33 - The PMDD Myth That Kept Me Sick: Nervous System Regulation, and the Healing Power of Dynamic Range

March 19, 2026

If you've ever been told to just calm down during PMDD, this episode is for you. Jes Fleming breaks down why nervous system regulation is about more than calming activities, how PMDD affects your stress response and emotional intensity, and why true healing requires dynamic range — not self-suppression.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Why nervous system regulation for PMDD is not the same as being calm all the time

• How PMDD affects stress sensitivity, emotional regulation, and nervous system flexibility in the luteal phase

• The role of allopregnanolone, GABA, cortisol, and autonomic nervous system dysregulation in PMDD

• The difference between suppression and repression — and how unprocessed emotions can worsen PMDD symptoms

• Why calming activities alone may not be enough if your body needs movement, expression, boundaries, or stress-cycle completion

• How to shift from trying to fix yourself into true PMDD healing through Jes's H.E.A.L. framework

• Why symptoms and strong emotions may be communication from the body, not proof that you are broken

Resources Mentioned:

• Her Mood Mentor programs and the H.E.A.L. framework
• Carl Jung: "Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one's being, but by integration of the contraries." / "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
• Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's 90-second emotion framework
• Research on PMDD, allopregnanolone, GABA, heart rate variability, cortisol, and stress physiology

Citations Mentioned:

• Hantsoo L, Epperson CN. Allopregnanolone in Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD): Evidence for Dysregulated Sensitivity to GABA-A Receptor Modulating Neuroactive Steroids Across the Menstrual Cycle. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2020;22(9):45.
• Hantsoo L, Payne JL. Towards understanding the biology of premenstrual dysphoric disorder: From genes to GABA. F1000Research. 2023;12:F1000 Faculty Rev-410.
• Landén M, Wennerblom B, Tygesen H, et al. Heart rate variability in premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2004;29(6):733–740.
• Hamidovic A, Davis J, Soumare F, et al. Allopregnanolone Is Associated with a Stress-Induced Reduction of Heart Rate Variability in Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2023.
• Hamidovic A, Davis J, Soumare F, et al. Blunted Cortisol Response to Acute Psychosocial Stress in Women With Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2024.
• Beddig T, Reinhard I, Kuehner C. Stress, mood, and cortisol during daily life in women with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2019;109:104372.
• Bolte Taylor J. Popularized the 90-second emotional wave concept in My Stroke of Insight.

HMM Resources + Services
https://courses.hermoodmentor.com/pmdd-resources

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Listen to the PMDD Pep Talk Podcast
https://courses.hermoodmentor.com/podcasts/pmdd-pep-talk-2

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You can find Jes:
Instagram: @hermoodmentor
Youtube: @hermoodmentor
Website: https://hermoodmentor.com/

