How Stress Affects Your Menstrual Cycle (Episode 308)

Full Transcript: Episode 308

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the Fertility Friday Podcast, episode number 308.

Welcome to the Fertility Friday Podcast, your source for information about the fertility awareness method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery charting journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health, because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health, because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health. And I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

I’m really excited to share today’s episode with you. I have been thinking for the past couple of weeks about what I wanted to talk about, and I suppose, you know what I came to makes perfect sense: today we will be talking about stress and how stress affects the menstrual cycle. And in light of what’s going on in the world — if you’re listening to this in real time, you know this is coming out in April 2020, and yikes, what a doozy. The world is basically upside down, opposite, and yeah, very different to the world that I grew up in at this current moment. So if you’re listening to this in the future, I distinctly hope that it’s a very positive, amazing, wonderful situation that we’re leading towards.

So with that said, after careful thought I decided that I would focus on stress and how stress can impact the menstrual cycle. If you’re on my email newsletter, I sent out an email last week to my list — so if you’re not on the list, head over to fertilityfriday.com/freebies and I’ve got all kinds of goodies you can jump in and grab. There’s free online courses, there’s free ebooks, and a free chapter of The Fifth Vital Sign. That’s all kinds of good stuff. But I was sharing some of my reflections, and it made me think about what I wanted to talk about on today’s podcast episode, because I did get some emails back, and some just connection with a lot of you who were really just, “Okay, great, I haven’t been thinking about my menstrual cycle and how charting could — how I could utilize charting during this uncertain time when I’m going through all this stress.” So let’s talk about it.

I think first things first, this is a conversation that I have with most of my clients, whether it’s in the group program or one-on-one programs. So if you’re a client of mine, you’re probably laughing to yourself a little bit as we talk about this. But I just want to remind everybody that the purpose of charting, in my opinion, is — it’s not about perfection. It’s not about crafting this perfect situation where your charts are always perfect, and it’s just not about that. I always say that charting should fit into your life. It shouldn’t be the other way around. So you shouldn’t be trying to fit — whether they say like the square peg into the round hole or whatever — charting is something that you should be able to incorporate into your life.

And one of the things about charting, especially coming from both my professional perspective working in this field, but also from a personal perspective having charted my cycles for two decades, is that with charting — if this is the method that you’ve chosen to manage your fertility with, so if you’re using it as a birth control method or to try to conceive — I always feel like you just have to roll with it. There’s going to be times, for example, like a week, or if you have a really stressful situation happening, where it’s not going to be perfect and you might miss a few days. And the most important thing, like I said, is not perfection. In my opinion, the most important thing is just, if you’re going through something, if something is challenging, then just do what you need to do — if you need to take some time for yourself, if you need to relax, whatever you need to do, take that time for yourself. And then don’t beat yourself up about it.

If you miss a day of charting, or a couple days of charting or checking or writing things down, just get on with it as soon as you catch yourself and you start to feel better. The next time you go to the bathroom, just check — just wipe and check. And when you wake up in the morning, just take your temperature. Put your thermometer in a place where it’s the first thing you have to touch when you get up in the morning, and just get on with it. Don’t worry and fret and beat yourself up, and certainly don’t give up on the whole chart just because you missed a bunch of days. Even if you missed like two weeks, just get on with it, get going, and don’t beat yourself up about it. It happens — move on.

The one thing I can say from the longevity perspective is that you potentially have hundreds of charts in front of you, so if one isn’t perfect, that’s completely fine. The wonderful thing about cycling is that once one cycle finishes, you always have another cycle to continue. I mean, I suppose “always” is not a hundred percent accurate — eventually we’ll stop cycling — but you know what I mean. I just wanted to start with that. So if you haven’t been as on top of it, give yourself a break, and let this episode — let this conversation that we are having, one-sided conversation at this point — let this just be your encouragement to, next time you go to the bathroom, just start charting. And tomorrow morning when you wake up, take your temperature, and let’s just do this.

Okay, so I wanted to talk about stress and the menstrual cycle, and I just want to take you through a couple of points. So I made myself a couple of notes to guide our conversation. When we’re talking about stress, I think it’s important to make the distinction between acute stress and chronic stress. For a lot of us it might seem pretty obvious, but these two different types of stressors can play out differently in the menstrual cycle.

