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. 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. Hello and welcome back to PFD Pep Talk. Today we're going to talk about a topic that I've been wanting to talk about for a really long time, and I'm really excited to talk about because it's such a common trigger for increased hormonal mood symptoms, and it is travel. So if you've ever noticed that travel seems to completely wreck you physically, emotionally, mentally, hormonally, especially if you're anywhere near your luteal phase, you're not imagining it. And before we dive into why and what to do about it and how and all the things, I want to just share that this was so hard for me during the 17 years of being undiagnosed and misdiagnosed with PMDD. I cannot tell you how many trips I ruined, um, which is a harsh thing to say, but it's true. My family, uh, is traumatized by the many trips that we went on that ended up with me having a complete panic attack, ending up in a hospital, really just creating lots of conflict and fights and drama and just the spiral that would happen afterward. I feel like I pretty much negatively impacted every trip that I went on up until I was about nearly 30 years old. So, and of course I didn't understand the connection between travel being a PMDD trigger and how much travel can impact your hormonal mood symptoms until later. But you're hopefully going to learn this sooner and hopefully going to have a lot less complex PTSD around trips and a lot less damage being done from the trips that you've taken without knowing how and why these things happen. And I just want to normalize it a little bit. If you've ever gotten home from a trip and thought, why do I feel so much worse? Or why is it so hard for me to get back on track? This episode is for you. So because travel can be a major trigger for PMDD symptoms We gotta have that conversation. It's just— it's— we could talk— we could do so many episodes on triggers for PMDD, but travel is going to be one of the top ones. And it's not because travel is bad, it's not because you're weak, it's not because your body is overreacting for no reason. Travel is a perfect storm of disruption, right? It throws off your sleep, it changes how you eat, it affects your hydration, it disrupts your routines, it increases stress, it overstimulates your nervous system. And for many of us, it creates the exact conditions that make PMDD symptoms more likely to spike. So today I want to break down why travel can be such a trigger, and it— like, we're going to use the language of like, it triggers PMDD so hard because I think it's funnier to say it that way. But what is actually happening in your body, and what do you need to understand so you can stop blaming yourself when travel hits you harder than the people that you traveled with or anyone else that you're around? So it's not that travel is a one trigger, it's a stack of triggers. It— and this is the first thing I really want you to understand— travel is not one isolated stressor. It's a stack of triggers, a stack of stressors. You're dealing with changes in sleep, changes in time zone, dehydration, irregular meals, more caffeine, often more alcohol, missed supplements or medications, less movement or unfamiliar movement, overstimulation, unpredictability, social stress. Packing stress, travel stress, pre-travel stress, decision fatigue, and the loss of the routines that help regulate you. We could keep going. I could keep listing things, but if your nervous system and hormonal pattern is already more sensitive, this stack is gonna hit hard. And this is why so many of us can't really bounce back very easily or are so affected by travel. Your cycle is not just impact— affected by what happens this cycle. And that's a really important concept to remember as we move forward. Your cycle is impacted in the months leading up to this cycle, right? This cycle is not an isolated thing. What happens this cycle can impact your next few cycles. What, what happened 3 months ago can impact your cycle now. So your symptoms this month are influenced by accumulated stress, sleep dep, blood sugar instability, inflammation, nervous system load, and how supported or unsupported your body has been over time. So when you travel, it's not just that one flight or that one late night or that one off-routine kind of meal. It's what happens when a lot of little stressors pile on top of an already struggling system that's carrying so much. So This is one reason we feel confused when travel-related symptoms flare. You might think, I was fine last week, or it was only a few days of a trip, but the body keeps score, right? There's a whole book about it in a little bit of a different context, but so true. And if your system was already vulnerable, travel can be that thing that really tips it over. Sleep and circadian disruption are a huge part of this. One of the biggest reasons that travel can trigger PMDD symptoms is that it disrupts sleep and your circadian rhythm. Even if you're not crossing multiple time zones, travel often means waking up earlier than normal, going to bed later than normal, sleeping in new places, poor sleep quality, more stimulation at night, less recovery, more blue light exposure across the board, and less consistency overall. And we know from the research that circadian disruption and sleep disturbances are linked with increased premenstrual and menstrual symptoms. There's research on social jet lag and the menstrual symptoms as well, and there's also broader research, research showing links between sleep disturbance and menstrual disturbances. So this isn't just, again, all in your head. Like, we have the data, but we also feel this in our bodies. Sleep is