Chaos to Calm
As a woman over 40, you’re in the busiest phase of your life and probably starting to wonder WTH hormones?! Maybe you’ve figured out that these changing hormones are messing with your mood, metabolism and energy. You want to know, is it perimenopause and will it stay like this (or get worse)? Host Sarah the Perimenopause Naturopath helps you understand that this chaos doesn’t have to be your new normal, while teaching you how to master it in a healthy, sustainable and permanent way. Explore topics: like hormones, biochemistry and physiology (promise it won’t be boring!), along with what to do with food as medicine, nutrition, lifestyle and stress management. All interspersed with inspiring conversations with guests who share their insights and tips on how to live your best life in your 40s and beyond. You can make it to menopause without it ruining your life or relationships! Subscribe to Chaos to Calm on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you don’t miss an episode! New episodes released every Sunday.
Chaos to Calm
Hair loss during perimenopause: why it happens and what to do about it
If you’re losing hair in perimenopause, it’s not just a part of getting older—it’s a sign that something deeper is happening. But don’t worry, there’s a lot you can do about it.
In this episode of Chaos to Calm, we dive deep into the real reasons why your hair might be thinning, and what you can do to stop it.
You don’t need to accept hair loss as your “new normal.”
Learn how to support your hair health naturally, and understand the factors that could be affecting your hair more than you think.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- The root causes: Discover the hormonal shifts that lead to hair loss during perimenopause, and why it happens for some women but not others.
- How to turn things around: Learn about natural steps you can take to slow down hair loss and encourage regrowth through diet, lifestyle changes, and stress management.
- Why acting now matters: Find out why addressing hair loss early can make a big difference in preventing further thinning, and how your body’s signals are all connected.
Sneak Peek:
"Hair follicles need a lot of energy to grow, and in insulin resistance, they’re not getting the glucose they need. Hair follicles aren’t metabolically flexible, meaning they can’t just switch to using fat for energy. Without the necessary fuel, they’ll struggle to produce healthy hair."
This episode breaks down exactly how your body’s changing hormones, nutrient levels, and stress are contributing to thinning hair. I also cover the conundrum of why you may be losing hair on your head but growing more on your face! And, most importantly, I’ll share practical ways to improve your hair health starting now.
If you’re ready to learn how to stop hair loss in its tracks, listen to the full episode to get all the insights you need.
Links & Resources Mentioned in the Episode:
- The Perimenopause Decoder: Download here to help you track symptoms and identify if perimenopause is contributing to your hair loss.
- Episode on testosterone
Send us a question for the FAQs segment or your feedback, we’d love to hear from you.
Find out more about Sarah, her services and the Freebies mentioned in this episode at https://www.ThePerimenopauseNaturopath.com.au
- OPEN NOW: Discover how to use food as your most powerful medicine, smoothing hormonal fluctuations and easing perimenopause symptoms naturally. (Yes, you have more options than hormone therapy!) Say goodbye to feeling out of control and hello to feeling more like your old self every day, with PerimenoGO (because who wants to pause anyway?!)
- The Perimenopause Decoder is the ultimate guide to understanding if perimenopause hormone fluctuations are behind your changing mood, metabolism and energy after 40, what phase of perimenopause you're in and how much longer you may be on this roller coaster for.
- Been told your blood test results are "normal" or "fine" while you feel far from your best? Discover the power of optimal blood test analysis with The Blood Test Decoder: Optimal Ranges for Women Over 40.
- For more, follow on Instagram at @theperimenopausenaturopath.
Hello, and welcome to Chaos to Calm podcast episode number 63, I'm Sarah, The Perimenopause Naturopath, your guide through the journey of perimenopause. So if you're over 40 and feeling like you're changing hormones are hijacking your mood, energy, and weight, and you want to change that in a holistic way, then this is the place for you because each episode I share with you, my views on what the heck is happening in your body.
Why you're feeling the way that you are and what you can do about it with actionable advice to help you feel more calm, in control, less stressed, and more comfortable in your body. I'm so glad you've joined me. Let's get right into discussing today's topic so we can keep shifting your perimenopause experience from chaos to calm.