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Episode Transcript

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\f0\fs24 \cf0 **0:20** \'b7 PMDDD 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.\
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**0:33** \'b7 Helping others heal from PMDD became my life's purpose. Hi, I'm Jess, a board certified nutritional therapist, coach, the founder of Hermood Mentor, and your host. This is PMDDD 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.\
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**1:07** \'b7 Whether you're in the depths of ludial 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. 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, purposefilled life. PMDD might feel like your whole story, but it's just a chapter. and you get to write what comes next. Welcome to PMDDD 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.\
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**1:58** \'b7 Hello and welcome back to the PMDD Pep Talk podcast. We have a juicy topic to talk about today. So, I'm so happy to have you here. If you've been experiencing hormonal mood symptoms or living with PMDD, you probably know what it feels like to be told to calm down when your whole body feels anything but calm. You try the breathing. You try the meditation. You try to rest more. You try to be more grounded, more positive, more in control. And sometimes those things help, but other times they leave you feeling more defeated because you're doing what you've been told you should do and should work. And yet you still feel rage, panic, agitation, like you're shutting down or like you want to crawl out of your own skin. And this is where so many women start to believe that the problem is them, right? That you're too emotional, that you're too much, that you're too reactive, too hard to help.\
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**2:56** \'b7 So today I want to talk about a myth that kept me sick for a long time and I see it keeping so many women in our PMDDD community in our onetoone program in our PMDDD rehab program also keeping them sick as well and keeping them stuck in their PMDDD healing journey. And this is the myth that nervous system regulation means calming down all the time.\
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**3:20** \'b7 So 2025 was really the year of nervous system in the health world. We saw it everywhere. It was being talked about all the time. And I really feel like the conversation missed the mark because it further entrenched this ideology of nervous system regulation being synonymous with calm. Calm and regulation are not the same thing. And the nervous system is dynamic. So, we're going to get into all of this. And the real juicy reminder here is that healing is not about becoming quieter, easier, or less intense. In fact, if that's what you've believed, I want to lovingly challenge it. So, what if healing is not about becoming less of a problem? What if healing is about becoming more whole? And this is what we're all about here at Her Mood Mentor.\
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**4:17** \'b7 The ideology of healing actually means to become whole. It doesn't mean disappear symptoms or minimize yourself more or be in control all the time. Mhm.\
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**4:28** \'b7 No, no, no. Uh healing means to become more whole. And I have a couple of quotes that underscore this whole conversation that we're having today.\
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**4:37** \'b7 These quotes are from Carl Young. And I'm a big fan of of Youngian psychology.\
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**4:43** \'b7 This really is a whole school of thought where you're bringing together the dark and the light within you and integrating those parts. So Carl Young said, "Whoesseness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one's being, but by integration of the contraries."\
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**5:01** \'b7 I'll read that one more time. Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one's being, but by integration of the contraries.\
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**5:10** \'b7 So that's the first quote that underscores our conversation here. And another quote that I reference a lot, but I also think it plays into this conversation. It plays into a lot of our conversation. So you've probably heard me quote it before, but another quote from Young Psychology, which says, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." One more time.\
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**5:35** \'b7 until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. So, both of these quotes really play into what we're talking about today, which is the myth that kept me sick. And for a long time, I thought healing meant that I should always be trying to calm down myself. I if I felt anger, urgency, panic, agitation, or any deep emotional intensity, I treated it as proof that something was wrong with me and that I needed to get rid of it quickly.\
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**6:05** \'b7 So, I reached for calming tools constantly. And let me be clear, calming tools can absolutely be supportive. I believe they have a place. But the problem was that I was using them almost in a way to override myself.\
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**6:21** \'b7 I wasn't asking what is my body trying to communicate? What is this emotion pointing to? What do I actually need right now? I was asking how do I make this stop? And that kept me sick. And that kept me st very stuck. I was not regulating myself. I was overriding myself. I was trying to become a calmer version of myself instead of a more whole version of myself. And I think this is where so many women with PMDD live without realizing it. Because when your body feels intense, the instinct is to shut it down fast. But sometimes what we call healing is actually self-abandonment in a prettier outfit.\
