one program. This is one of the first things that we do is we have a whole strategy for helping you understand your triggers and how this results in an escalation of your symptoms. And then we create deescalation plans. We create plans for reduction verse management techniques. So if you're like, "Jess, this is all great and fun and I love this conversation, but like how do I do it?
(13:41):
" We can help you. This is what we do. So stay along for the conversation though. There's so much more to unpack more on the surface level here. So I want to talk a little bit more about what happens when that damage control cycle continues to get played out. Now, we did a post on this. It went viral. It had over 600,000 views because it's so relatable. I'll link it in the show notes. You can look at it, but I'm going to talk it through with you here. So I call this PMDD whiplash because that's what it feels like when you are only addressing your symptoms when you're symptomatic and you haven't actually accessed the tools and resources for symptom reduction and management throughout the entire cycle with a whole cycle approach. So what happens is like, what is PMDD whiplash? Let me talk you through that a bit more.
(14:42):
So it's the emotional and psychological shock that happens when your body and brain swing between two completely different states in a short period of time, most commonly around ovulation and then potentially again before menstruation is the most common symptom presentation pattern we see with our clients and students. So one week you're in the thick of PMDD, feeling anxious, angry, hopeless, questioning everything about your life. Next, your symptoms lift and you suddenly feel fine, motivated, normal, and like nothing ever happened. That sudden shift back and forth, whether you're going into it or coming out of it, can feel like whiplash because you've just been emotionally thrown from one extreme to the other. Sound familiar? So what does this look like? You start doubting whether the bad days were even real. Was it just being dramatic is like one of the quintessential BMDD questions. You also are going to feel guilt and shame for things you said or did while you were symptomatic.
(15:42):
You will also overcommit or take on too much once your energy returns. You'll feel disconnected from your life or your relationships because you missed so much during the luteal phase.
(15:56):
You'll also live in a constant state of bracing and waiting for the next crash. Now, why does it happen? This PMDD whiplash is rooted in the neurochemical shifts and nervous system dysregulation between phases of your cycle with PMDD. During the luteal phase, hormone sensitivity, especially progesterone and its metabolites, alter your neurotransmitters like serotonin and GABA, affecting mood, cognition, emotional regulation, and your brain and body are put into survival mode. We have so much research on how the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access, your stress response system is impacted in PMDD because of the sensitivity to the natural fluctuation of your hormones. Then your period begins and those hormones drop and you suddenly feel relief, but your nervous system is still recovering from weeks of stress, chemistry. That rapid transition creates the emotional whiplash sensation that your body hasn't caught up yet with the new state.
(16:59):
Now we're going to talk about how to support this, but I want you to know like you're here, you know you're not alone, but it can feel very lonely to be experiencing this, feel very confusing, feel very hopeless, which then is just perpetuating more and more of this cycle. So waiting until you're symptomatic is going to worsen the whiplash sensation. When you only work on symptoms during the luteal phase, the contrast between the good weeks and the bad weeks becomes even more extreme. You have no foundation to stand on, which equals bigger crashes each cycle and your body hasn't built resilience up, which we teach an entire module in PMTD rehab on resilience because this is so important to symptom reduction and management over the long term. So every single hormone transition is going to feel like you're starting from zero, whether it be each cycle, whether it be going through perimenopause, whether it be postpartum, weaning, all of that is just going to be monumental for you to go through when it doesn't have to be that way.
(18:12):
And it creates the sense of two different views, two different lives that you're living, which women often describe, which is why PMDD is so commonly misdiagnosed as bipolar, which we have an article on, we have posts on that maybe could be your case. I get messages weekly. "I've been diagnosed as bipolar. Do you think it could actually be PMDD? "It's so common's most common misdiagnosis for PMDD because of this two different versions of yourself. Ultimately, mood disorders in general and personality disorders create that presentation psychologically, but this takes such a physical and emotional toll on you. I don't need to tell you that, right? We know that you're living it. You're constantly bracing for the next cycle what's going to come. You're fearing. You're living in a state of hypervigilance during the follicular and potentially ovulatory phases, depending on your symptom presentation. Then you're recovering from guilt and shame from the things that you did or said or didn't do while you were symptomatic and you're continually creating disconnection in your relationship with yourself and your other relationships in your life during ... From cycle phase to cycle phase because you'll feel like you miss so much during luteal.