Today, we're going to talk about a topic that has some irony within it because you might have been brushing your hair and noticing a lot of hair in your brush and less on your head, but also at the same time, more on your face. It's one of the most common things that women complain to me about and that I noticed in myself as well during perimenopause was lots of coarse and annoying hairs on my face.
I have very, I have a lot of hair and I have thick hairs. But I have lots of them. So hair thinning or loss is not something that I've personally experienced, but I know that it's a problem for many women and you want to know why it happens and what you can do about it. How can you prevent it? So, and why does it happen for some women and not others?
So today we're going to go deep into that. Why does it happen? What can we do about it? There are some things that you can do with food and with nutritional medicine, but we really need to understand why it's happening for you to be able to fully address it. So let's, first of all, I want to start with, talking about the hair growth cycle, because it's important to understand, because through the podcast, I'm going to be referring to different phases of how your hair grows.
And it won't make sense if we don't know that there as well. So there's three phases that each hair goes through. There's the anagen, the growth phase. So this is the active growth phase when your hair follicles, which are the little bits like inside your skin there, they're producing a new hair. Most of the hair on your scalp is in this phase at any given time. Then we have catagen, which is the transition phase. It's a short phase where your hair growth slows and the hair follicle begins to shrink. And then we have telogen, which is the resting or the shedding phase. And it's the final stage where the hair is shed and the follicle rests.
It remains inactive for a few months. Before it starts the growth cycle all over again. For healthy hair, most follicles stay in the anagen phase, but during perimenopause and menopause, there's many factors that can disrupt the cycle and causing more hair to shift into the telogen phase, which can lead to thinning and shedding.
All right. So why does hair loss happen? Now, I'm just going to pre warn you. There are 14 different reasons that I'm going to give you here. So it's not just as simple as just perimenopause or just menopause. So I want to say to you that it is important to talk to your doctor or health professional and help find out what the reason is for you.
Okay. So the first reason that it can happen more significantly in perimenopause and is the hormone shift and androgen excess. So we have male hormones, like testosterone, they're androgens. Actually, I did a whole episode on testosterone, so you can go back and find that at www.chaostocalmpodcast.com.
So yeah, one of the most significant factors for women in hair thinning and hair loss in perimenopause and menopause is the shift in hormones. And a shift in hormones actually can trigger, hair loss at any phase of life, pregnancy, puberty, if there's an imbalance like PCOS, you might notice that change in your hair as well.
So it's not necessarily exclusive to perimenopause, but it is another time of significant hormone shift that can trigger that loss. So as your estrogen and progesterone levels decline, they you lose that protective effect on the hollow on the follicles. But also, while testosterone levels do drop during, in menopause, they do so very slowly, like slower than progesterone.
They have a nice steady decline. They're not like estrogen ping ponging and rollercoastering around. Testosterone steadily declines. But it does do that slower and it can create a relative excess or increase in testosterone compared to estrogen and progesterone. And that can create problems in itself in terms of our insulin management and blood glucose management.
But also when we have excess testosterone, more of it can be converted to dihydrotestosterone, DHT. DHT binds to receptors in hair follicles and shrinks them and shortens the growth phase. And this leads to hair, thinning hair on the scalp, especially at the crown and the part line. So you get that more male pattern.
Oh, a female pattern loss, but it's yeah, that balding there as such. And as I said before, at the same time, you might find that you're growing more hair in places like your face and your chin, especially those dark course ones. And this happens because of that relative rise in androgens and how it actually impacts hair growth differently depending on where it is in the body.
So we get more here, less here, less in your pubic area, and maybe even in your armpits. You might notice as well.
So the next factor is genetics and well, your hair loss susceptibility that your genetics give you. So, not all women are going to experience hair loss during perimenopause and menopause. So genetics play a big role in determining who is going to some women are more genetically predisposed to that hair thinning or androgenic alopecia, which is that female pattern hair loss where hair gradually thins on the top of the scalp.
So if you notice that your mother, your grandmother, your aunts. The women around you and your family experienced hair thinning, then there's a higher chance that you're going to as well.
And androgenic alopecia just means that female pattern hair loss that is related to menopause, but could actually show up in a condition like PCOS. So yeah, like I said, not everything is necessarily exclusive to perimenopause here, but at this, what's significant about perimenopause and menopause is the hormone change and shift.
