In Part 1 of this episode, we covered supporting your health through mindfulness practices, targeted nutrition, and avenues of self-exploration. This week, we'll talk about how the menstrual cycle impacts your mood (and vice versa), depression and your cycle, birth control's impact on your mental health, PMS vs. PMDD, and herbal support for depression and anxiety.
Listener perk: $100 off my cycle-syncing course, Cycle Magic, with code LUNARLOVE.
View all podcast listener perks here.
How you can work with me:
Keep in touch!
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Virtual Tip Jar
Thanks for listening!
In Part 1 of this episode, we covered supporting your health through mindfulness practices, targeted nutrition, and avenues of self-exploration. This week, we'll talk about how the menstrual cycle impacts your mood (and vice versa), depression and your cycle, birth control's impact on your mental health, PMS vs. PMDD, and herbal support for depression and anxiety.
Listener perk: $100 off my cycle-syncing course, Cycle Magic, with code LUNARLOVE.
View all podcast listener perks here.
How you can work with me:
Keep in touch!
Website
Instagram
Virtual Tip Jar
Thanks for listening!
I’m Kristen Ciccolini, host of this Lunar Body podcast, I’m a nutritionist, menstrual health educator, period priestess, and your friendly neighborhood witch. This is part two of our episodes on Mindfulness and Mental Health. I hope you found last week’s episode helpful and got started on some mindful self-exploration through astrology, human design, or your Enneagram type.
One thing I should have mentioned is that while those systems can tell us a lot about ourselves, it’s not all necessarily prescriptive. It doesn’t mean everything is 100% true for you, it may or may not feel like it aligns. But if you’re feeling a lot of frustration, resistance, and nervous system dysregulation in your life, it’s worth knowing these things about your personal astrology and design. It can help give you some self-awareness, self-compassion. Like I mentioned that in human design it tells me that I am frustrated when I’m not being my authentic self — so that gives me a clue as to how I can deal with the resistance that I’m feeling. Rather than spinning in circles angry and upset, I can look to my design and say okay, I’m upset, or I’m having a strong reaction to this thing. Why is that? Where am I not being true to myself?
These systems are really helpful for navigating our self-care. They’re tools. They’re not the only tools, but they can certainly be helpful for getting to know yourself.
So last week’s episode was more about mindfulness practices for your mental health, and this week I want to talk more about the cyclical aspect of our mental wellbeing. So how the menstrual cycle impacts your mood, and vice versa, depression and your cycle, birth control’s impact on your mental health, the difference between PMS and PMDD, and also some herbal support for depression and anxiety
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We’ll start with a brief recap of what we talked about earlier this month — the gut-brain connection, and how food and mental health can be linked.
The general conversation about how food impacts us is largely focused on the external — how your body is shaped, how your skin looks, how your hair shines. But the external is not the only thing that food can influence, of course. Food impacts your hormone health, menstrual cycle, and mental health. If the food you eat has an effect on your skin and your muscles and your bones, your insides — your brain is included in that too, it’s a physical part of your body, and the food you eat influences the brain, which in turn influences your mental wellbeing, emotional stability, and hormones, because hormone production begins in the brain.
I also mentioned last time about the emerging field of nutritional psychiatry, which is a relatively recent focus on how the food you eat makes you feel, with an important focus on gut bacteria. Remember the gut-brain connection.
But food isn’t the only thing. It can have a big impact on your wellbeing, for sure, but mental health requires a holistic approach. And that includes having a better understanding of how your body works at its foundation.
That’s where it starts for me. It’s the education about the basics of your body’s inner workings, the pillar of mental health that’s about biochemical reactions, your nature.
Then layered on top of that is your personal design, your astrology, your human design, all the things that are unique to you.
And on top of that are more external influences, the other pillar of mental health—lived experiences, trauma, perceptions, beliefs, socioeconomic status, systemic oppression, the things that contribute to your perception of the world.
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So let’s get that foundation. If you’ve listened to the first episode of this podcast and have been following along here, you have an idea of how the menstrual cycle works already. Now we’re going to talk about this foundational element in the context of your mood.
