A PMDD Morning Routine That Works

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Your PMDD brain can wake up already searching for danger and by breakfast it has built a full case against your relationship. We walk through the psychology behind a PMDD partner’s morning routine designed to interrupt that pattern early, especially in the luteal phase when sensitivity, cortisol reactivity, anxiety, and irritability can spike.

We start with a mindset shift that changes everything: the goal is not productivity. We’re not chasing a “5 a.m. hustle” identity. We’re building intention and lowering cognitive overload so our nervous system has fewer triggers and fewer decisions to fight through. We explain why snoozing can backfire through fragmented sleep cycles, and how setting out workout clothes the night before removes avoidance and makes the next right step automatic.

From there, we get practical and specific: a simple outdoor walk (yes, even just “one foot in front of the other”) for circadian rhythm support, serotonin, and fewer looping intrusive thoughts. We talk about habit stacking with headphones, why social media and bad news can feed PMDD’s negative bias, and how the reticular activating system starts “proving” your partner is the enemy if you let it. You’ll also hear why hydration matters after night sweats, how 30 minutes of movement reduces PMDD rage and cravings, and how a calm shower with spa music becomes a downshift that signals safety.

We close with tools that create psychological distance and emotional safety: prayer and a short Bible reading, journaling to separate feelings from facts, and then connecting with your partner after you’re regulated, not before. If this helps, subscribe, share it with someone navigating PMDD, and leave a review so more couples can find these tools.

Transcript

Why Routine Matters With PMDD

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Today I want to talk to you about the psychology behind my PMDD partner's morning routine. If you have been with me for a while, you know I talk about my PMDD partner's morning routine so often. And I know that I have so many new people here. So I really want to give you insight on my morning routine just so that you cannot copy what it is that I do, but I want to share how I integrate my PMDD trauma transformational tools into my morning routine so that you can create one for yourself. So I'm going to give you the whole breakdown. And what I really want you to know is a lot of times if you follow me on social media, my name on Instagram is Dr. Rose Vibes, V-I-B-E-S. The reason why I changed it outside of PMDD is because so much of your life can become premenstrual dysphoric disorder in PMDD. And it's really not good for you to constantly think about PMDD all month long. And I had to learn that the hard way because I was always thinking about PMDD, even when I wasn't in PMDD, and I had so many clients that said, no, when I'm in my good days, I'm in my follicular days. Like I don't even like go to your page and follow you because I don't want to hear anything about PMDD unless I'm in PMDD. And I remember thinking, like, what do you mean by that? But I really understood it because when you're in your good days, you kind of want to forget that you are about to suffer for, you know, seven to 10 to 14 days in your luteal phase. You kind of want to give yourself a break. So I was like, you know what? There's so many aspects of my life that are outside of PMDD, and I'm gonna start sharing what those look like. I mean, I have like a billion jobs right now. I am at a conference. I'm deep in my luteal phase, by the way, which is why I wanted to talk about my morning routine. I'm deep in my luteal phase and I am teaching at a conference on stress management and how that impacts you. Um, I am a trauma psychologist. My specialty is PMDD, but I also go around and talk to corporations about that within the workplace, within their business, within their homes. I have clients that want me to come out and do in-person sessions. So I travel a lot, probably about two weeks out of the month. If you're my private client, you know, you know. Because we go through the whole time zone things and everything like that. So if you're ever wondering if your time zone is a problem, it's not because I'm always in a different time zone. But this is why I this is one of the main reasons why I have to have a PMDD partner's morning routine, is because a lot of my schedule is not the same all the time. And what happens is when you have premenstrual dysphoric disorder, routine is best. Anything that you can control with a routine gives you less stress because you don't want to feel like you constantly have to think about what you have to do because your brain is already overloaded when you're in your luteal phase, you're already irritable, you're already stressed out, your cortisol levels are very, very sensitive during that time. So the more things that you can have as a routine, the better it is for you because you don't have to use your PMDD brain to be making those hard decisions. Have you ever been in PMDD and you just feel like everything is just so overwhelming? Even if you're doing the regular day-to-day things, it's all of a sudden so overwhelming when you're in your Lutea phase and you're in PMDD and you're having to make these decisions. And this is where you have a lot of conflict and fight with your partner because you're like, can't you make it easier for me? You're not supportive. Why aren't you helping me? But the truth of the matter is you're overwhelmed because you're in your luteo phase, because you have PMDD and you can put the simplest task out there and all of a sudden you're overwhelmed. So I had to notice that. Um, so as many things as I can get in routine, I put that in place. Uh this year, I think, yeah, this year, 