So another factor in hair thinning is insulin resistance. So we've talked about insulin and insulin resistance in its own episode before, and this is when your cells stop listening or efficiently to insulin. It's like your teenagers not listening when you ask them very pleasantly to pick their clothes up off their floor.
And it's not true. You're shouting that they're like, Hey, what's up? And tuning into what you're saying, it's pretty much the same with your cells and insulin, and it becomes more common in perimenopause and menopause because of the change, the decrease in oestrogen. Now, in the same way that this can be problematic for your brain, and I talked about it in the brain fog episode, it makes it hard for the cells in your brain to do what they need to do because they're essentially starving, lots of glucose in the blood, but it's not getting into the cells. It's the same for your hair follicles because they need a lot of energy to grow. And in insulin resistant, they're not getting the glucose they need to fuel their hair growth cell. And they're also not metabolically flexible like other parts of our body, meaning they can't just easily switch to using fat for energy.
So without the necessary fuel, they'll struggle to produce healthy hair. Also remembering that insulin resistance increases the level of free androgens like testosterone, exacerbating the effect of DHT on your hair follicles and contributing to further thinning. So it's a bit of a vicious cycle once it gets started.
So, there's lots of reasons in our health to pay attention to our insulin levels resistance or that how our body's coping and our blood glucose levels. And this is just another one of them. So yeah, it's interesting that what you eat and how you eat can have such a profound effect on things like your reproductive hormones and also the effect that they have on your whole body and the different systems is quite startling.
But it makes sense because when are isolated systems, we are all, it's all of our bodies interconnected and interrelated and think that's the benefit of natural health and natural medicine is that when approaching you from that holistic looking at you as a whole person and a whole body and not just individual systems.
So nutritional deficiencies. Let's talk about those in hair health because your hair follicles really need specific nutrients to stay healthy and produce strong luscious hair. So the key nutrients are some amino acids, cysteine and methionine, lysine, and also minerals, zinc and iron. So deficiencies in those can really weaken the hair shaft and slow down your hair production.
Those amino acids are sulfur containing, and so really support healthy elimination as well. And the minerals themselves too are essential for synthesizing keratin, which is the primary protein that makes up your hair. It's also in your nails as well. And in your skin. So those things you know, nutrients, very helpful for hair, skin and nails.
So, I will talk some more about where you find those foods. It, later on, we'll talk a bit more about that, but this is one reason why we need to have an omnivore like animal proteins in our diet, because those foods are rich in cysteine and methionine as well. There are some vegetables.
Yes, it's true. That, and vegetarian proteins that have those amino acids, but it's much easier to get them from animal products. Now, and without those nutrients, your hair will become brittle, thin, and more prone to falling out. Now, gut microbiome, having just talked about how we're all interconnected and interrelated.
Of course, gut health is everything. So the health of your gut microbiome plays a role in your hair growth. It, without a healthy gut, we're not able to break down and absorb and assimilate the nutrients in the food. You can eat the most beautiful diet, but if your gut's not up to the job, if your digestion is not firing and providing the, the enzymes and acids needed to break down the food, you're not going to get the nutrients from them.
And also how our blood glucose level and insulin levels are relates to our microbiome as well. Our fat storage is related to our microbiome and its balance. It can out of balance microbiome can contribute to inflammation, elevated cortisol levels, insulin resistance, all of those things contribute to hair thinning and hair loss.
I do have a whole episode on gut hormone connection, and I'm sorry, I can't remember the exact episode number right now, but I will link it in the show notes. So be sure to go check it out there at www.chaostocalmpodcast.com. So other, Oh, I forgot to mention some other nutrients, Omega three fatty acids and beta carotene, which is in our orange colored fruit and veg is a precursor for vitamin A.
So you could shortcut that and just have some more vitamin A rich foods like go the pate yum, the liver and the butter rich in vitamin A there as well. Beautiful. They're really essential for health, hair health as well. And also, as we age, our circulation can slow and the blood flow to your scalp can decline, and really that's what I wanted to mention at this point as well.
All parts of our body age, and hair follicles are no different. As we age, they, age too, and they may struggle to remain in the growth phase, especially if there's decreased circulation and decreased nutrients available to it and decreased glucose. So it's really important to provide the fuel and the building blocks because it's the same for anything in our body.