So acute stress is what we typically think of when we think of stress — situational things, a really specific event, a specific period of time. If you have a really stressful week, if you’ve got a really big event or occasion, if you’ve got travel — as, if you’re listening to this in real time, you know the last couple weeks have been stressful — so acute stress is more of that situational piece, where you can really put your finger on a specific thing or event or period of time that has been stressful. And that can affect your cycle in different ways.

So when I’m talking about how stress can impact the menstrual cycle, I typically think of the menstrual cycle in two phases. If we divide it in half, air quotes, the first phase of the menstrual cycle — the pre-ovulatory phase — is the period of time before you ovulate. And then the second half of the cycle is the period of time between ovulation and when your period is coming.

So if you’re experiencing a specific acute stressor before ovulation — whether it’s a specific event or a period of time you can really put your finger on — then the most common way that can affect your cycle is to actually delay ovulation. And it doesn’t always happen that way. I know sometimes in my program my clients will be like, “Okay, I’ve got a trip coming up,” kind of expecting to have this response, and it doesn’t always happen that way, because at the end of the day, with fertility awareness, with charting, you don’t control your body. Your body is doing what it’s doing, but what you’re doing is tracking it and understanding it — you’re kind of in a dance with it.

But one of the most common ways that stress can affect the cycle when you’re in that pre-ovulatory phase, so before you’ve actually ovulated, is that it can really delay that ovulation. So a couple of things you just want to watch for: if you’re charting your cycles, if you’re paying attention to your cervical fluid, you really do want to make sure that you’re confirming ovulation. It’s certainly possible to have more than one patch of cervical fluid. So in a situation where there’s stress, you might notice that you have cervical fluid, it looks like you’re going to ovulate, you’re expecting it to happen, but then your temperature doesn’t go up and you see mucus again. That’s called the double peak — where you actually see mucus, then maybe it doesn’t lead to ovulation, and you see it again.

So whether you’re avoiding pregnancy or trying to conceive, you want to be aware that that’s a possibility. First of all, if you’re using the method to avoid pregnancy, you’ve got to choose a method — pick one, really learn the rules, understand how to confirm ovulation. And if you’re using a version of the sympto-thermal method — so temperature and mucus — you’re going to want to learn how to cross-check those two signs and verify that. And in a case where ovulation is delayed, like I said, you can have more than one mucus patch, or you can just have a fairly long delay until you start seeing wetness at all. So I’ll be interested to see, once I release this episode and we chat about it, if this is something that you’ve experienced over the past little while.

And so if we switch and talk about the post-ovulatory phase — so after ovulation has already happened — if you happen to experience an acute stressor during the second half of your cycle, it would affect your cycle differently, because if you’ve already ovulated, things are already in motion. But what can happen is certain stressors can shorten the luteal phase, and can increase or cause premenstrual bleeding, which is essentially a result of a sharp drop in progesterone earlier in the cycle than you would expect. And that could also coincide with increased PMS symptoms and that feeling of hormonal imbalance. So if you happen to experience an acute stressor in the post-ovulatory phase, those are some of the signs to watch for.

I think it’s helpful to talk a little more specifically about stress, because when we think about stress we tend to think of negative events — traffic, a job you don’t like, a stressful relationship, something emotional. But stress can be a lot of different things — it can also include happy events. I already mentioned things like travel, or if someone’s getting married, or if you’re planning a big birthday party to celebrate — there can be things we identify as positive that can actually be stressors.

But now that we’ve talked about some of the acute stressors, I think it’s also helpful to touch on some chronic stressors, because some of the chronic stressors that can negatively impact the menstrual cycle aren’t necessarily obvious and don’t necessarily come to mind when we think about stress. Chronic stress can be induced through things like diet — if you’re eating a really high-processed or high-sugar diet, that can cause inflammation, which is basically a type of chronic stress. If you think about stress from a hormonal perspective, cortisol is a stress hormone, and certain things can increase that in your body. In addition to eating inflammatory foods, if you have certain food sensitivities or allergies and you’re regularly consuming those types of foods, that can again cause an inflammatory response that is stressful in the body. If you have chronic infections that you’re not aware of — underlying infections your body is fighting off — that again can contribute to an inflammatory response, a triggered immune response. So these are things you wouldn’t necessarily think of as stressors, but they could certainly be present and having a negative impact on your cycle. Of course this is outside of the current situation paradigm, but it’s something to be attuned to.