(19:32):
It's again, rebuilding that sandcastle over and over. Now, why are women waiting until they're symptomatic to experience symptoms? Couple of reasons that I see a lot of times we just want to feel good when we feel good and kind of be like, " Oh, I have this relief. I'm just going to live my life. I just want to do my own thing and I'm not going to think about this anymore. "There could also be a aspect of, " Oh, it won't be like this again. That was just a weird thing that happened. There can be a denial that comes along with PMDD that's very common. "We also have an entire post on PMDD denial because this is such a common challenge that women are facing and it happens even more so when we're misdiagnosed or dismissed or we're not taken seriously by healthcare providers, friends or family, or you're not taking yourself seriously.
(20:28):
The truth can feel too big. You can minimize your own pain. You can say you're doing okay when you're not. You can be told it's just PMS or you're just being hormonal when it's really something much greater than that, that you're being dramatic, you're too sensitive, you're overexaggerating. All of that can fuel the PMDD denial, which then can result in taking less responsibility and accountability and action around the symptoms preovulatory. You also may just not be aware of the cyclical nature of the symptom presentation. It often is so consuming what you're going through that you don't see it. Like for example, if you listen to the episode on my story, my mom was the one that pieced together," Hey, this is your cycle. The people closest to you can see the pattern. "When you're in it, it's really hard to see what's happening. There can be such a lack of consciousness, not because you're in denial, but because you're so consumed in the reality of what's happening that you don't notice the cyclical nature.
(21:38):
And because we've never been taught about our menstrual cycles and because symptoms often occur around ovulation, which is 14 days before your period, you're likely not tying this to your menstrual cycle. If you have an episode and then you bleed the next day a few times, you're going to be like, " Oh, well, it's my period. It's related to my hormones. "But when it's happening with PMDD, these symptoms, they're often presenting 14 or more days before you have a menstrual cycle. So there's no cue to tell you this is actually tied to ovulation. And we rarely understand the different cycles of the four different cycles of the menstrual cycle. We really understand the hormone fluctuations, how that can impact mood because we haven't got that comprehensive reproductive health education, which is why when you come into our program, that's one of the first things that we do is we provide that education for you because you cannot learn to reduce and manage your symptoms without that information.
(22:34):
And you have not received it, I promise you. Unless you've done a lot of self-education, there are so many pieces of the puzzle that you're missing about your female biology that you've never been taught that you need to know in order to change your relationship with this diagnosis in order to reduce and manage your symptoms over the long term, this is non-negotiable. It's the first step to learning to reduce and manage your symptoms is symptom mapping and getting this reproductive health education. So it can be denial. It can be, " Hey, I just want to live my life. "It can also be a lack of awareness that's not your fault just because of the lack of education that you've had access to.
(23:18):
And then it can also be playing into what I like to call PMDD amnesia. We also have a post on PMDD amnesia. I will tag it in the show notes, but what is it? So this is a term I use informally to describe the PMDD experience of frustration and confusion that you experienced during the luteal phase of two weeks before menstruation-ish, give or take with your specific cycle. And during this phase when we're symptomatic, we feel overwhelmed, we feel desperate, we feel anxious, we feel hopeless. Then our period starts and the symptoms subside and we may struggle to recall just how intense that experience was. Many of our clients will come back to me and say," I do not remember what I said during this fight. I do not remember what happened. "It's almost like I'm possessed. It's almost like I'm in a fog. It's almost like my body and mind have been hijacked.