Progesterone and estrogen, which are the primary hormones involved in the menstrual cycle, impact the parts of our brains that influence mood and behavior.
For people who menstruate, your brain changes by up to 25% during your cycle, thanks to the fluctuations of estrogen. That’s a pretty significant difference, yet we push ourselves to be able to do the same things day after day. And we can do it all, but it’ll feel a lot better if we can organize the things we need to do based on when in our cycle we’re able to do them best.
The follicular phase starts out with good spatial skills, meaning awareness of your surroundings and personal space. Also good for imagination, memory, socializing, as you move towards ovulation. But it also makes you more prone to anxiety here too.
Estrogen rises in this phase, and serotonin rises along with it. So as you move towards ovulation and you’re in alignment, you’re feeling like you’re in a great mood, motivated, social.
It’s also scientifically proven that we are more attractive at this time, we are more magnetic and appealing to others, and in turn that makes us feel pretty good about ourselves. More positive and confident.
One of estrogen’s effects is making you feel more receptive to other people. It makes you want to care for and be around others. It helps you better communicate and collaborate. It's the hormone of community. The first half of your cycle tends to be pretty positive.
And that’s evolutionary — you gotta find a mate somehow, and it just so happens your libido is increasing at the same time as your estrogen in preparation for ovulation.
Estrogen has a mood-elevating effect that makes us feel outgoing and optimistic. It’s a great time to embrace your social life and pack your calendar, and you’ll probably feel pretty motivated to exercise more too, which has its own mood-boosting benefits. What feels easy-breezy right now might actually stress you out in a couple weeks, but peaking estrogen lets you brush things off a lot more easily.
If you have low estrogen in the first half of your cycle, it can lead to irritability and anxiety. But on the flip side, if your estrogen is high and you don’t know what to do with that energy, you can feel on edge, jittery, and irritable. If you’re dealing with estrogen dominance, these feelings may be even stronger.
Now the luteal phase is generally calmer thanks to progesterone.
Estrogen begins to lower in this phase, and so does your serotonin. This is when we start to turn inward, stop caring so much about being around others, and focus more on self-care and rest. With progesterone having a calming effect, you’ll notice your energy wane, too.
If you’re not aligned with these changes, it can manifest as moodiness and depression. You might not realize what’s happening in your body, that things are naturally winding down, so things feel a lot harder and you get down on yourself for not being able to copy-and-paste that peppy attitude you had in your ovulatory phase. But then your period comes, and all those feelings suddenly make sense. This is one way that tracking can be helpful, so if you know you’re in your luteal phase, you can better understand where certain feelings are coming from, and how to manage them, or work with them instead of against them.
For instance, maybe you notice that you’re getting close to your period and you know that around this time, you’re really not very outgoing and have low patience for people. So maybe that week you plan to take it easy on social invitations, or you avoid meetings if at all possible.
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If you experience anxiety more before your period there are a few reasons why this might be happening:
At the end of the luteal phase, when your body recognizes there is no pregnancy to maintain and so there’s no need for the uterine lining that it just built up over the last few weeks, progesterone drops and that triggers menstruation. In the menstrual phase, both estrogen and progesterone are very low. Since both of these have such an impact on your mood and behavior, it’s sort of like a liminal time where you just don’t know how to feel. All you know is energy is low, you want to be quiet, and rest feels really good.
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I want to dive a little more into depression and anxiety.
Going back to those two pillars of mental health, depression can fit in either category. It can be a biochemical reaction that influences your perceptions and how your nervous system handles the outside world, or it could be brought on by those external influences.
We just talked about how your cycle can influence your mood, and so you might have a clue as to why you feel depressed in some days of your cycle. But let’s talk about what happens the other way around, where depression can impact your cycle.
Depression can be a mental and physical stressor — and as you are well aware now, stress is a major factor in hormone imbalance and cycle-wise, it can cause delayed ovulation and missing periods, because it can suppress the function of the hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain that’s responsible for managing the cascade of hormones that flow throughout your cycle.