In addition to that, emotional stress — depression, loneliness, excessive worrying, feeling afraid, feeling helpless or hopeless — those types of feelings, especially over the long term, can certainly contribute to stress. And basic things like lack of sleep, not eating enough food, and I should mention even exercise can be a stressor to the body. I mentioned how stress can impact the second half of your cycle and shorten the luteal phase — exercise, if you’re not consuming enough to offset that, can certainly contribute to that as well, and so can hunger. In times of stress it’s easy not to eat — I’m certainly guilty of that sometimes — and it’s important to be aware of those things.

What I’ve always said throughout the years, especially for those of you who’ve listened to the podcast for a while, is that one of the things I’ve found in my life and also for my clients over the years, is that charting can prevent you from going totally off the rails. What I mean by that is, if you have a really stressful situation, or even if you have a health issue that is causing your body to experience some of those chronic stressors we talked about, when you’re charting your cycles — especially the more charts you have under your belt — and if you were working towards improving your cycle, getting your hormones in balance, everything starting to look great, and then something happens and throws you for a loop, and your cycles start to look different, and you start to see some of the effects of stress — one of the things I’ve found is that it can really help you stay on track once you have a track record.

Some of the symptoms you were so successfully managing can start creeping back — you have a kind of super-high PMS cycle where a lot of those symptoms had resolved, you’ve got a ton of pain in one cycle where you have your period, and that’s something you hadn’t previously addressed. When you’re charting your cycle, when you’re paying attention, you start to see that your actions, your self-care, and how attentive you are to some of these things — those choices you make can have such a significant impact on your quality of life and your cycle. Then it’s often just a really great tool to keep you in line, to keep you balanced. So I always say it has the potential to keep you from ever really going off the rails, because you can actually see that, “Wow, I have the power to improve things and change things.”

So again, I want to stress, how I started the episode at the very beginning — again, this isn’t about perfection. And if you do have a cycle that’s totally off the rails in a time of stress, it’s not an opportunity to beat yourself up about it and act like you did something wrong. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on the fact that we’re human beings, that our lives are in constant motion, and our cycles are simply reflecting back what’s happening. So for example, if your past cycle was kind of off, I would encourage you to take it out and look at it — if you take notes during your cycle, and that’s something I really encourage my clients to do, to take notes of things that are happening, note if there were any big events, or if you had any heavy emotions, or if certain things took place — so that when you’re looking over the cycle and trying to analyze it and figure out what was going on, you have that information.

One of the ways I support and guide the women I work with is to help reflect on some of those things, because often we’re in a situation where you look at your cycle and think, “Wow, I don’t even know what was going on here — ovulation happened super early, or ovulation happened super late, my mucus patches were all over the place, what was going on, my luteal phase — I never have spotting before my period but this time I did, it doesn’t even look like I ovulated this cycle, but why was I bleeding?” Whatever the case is, when we’re looking at that together, I’ll often find myself asking questions — what was going on, what was happening, did anything happen on this date, was your temperature kind of wonky on this day — and as we go through it together and I ask questions, we typically put a picture together.

To be honest with you, I can’t think of a time when I’ve worked with someone who had a cycle that was off in a very specific way that was different from how it usually is, where nothing at all happened. It’s really funny how we can forget what has taken place. I can’t tell you how many times we go through it and it’s like, “Oh yeah, there was this huge thing that happened at work that week, it was really stressful,” or “I never really thought about it, but yeah, I guess I was kind of sick that week,” or “That was totally around the time I was traveling and I didn’t think it affected me that much, but now that I’m looking at it…” Understanding how stress can impact the cycle, understanding how important it is to keep good notes, and really taking the time to go back and analyze any cycle abnormalities and ask yourself those questions — what was going on, did anything change, was there anything happening in my personal relationships, was there anything happening with my job, was there anything happening in the world, what was happening around the time I’m noticing those changes — just by going through some of those questions and making your own notes, potentially journaling about it, that can really help you interpret your charts.

And as I mentioned, it can allow you to be kind to yourself. I think we have certainly an attachment to perfection in our culture — we want everything to be just so, we want it to be picture-perfect, we want everything to be really easy, and we want it right away. And with charting, it’s not any of those things. The experience of charting and developing mastery and feeling comfortable and confident — it’s something that doesn’t happen right away. It happens after you actually chart your cycles for a minimum of three to six months. You can certainly get the hang of it and understand it, but when you stick with it and continue to chart over a period of a year, two years, five years, ten years, you gain insights from that consistent habit of charting that you couldn’t possibly gain from a book, and that you wouldn’t gain from just a cycle or two.

