Harnessing your power
As the science around our hormones becomes more well-known, we are starting to understand that a hormone imbalance could be holding us back from living our most authentic, powerful lives. Emma Johnson looks into the art of working with our hormones…
Complex and hard to understand, our hormonal systems can sometimes feel overwhelming and out of control. But without them we would live smaller lives. Without our hormones we would be mere flesh and bone, living beings, but also static and unchanging. Our hormones are the essence of who we are, the fluid beauty of our mercurial lives, the reason for deep despair, giddy highs, flashes of creativity, moments of painful self-knowledge. They also act as the sentinels of mood, hunger, reproduction and wellbeing – and understanding these important fluctuations within our own bodies allows us to care for ourselves better, and to know ourselves more intimately.
‘Hormone balance is one of those things that you need to have to achieve a good life, longevity and to have a productive lifestyle,’ says Dr Shawn Tassone, author of The Hormone Balance Bible.
Hormones are produced by glands in the endocrine system – these glands are found in places such as ovaries, adrenals and the thyroid. They produce hormones such as melatonin, which helps us to sleep; cortisol for assisting our stress response; testosterone (good for bones, muscles, libido); the reproductive hormone progesterone; and oestrogen, which is the main female hormone and not only helps fertility, but also our skin and general health.
We need all these hormones throughout our adult lives, and rely on them to support our overall wellbeing. However, when these hormones are out of balance, it can have a dramatic impact on our lives.
For many, many women, stress, burnout and mental health problems are all too common and, in many cases, it is linked to our hormones. ‘Women are stretched, as mothers, partners, working, thinking about ageing parents, as well as doing the bulk of unpaid labour and emotional labour… If we keep going at this rate it exhausts us and can have devastating results,’ says Maisie Hill, who has been working in reproductive and hormonal health for over 15 years and is author of the ground-breaking book Period Power.
Of course, for women, one of the key hormonal changes we go through happens every 28 days of our menstrual cycle, when we experience a rapid rise and fall in oestrogen and progesterone that can play havoc with our sense of wellbeing and mental health. And even if we have become adept at pushing through it, medicating with antidepressants, painkillers, alcohol or supplements, the truth is that we need these hormones and we could do better than merely ignoring them.
How your hormones change each month
Day One (Winter) (the first day of your period): Oestrogen and progesterone levels are low; you are tired and lack energy.
Days Six/Seven (Spring): A few days after your period, oestrogen is rising, while progesterone stays low. You feel more alert, more curious about the world around you, in control, chatty, upbeat.
Days 14/15 (Summer): In the days after ovulation, your progesterone rises sharply, while your oestrogen and testosterone drop for a few days, then the oestrogen rises again. This surge and fall in hormones can often affect your mood in a positive way, making you feel full of energy, ready to say yes to things.
Days: 21/22 (Autumn): Your oestrogen rises briefly once more, and then drops again, but it’s your progesterone that takes the biggest hit, falling dramatically and leaving you feeling detached and withdrawn, low in mood and energy, being sensitive to criticism.
While these hormone fluctuations are a natural part of our reproductive cycle, the imbalance can be challenging. Add other external factors into our lives that can create a further imbalance – such as overwork, bad nutrition, lack of sleep, stress, relationship problems, trauma or child-bearing – and you have the perfect storm for a hormone imbalance that affects all aspects of your life. ‘For women that are already frustrated, anxious, depressed, adding a hormone imbalance to the mix is like putting things under a magnifying glass – so anything that’s already bothering you just becomes much more of a problem,’ says Tassone.
Luckily, our body will always let us know when things are not balanced. The trick is to be able to listen, and interpret.
Some of the classic symptoms of hormone imbalance are fatigue, dry or unhealthy skin, low or angry mood, rage and anger, weight gain, muscle weakness, aches, tenderness, stiffness, and an increased or decreased heart rate. But it gets more specific when you consider an over- or under-production of hormones.
Oestrogen dominance, for instance, is one of the most common hormonal imbalances in women today, and is typified by fatigue, low mood and irritability (what we often call PMS), weight gain and breast tenderness. While it can be caused by your cycle, it can also be exacerbated by a poor diet, especially with commercially-raised meat, stress and a blood sugar imbalance. If, however, oestrogen is low, you will experience aches and pains, low energy, even short-term memory loss.
By comparison, low progesterone may be typified by insomnia, problems with fertility, headaches and an irregular cycle; while high levels of the hormone cause us to feel sleepy and hungry.
Testosterone imbalances (yes, we all have it: it’s a human hormone, not a male one) can cause aggressive behaviour, excess hair and bad skin when it is high; fatigue, depression and apathy when it is low.
It’s important to note that in all of these cases, the key is not to have more of one hormone than the other, but to have them in balance. Chinese medicine is often used to treat hormonal imbalance, which is partly why the yin-yang concept lends itself so well to understanding our hormones. In Chinese medicine the first two weeks of your cycle are in the yin phase, the second two weeks are the yang phase. Yin and yang are opposite, but they are also in balance. The oestrogen and progesterone literally keep each other in check; the strength of each relies upon the strength of the other. Sometimes an imbalance is not caused simply by a lack of one hormone over the other, but a lack of one hormone, coupled with an excess of the other.