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**7:03** \'b7 Sometimes what looks like being calm is actually suppression. Sometimes what looks like being fine is actually disassociation or disconnection. And sometimes what looks like regulation is also actually disassociation.\
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**7:17** \'b7 Disassociation is not peace. Numbness is not regulation. And that distinction matters.\
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**7:26** \'b7 So many women are in so much pain. And a lot of the women with PMDDD are not failing at healing. They're following an incomplete model of healing. They've been taught that healing looks like being calm, being agreeable, being composed, being lowmaintenance, being less emotional, being easier to be around. So when they still feel intense emotions during the ludal phase, they assume that they must be doing something wrong. But if you're experiencing PMDD, you know this pain. You can feel like your body is on fire, like you are trying so hard to hold it together, why something inside of you is unraveling.\
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**8:07** \'b7 And when the usual advice doesn't help, most women don't become more compassionate with themselves. They become more controlling. They suppress more. They push through more. They disconnect more. They judge themselves more. They try harder to be good and calm and productive and grateful and regulated. not because they're broken, but because they're desperate. And this is where the wound deepens.\
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**8:30** \'b7 Because now you're not just suffering from symptoms. You're suffering from the belief that if you were healing correctly, you would not still feel this way.\
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**8:39** \'b7 But a lot of women with PMDD are not broken. None of the women who are experiencing hormonal symptoms are broken.\
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**8:46** \'b7 You are all trying to heal inside of a framework that taught you to fear your own intensity instead of understand it.\
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**8:56** \'b7 And we're going to change that today in this conversation.\
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**8:59** \'b7 What even is regulation? Okay, let's define this clearly. A regulated nervous system is not one that is calm all the time. A regulated nervous system is one that has dynamic range. And by dynamic range, I mean the ability to move between activation and settling without getting stuck. It can mobilize when needed for actions, boundary, effort, protection, and honesty. And it can settle when needed for rest, digestion, repair, connection, and sleep. The goal is not to eliminate activation. The goal is to stop getting stranded there.\
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**9:37** \'b7 Calm is one expression of regulation.\
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**9:40** \'b7 It's not the definition of regulation.\
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**9:42** \'b7 And this matters so much for women with PMDDD specifically because if you believe regulation always means softness and stillness, then every strong emotion that starts to bubble up inside of you is going to feel like proof that you are failing.\
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**9:57** \'b7 A strong emotion is not a dysfunction.\
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**10:00** \'b7 It's information. It's protective energy. Sometimes it's grief. Sometimes it's anger asking for a boundary. And sometimes it's your body saying that something needs attention. Here we know from so much research on PMDDD that it increasingly points to altered neuroststereroid sensitivity, autonomic regulation, and stress response patterns, which is one reason that this is so much deeper than simply learning to calm down. Okay, getting I'm getting a little hyped up.\
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**10:35** \'b7 You can hear in my voice because again, this was me. I was stuck here for so long. I was sick for so much longer than I needed to be because I believed this myth. I did not understand what regulation actually meant. I didn't understand the nervous system. And I allowed that unconscious kind of truth that I made for myself within that dictate how I felt about myself and how I perceived what was happening to me.\
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**11:06** \'b7 So let's dive into healing verse fixing.\
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**11:08** \'b7 Also, at some point, I had to shift from trying to fix myself to actually healing. And those are not the same thing. Fixing assures something is wrong with you. Healing assumes something needs care, safety, understanding, and integration. Healing asks for presence, not perfection.\
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**11:26** \'b7 And I also want to bring something deeper here. The word heal again comes from an old root meaning, the ideology, which means to make whole. This is such a different framework. Healing is not about becoming less emotional, just like regulation is not about becoming less emotional. It's about it's not about standing off the parts of you that feel inconvenient. And it's not about becoming easier for everyone else to deal with. Healing is about becoming more whole. And we talk about this in the episode uh that we released earlier all about what healing PMTD actually looks like. Now wholeness includes parts of you that society taught you to disconnect from.\
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**12:14** \'b7 So this isn't again a personal feeling.\
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**12:16** \'b7 This is how we learned to behave within society to be appropriate. Right? So it taught as we were raised, we learned very specifically and very early how to disconnect from anger, from our grief, from our fear, from our sensitivity, from our exhaustion, from our body signals, from intuition, from truth, from unmet unmet needs, and from your symptoms.\