So I encourage you to stick with it, to remember that your cycle is always reflecting back to you what’s going on in your health — whether it’s immediately, in the case of stressors like this we’re talking about, or health-wise, whatever the case is. And so when you have a cycle that doesn’t conform to what you expect, it doesn’t mean it’s a failure, it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong — it just means that this is a reflection of what was happening. So I hope you take that to heart if your cycle was kind of wonky. And on the flip side, maybe your cycle isn’t wonky at all — maybe you expected that, because of all the stress happening globally, there would be something changing in your cycle, and maybe there wasn’t, and that’s okay too.

Sometimes it’s helpful to reflect on all the things you’re doing right — it’s so easy for us to really focus on everything we’re doing wrong. I think it’s really helpful to remember all the things you’re doing right, all the things you have been and continue to be doing to support your cycle and your health, and maybe if you notice that your cycle hasn’t really changed a lot, it just means that it’s confirmation that what you’ve been doing is working.

So everybody manages stress differently, and certainly what I’ll share here isn’t necessarily new information for a lot of you, but I do think it’s helpful to have a reminder every now and then — and that’s something that’s consistently been reminded to me too. Even I need a reminder sometimes, and especially at times when there’s a lot of stress and uncertainty going on, it’s really important to go back to the basics.

So when you think of stress from a hormonal perspective, what we’re often trying to do is balance out our hormones. Cortisol is a great hormone when you make it at the right time. Melatonin is also a great hormone, and cortisol and melatonin have a bit of a dance going on — in the daytime, when the sun is out, that’s when our cortisol levels should be highest, and at nighttime, when we’re fast asleep, that’s when our melatonin levels should be highest. These hormones are kind of in opposition to each other, and not in a bad way. So to encourage your hormone production during the time it should be happening, you want to try to encourage your cortisol production from when you wake up. Managing your hormones and your stress can actually start when you wake up in the morning — if at all possible, it’s good to get some sunlight and some fresh air. If you have the ability to go outside, expose your eyes to the sunlight to stimulate that cortisol production, open a window, look outside, go for a walk, whatever the case is — it’s a really good option to stimulate that natural cortisol production so that you’re having your natural energy boost and also setting your circadian rhythm.

This also helps set you up for good sleep. Once you get into the habit of exposing yourself to the sun first thing in the morning, it sets that circadian rhythm, and you might find you’re actually feeling ready to go to sleep at bedtime the following night. One of the things that’s really important is to optimize your sleep. If stress is becoming an issue for you, it’s good to go back to those basics — try to get to bed early, ideally before 10 o’clock, or before 9 o’clock if you’re able to, before 11 o’clock at the latest — and try to optimize your sleep environment, especially when you’re looking to support hormone production, to support your progesterone production in the luteal phase and generally balanced hormones, and to support your melatonin production at night.

You want to sleep in the dark — really, really dark. I’ll list a couple of episodes below if this is a new concept for you, something we haven’t talked about on the show for a long time — you want to sleep in the dark, try to minimize your light exposure in the evenings so you can really support your melatonin production and get a really great sleep. One of the things you can do to support your progesterone production and encourage a really great night’s sleep is to consider doing a bath before bed, and make sure to throw in some Epsom salt, throw in some lavender essential oil, or anything that’s really going to relax you. Magnesium — Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate, and magnesium is known to relax the body and relax muscles and especially help you have a really good, solid sleep. So certainly something to try, especially if you’ve been experiencing stress, whether it’s chronic or acute — it’s one of the ways to lower inflammation in the body, but also to help relax your muscles, calm the nervous system, and help you get more sound sleep.

There are tons of other ways you can reduce your stress, and it’s really individual — it really depends on what works for you, so what works for one woman might not work for another. You may want to consider some sort of practice, whether it’s yoga, whether it’s exercise, walking in nature, whether it’s spending some time with a friend, whether that’s virtually or in person. You want to think about things you can do that make you feel good, happy, joyful, laughter — whether that’s putting on your favorite song and dancing to it in the morning when you get out of bed, or, if you’re feeling a bit low, having a couple of songs at the ready that always put you in a good mood.

What activities did you like to do? A lot of us forget or stop doing some of the things that used to make us happy when we were kids — whether that’s journaling, writing stories, creative writing, writing fiction, whether it’s playing an instrument, did you play the piano growing up, did you play the guitar, did you like to sing, what is it that brings you joy, did you like to draw, did you like to paint. When we’re feeling stressed out, it’s helpful to think about the things that can make us feel happy and to reconnect with things that bring us joy.