I bring up the importance of tracking again because for mood purposes, it can help you see patterns and help you plan accordingly. Or if you’re experiencing mood concerns that really impact your life, tracking can give you insight to the frequency of your symptoms too that will be helpful when discussing with your doctor, whether the symptoms are cyclical or happening all the time.
I personally deal with depression and, I want to emphasize that this is my personal experience and I don’t speak for everyone, but what I found helpful was committing to exercise and changing my diet. In fact, seeing the positive effects of how changing my food helped my mood was what led me to becoming a nutritionist. I never understood the connection between diet and depression, and when I committed to learning what foods made me feel good, what exercises made me feel good, it changed my life. I still deal with depressive days, but I at least have the foundations in place now to better manage it and tools to work through it.
That’s my experience. And sometimes that’s what people need, nutrition education is the missing link. But I also acknowledge that it’s not everyone’s experience and that medication might be the missing link. Regardless of whether you use medication to deal with mental health, it’s important to understand the root cause, or work towards finding and healing the root cause, whether that’s through food or therapy.
All the foods we always talk about here, whole foods, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, meat and fish for some, nuts, seeds — all these foods, and the elements of balance, blood sugar regulation, a lot of this contributes to your mental and emotional wellbeing.
Also plant foods contain lots of fiber that are important for your gut health and for the bacteria in your gut, which produces 95% of our serotonin and 50% of our dopamine, our feel-good hormones. Studies show that imbalanced gut bacteria is linked with psychiatric disorders, so it goes back to the gut-brain connection and how important it is to maintain good gut health through our diet. The gut is actually sometimes called our “second brain” because of its ability to influence our mood.
These whole foods also contain key vitamins and minerals for supporting your brain and mental health, including omega-3s — a deficiency of which is linked to depression, because it both regulates the release of serotonin and regulates serotonin receptor function.
But it’s not always a deficiency of omega-3 that causes problems. Oftentimes it’s an imbalance of omega-3 to omega-6. They are naturally anti-inflammatory when they’re in balance, but too much omega-6 can actually cause inflammation, and the Standard American Diet is high in omega-6 from different oils like safflower oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, soybean oil — so to keep inflammation at bay you’ll want to stock up on things like walnuts, chia seeds, flax seeds, and hemp seeds to balance it out. Fatty fish is a good source of omega-3s as well. You may want to discuss supplementation with your doctor too.
Speaking of inflammation, this is a common cause of anxiety too.
Anxiety can be cyclical like we talked about earlier, so it can be the result of imbalanced estrogen or progesterone. It can also be the result of poor gut health, nutrient deficiency, sleep issues or other lifestyle concerns. Your biology alone makes you more likely to have anxiety, research says women are twice as likely to experience anxiety than men.
Gut health is key here too. One thing you might want to track is if you’re pooping every day and if it’s a good quality. You eliminate excess estrogen through your stool. If you’re not going every day, if you’re constipated and the waste is just sitting there in your digestive tract for too long, the estrogen can be reabsorbed and recycled in the body. We don’t want that, that can lead to estrogen dominance and as we discussed, too much estrogen can make you feel anxious, among many other hormonal symptoms.
So you want to be pooping daily, and you want it to be a good one. Like one you can pat yourself on the back for and write home about. And get your fiber in, eat probiotic-rich foods, reduce stress, all of these things will be helpful.
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If depression and anxiety are severe for you each cycle, you may have what’s called PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder.
Research says that anywhere from 3-8% of menstruators experience PMDD. Even though it affects a relatively small percentage of menstruators, it’s still a significant issue.
While PMS is usually just a few days before your period, PMDD can impact people for half of their cycle, like all of the postovulatory time, and can have severe versions of typical PMS symptoms. It is a whole other level of PMS, but the difference is in the severity of symptoms, the frequency of symptoms, and how long they last.
It is difficult to get a diagnosis, it’s often dismissed because hormone tests can come back normal, you might feel like it’s all in your head or be told that when you know it’s not.
Let’s look at how PMS and PMDD are diagnosed.