2026, I just started putting in an evening routine. And I will not tell you to implement a morning routine and an evening routine if you don't have a morning routine. Like, we're not gonna go off the deep end and just do all the things, right? I'm only implementing an evening routine because I've been doing my morning routine for over 12 years. But I have a lot of colleagues that are in the mental health community that I go on their podcast and I talk to them, and they've given me the importance of evening routine. So I'll tell you about that later. But let's get to the psychology behind my PMDD partner's morning routine and why it changes my PMDD brain before my PMDD brain changes me. So that's the biggest thing that I really want you to know. When you are in PMDD, your brain literally changes and shifts. And if you allow it, it will change you. This is why you feel differently in PMDD. This is why your partner says you look differently. It will completely transform you to where you feel like it's a whole different version of yourself. Like I have clients, and when they look back and they tell me about things that they've done in PMD, they're like, that doesn't even seem like it's me. Like I hear my partner saying that I did this. I hear my partner saying that I said this, but I don't resonate with that version of me because I literally don't feel like that's me. When I'm in my follicular days and I'm in my good days, I don't feel like that's me, but it is. And so I I want to give you a tool that you can do while you're in your luteal phase. And I want to also say I do this all month long. I don't wait until I get into my luteal phase and try to patch myself up. And that's why it's a routine, and that's why my brain really doesn't have to think about it because regardless of how I feel in my luteal phase, my follicular phase, my ovulation phase, my menstruation phase, I do this morning routine. This is pretty much the only constant that I have in my life, and I use it in the morning because it literally rewires my PMDD brain so that I don't get irritable with my partner, so that I don't go off on PMDD rage. It lets me get ahead of the PMDD symptoms that I'm gonna feel when I wake up first thing in the morning. I don't know if you're like me. I have symptoms like night sweats and they hit me first thing in the morning, and it's almost like a reminder of like, oop, you're in your luteal phase. There's anxiety, really severe anxiety. I mean, so much to wear. Sometimes my hands are shaking when I'm brushing my teeth, like it's all this anxious energy. And this is why I have to like get it out of my body. But again, one of the biggest mistakes that people can make with PMDD is waiting until they feel better before they start looking for a solution. How many times have you been on those PMDD forums or you Google PMDD and then you find out someone else has it and you're all what is the first thing you ask them? What are you taking? And I always get this question in my DMs, probably like 10 times a week. What are you taking, Dr. Rose? What are you taking? You want to know the supplement, you want to know all the things because you want to try them. So this for me is my supplement. This is what I do to supplement. That's all a supplement is. It's supplementing what you're naturally producing in your body. It's giving you something extra to get through whatever it is that you're trying to get through. I have a business mentor that I, you know, work really closely with, Brendan Bouchard. I don't know if you ever heard of him, but he's always tells me, take your meds. And what he says meds is, it's meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep. So that's his protocol for high performance individuals. It has nothing to do with PMDD, but when I went into the business aspect of things and got a business mentor, even they had a morning routine and I was looking like, okay, what do you all do? And they had something that they put in place so that they can operate their best. So this is not only people with PMDD because I feel like there's so much shame around it. Like, why do I have to do this extra thing? People who have a lot of stress in their life, they have things that were gonna cause them to be thrown off. They have a lot of things going on and they want to be their best for not just themselves, but the people that they love. They have a morning routine. Athletes have morning routines. I want you to feel empowered about having a morning routine. I don't want you to have shame about it, right? I don't want you to feel like I have this disorder. So all of a sudden I have to, you know, do all these extra things because I have PMDD. Because if you start to think about your morning routine like that, you're gonna feel like crap that you have to wake up earlier and do this extra thing, right? Okay, so let's get into it. First of all, the goal of my PMDD partner's morning routine is not to be more productive. I know a lot of times for high-functioning individuals like me that are really hyper-vigilant, you always want to get into your lude phase and I want to get ahead of it and I want to do all the things. And what happens is you're stressing out your mind, you're stressing out your body, you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself. So I had to literally remove productivity from my morning routine. Like I'm not trying to be more productive, right? There's a lot of masculine energy that that comes with that. The goal of my morning routine isn't to become more productive, it's to become more intentional, right? What am I trying to do? What is the goal of my PMDD partner's morning routine? I want to influence my stress response. The reason why I want to influence my stress response is because it's directly tied to what? PMDD rage. I am trying to keep PMDD rage at the lowest level