definitely not a luxury when you have PMDD. It's part of symptom reduction in management. And when travel disrupts sleep, many of us start to notice more irritability, more emotional reactivity, more anxiety, more fatigue, and less resilience overall. Again, not surprising. None of this is surprising. It doesn't change the circumstance, but the, the context can scaffold understanding around you. Even if nothing changes, it gives you a small window. It cracks the door open to like understanding yourself, acceptance, awareness, and not just turning to shaming and guilting yourself more, which is not helpful. Travel also throws off hydration, blood sugar, and digestion. Obviously, this is a huge other piece of why travel is a trigger. Air travel in particularly increases dehydration risk, and many of the women we work with are already dehydrated to start, right? Have that Venn diagram of dehydration and PMDD symptoms and like all of them fall in the center of the diagram except for things like dry mouth or dry lips. And then this is going to lead to more headaches, more fatigue, more constipation, more brain fog, more mood instability, because when you're dehydrated, it's affecting every system of the body. And then on top of that, you start adding in missed meals and long gaps without protein and airport snacks and convenience foods and more sugar and more caffeine and less consistency, and your capacity just gets lower and lower to rebound from all of this. And the blood sugar swings start to happen, and the blood sugar swings are going to feel like anxiety and irritability and shakiness and mood cravings and overwhelm and food cravings and poor stress tolerance. So it just— you see how this is all starting to stack up to really take you down? Then we get to how travel is going to disrupt your digestion and your elimination, a lot of us get constipated and bloated and inflamed, and we just feel off with the gut when we're traveling. Obviously, dehydration and changes in food and stress and moving your body less and schedule disruption are all just things out of your normal routine which are gonna impact your digestion. But when digestion and elimination of all of the accumulation in your gut. Your, your body is literally taking estrogen and you are trying to remove that through your stool. So when this gets thrown off, you're going to feel more sluggish, you're going to be more uncomfortable, you're going to be more symptomatic overall. But like, you're also not clearing hormones that have been processed for elimination. And what happens then is those hormones are reabsorbed back into the bloodstream as free radicals causing and wreaking havoc on the system. And it just, it's starting to compound. So I hope you're starting to see the picture of, again, how all of this is piling on. And that's before we even get to increased alcohol. And this is another hidden amplifier that really matters. A lot of us drink more alcohol when we're traveling, whether it's vacation or social events or airports or celebrations or just being out of routine. But alcohol is then also going to lead to more dehydration and worsens sleep quality and worse blood sugar regulation and more inflammation and more anxiety and less nervous system resilience. So if you've ever noticed that travels make— makes you feel worse than it, air quotes, should, alcohol is going to be another reason that that total load is getting higher than you may realize. This is before we even get to the histamine layer, which is at play for many women. Um, histamines are really important to mention here because this is a big symptom driver for many of us with PMDD. It's a big part of the picture, and some of us, especially those who are already more histamine sensitive, air travel can add another physiologic stressor to that list. As we're just piling them on here, histamine is definitely a factor. So all of this matters because PMDD for all of us is not just about hormones in a vacuum. It's not just about this cycle in a vacuum. It's connected to your broader environment that your— the body is operating in, including your stressors, inflammation, immune activity, histamine responses, all the things. So if you already know histamines are a problem for you, travel is going to be one of those experiences that's going to increase your histamine load on an already sensitive system. It's definitely a layer worth paying attention to. Okay, and we're gonna do a next episode on tips, and I'll get into histamine tips for traveling because I have to employ these when I travel as well. But I want to keep the list going of how travel is such a trigger, why travel is triggering PMDD symptoms so hard. And routines are the next part of that. Routines protect so much more than we think. A routine can feel really like it's holding you back, but often it's routines that set us free. And when we loosen our routines, it quietly starts to dysregulate us. At home, you may have stabilizers you do not even think about anymore. Things like what time you go to bed, when you wake up, when your meals are had, what types of meals you have, when you take your supplements, what supplements you're taking. Same with medications. Your hydration rhythm is going to be different. Your outside time, your quiet time, your nervous system tools that you're gonna be able to access are gonna be different. Your boundaries will be different. So much is different with your routine and travel strips all of those routines away. So when you start to lose those anchors, is what I like to call those, your system has to work harder. So if travel makes you feel really emotionally less steady, less grounded, more inflamed, more fragile, that doesn't mean that you are actually