PMS is diagnosed when you have 1-4 symptoms, which can include a long list of things like mood swings, irritability, cravings, low energy, cramps, breast tenderness — you know the drill, and those symptoms happen 5-7 days before menstruation and resolve when your period comes.
PMDD is diagnosed when you have 5 or more symptoms and they are extreme enough to interfere with your daily work life, school life, or relationships — not just kind of interfering, but actually damaging these things because it’s so bad.
Doctors use the DSM-5 to diagnose PMDD. This is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is like the Bible of psychiatry — so this is seen as a mental health issue as related to your cycle. At least 5 of those symptoms must be present in your luteal phase, and four of them MUST include:
So you have to have these four symptoms, plus at least one more, in a severe manner. That might look like extreme irritability, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, feeling overwhelmed, panic attacks, bouts of crying.
These also must resolve when your period arrives in order for it to be classified as PMDD.
As for a cause, research is still limited in this area but there is a biological component, and studies have found that PMDD may be caused by a genetic sensitivity to estrogen and progesterone.
One thing I want to note here is that while I always recommend food first before supplementation, in the case of medication, it’s okay to take medication. You don’t need my permission but I know sometimes it helps to have an affirmation. I want you to do what helps you feel better, and I also think it’s important to understand the root cause and work towards a solution, rather than relying only on the medication. Sometimes you might find that medication IS the solution, but oftentimes there are other factors at play. I just want to emphasize that I’m not stigmatizing medication for mental health, because I know there are a lot of practitioners out there who are fully anti-meds for everything, and I’m not trying to shame you for doing what you need to.
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One more thing before we get into some self-care strategies — the medication I do want to discuss is birth control pills. Another example of something I’m not against if you need it, but in this case I do believe it’s overprescribed and used as a go-to solution for all things cycle-related, when it can cause more harm than good in this area.
Birth control pills are hormonal contraceptives, meaning they influence your hormones in a way that impact your ability to get pregnant. Which is the whole point. It suppresses the communication between the brain and the ovaries.
The pill has been linked to an increased risk of depression, it has been found to actually cause depression, and research has also shown that it’s linked to structural, neurochemical, and mood-related changes in the brain.
This is really important stuff, especially for teenagers going on the pill. Being a teenager is already a confusing, hormonally and emotionally chaotic time, and even into your twenties, you’re figuring yourself out, figuring out life. Life changes come with the territory and to add depression or depressive symptoms on top of it isn’t really necessary. It makes things harder.
We’ve discussed before how the pill is associated with various nutrient deficiencies, and that includes nutrients needed to make serotonin. What it seems to do is interrupt the tryptophan pathway, which is how you produce serotonin, it’s made from tryptophan. The pathway is the amino acid tryptophan, which converts to serotonin, which ultimately converts to melatonin. There isn’t a ton of research on why, but I’m going to share with you something that Dr. Jolene Brighten shared, she’s the author of Beyond the Pill. She said:
“For some people on the pill, their tryptophan can instead go down the quinolinic acid pathway, which is a neurotoxin. There is strong evidence between the association of hormonal birth control and poor moods, but we don’t have enough studies to help us completely understand why. It’s really concerning that for as long as we’ve had the pill we have had women complaining about this side effect, but science has neglected to invest substantial resources into helping us understand why.”
And that is part of the reason you’re here right, because you’re navigating a world that wasn’t designed for your body or with your body in mind.
So this is a conversation worth having with your doctor.
You can decide to use it knowing this risk and possibly planning for it by keeping up with the nutrients that support your mental health, to help avoid any imbalances, or you could decide to use another method of birth control instead. Up to you.
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Herbal support for depression and anxiety
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Okay, so that’s a wrap on mindfulness and mental health. I know it’s a lot of information, but to recap this episode and the last, the main things we want to pay attention to when it comes to managing our mental health and thus our menstrual health are:
Okay, I never know how to wrap up these episodes, I feel like I’m always just like. That’s all, hope it was helpful! But I do hope it’s helpful, I do hope you take away something actionable. I aim to please folks. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next week.