Intentionality Over Productivity

SPEAKER_00 9:44

possible because it does the most damage in PMDD relationships. Whenever I'm working with a client, the first thing that I work with them on is PMDD Rage because almost everybody has gone off on PMDD Rage. I've done it too, and it's done the most damage. You say the most hurtful things, you do the most hurtful things, you act out of character, you feel a lot of shame, you feel a lot of guilt about it. So what we what do we want to do? We want to influence with your morning routine your stress response. Notice I didn't say remove stress. The goal of having PMDD is not to remove stress because that's unrealistic. If I told you that I'm a magically make all of the stressful things in your life disappear, I would be lying to you. I would be selling you a dream. I'm not selling you anything, but this is free. But you know what I mean. I would be telling you, oh, if you do these five things, then you're not gonna have any stress in your life. The truth of the matter is stress is going to occur in your life. When you have PMDD, you have to be very mindful about how you let that stress impact your PMDD symptoms so that you don't go off on PMDD rage, so that you don't let the intrusive thoughts that you think in your mind cause you to think differently about your partner and go off on them or shut down on them or do something damaging to your relationship. So the next thing that I want to influence with my PMDD partner's morning routine is rewiring my PMDD brain. What am I thinking? There's some crazy wild thoughts that happen in your PMDD brain. And it's almost like you become a watcher of your thoughts after you do this for so long, and you're like, why am I thinking that? Like that is the most evil thing. Like, have you ever done that when you've been in PMDD and you've really just been in this place of thinking the most negative things? And I'll go into pessimism too, pessimistic mentality. The most negative things about your partner. And then when you get into your follicular phase and your good days, you're like, I can't believe I thought that my partner was like a piece of crap. I can't believe I thought that my partner didn't love me, that they didn't care about me, that they, you know, were trying to get me, that they were the enemy. But literally, when you go into PMDD, it's almost like you get really suspicious of your partner. Like they're doing the nice things, but you're like, why are they doing that? Like, are they really doing that because they love me? They don't really love me. Then you want to prove, you know, that they need to prove to me that they love me. Like the thoughts are wild, but if you really don't get ahead of them, they will really influence how you start to treat your partner, right? Like you start to feel differently about them, think differently about them, and then all of a sudden you treat them differently. So we went to get ahead of that. The next thing I do is my PMDD partner's morning routine helps me redirect my attention on what matters, right? A lot of times when you're in PMDD, you're thinking about things, you're worrying about things that do not actually ever happen. But in your PMDD brain, it makes you feel like these things are gonna actually happen. So you start freaking out about, oh, we're gonna break up, and you know, oh, what if they leave me? And and all of these things. And so when you focus on that, when your your PMDD brain is focusing all on all of your fears, then you start to have the emotions as if the action has happened. How many times have you thought about you've literally mourned breaking up with your PMDD partner? You're like, oh gosh, you know, this one thing happens, they say something to you, you feel rejected, and you're like, up, I guess we're gonna break up. I guess we're not gonna be together. Now I have to move, now I have to do this. Like you're thinking about all the logistics of breaking up and nothing has actually happened. That's because your PMDD brain doesn't know the difference between what you make up in your mind and what is actually happening. So you have an emotional response to intrusive PMDD thoughts that are going on in your brain. So if you do not get ahead of this, you will find yourself in a deep, deep dark hole mourning, like grieving your PMDD relationship even while you're still in it. Okay. So let's get into my PMD partner's morning routine. I just wanted to give you a little bit of an overview as to why I am even doing this. And let me tell you, let me tell you, if this didn't work, I would not be doing it. Okay. I have enough things to do. I would not be doing it. And like I said, I've done it over the past 12 plus years, have PMDD for over 20 years, and I know what it feels like to not do it, and I know what it feels like to do it. And I've shifted it and perfected it over the years based off of my lifestyle. So if you're taking notes, I really want you to customize this to you. Do not listen to something that I'm doing and be like, oh, I'm not doing this and stop listening. No, no, no. Remember, I'm helping you. This is a free counseling session for you. I'm helping you customize your own PMDD partner's morning routine. I am not telling you, I'm giving you a timestamp of how I do things, but I'm not telling you that you have to do it at the exact same time that I do it. I pretty much don't care