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**12:42** \'b7 And this is a huge part of what we mean in our heal framework, our heel.\
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**12:50** \'b7 And this is a huge part of what we mean in our heal framework, our heal framework that we guide you through in our one-to-one program for learning to reduce and better manage PMDD symptoms.\
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**13:03** \'b7 We're not here to help you become better at merely dealing with symptoms while abandoning yourself continually.\
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**13:10** \'b7 Not what we do here. We're here to help you heal, to become more whole in your body, your story, your patterns, and your experience. That means learning how to listen instead of immediately override what's happening inside. It means learning how to understand symptoms as communication, not an inconvenience. And learning how to respond to your body with skill and safety and compassion.\
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**13:34** \'b7 And this is exactly the kind of work we help women do inside of our programs.\
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**13:42** \'b7 As we move forward here, I also want to talk about suppression and repression because this is such an important part of the conversation. Suppression is more conscious. It's when you know what you feel, but you push it down anyways. You know you're angry, but you smile. You know you're hurt, but you minimize it.\
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**14:00** \'b7 You know you're overwhelmed, but you keep performing. You know you need rest, but you override. You push through and you keep going.\
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**14:07** \'b7 Repression, on the other hand, is less conscious. It's when your system buries things more automatically because they felt unsafe, unacceptable, or too overwhelming to fully feel at the time.\
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**14:21** \'b7 So, you may not even exactly know what is under the surface. You just feel tense or irritable or numb. You feel disconnected, anxious for no clear reason. You feel shut down, chronically braced, or exhausted in a way that rest alone does not fix. And for some of us, the ludal phase does not create all of that from scratch. Really, for none of us, the ludal phase is a very powerful and valuable time of the cycle, even though it's demonized in the PMDD sphere.\
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**15:02** \'b7 This distinction between suppression and repression is really important. And I don't mean that PMDDD is simply caused by repressed emotion. PMDDD is a real neural neurobiological condition. But PMDDD can absolutely become a window where unresolved stress and accumulation of tension and unmet needs and unprocessed emotions feel much harder to keep contained. PMDD doesn't create the truth, but it can expose what your system has been working overtime to contain. Like your system is working in overtime to contain some of this truth that has been going on that just becomes more clear during the ludal phase and more overwhelming.\
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**15:50** \'b7 And that's why I think that quote resonates so deeply from Carl Young.\
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**15:54** \'b7 Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. That quote is so powerful. Integrating the darkness and the light and then the unawareness to the awareness. And whether or not you've heard it before, the point is powerful. What we do not bring awareness to can keep running the show. What we suppress, it doesn't disappear. What we repress, it doesn't vanish. It comes out often sideways. And for women with PMDDD, that may look like sudden rage, hopelessness, panic, relationship conflict, shutdown, body tension, compulsive coping, and feeling like you become a different person every ludal phase, but there's often something meaningful in there. Not always a simple meaning and not always one cause. We know there are many root causes to PMDDD, but again, communication, information, the symptoms are telling you a story. The symptoms are giving you the information you need in order to change them.\
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**16:57** \'b7 And a lot of us were never taught how to be with strong emotion safely. We were taught to avoid it, to hide it, to override it, or to judge it.\
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**17:08** \'b7 And especially as women, many of us were conditioned to disconnect from the parts of ourselves that felt inconvenient, messy, too intense, too honest, too disruptive. Instead, we were taught very well how to stay pleasant and agreeable, how to minimize anger, how to override exhaustion and rationalize hurt, how to disconnect from our bodies so we could put other need others needs before our own. And we were taught how to call our emotions, our emotions irrational. We were taught how to keep functioning no matter what. So when hormonal mood symptoms intensify during the ludial phase, they intensify our emotional experience.\
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**17:47** \'b7 And many women do not have a safe framework for what to do with that. They only know how to suppress it, to disassociate from it, to fear it, to pathize it, or to shame themselves for having the emotion or the feeling.\
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**18:05** \'b7 But what we actually need is to become more honest, more in our bodies, and more skillful in how we move the emotion through our body. This is very different from becoming flooded by emotion or over overtaken by the emotion. And it's very different from acting out an emotion.\
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**18:24** \'b7 It's not about chaos. It's about capacity.\