If we're not providing the building blocks and we're not providing the fuel for it, How's that? How are ourselves going to do anything? They're not. So, let's talk about thyroid health because you are more predisposed in perimenopause and menopause to develop a thyroid condition. And I see that so many times it's undiagnosed, it's not addressed.
And often it's because, Oh you're a busy, mom. So it's normal for you to be tired. You're in perimenopause, you're in 40, blah, blah, blah. Also, what contributes to it is, blood testing in Australia, particularly isn't testing the full range of thyroid hormones. It's only testing one, and that one is very slow to change.
And by the time it's changed, you could have already had a thyroid condition for quite a while. So the reason that your thyroid health is important in hair is because it plays a key role in regulating your metabolism. So a sluggish thyroid, a slow thyroid hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's is the autoimmune version.
It slows down your hair growth. And it spends more time in that shedding phase there as well. So if you have unexplained hair loss, this is why I was saying you shouldn't just accept it as part of perimenopause. Do go and get you know, blood tests done and have a checkup of your thyroid and your overall health because iron deficiency is one that can I mentioned iron as a nutrient of value before, but iron deficiency can also lead to sudden and significant hair loss too.
So I did talk a lot more about thyroid health in episode 17 and 18 of chaos to come, and there's a blog post for them as well. So you can find those links in the show notes, as I mentioned earlier. Now stress, It is actually a significant factor in hair loss, particularly alopecia arata and telogen effluvium, which aren't sort of specific to your hormone balance or your reproductive hormone balance there as well.
More related to, the stress and cortisol levels. And again, higher cortisol can disrupt your hair growth cycle. It can push more hair follicles into the telogen phase prematurely leading to excessive shedding. So if we're thinking about the purpose of cortisol and adrenaline in our body, it's to focus.
And make sure that our muscles in our limbs, big muscles have enough fuel. And so hair and hair growth is not a priority at that time. Survival is, and keeping us and our heart having enough glucose so that we can run away from it's still a primal response. So it's still thinking about running away from a woolly mammoth or a saber toothed tiger, although our stress is not like that anymore. Our stress is more constant and there's lots of low key stressors that add up to a larger, more chronic stress response there. But hair growth is not a priority. And so, blood flow to the area, nutrients to the area, particularly glucose, there's less of it as well.
So, yeah. Stress can also increase inflammation and that can weaken your hair follicles as well. So just flowing onto that, there's autoimmune diseases. Like I mentioned, alopecia arata, lupus Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune thyroid condition, they all can contribute to hair loss when the immune system attacks the hair follicles in alopecia arata.
But as I mentioned before, with a thyroid disorder, it can just slow that hair growth and, put more of your hair follicles into the shedding phase. So particularly in alopecia arata. Your immune cells are targeting the hair follicles, causing inflammation, disrupting the hair growth cycle, and your hair loss occurs when your follicles are pushed into the telogen or the resting phase.
In systemic autoimmune diseases, lupus is one of those. Inflammation and compromised blood flow to the skin can damage hair follicles, leading to hair thinning or patchy hair loss.
Alright, fungal infections. Who knew? But you can get fungal infections of the scalp. Like you can get tinea in your, in between your toes. You can also get a fungal infection of tinea on your head, tinea capitis. And that can contribute to hair loss. So the fungus infiltrates the hair shaft and the follicles, causes inflammation, weakens the hair structure, you get breakage close to the scalp, so you might get more patches of hair loss rather than that whole pattern or thinning all over.
The body's immune response to the infection also contributes to the hair loss by that localised inflammation. Sometimes depression medications, antidepressants, particularly the SSRIs are associated with hair thinning and shedding. Of course, don't stop your medication without talking to the person who prescribed it for you first.
That's very important. They can perhaps switch you to something different if that is a concern for you or there may be another reason for your hair loss as well. But again, the antidepressants can disrupt the hair growth cycle by pushing hair follicles into the resting phase. And that's telogen effluvium.
Because the contribution that the medications can make to your hormone levels, your neurotransmitter balance or even the body stress response, having a significant change in a short period of time in your stress, either up or down can lead to temporary hair loss. So it's important to know it's temporary.