Wake Up Without Snoozing

SPEAKER_00 14:16

what time you do it, as long as it's in the morning, right? Okay, so first things first. I wake up at 4 30 in the morning. Right now, I am on the East Coast. I live in California, but I'm over here in South Carolina. So it's a three-hour time difference. Doesn't matter. I am getting up at 4:30 in the morning. I do not snooze. This is really, really hard because there's a lot of fatigue that you're gonna feel in your Luteal phase. Again, for me, I cannot snooze. There's a psychology behind that. During PDD, your brain already has more difficulty with managing your emotions, navigating your emotions, emotional regulation because it's altered for sensitivity, right? It's altered for this is why when your partner says things to you in your luteo phase, you automatically feel rejected, you feel abandoned, you feel all of these things because there's this level of sensitivity that you have when you're in your luteal phase. So every single time that we snooze, we're actually interrupting another sleep cycle. So I used to do this. I used to snooze and be like, oh, well, give me five more minutes, 10 more minutes. What happens is you wake up ending up, you you wake up more groggy. You wake up with slower thinking, more brain fog, you're in a worse move, and it increases irritability. So you think that snoozing means you're gonna get that extra five minutes of rest. But what's actually is doing is it's giving you fragmented sleep, right? Instead of getting up when the alarm goes off and allowing your circadian rhythm to become more predictable over time. Your circadian rhythm is basically you wake up and you go to bed at the same time. Your body gets used to waking up and going to bed at the same time. When you press the snooze button, your body thinks that you're going into a whole nother sleep cycle. A sleep cycle can last you another couple of hours, right? So you're going in and out of REM sleep, right? So resting eye movement sleep, the deep sleep, right? So when you press the snooze button, your body's going all the way deep down into this sleep and it's thinking you're gonna have another two to three hours of sleep. Like that's the time frame that it can take for you to go through a full sleep cycle. Well, when you only give your brain and your body five minutes, you wake up more groggy because you've gone deeper down into your sleep. You've restarted your sleep cycle. So think of it as you're going to bed at nine o'clock. That's what time I went to bed last night. You go to bed at nine o'clock. It takes you a while to get down into deep sleep. Say you get into deep sleep around 10:30, 11 o'clock PM. Two hours takes you to get really down there, right? Before that, you're at a higher sleep state. You're just like lightly sleeping. So when you press the snooze button, your PMDD brain thinks you're going back down two hours deep into sleep. And so when you wake up five minutes later, you're groggy, it increases your fatigue, it increases your irritability, it increases your depression. You actually feel less motivated because you've broken up that sleep cycle. So it makes everything that you're doing harder. So just think of it as when I snooze, it's gonna make everything feel harder. I might as well just get up. Let me tell you, actually, this morning, I woke up a couple minutes before my alarm because I had to use the bathroom, right? I drank a lot of water before bed. And instead of going back to sleep, I literally allowed myself, okay, it was literally five minutes. It was literally, I was gonna wake up at 4:30. I woke up at like 424. And then, of course, my PMDD brain is like, oh, I'm so tired. Let me go and get an extra couple of minutes of sleep. That would have put me back into another sleep cycle. Being that I know that, I just said, let me just go ahead and get up. So the next thing is again, pick your time. If you're taking notes, pick your time of when you're going to wake up and let it be a time that's going to work for your individual life, your individual schedule. I have clients that wake up at 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, it doesn't matter. 4:30 is for me because I have a billion things to do, right? I meet with clients in over 25 different countries right now, not states, countries. So the different time zones. I start working really, really early with meeting with my clients. So I need to get up and have my morning routine done before my first client session, right? So the next thing is put on your workout clothes that you already have laid out from the night before. Do not wake up in the morning and try to go through your drawer and find something, you know, to wear because your PMDD brain is in cognitive overload. It's already feeling like everything is too hard. So the psychology of this is this this is called reducing your cognitive overload. What that means is not making you have another PMDD decision to make you feel stressed out and overwhelmed, right? So PMDD already increases fatigue, overwhelm, functioning, anything that you do, overwhelming, right? So every tiny decision that you have in PMDD requires more mental energy. So anything that you can do to reduce that the next day, you do it the night before. So you set out your clothes. The questions like what should I wear? Should I work out, maybe later, it creates opportunity for avoidance. It means it gives your PMDD brain the opportunity to say no. We're not giving your PMDD brain the opportunity to say no, because it's gonna say no. You're telling your PMDD brain what you are going to do. Your environment makes the decision for you. When you wake up, you have your workout clothes right there. You're gonna put those clothes on, right? It's just an automatic thing. You're gonna you're gonna get to the point where this becomes autopilot. So this call this is called the choice architect. So you're making the choice that's the easiest choice. The easiest choice is to get up and put on those workout clothes, not to keep your your pajamas on, not to sit around and immediately put that on because what that's psychologically doing for your PMDD brain is letting your PMDD brain that you're gonna move, know that you're gonna move your body, right? So making this choice is the easiest choice. It reduces procrastination, it reduces overwhelm, it reduces lack of motivation. Okay, so the next thing that I do is I walk my dog outside. I have a dog, which for me, I feel like is the best thing to have in PMDD that rhymes. I'm always throwing this because it forces me to go outside. My dog has to go outside, like it has to go to the bathroom. I've trust me, there's been times where I've had PMDD and I've been groggy and my dog has literally peed on the floor, and I felt like it was like a punishment. I'm like, you know how you have so many things go wrong when you're in PMDD and you're in your Lubia phase and you're struggling, and then one more thing happens and you're like, that that's the little thing that sends you over the edge. That was me this one time that I was like, oh, I'm just gonna stay asleep and I not walk my dog. Yeah, I peed on the floor. I literally stepped in it and I was like, okay, note to self. You are you are permanently in my PMDD partner's morning routine. And I have this cute little dog, Mr. Leo, and he's a shit zoo Maltese mix. So he like curls up on the end, the edge of the bed when I'm sleeping. And literally, he even knows my PMDD partner morning routine because he will literally not