(24:15):
I'm not consciously aware of what happened. And this is because of that nervous system dysregulation that hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis dysfunction when you are in a fight and flight, freeze and fawn state of the nervous system, survival state, you can have kind of like a blackout experience because of this. So you can forget the emotional and mental toll that the episode has brought into your life. You might forget how much you struggled with your partners, your friends, your family members. You might be surprised when they bring up incidents that happened during your luteal phase. Maybe you will stop taking medications, skip therapy, neglect the symptom strategies that you put into place because it's not that bad. You kind of have this amnesia, this forgetting effect of how hard it was. You might rationalize or kind of talk yourself out of the intense, dark, self-harming thoughts that you may have, like it was just stress, that was just a weird fluke, rather than recognizing them as the serious PMDD symptoms that they may be.
(25:27):
And you may also think that it wasn't that hard to focus and planning ahead and using cognitive support strategies aren't really necessary because I was actually fine. My brain fog wasn't that bad. My decision fatigue, my overwhelming wasn't that bad.
(25:56):
I don't really need to do anything about it. There's that amnesia. And this happens because those hormonal shifts can have a major impact on your mood, memory, perception, your nervous system state. And then when hormones begin to stabilize in the follicular phase and come back up and you're not having as much sensitivity to those fluctuations, potentially depending on your symptom pattern presentation, your mood, your cognition, improve with that estrogen rise, making the previous emotional state feel distant, exaggerated, even though it was very real at the time. Estrogen has this kind of like a rose colored glasses effect where it's like, it's fine. It's okay. It's not a big deal. Estrogen is on board. It's just like, nevermind. And then when progesterone comes on, progesterone is like, mm-mm. No, no, no, no, no. That is not the case. So this is where that two selves can really come out because you feel the way the way estrogen is impacting your brain, chemistry and mood is very different than what progesterone is doing.
(27:08):
And I love to unpack this. I love to unpack this because you would not believe the things that those hormones, those hormone metabolites are communicating, are creating in your behavior. So much of this is predictable and shared in the female experience and it actually has nothing to do with your personality or who you are as a person. And when you start to learn some of this, like how progesterone puts you into a protective mechanism because you could potentially be pregnant. So that isolating tendency, that staying home, that nesting tendency that you feel during luteal, if you're paying attention, you understand your psychophases and where you are, not about anything about you. Literally just a behavioral response to those hormones in your brain, which are manipulating you, persuading you to behave a certain way to protect this potential embryo implantation. Guys, learning about your body, like I said, this foundational health education will help you forgive yourself, will help you change everything in your perception of what's happening with PMDD because you start to see it all very differently, but you cannot do that without the education, you cannot do that without the awareness.
(28:26):
And this is key. So that amnenesia creates a disconnection where it can make it harder for you to track symptoms, seek support, feel validated, again, especially if others continue to downplay your symptoms. So that damage control cycle is continuing to play out and the number one mistake you're making is not addressing symptoms throughout the entire cycle. You're waiting until the symptoms appear to start addressing them. That leads to PMDD whiplash that happens because of PMDD amnesia or PMDD denial or just a simple lack of education and awareness of the cyclical nature of your mood symptoms. So we covered a lot of ground there. That was a little recap up until this point. Are you with me? Are you with me? Now this brings us to our next part of the conversation, which is how important reduction techniques are, how important management techniques are for long-term symptom reduction and management of PMDD symptoms, and that you use these at different times.
(29:45):
So I see a lot of clients and students coming into our practice and they're just using management tools or they're most commonly just using management tools. And if they're using reduction tools, it's random. It's not personalized and targeted it to their specific symptom drivers and they're not using the reduction tools at the right time and they're not using the management tools at the right time. They have no strategy long term over the entire cycle to stop making the mistake that's driving this whole damage control pattern that they're stuck in. So reduction strategies are interventions that address the root causes and symptom drivers behind your symptom pattern presentation. So it's going to help you, reduction strategies are going to help you decrease your symptom severity, how bad the symptoms are and your symptom duration, how long the symptoms are lasting over time. This is foundation work.
(31:00):
We talk a lot about foundations, our whole PMDD rehab program is about foundations, everything that we do initially in our one-on-one program is about foundations. The reduction strategies are foundational strategy