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**18:28** \'b7 So, I want to break down the science a little bit of why this is not all in your head. Okay? We're going to ground this in the science because women living with hormonal mood disorders, hormonal mood symptoms, women in pmenopause, women in postpartum, and especially women with PMDD have been dismissed for too long in this emotional regulation conversation here.\
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**18:53** \'b7 So, PMDD is not bad PMS. It's not a character flaw and it's not just poor coping. We know from the research that PMDDD involves an abnormal sensitivity to normal hormonal fluctuations across the menstrual cycle especially in the ludal phase. One of the major pathways that this is happening um in the brain is going to be tied to a progesterone metabolite which is called alopanolone.\
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**19:22** \'b7 So a progesterone derived neuroststereroid in the brain. AloR pregnanolone interacts with the GABA A receptor which plays a major role in calming inhibition and stress buffering in the brain.\
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**19:35** \'b7 We know from a 2020 review by Hansu and Epson called alopregnanolone and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. It lays out the evidence that PMDD may involve disregulated sensitivity to neuros neuroactive steroids across the menstrual cycle. So, in plain language, the problem is not simply that you have a hormonal imbalance or there's a problem with your hormones themselves, but how the brain responds to those hormonal shifts.\
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**20:05** \'b7 Another to uh another um 2023 review called towards understanding the biology of premenstrual dysphoric disorder from genes to GABA reinforces this idea and helps show that PMDD is a real neurobiological sensitivity disorder and not a failure of willpower. What a relief, right? So re researchers have also looked at the nervous system more specifically. In a study called heart rate variability and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, they found evidence suggesting altered autonomic regulation in women with PMDDD. That matters because heart rate variability gives us insight into nervous system flexibility, the ability to be dynamic within the nervous system, and shift and recover, which is what we're talking about in today's episode. There are more and more studies. A 20 to 23 study found that alop pregnnolone was associated with a stress induced reduction in heart rate variability in women with PMDDD which suggests that the same pathways affecting mood also affect the nervous system flexibility under stress. A 2024 study that came out reported a blunted cortisol response to acute psychosocial stress in women with PMDDD that suggests that the stress response system in PMDD may be more disregulated rather than simply more overreactive. So there are lots of studies, we just touched on a few there, but there are more and more and more tying past trauma, nervous system dysregulation to PMDD.\
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**21:36** \'b7 And I think this distinction really matters because so many women assume that their system is just overreacting.\
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**21:41** \'b7 But in many cases, it may be more accurate to say that the system is having a harder time adapting and recovering, aka regulating.\
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**21:53** \'b7 So again, in plain English, your system may generally have a harder time shifting smoothly through stress in the ludal phase. That does not mean you're weak. It does not mean you're failing.\
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**22:04** \'b7 And it does not mean this is all in your head, although it is in your head cuz it's in your brain, it's in your body, right? All connected. So, but not just in your head in the air quote um way that people say this. So, with PMD, your system is more sensitive and that is real. We see it from the research. We didn't need to see the research to know it. We feel it in our bodies. But this is why just calm down is incomplete advice. And this is why thinking of regulation being synonymous with calming down is really problematic and will keep you sick and will keep you stuck. So let's connect the science to the real life. And this is exactly where the research on heart rate variability and autonomic regulation and cortisol response matters because it helps explain why just calm down can feel not only unhelpful but actually impossible.\
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**22:54** \'b7 If your system is activated, bracing, restless, anger, buzzing, overwhelmed, or on the verge of tears, the answer is not always to immediately to try to sedate that state.\
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**23:07** \'b7 Sometimes soothing is the right answer, but sometimes your body does not need to be talked out of its activation.\
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**23:12** \'b7 Sometimes it needs to help, it needs help in completing what got activated.\
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**23:19** \'b7 And this again is another huge distinction because if your body is mobilized for energy, trying to force stillness will feel impossible. You feel it, right? You don't need me here talking to you about it. You know what this feels like. And then you start to think, well, meditation doesn't work for me. Breathing doesn't work for me. It must be worse for me than anyone else.\
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**23:40** \'b7 No. Sometimes the body needs movement before it can settle. Sometimes it needs expression before it can soften.\
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**23:47** \'b7 Sometimes it needs protection before it can rest and sometimes it needs a boundary before it can actually exhale.\