Walks Sunlight And Better Inputs

SPEAKER_00 20:56

get up until he sees me put my workout clothes on. When he sees me put my workout clothes on, he's like, okay, it's go time. So I walk my dog outside 20 to 30 minutes. Okay, so here's the psychology behind that morning sunlight. Granted, at 4:30 in the morning, there's very rarely morning sunlight, but I do two walks for him. One when I first wake up and then one after my workout. But again, a lot of times when you're waking up, you're waking up after the sun comes up. Like if you're waking up seven, eight o'clock, the sun's already up. Okay. So what we're doing, the psychology behind it is it regulates your circadian rhythm. Remember, we talked about that for sleep. It's letting your body know, your brain, your PMDD brain and your body know it's time to wake up. It is daytime, it's go time. It increases morning cortisol naturally. It improves melatonin production later, right? And it boosts serotonin. Serotonin is this beautiful thing that it makes you feel good. It's this feel-good hormone. So we have to really work with our hormones when we have PMDD because we don't want them working against us, right? We want our cortisol levels to be low in the morning. Even though we wake up in their high, we want to bring them down, right? Morning sunlight does this. Walking is calming. I'm not telling you to go out there and go on a 5K run. I'm saying walking. Put one foot in front of the other. And walking is so impactful. It can literally calm you down when you're in PMDD range. I use it for so many things, but we're sticking to the morning routine, right? Okay, so being in nature decrease decreases intrusive thoughts. You know, those looping thoughts that go around again and again and again. I have them. I have them. I have intrusive thoughts probably every single morning in my Ludial phase. It decreases them because I have a chance to kind of sift through them. Instead of staring at my ceiling and my bed and thinking about all of the intrusive thoughts, the PMDD thoughts that are horrible and negative. Oh, my partner's gonna leave me. Oh, my partner doesn't like me. Oh, I feel so unattractive. Oh, I'm the worst. I'm a monster. I can't believe I said that. I can't believe that I do that. Going for a walk disrupts that. Okay. Okay. You've taken your PMDD brain out of the environment automatically and it literally decreases the thoughts. It's like, okay, we're not going to sit here and focus on these PMDD symptoms. We're not going to get down with depression, anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, emotional overwhelm, and intrusive thoughts. This is what this walk is doing for you. It is reducing all of those things that you probably have first thing in the morning. Okay. So the next thing is while I'm walking, this is called habit stacking, meaning I'm doing these things, but I'm doing my walk and I'm listening to something that is going to rewire my PMDD brain. Literally putting on my headphones. Number one, I have misophonia, which is the sensitivity to noise. So I can have just, you know, construction or, you know, noise from cars. I don't want to hear any of that. Right. I want to put on my noise-canceling headphones. I have AirPods Pro, if you care. I put those on and then I put on something that rewires my PMDD brain. I do you know that I actually listen to my own podcast? I I really, even though I record the episodes, but for some reason when I'm in my Ludio phase, it's almost like I'm listening to somebody else. Like it's one of those PMDD things. But I'm in PMDD, so I listen to it. And the negative bias, the negative bias in PMDD, what I mean by that, the negative thoughts in PMDD is so strong. Meaning your brain, your PMDD brain is geared towards thinking the negative about your partner. If the first thing you put in your ears is social media, stressful emails, or bad news, your brain, your PMDD brain is going to start searching for danger. It's going to start searching for all of the negative things that are going on in your world. PMDD already thinks that your relationship is negative. And let me tell you, this can be really dangerous when it comes to social media because if you start liking a lot of those social media posts that are making you think negatively about your partner, like if you're in a very negative mindset about your partner and your PMDD relationship and you start tapping and liking and loving all of these posts that are like, you deserve better. You should just break up and all of these things, your social media is going to start feeding you more of that. So if you're looking at that and during your morning routine when your brain is already in a place of feeling depressed, feeling negative, you're just feeding your PMDD brain with more negativity. Like just think of that. Like your PMDD brain is already filled with negativity and you're just adding to the bank of negative thoughts. So you're actually making yourself feel more negative about your partner, right? So what happens is we have this thing in our PMD brain called the reticular activating symptoms system. Reticular activating system. What this means is your PMDD brain is going to start to look for evidence for things that you believe in your brain about your PMDD relationship. If you believe that your partner is not supportive, your reticular activating system in your PMDD brain is going to start looking for more things that your partner does to support the belief that your partner is not supportive, they're negative, that you should break up. So this is why you have to be very careful about what you allow into your PMDD brain because your PMDD brain is going to use it. When you have a negative PMDD brain, when you have a pessimistic PMDD brain about your partner, it's going to use every single negative thought that is in your brain and it's going to expand it, right? So this is when you have the catastrophizing, the all or nothing thinking, like, oh, we should just break up because your PMDD brain took one thought, one event that actually happened, a fact that actually happened, and it makes you feel like this is the reason why you should break up with your PMDD partner. Remember that your PMDD brain's job is to make you break up with your PMDD partner. So you have to be on the defense and you have to be able to say, okay, I have so many negative things that are automatically in my PMDD brain. I have to replace that with positive things about my PMDD partner. I have a list of 10 positive things about my PMDD partner that I have on my phone in my notes section. And I have to read it every single day. Because your PMDD brain is not going to automatically let you remember why you're with your partner. It's going to make you remember of why you're you shouldn't be with your PMDD partner. It's going to be like, remember that time they did this and remember that time they did that. Here's the thing: we all have conflict in our PMDD relationships. When you're in PMDD, it makes you remember all of those fights and it points out specific things that your partner said and did. It's reasoning as to why you shouldn't be with them. Okay. So you have to rewire your PMDD brain in that way. The next thing is I drink lemon water. Now, it's not that lemon water magically fixes PMDD. Okay, I just want to say that. But it's that hydration when you first wake up in the morning begins immediately. You're automatically dehydrated. And one of the reasons why you're dehydrated first thing in the morning is because of the night sweats. When your brain is working on overload and you're having those intrusive thoughts, it it comes up in your body because those intrusive thoughts start to impact your emotions. Your emotions impact your bodily functions. So what that means is when you have those night sweats and you have that anxiety and your heart is beating fast and you have those heart palpitations and all those things, you're dehydrating your body. So what you're doing is you're drinking the lemon water to rehydrate yourself, right? To reduce fatigue. Because when you're dehydrated, you're going to be more tired. You're going to have headaches. You're going to have bloating. I have horrible