With all this going on, it’s hard to feel like we’re in control of our lives. Maisie Hill describes feeling like you’re being held hostage by your hormones; but explains that there are ways to prepare and get to know yourself better.
‘I don’t want you to be held back by your hormones. I want you to use them to get what you want out of life,’ she says in Period Power. Hill explains that the more we understand our hormones, the less we can be ruled by them, and the more we can take action to support ourselves.
She recommends using tools, such as her Flo Collective cycle tracker, or any of the similar ones on the market, to get to know your cycle more intimately and begin to understand how your mind and body changes over the course of four weeks, and what happens when other external factors are added into the mix. ‘I like to think of being aware of your cycle as like knowing the weather forecast in advance,’ she told the Hacking Happiness podcast recently.
For Hill, being prepared means that even if you can’t change your daily life – i.e needing to be in work when you want to be curled up in bed – you can make adjustments to help yourself throughout the month. “Working with your cycle will change your life for the better. You’ll move forwards with your life and reach your goals without the burnout. This isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing less.’
If you know you have an imbalance, then there are a series of approaches ahead of you. Some sit firmly in the mainstream ‘medical’ sphere, and some work more holistically and with our individual bodies.
At the outset, you may want to consider hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which can help with more serious imbalances and is used across the world for women going through the perimenopause and menopause. While effective and likely to ‘give you the most bang for your buck, as it were’, according to Tassone, many women have chosen to avoid it, due to a suspected link with breast cancer, which experts are now starting to show is untrue.
In Hill’s recent book she calls the study that led to this impression of HRT ‘fundamentally flawed’, and says that, for her, a good hormone balance is about a combination of approaches. ‘It isn’t just about supplements and treatments. Don’t get me wrong, they’re amazing and I love using them. But after treating women with reproductive issues for 15 years, I realised that the same issues kept cropping up time and time again that cause/contribute towards my clients’ hormonal and reproductive issues.’
Hill talks a lot about how a hormone imbalance can be caused by, or lead to, things as damaging as habitual people-pleasing, imposter syndrome, struggling to express your feelings, irritability and rage that erode your career, living in fight, flight or freeze, and an inner critic that won’t back down.
For Hill, addressing these issues, and being honest with yourself, is one of the most important things you can do. And Tassone agrees. ‘The story is what kind of gets me in the gut. Let’s say I have a woman who is burning the candle at both ends… she’s working herself to the bone, sabotaging her own health because she’s taking care of everybody else. Women like this will at times present with a low cortisol reading, and I talk to them about being saboteurs because they’re sabotaging themselves. And when I talk to a woman about this, the head starts nodding, the tears start flowing, because she’s finally been acknowledged. And now she can start working on herself better.’
Tassone’s book is designed to help women acknowledge their true natures, the issues that need working on, and how to tackle them. He uses a structure of five hormonal archetypes – the nun, wisewoman, queen etc – to allow him to talk to women in a way that connects with their innate feminine selves. ‘When you talk about a testosterone deficiency or oestrogen dominance, it sounds too medical. But the more that I sat with it, the more I realised I was hearing very similar stories from women, and I found that I could group these things into archetypes, which became a way for women to connect to the storyline of their feminine balance, which then gives them the power to help fix it. You’re not just looking at the physical and emotional, but the spiritual aspects of things too.’
It’s important to start to tune back into your hormones. Our modern life has been designed to shut down our instinctive nature, and we don’t listen to the messages our bodies are sending us. But balancing our hormones is about working with the ebb and flow of who we are, and about being truly connected to the wisdom of our body, and our cycle.
Day One (Winter) (the first day of your period): Oestrogen and progesterone levels are low; you are tired and lack energy.
Days Six/Seven (Spring): A few days after your period, oestrogen is rising, while progesterone stays low. You feel more alert, more curious about the world around you, in control, chatty, upbeat.
Days 14/15 (Summer): In the days after ovulation, your progesterone rises sharply, while your oestrogen and testosterone drop for a few days, then the oestrogen rises again. This surge and fall in hormones can often affect your mood in a positive way, making you feel full of energy, ready to say yes to things.
Days: 21/22 (Autumn): Your oestrogen rises briefly once more, and then drops again, but it’s your progesterone that takes the biggest hit, falling dramatically and leaving you feeling detached and withdrawn, low in mood and energy, being sensitive to criticism.
While these hormone fluctuations are a natural part of our reproductive cycle, the imbalance can be challenging. Add other external factors into our lives that can create a further imbalance – such as overwork, bad nutrition, lack of sleep, stress, relationship problems, trauma or child-bearing – and you have the perfect storm for a hormone imbalance that affects all aspects of your life. ‘For women that are already frustrated, anxious, depressed, adding a hormone imbalance to the mix is like putting things under a magnifying glass – so anything that’s already bothering you just becomes much more of a problem,’ says Tassone.
Luckily, our body will always let us know when things are not balanced. The trick is to be able to listen, and interpret.