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**23:53** \'b7 This is what dynamic range looks like when we're talking about nervous system regulation. Regulation is not about being calm all the time. Regulation is about having access to the right state at the right time and being able to move through that state without getting trapped there aka completing the stress response. So let's make this practical. When stress gets activated in the body, the body prepares for action. This can look like increased heart rate, muscle tension, restlessness, urgency, irritability, shallow breathing, narrowed focus, and a charged buzzy feeling in the body. If that activation never gets completed, the system will likely stay braced. You will stay stuck. And when a woman uses only calming tools, she may miss the fact that her body is not asking for sedation at this point, right? It may be asking for completion.\
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**24:51** \'b7 Healthy and safe ways to complete a stress response include walking, shaking out the body, crying, and having that release, uh, vocal stimulation, sound matching, stretching, strength work, pushing up against a wall, dancing it out hard to one of your favorite songs or a rage song, journaling the uncensored thoughts that are happening inside, stepping outside of the circumstance, and moving until the charge begins to drop.\
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**25:26** \'b7 Saying the thing that you need to say, setting a boundary, leaving an over stimulating environment. There's so much more we could list here. And this is not about lashing out on people. That is not what we're talking about. But it's not about justifying harmful behavior. Not what we're talking about. It's about creating a safe container for the body to move what is inside, to move that activation through. And this is something we help women practice in our programs too. Not just understanding this this theory of the nervous system and regulation, but learning how to work with the activation in real life so they can stop fearing their own internal experience so much, which is a huge part of PMDD. I cannot express enough. Every day, all day, I'm talking to women experiencing strong hormonal mood symptoms and they are so afraid of themselves. They are so afraid of their experience and they are constantly going away from it rather than toward it because who wants to go toward that first of all obviously totally natural human response but also something that we've been taught and as we're moving away we're disassociating we're suppressing we're repressing we're getting stuck and we're staying sick.\
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**26:35** \'b7 So symptoms and emotions are communication symptoms and emotions are telling you a story. And when we stop treating symptoms and emotions like enemies and start treating them like communication and stories, everything changes.\
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**26:52** \'b7 Because then the question is no longer how do I make this stop? Immediately the question starts to become what is this trying to tell me? What is my body asking for? What is needed here? What truth have I been overriding? What boundary is missing? What grief has not had space? What anger is acting is asking for protection and what exhaustion is asking for relief. See how that feels different. Your body is not trying to ruin your life. Okay? It feels like it with PMTD, but I promise you that it is not. It's trying to get your attention. And that doesn't mean that every feeling is a command. It doesn't mean that every symptom has a single interpretation.\
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**27:36** \'b7 And it doesn't mean that you have to indulge every impulse. But it does mean that your internal experience deserves curiosity instead of immediate warfare or fear. So I want to talk you through this 902 hypothesis of emotion that's going to give more context to what we're talking about here. So there is an idea out there that emotions last about 90 seconds if you're fully present with them because and and this gets shared a lot online and I think it's really helpful when it's explained correctly. So this idea comes from Dr. Jill Bolt Taylor. I may be saying her name wrong and I'm sorry if so, but she is a neuroanatomist who popularized the idea that the initial physiological surge of an emotion may actually be quite brief. And it's often described as as brief as around 90 seconds unless we keep reactivating it with a thought, resistance, rumination or a story. And I think that this hypothesis is and this framework of understanding emotion can be very useful if we understand it correctly. So it doesn't mean that grief only lasts 90 seconds. It doesn't mean that anger disappears in 90 seconds. It doesn't mean that trauma or PMDDD symptoms resolve in a minute and a half. But what it points to is the difference between the initial embodied wave of a feeling and the prolonged suffering that's created by suppression, fear, shame, resistance, and the mental looping that then often happens when we don't stay present with the emotion, the feeling.\
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**29:13** \'b7 And there's a difference between feeling an emotion and feeding it. So often the raw wave of emotion is more tolerable than we expect when we actually stay present with it. And I see this with my clients all the time. I get messages in our client portal about this. It's so it's magical. But what tends to prolong suffering is the resistance, the suppression, the shame, and the stories we build around the feeling. So the invitation is not just feel it for 90 seconds and you're done. The invitation is can I stay with this wave safely for long enough for it to move instead of constantly abandoning myself within the feeling. And that's a very different approach than what you've probably been doing. unconsciously.\
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**29:57** \'b7 So, a simple in the- moment practice that you can play with to make this more practical is when you're in it, you do not need a perfect response. You need a simple next step.\