Hydration And 30 Minutes Movement

SPEAKER_00 28:17

bloating when I'm in PMDD. And I hate it. I hate it because sometimes I could really be doing all of the right things, but I still look at myself and I'm bloated and I'm like, this is very like, it makes me want to stop doing what I'm doing. And it also helps with brain fog. When you're dehydrated, you like your brain is all over the place. So we're just gonna literally just drink lemon water, right? Drink water. I put lemon in mine. It's really detoxifying. And it really rewires your PMDD brain. Is that I I'm someone who takes care of myself, regardless of the fact that I feel like crap in PMDD, right? That there's one good thing. This literally takes you no time at all to just two minutes. I literally cut the lemon, squeeze it in some water, and drink it. I even use Mio in mine for a little bit of flavor. So you can do that, right? Drink water, you'll feel better about yourself. Takes two minutes. The next thing is move your body. I am not gonna tell you how to move your body, but this is so important. You need to move your body for 30 minutes, right? So at this point, the psychology of when you're in PMDD is that you have to do something hard. You have to, you know, work hard and you automatically think of working hard, moving your body, exercising, working out. That's why I don't really call it working out because I don't want to think of it as work. I want to think of it, I'm going to move my body, right? So don't force yourself into the perfect workout. Do not force yourself into the perfect routine. I know when you get into your follicular phase and you're feeling all motivated, maybe that's the time that you stick to a routine and you're saying, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna run this 5K and I'm gonna have at it. But when you're in PMDD, you have to move however your body needs today. You literally have to wake up in the morning and think of what I can do today. So today, lifted weights, right? Some days I dance around, some days I do yoga, some days I do bar or Pilates. It doesn't matter. Some days I swim. It doesn't matter what you do. The goal is just to move your body for 30 minutes. Literally set your Apple Watch or your Garmin or whatever you have, or even a timer on your phone and just say, I'm gonna move my body for 30 minutes. It does not have to be in a gym. I happen to have a gym in my condo and I'm traveling in hotels a lot. So I have a gym that is here, and I just literally I make it the passive leaps resistance because I honestly have a gym membership at 24 Hour Fitness, and I never go to it. You know why? Because I have to drive to the gym. I have to pack a bag, pack the water, drive to the gym. And literally the only times that I go to my gym, the place where I have my gym membership is when I'm in my follicular phase. So what I said was, you know what, I need to move to a place, and this is you know, everybody can't do this, but I literally pick where I move to based off of their gym in the in the condo complex. And I know I have a lot of clients that have a lot of at-home workout equipment, which I think is amazing. I used to work out at home all the time. I never really went to the gym, especially during COVID. Like I did all of my workouts at home. I was a beach body coach, and I literally I love home workouts because it takes the excuse out of it. Like you literally get up, put your workout clothes on, go down to the living room. That used to be my gym, and you literally do your routine. So I like going to my home gym because early in the morning there's nobody in there, right? So it's less, you know, interaction. I can just put my headphones on and zone out. What the moving your body does, it increases your endorphins. You get more energy, your dopamine, the serotonin, all pretty much all of the hormones that make you feel good, right? It increases them. The dopamine is the get it done hormone. And the reason why this is so important because PMDD will make you feel really bad about yourself. You have really bad self-esteem for if you don't do anything. It's like, oh, you're a piece of crap, or oh, you're so lazy, oh, you're so this. It literally tells you all the reasons about why you're not a good person because it's giving you evidence of, oh, you didn't do anything. When you move your body for 30 minutes, you can literally tell your PMDD brain to shut up. I did 30 minutes of exercise. You don't even have to say like how long you did. I did 30 minutes of movement. You're gonna feel good about yourself for the rest of the freaking day. So every single time that your PMDD brain tries to tell you that you're all of this, I literally don't care if you do this morning routine and get back in the bed. There's been some days where I do this morning routine and I literally put my cozy pajamas on, put my cozy robe on, and I literally get in the bed and I don't move. I bed rot. But I literally don't feel bad about it because I've been, you know, in that place of rewiring my PMDD brain. And it literally helps with the thoughts that I have once I'm in the bed. If you sit in the bed and you listen to the negative thoughts, they're just gonna stay negative. When you get out of the bed and rewire your PMDD brain and then get back in the bed, then it means you are emptying out all of those negative PMDD thoughts, throwing them. It's literally like taking the trash out. PMDD is trash in your brain, and you're literally taking the trash out. You're taking the intrusive thoughts out, you're taking the negative thoughts about your partner out, you're taking it out to the garbage. Think of your PMDD partner's morning routine as taking the garbage out of your PMDD brain and then going back into your clean house. Nobody would sit in a house filled with garbage that stinks, and your PMDD brain stinks. Okay, I have to make it very, very simple for you. That's what how I want you to think about it. So, what happens when you move your body? It reduces the chronic stress that you're gonna have, which again, what does that impact? Your PMDD rage. You're less likely to go off on your partner after 30 minutes of movement, guaranteed. It decreases your depression, your anxiety, your irritability, your fatigue, your cravings. If you have really bad cravings and PMDD, which I have, what happens is when I move my body, the cra the cravings decrease and then it decreases my stress. This is another way that I just put in my morning routine the last couple of years after my shower. Okay. Or after not after my shower, during my shower. So after my movement, I go to take a shower. And what I used to do was try to be really productive and listen to like a podcast or listen to some motivational talk while I was in the shower. I literally have a speaker, I have an Alexa in my bathroom, and I would like listen to that, or I would listen to a lot of upbeat music to, you know, keep my energy up because I was so scared that if I allowed my energy to go down, then I would stay down. But now what I started to do, and I got this from my my bestie, she's a massage therapist, and her vibes are amazing. She's just, she just the vibes in her home, she has like calming vibes. She has like these eucalyptus, like the the candles and the aromatherapy and all of this stuff. But she listens to spa music when she's in the shower. And so many people think about showers is just, oh, I'm gonna hop in there and it's just one more thing to do. It's about hygiene. Mine is about regulating my stress