failing. It means that your body is missing the regulation that supports it and it's normally relying on. Another thing, when we fall away in the routine from taking the supplements and medication, it matters more than you might think. This is really practical. Like, when we travel, we miss doses of our medications and our supplements, or we delay doses, or we forget things, or we run out, or we take things at weird times because everything in the day is off. And it may not sound like a huge deal in the moment, but when your, your body is depending on consistency, like, those changes are really going to matter. So If medications, supplements, minerals, or nervous system supports that are part of what helps you feel more stable fall away when travel interrupts them, then you're just losing that safety net, that protection net. Overstimulation is also not a small thing. We have to talk about it here. This is really important for women experiencing hormonal mood symptoms and PMDD, especially those of us who are anywhere in the neurodivergent spectrum or have a trauma history or sensory sensitivities or really struggle with chronic overwhelm because travel is gonna mean more crowds, more noise, more rushing, more uncertainty, delays, unfamiliar environments, social demands, less time alone, a lot more decisions and a lot less control. And it's not just inconvenient, it's a nervous system tax that you're paying. And when the nervous system becomes overloaded, the symptoms are going to get louder. We know the nervous system is directly linked to PMDD and PMDD symptoms, so this is going to come. And this absolutely came for me as my symptoms increased on the trip, after the trip, before the trip. I would have more rage, more anxiety, more crying, more hopelessness, more exhaustion, more shutdown. Or just feeling like my whole capacity just went out the window. So the luteal phase needs more protection in general, but the luteal phase travel needs extra. So this is a big one. Travel during the follicular phase may feel very different than travel during the luteal phase, because in the luteal phase you're already less resilient and more sensitive and more inflamed and more reactive. Your stress tolerance is already impacted. And you have a smaller margin to handle disruptions, right? The capacity is lowered. So the exact same trip that feels manageable in one phase of the cycle may feel really brutal in another, and you may need to approach a trip planned pre-ovulatory very— approach that trip very differently than you would plan a trip during luteal or during your menstrual phase. And Again, it's— I think we get into this like, oh, like consistency should be the same thing every day, and it's, it's not. If you live in a female body, we have to reframe what consistency looks like for you. And that's some deep work that we can't do on this podcast, but we do do in our— we do do— sorry, I love that— but we do do in our one-to-one program where we're helping you navigate all of this. The context really matters of when you're traveling, what cycle phase it is, how you're supporting each other, how you're gonna modify consistency for you in those different cycle phases. And if you know that travel tends to hit you harder during luteal, it's not something to ignore, it's something to prepare for. This is again not a personal failing, anything like that. It's just context that you're going to modify what you need at a certain time. Something else I want to talk about here is the re-entry is often as hard as the trip. I just took a trip such a good trip. It was during my ovulatory window. Everything went so well, it couldn't have gone any better. But then it still has taken me 3 to 4 weeks of re-entry after the trip to get back into my routines and build in the consistency that I do have at home. And I don't feel like people talk about this enough. Like, I used to work at an airline. I traveled 1 week of every month out of 3 weeks for pleasure. Um, I traveled all over the world. I traveled in the States. So much traveling. And, you know, we always talk about the pros of traveling because there's so many and they're great. We want to keep doing it. But there are also some things about travel that make it hard, and re-entry is one. And I think a lot of women think once they get home, they should just feel normal right away and everything should just be back to normal and your routines just immediately click back in. But coming home is often its own stressor. Now you're dealing with the laundry and the unpacking and the food prep and the messy house and the work backlog and any kind of childcare that you're trying to navigate catching up on and decision fatigue and trying to reestablish all of those routines when your body just isn't feeling great. So many women crash harder after travel, not during. And it's important to understand that because if you do not expect a reentry delay or it to be hard when you kind of re-enter back into your life after travel, you're going to interpret that as a personal failure. I certainly did. And then there's even more delayed fallout from that where you're just shaming and guilting yourself, and it's just a downward spiral from there. So this matters a lot for PMDD because PMDD is already a condition of sensitivity, right? Research is showing that for us, it's the PMDD. It's not about an abnormal hormone level, it's about being sensitive to those normal hormone fluctuations. So the body is already reactive, and then you add the travel with everything that we listed. Do you want me to list it again? Because I will. Sleep disruption, circadian disruption, dehydration, blood sugar instability, stress, overstimulation, digestive disruption, routine loss, alcohol