Some of the classic symptoms of hormone imbalance are fatigue, dry or unhealthy skin, low or angry mood, rage and anger, weight gain, muscle weakness, aches, tenderness, stiffness, and an increased or decreased heart rate. But it gets more specific when you consider an over- or under-production of hormones.
Oestrogen dominance, for instance, is one of the most common hormonal imbalances in women today, and is typified by fatigue, low mood and irritability (what we often call PMS), weight gain and breast tenderness. While it can be caused by your cycle, it can also be exacerbated by a poor diet, especially with commercially-raised meat, stress and a blood sugar imbalance. If, however, oestrogen is low, you will experience aches and pains, low energy, even short-term memory loss.
By comparison, low progesterone may be typified by insomnia, problems with fertility, headaches and an irregular cycle; while high levels of the hormone cause us to feel sleepy and hungry.
Testosterone imbalances (yes, we all have it: it’s a human hormone, not a male one) can cause aggressive behaviour, excess hair and bad skin when it is high; fatigue, depression and apathy when it is low.
It’s important to note that in all of these cases, the key is not to have more of one hormone than the other, but to have them in balance. Chinese medicine is often used to treat hormonal imbalance, which is partly why the yin-yang concept lends itself so well to understanding our hormones. In Chinese medicine the first two weeks of your cycle are in the yin phase, the second two weeks are the yang phase. Yin and yang are opposite, but they are also in balance. The oestrogen and progesterone literally keep each other in check; the strength of each relies upon the strength of the other. Sometimes an imbalance is not caused simply by a lack of one hormone over the other, but a lack of one hormone, coupled with an excess of the other.
With all this going on, it’s hard to feel like we’re in control of our lives. Maisie Hill describes feeling like you’re being held hostage by your hormones; but explains that there are ways to prepare and get to know yourself better.
‘I don’t want you to be held back by your hormones. I want you to use them to get what you want out of life,’ she says in Period Power. Hill explains that the more we understand our hormones, the less we can be ruled by them, and the more we can take action to support ourselves.
She recommends using tools, such as her Flo Collective cycle tracker, or any of the similar ones on the market, to get to know your cycle more intimately and begin to understand how your mind and body changes over the course of four weeks, and what happens when other external factors are added into the mix. ‘I like to think of being aware of your cycle as like knowing the weather forecast in advance,’ she told the Hacking Happiness podcast recently.
For Hill, being prepared means that even if you can’t change your daily life – i.e needing to be in work when you want to be curled up in bed – you can make adjustments to help yourself throughout the month. “Working with your cycle will change your life for the better. You’ll move forwards with your life and reach your goals without the burnout. This isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing less.’
If you know you have an imbalance, then there are a series of approaches ahead of you. Some sit firmly in the mainstream ‘medical’ sphere, and some work more holistically and with our individual bodies.
At the outset, you may want to consider hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which can help with more serious imbalances and is used across the world for women going through the perimenopause and menopause. While effective and likely to ‘give you the most bang for your buck, as it were’, according to Tassone, many women have chosen to avoid it, due to a suspected link with breast cancer, which experts are now starting to show is untrue.
In Hill’s recent book she calls the study that led to this impression of HRT ‘fundamentally flawed’, and says that, for her, a good hormone balance is about a combination of approaches. ‘It isn’t just about supplements and treatments. Don’t get me wrong, they’re amazing and I love using them. But after treating women with reproductive issues for 15 years, I realised that the same issues kept cropping up time and time again that cause/contribute towards my clients’ hormonal and reproductive issues.’
Hill talks a lot about how a hormone imbalance can be caused by, or lead to, things as damaging as habitual people-pleasing, imposter syndrome, struggling to express your feelings, irritability and rage that erode your career, living in fight, flight or freeze, and an inner critic that won’t back down.
For Hill, addressing these issues, and being honest with yourself, is one of the most important things you can do. And Tassone agrees. ‘The story is what kind of gets me in the gut. Let’s say I have a woman who is burning the candle at both ends… she’s working herself to the bone, sabotaging her own health because she’s taking care of everybody else. Women like this will at times present with a low cortisol reading, and I talk to them about being saboteurs because they’re sabotaging themselves. And when I talk to a woman about this, the head starts nodding, the tears start flowing, because she’s finally been acknowledged. And now she can start working on herself better.’
Tassone’s book is designed to help women acknowledge their true natures, the issues that need working on, and how to tackle them. He uses a structure of five hormonal archetypes – the nun, wisewoman, queen etc – to allow him to talk to women in a way that connects with their innate feminine selves. ‘When you talk about a testosterone deficiency or oestrogen dominance, it sounds too medical. But the more that I sat with it, the more I realised I was hearing very similar stories from women, and I found that I could group these things into archetypes, which became a way for women to connect to the storyline of their feminine balance, which then gives them the power to help fix it. You’re not just looking at the physical and emotional, but the spiritual aspects of things too.’
It’s important to start to tune back into your hormones. Our modern life has been designed to shut down our instinctive nature, and we don’t listen to the messages our bodies are sending us. But balancing our hormones is about working with the ebb and flow of who we are, and about being truly connected to the wisdom of our body, and our cycle.