Shower Reset Prayer And Journaling

SPEAKER_00 34:57

response, regulating the stress that is left over in my body. So this is about getting myself down to the bottom of feeling stressed out. So if I just stress my body out with some kind of movement, like today I did lifting. So I had all of these endorphins and I'm feeling all hyped and I'm feeling all this. I need to bring myself back down. So calming music literally signals to my PMDD brain that it's safe. It literally says we don't have to keep scanning for danger. You're safe. Warm water helps me relax physically. It literally helps all of the muscles that I just activated in my body relax. We don't want to put our body on the defense like we're about to go to war. We're literally relaxing, right? So instead of rushing, do not rush this. Don't put on anything but that spa music, calming music, classical music, whatever it is. And you literally just ask yourself, what do I need today? How am I feeling today? What am I carrying today that feels heavy? What am I thinking about my PMDD partner? This is when I want you to really scan your PMDD brain for all of those negative thoughts because we're gonna literally translate from feelings and negative thoughts into actual facts, right? So if your partner didn't say good morning to you that day, if they didn't text you goodnight, what do you what is your belief about that, right? What it what is your belief that is negative that PMDD can use? Ask yourself this question: what can my negative PMDD brain use right now that's still in here? And I want you to empty it out. Empty out the negative thoughts in your PMDD brain. This is gonna reduce anxiety. This is gonna reduce overwhelm. This is gonna reduce the tension that you're feeling. This is gonna reduce you feeling like your PMDD partner is the enemy, and this is gonna reduce your irritability. You're releasing it in the shower. What am I believing in what is actually true? What is the negative thought that I'm believing? What's actually true? Your shower doesn't even have to take that long. 10 minutes, 12 minutes, 15 minutes. I don't, it doesn't matter. But you're reducing all of your PMDD symptoms while you're in the shower. The next thing I do is I get out of the shower, I put my clothes on for the day, and then I pray and I do my Bible reading. And I I'm not very rigid about this. I'm not reading 75 chapters of the Bible. I am literally reading one passage. I make it so easy. I read one scripture, and that's it, right? So PMDD creates a lot of uncertainty. When I'm praying, I'm literally taking all of those negative thoughts that I just talked about with my partner, with my relationship, with my symptoms, and I'm giving it to God. I'm releasing control because guess what? I still have PMD. During my morning routine, I didn't, I didn't, you know, get rid of it. So whatever's left over and whatever I feel like I don't want to handle today. I literally just give it to God. I'm not gonna try to solve everything, right? My partner has this saying, it's like Rome isn't built in a day, babe. Like when I'm trying to overthink it, I gotta do this and I gotta do the Rome wasn't built in a day. And that's a way for me to be like, you know what? It wasn't. Like I can release what I can't control. I can't control my PMDD symptoms today. So I'm gonna release it. So faith gives my suffering meaning, it reduces my stress. And spiritually, I remember that God is carrying what I can't. Literally give it to God and let the rest go. It gets rid of a lot of fear that I have to do all of the things. And what I literally do when I'm praying, and it doesn't matter what your religion is, what you believe is what you believe. But what I do is I literally pray for my PMDD partner and I literally say, whatever it is that my PMDD partner needs right now, please instill it in me right now. Please let me be the partner that they need me to be today. Please allow them to be the partner that I need for them to be today. Because a lot of times we don't know what we need, but God knows what we need. He sees the hearts of both of us. And so it releases a lot of shame, a lot of helplessness. If I've done something, I'm just like literally, you know, I'm God, I'm sorry I did this. I'm sorry I went off on my partner. I'm sorry I did it. Like I'm just releasing it. So I don't have to feel guilty about it. I've, if God can forgive me, so can my partner, and so can everybody else. Like literally, when your PMDD brain is making you feel bad about yourself, if literally your creator has forgiven you, who are you, PMDD brain? I'm forgiven. I'm good. I I'm literally good. So I'm gonna share with you the scripture that um I was reading today, Proverbs 4 and 23. Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance, and above all that, you guard for out of it flows the spring of life, right? So if you want to have life, positivity flowing out of you to your PMDD partner, guard your heart, right? And what that means is guard your PMDD brain and what you're believing about your partner. If you have this negative, pessimistic mentality, guard that, protect that. Literally say, I'm not gonna think negative about my partner today. You have to be careful about what you put in your mind, in your heart. What are your beliefs? Like I told you earlier, you're guarding that. I'm not gonna let any negativity come in my PMDD brain about my partner. That's a mantra that I always use. I do, I say that during my morning routine because whenever the negative thoughts come, it's like, ah, we're not doing that. PMDD brain, we're not doing that. And the next thing I do is I journal, right? So I journaling creates psychological distance. Instead of becoming your thoughts, instead of thinking that everything your PMDD brain is telling you, you're observing your thoughts. All of this negative stuff, I'm getting it out, I'm observing it, I'm putting it down on paper. I'm not my PMDD thoughts. And I can literally ask myself, is this my PMDD or is this reality? Notice I'm doing this without any interaction with my PMDD partner. I'm not going to them with all of the negative thoughts, right? Writing slows down your PMDD brain. Instead of just believing everything that your PMD brain is saying, you're writing it down. And a lot of times with my private clients, I will have them read their journals to me when we come on our session. I'll literally say, okay, I've I've had you journaling. Now what is it that your PMDD brain has been telling you this week? I when I meet with my clients every single week, which I strongly suggest. So if you haven't gotten those sessions, go to inlove with PMDD.com or go to the link down below in the show notes, get those private sessions because when we're going on the private sessions, we're literally working through all of those PMDD negative thoughts, right? It lets us challenge all of those distortions, the PMDD distortions before we act on them. So if you have issues with intrusive thoughts, with being flooded with emotions, with erasing thoughts, with thoughts that are going on in your brain again and again and again and again, and then you're feeling really impulsive about them and you're feeling like you need to act on them. We need to get to the root of where did that come from? That's what we do in our private sessions, so that PMDD cannot use them against you. And the next thing I do is I get ready for my day. After I've done this, I literally get ready for my day and I feel so good, so positive, and I'm not in that place of believing everything that my PMDD brain has told me. I'm I'm I'm literally taking back my power that PMDD tries to steal every single month by doing this. And then you know what's the last thing I do in my PMDD partner's morning routine? You know what I do? I connect with my partner. I intentionally do this after, after I've done my PMDD partner's morning routine because I'm not stressed, because I'm not overwhelmed, because I'm not irritable. Not before, not before. My PMDD partner knows. I think he said this one time and I didn't even recognize that he picked up on it, but I should have known because he's he's very intuitive. He observes a lot. But I remember he was like, Yeah, babe, I have to make sure you get your morning routine because when we first started dating, he was like, I, you know, I don't, and he literally said it, I don't like how you treat me when you don't have your morning routine. And the immediate thought, because I was in my luteal phase, made me feel so much shame about that. I'm like, oh my gosh, I must have treated him horribly. And you know how you're trying really hard not to treat your partner bad, but then it almost is like this self-fulfilling prophecy because when they say that you did something, you almost feel like a failure. You're like, I knew it, I'm a piece of crap. But it almost made

