You may have noticed this in your own cycle after something has happened to you in the past but it’s scientifically proven that trauma and stress can have a huge impact on our cycles. It’s also true that the opposite can happen; where we are in our cycles can affect how we perceive trauma or stress. When I am talking about stress, I mean chronic stress things like a stressful job, homelife, or going through an ongoing stress like infertility or chronic illness. When I’m talking about trauma, I mean an acute event like the loss of a pregnancy, a car accident or significant injury, surgery, or experiencing an extreme emotional event like the loss of a loved one, or onetime sexual abuse/harassment. All of these can have immediate and lasting impacts on our cycles.
Lets first talk about how chronic stress affects your menstrual cycle. Chronic stress is often more detrimental to our overall health and menstrual cycles. This is because it doesn’t just go away on its own, its ongoing. What happens with chronic stress is your body begins to regularly excrete the hormone cortisol. Cortisol while great in an emergency situation because it gives us the energy to get up and move out of danger or fight, is not so great when it is being released constantly. It has been shown that when we are constantly releasing cortisol due to chronic stress it becomes inflammatory. Cortisol released at the wrong times can also affect your sleep and down regulate sex hormone production, aka estrogen and progesterone. Cortisol also tells your body to release stored glucose (sugar) so you have energy to fight or flight but the problem is we aren’t actually doing either so then when the glucose isn’t used you secrete insulin to put it back in storage this leads to a vicious cycle of blood sugar rising and falling which can eventually lead to insulin resistance. This then leads to issues with ovulation and egg quality. As you can see chronic stress leads to many hormonal issues in the body affecting our fertility.
Now, let’s look at trauma. Trauma is often a one-time event like an accident. This leads to some of the same bodily functions as stress but it’s much shorter lived so with something like an accident it is common that your ovulation be set off by a few days but typically it doesn’t then go on to affect future cycles. Sometimes it may even trigger your brain to say scratch this cycle and you may get your period early without ovulating or you may get your period early because the accident fell in your luteal phase and your body has down regulated the production of progesterone so you have a withdraw bleed. Again, these would be one-off events and future cycles would continue on as typical. Another possible factor is if the traumatic event included a head injury. Head injuries can impact our hypothalamus/pituitary glands located in the brain. These glands are our master hormone controllers so depending on the severity of the head injury our cycles may be impacted in different ways. If it’s minor, we may find again that ovulation or our period is affected short term but if it is more severe, we may find we have hormonal imbalance issues for months or years to come as your brain heals. If you have had a serious brain injury and you experience hormonal issues, I would strongly suggest you bring it up with your doctor.
However, a traumatic event can turn into chronic stress especially if you are left with PTSD like symptoms. PTSD is often portrayed as something that is exclusive to people who have been exposed to war or other violent acts but it’s not. If you have experienced a trauma you can have PTSD. Trauma is defined by the person who has experienced the event and what one person perceives as traumatic may not phase another person and some of these variations may also be influenced by where you are in your cycle. Research has shown that due to the nature of progesterone if you experience an intensely emotional event during your luteal phase you are more likely to perceive the event as traumatic and have future complications like PTSD. I do not share this to scare you but to empower you, so that you know why something may seem more intense emotionally than you logically feel it should (sometimes it’s nice to blame things on our hormones).
We know that stress and trauma can have a huge impact on our menstrual cycles and fertility so what can we do about it? A lot actually. First if you are dealing with chronic stress do what you can to get rid of it. If you hate your job consider finding a new one (just the act of looking and knowing that you may be able to get out of the job you hate can help alleviate stress). If you have a stressful homelife ask for help. Seek therapy or a support group for things like fertility, or chronic illness; speaking about your struggles and finding community with those going through similar situations can be very comforting and stress reducing. Exercise and time outdoors are proven ways to reduce stress. Plan time with friends or family doing something you enjoy or even something as simple as a dance party in your PJ’s when you get up in the morning can help relive stress. Also, SLEEP! Everyone needs more sleep and lack of sleep actually increases your stress hormones so make sure you get in at least 7 hours each night.
There are also some great supplements and practitioners you can see to help you with your stress. I suggest everyone find a magnesium supplement that works for them be it pill or topical. There are also some great adaptogens that help our bodies deal with stress if you are actively trying to conceive, I would stick to CBD and reishi mushroom as both of those are safe for pregnancy. If you aren’t trying to conceive then I also highly recommend ashwagandha and tulsi (aka holy basil). Finally, some amazing practitioners that can help you with stress are acupuncturists and chiropractors. Both of these can help calm your central nervous system so you can get back into a sympathetic state. No matter what your trauma or stress is it’s important that we take care of ourselves and sometimes that means we need help. If you would like my support in healing from stress or a traumatic event head click here to sign up for a free consultation.