consumption or substance consumption, consumption in general, mis-supplements, mis-medications, histamine reactivity, on and on. I can keep going, I can keep going, I promise I can. So it makes sense that your symptoms are going to spike worse around travel, before, during, and after. Doesn't mean travel causes PMDD, but travel did create a perfect environment of built-up stressors to flare your symptoms. So if travel is a big trigger for you, I, I don't want you to continue telling yourself the story that it's because you're dramatic or broken or bad, or you're bad at traveling, or you can't cope. Like, travel is super demanding, and as a woman with PMDD or a woman navigating a hormonal transition like perimenopause or postpartum, it can be especially demanding because it affects so many of the systems that help keep symptoms more stable. So the goal isn't to judge yourself from struggling or to never travel again. The goal is to understand what traveling actually costs your body and start planning accordingly. So this is going to mean that you're going to travel differently, you're going to plan differently, you're going to take control over the things that you can, and then use the context to scaffold that understanding around you of how you're going to move through the trigger. So for me, you know, it's gonna look like protecting my sleep more aggressively. It's gonna look like trying to stay, say, as consistent with meals and protein when I'm traveling as possible. Really plan for hydration, not just with water but with minerals. I'm going to make choices around alcohol and caffeine differently depending on where I am in my cycle and like the threshold of that during the trip. That I need to navigate. I'm going to have tools to keep my digestion moving so I don't get that free radical backload in the bloodstream. I'm going to support histamine load for myself, and you may need to do that as well. I'm going to be more intentional with how I'm taking my supplements and medications and the timing around that. I'm going to build in more recovery days, and I'm going to change my expectations for myself, and I'm going to build myself a re-entry plan for when I get home. So, and I don't want you to hear this and think like, oh great, more stuff to do, right? Oh, I just have to do more to make travel work for me or to not be such a trigger. And that's definitely okay to feel like. I get that that is a perspective that you can take on it, but that is one story. I really want you to reframe this in a way that's going to be supportive to you and also Some of this isn't about doing the thing. Some of it is about having the context of understanding how travel is a trigger and then shifting the way you move through that differently rather than getting stuck and getting pulled down into all of these automatic negative thoughts and this negative internal dialogue. So if you're going to be traveling in the luteal phase, you, you're going to have to give yourself more protection, more support, and more of a margin than you think you need. And that's okay because that is what living in the female body is like. Like, we need different things at different times. Consistency looks different for us. It's not, again, a personal failing for you as an individual, but the more you understand the pattern, like, the more agency you're going to have. So this, I hope, is feeling valuable and understanding why travel is such a trigger and what you can actually do about it. But that context and that understanding is always the goal. So if you feel seen in this episode, you're like, okay, I understand a little bit more about travel, how it's a trigger. I'm starting to get a sense of where I can take some control, where I can shift my expectations, how I can better prepare for travel and the recovery and the re-entry. Love it. That's what you're here for. If this is helpful, make sure to share this episode with someone who needs to hear this. It's not just them, it's not just you, right? Travel is a trigger for everyone regardless of PMDD, regardless of hormonal mood symptoms, all of that. Um, come back to the next episode cuz this is where I'm gonna be drop— dropping a lot of travel tips that I have built in for myself and that we use and help with our clients who do a lot of travel. In all phases of their cycle. I love this conversation because again, I just felt like, oh, I'm not going to be able to travel, or I just can't handle it, or I am so much more sensitive than everyone else. And then I start to learn, okay, no, I'm just going to travel differently. It's just going to look a little different for me, and that's not— I don't need to attach a meaning to that. I can just move forward with this information and this education and have better trips, not feel like I'm ruining everyone's vacation every time I take a trip, feeling afraid of the trip so much, you know, replaying all of the bad experiences that I've had where I've had episodes on trips and it's kind of made a name for me within my family. You know, it doesn't have to be that way moving forward, but it always is going to start with the reframe of this is a problem to this is a challenge, and then building in that awareness and that understanding. Starting to accept, having some agency, and then taking more aligned action that's going to be supporting you in making the travel better for you individually. And it's going to look individual for you. Even though I'm going to be sharing these tips in the next episode, you're going to want to personalize these to you because the way travel triggers you isn't going to be the exact same way as it triggers, triggers me or triggers some of our clients. All right, see you next time on PMDD Pep Talk.