Connect With Your Partner Afterward

SPEAKER_00 42:40

me feel good because he said, Yeah, I don't like you. I don't like the way you made me feel when you didn't have your morning routine. So I'm gonna make sure that you have your morning routine. Number one, he noticed the importance of my morning routine. I didn't talk to him about it. He didn't even know. He just knew we're long distance. He just knew that I did my morning routine. That's all I would say. Oh, I'm gonna do my morning routine. He didn't know what that was, what that consisted of outside of what I posted on, you know, on social media. He just knew I don't like how you treat me before you have your morning routine. And he said, I love how you treat me after you've had your morning routine. Not before, but after. So that changed everything. Instead of asking my partner to calm my anxiety, to make me feel better about PMDD, I bring that calmer version of myself to him. This creates emotional safety because you know, a lot of times because you've gone off on your PMDD partner so many times, and we all have, so no shame. They feel like they're a little bit scared of you. They're feeling like they're walking on eggshells. They're feeling like they don't know what you're gonna do next. They feel like they don't know what you're gonna say next. And this allows them to calm down and feel safe around you again. This also increases oxytocin, which is the bonding hormones, which makes you feel like, oh, I'm closer. I'm closer to my partner, right? So overall, my morning routine can take like an hour. Literally, I went through everything step by step, by step by step, but it can literally take an hour. Do not waste two to three to four hours unless you, unless you have the time doing it. But it literally, you can get it all done in hours, your first hour of the day, but you're not wasting them. You're literally rewiring your PMDD brain for the other 23 hours that you have within your day. This doesn't just change me and my PMDD symptoms. It doesn't just change my mood, it changed my PMD brain about how I see my partner. It literally, when I am less hyper-vigilant, if I'm not scanning for danger, if I'm not being really suspicious of my partner and I'm not saying, oh, my partner doesn't love me, they're pulling away, we're not compatible. It reduces the PMDD breakups. It reduces it and makes me feel very positive about my partner because when you feel negative about your PMDD partner, there's a lot of things that your your PMDD brain can use. And I'm gonna talk about that on the next podcast. But hopefully you've taken notes and maybe you listen to this again and you create your own PMDD partners morning routine. And if you have, you can follow me on Instagram at drose vibes, or you can go drose underscore in love with PMDD on TikTok or just send me an email, rose at inlove with PMDD.com and let me know how your PMDD partner's morning routine is going. I want to know how this has helped you. Please make sure that you share this podcast on your social media with other PMDD partners, with other PMDD sufferers, so that they too can have their own PMDD morning routine. I remember it took me so long to even construct this. This is years and years and years in the making. So if someone is suffering, I don't want it to be like I wish I would have known this earlier. Share this with individuals that is really going to help them in their Louis phase. Share this with your partner and let them know. Hey, maybe you sit down with your partner and say, I want to create a PMDD partner's morning routine and you do it together so that they're supporting you in doing this. Until next time, we got this. I love you.