It’s hard to talk about stress without talking about developing a meditation practice, or having some sort of way to reflect, whether it’s through prayer, through meditation, through journaling, whatever it is — and again, everyone is different in how they’re going to manage stress. But there’s so much science behind meditation in terms of its ability to reduce stress, reduce cortisol, even change the brain, and to help us really relax and maintain a state of calm even under pressure, even when things are going haywire around us. So certainly worth thinking about, if you’ve never considered a meditation practice before, as one of the possible options for managing stress.

In terms of the current situation that we’re in, where many of us are basically in our homes and we don’t really have a lot of options in terms of where to go, a lot of the things you might have done previously to reduce stress may no longer be an option to you. For example, one of our favorite activities to do as a family is to go swimming, and that’s not something we’re able to do anymore. So for the current situation, a couple of specific examples that I found to be helpful, that many of you may find helpful as well, is to either limit or completely eliminate the media. If you find that you are feeling anxious, nervous, fearful, or hopeless, and you’re watching the regular media on a day-to-day basis, it’s worth considering doing a media fast — take some time, do a little bit of journaling, write down how you’re feeling and how many hours a day you’re consuming media, and try going a day, two days, a week, two weeks with no media at all, or consider limiting how much media you’re watching in a day. Then take out the journal and make a note of how you feel, if it makes a difference for you, and think about how you would use that extra time. For some of us it makes a huge difference — if what you’re really wanting is to reduce stress, reduce fear and anxiety, and feel more peaceful and calm, then it’s certainly a good idea to at least try limiting or eliminating your exposure to media.

If you do decide to reduce or eliminate some of that media time, what does it leave? One of the activities you may want to incorporate during a stressful time is reading, and paying attention to the types of books you’re reading, especially if you’re trying to maintain a state of calm — what’s going to calm you, what’s peaceful, what’s going to make you laugh, what’s going to make you feel joyful. I’ve seen a number of memes floating around saying, “All those times I wished I had time to do things, now I have time and I’m not doing things.” I think that’s an interesting reflection, but I think for many of us who’ve been on this crazy treadmill of life and haven’t had much time to slow down, of course it would have been nice to have under different circumstances — but for many of us, this is the first time we’ve been forced to sit down, relax, and reflect, and just be with ourselves. And it’s okay not to be super productive. It’s okay to sit with the uncertainty and try to make sense of it, because that in itself is extremely productive, even though it’s not productive by our patriarchal standards. So I think for many of us, this has been a time to really turn within and reconnect with ourselves and with what’s important to us.

So with that, I just want to do a quick recap of what we talked about in today’s episode. To bring it back to stress and how stress can impact the menstrual cycle — we talked about acute stress versus chronic stress and the different ways that can impact the menstrual cycle. We talked about how stress can impact the cycle in the pre-ovulatory phase versus the post-ovulatory phase, and we talked about some of the practical strategies we can use to manage stress. A lot of it, when it comes to stress, is lifestyle, and really going back to the basics, especially in times of really intense stress or intense situations — going back to the basics, making sure we’re eating enough, getting good sleep, staying hydrated, taking good care of ourselves, and going back to some of those basic tenets, basic things that bring us joy. I think that’s really important. And managing what we’re allowing to come into our environment — so managing our media time, whether that’s television or social media — really thinking about, if you’re looking to reduce stress and keep yourself in a state of calm, really managing what you’re allowing into your world can be super helpful.

So I want to hear from you — I want to hear how you have been managing during this time, what has really worked for you to manage your stress, what did I leave out, what are some of the different practices you’ve been doing to help you maintain during this time. We’ll be talking about this episode in the Facebook group at fertilityfriday.com/community, so I look forward to hearing from you in there. You’ll also find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/308 — in the show notes page I’ll make sure to link past episodes where we’ve talked about stress, where we’ve talked about the HPA axis, and different ways to manage stress. I’ve done a number of episodes that talk about meditation and a number of different ways to manage stress, so that we can really optimize our cycles and maintain hormonal balance, and of course feel good, because it feels a lot better when we’re not living under a constant state of stress.

So with that, I want to thank you for tuning in to the show today, for joining me for this important conversation, and I do hope that you and your families are coping and doing well, and I suppose just doing your best — I think we’re all doing our best during this time to keep our spirits up and to move from a state of fear to a place of peace and love. So that’s what I will leave you with today. Thank you so much for being part of the Fertility Friday community. Please share this episode if you know someone who could really appreciate and benefit from hearing it. And of course, as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.