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**30:08** \'b7 What's the next thing that you can do?\
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**30:10** \'b7 So, here's a quick regulation check-in you can use when you start to feel something bubbling up inside. Instead of turning away from it, you're going to ask, "What am I feeling?" And you're going to name it as honestly as you can.\
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**30:24** \'b7 Then you're going to ask, "Where do I feel it in my body?"\
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**30:30** \'b7 Next, you're going to ask, "What does this state need most right now? Does it need soothing? Does it need expression, movement, protection, boundary, or rest?"\
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**30:45** \'b7 And then what is the next safe step? Not the perfect step, the next safe one.\
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**30:51** \'b7 Maybe that's grounding and going outside and putting your feet on the ground or walking around barefoot. Maybe it's slower breathing. Maybe it's some quiet or some sensory deprivation. Maybe it's some warmth on the body or some weight on the body. Maybe it's a hand in a certain place on the body.\
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**31:10** \'b7 Or maybe it's a fast walk, a good cry, shaking it out somatically, stretching, writing out what you're actually feeling. Maybe you need to speak a truth that you've been holding on to and holding in. Maybe you need to ask for support. Maybe you need to change your environment.\
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**31:30** \'b7 Maybe you need to cancel plans or something that your body just doesn't have the capacity for right now. And this is where nervous system healing starts to become deeply personal because regulation that dynamic range and moving through it is not a one-sizefits-all.\
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**31:45** \'b7 It's not a in every sit circumstance that matches this category. I'm going to do this. It's about checking in and finding your way with this. We actually help women build personalized escalation skills for themselves and nervous system regulation menus that are personal to them because if I tell you what I'm doing, it's probably not going to help you, right? This is very individual. And inside of our programs, this is exactly what we help women do. We help them build the ability to understand their own patterns, to recognize the state that they're in, and to uncover the drivers behind their symptoms and to start responding in a way that supports true healing, becoming more whole instead of continuing to self-abandon.\
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**32:30** \'b7 So, if you've believed that your healing depends on becoming calmer and quieter and less emotional or easier to manage, I want to again lovingly challenge that.\
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**32:40** \'b7 What if healing is not about becoming less of a problem? What if healing is about becoming more whole? What if your anger is not the enemy, but instead a signal? What if your tears are not weakness, but a release? What if your symptoms are not random betrayal, but a communication that your body has been trying to get you to pay attention to?\
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**33:03** \'b7 With PMDD and escalated hormonal mood symptoms, our systems are more sensitive. that is real and healing is possible not by abandoning your experience but by learning how to turn toward it with skill and safety and compassion. That is the work and that is so much more of what we help women do through our heal H E A L. It's an acrostic um framework, right? We help you move from self-fixing and self-abandoning to true healing. We help you move from me merely dealing with your symptoms to understanding what's driving them, from overriding your body to learning how to work with it, and from disconnection to wholeness. So, if you want that type of support, go to the show notes, DM us intro on social media, leave a comment of intro in any of our social media platforms, and schedule an intro session with our onboarding team. We're going to run a 320 question assessment for you that is designed to help uncover drivers behind your symptoms. and then we'll talk through next steps um and see what we can do to support you and what makes the most sense. You do not have to keep white white knuckling it through these symptoms. You don't have to keep trying to calm down harder and you don't have to do it alone. So, if this episode spoke to you, send it to someone who needs to hear that healing is not erasing yourself, becoming smaller, that regulating the nervous system isn't all about calming down. And if you're ready for support, come explore our heal approach. Because again, I cannot emphasize enough, your body is not the enemy. Your emotions are not the enemy.\
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**34:54** \'b7 And true healing, becoming more whole, will not come from continuing to abandon yourself. It will come surprisingly through learning how to come home to yourself more fully.\
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**35:07** \'b7 If this episode helped you understand your PMDDD symptoms in any way, make sure to follow the show so you don't miss any future episodes on the PMDDD Pep Talk podcast. Make sure to share this with a friend. If she's feeling confused about her cycle or nervous system regulation, if PMDD Pelp talk has helped you in any way, please leave a quick rating on Spotify or Apple. Leave a quick review.\
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**35:34** \'b7 It helps us find and support more women suffering in silence. Thank you so much for being here today and I'll see you in the next episode.}

33 - The PMDD Myth That Kept Me Sick: Nervous System Regulation, and the Healing Power of Dynamic Range

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