It's going to come back. Unlike the, androgenic alopecia. So blood pressure medications can also contribute to hair loss as well. The beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, diuretics can sometimes do it, like the risk of it is low. Again, it's telogen effluvium, so it alters the circulation, nutrient supply, disrupts the hair growth cycle there.
Diuretics can also lead to dehydration and a loss of your minerals, like potassium and zinc, both of which are important for your hair. So, this is just a side note as well. I know I talk about water and staying hydrated often, but it is actually really important for lots of different things or different parts of your body there as well.
And when you're dehydrated, your blood is thicker and it's slower and less, circulation or less oxygenation to the different, the peripheral parts of your body there as well. So that reduced blood flow, reduced oxygenation to the scalp can weaken your hair follicles and contribute further to thinning.
We're almost at the end of the reasons. We're nearly there. Cholesterol medications, statins. They have been reported to cause hair thinning in some people. And that could be with regard to their impact on your steroid hormones, like progesterone and testosterone, because they reduce the cholesterol that is the backbone or the building block for those hormones.
Then I did an episode on cholesterol recently. So you can learn more about cholesterol, what it's used for in our body why blaming it, or trying to suppress it is not the solution. I talk about that in that episode. Cholesterol is not the problem. It's a symptom of a different problem. And hair follicles rely on your healthy fat membrane.
So if you are reducing your fat and cholesterol that can contribute to an issue there. All right, last one, stomach acid medications, but I want to actually change this. So, it's not sometimes we have lowered stomach acid, not just from taking things like the, proton pump inhibitors, the things that suppress or reduce your stomach acid.
You might have, lower stomach acid because of stress or some other functional reason as well. So it's not just because of medications, although they're more likely to achieve that for you. If you've got reflux, that's probably something that's going to be prescribed for you. And I need to do an episode on reflux because I have a totally different perspective compared to Western medicine on reflux.
on whether it's too little or too much stomach acid. So yeah, proton pump inhibitors, PPIs can contribute to nutrient malabsorption as well, particularly of iron and zinc and calcium and B vitamins, which all used for energy metabolism in your body and also hair growth and structure. So long term use of those medication will, it reduces your stomach's ability to break down and absorb nutrients from food.
So it's a, yeah, it's creating a nutrient deficiency secondary to its use. So you see, there's lots of different factors and it's not necessarily just perimenopause or menopause. In fact, many of these things might come up for you at a different phase of life as well. So you do need to check in with your doctor or health professional and get these factors checked out and rule them out and find the cause.
It's always really important to find the cause because if you're just trying to treat the symptom, it's not going to work, particularly with hair loss, you really need to resolve the underlying issue or problem. And just one more final note, please don't take iron unless you've had blood tests and been told by a doctor.
and nutritionist and naturopath or your doctor to supplement with iron because too much iron is also not great for our bodies. Now let's talk about some natural ways to address that hair loss and get your hair luscious and, we'll keep it luscious and beautiful there as well. So like I was saying before, there's lots of nutrients that are very important for your hair structure, your hair follicle function.
So cysteine and methionine, those amino acids I talked about, eggs, chicken, turkey, legumes, oats if you don't need to be gluten free, they're really essential for that keratin synthesis which is critical for building strong and resilient hair. We also need L Lysine. That's an amino acid that helps maintain hair volume and strengthens the hair shaft as well.
So you can find Lysine in, in animal products like beef and pork and vegetarian proteins like lentils. Their biotin, a deficiency in biotin can cause brittle hair and so breakage and hair loss that way. Foods rich in biotin include eggs, almonds, spinach, sweet potatoes. So zinc is another one I mentioned really important in hair tissue growth.
Also in skin great and needed for your stomach acid, your immune system, your neurotransmitters like zinc is really important for us. It also helps keep the oil glands around the follicles working properly. So foods rich in zinc include oysters, yum, beef. Pumpkin seeds, chickpeas any animal product or animal protein tends to be rich in zinc.
So keep that in mind in there. And if you're thinking, Oh, maybe I'll get a supplement. Sure. You could use a supplement to help as a security blanket, but why not work on your diet as well? And what you're eating to make sure you're optimizing your nutrient intake. So working on your gut health, working on your foods going in to make sure they're providing the nutrients that your body needs.
And then if you want to I guess you could use a supplement to help. secure that too. And you want to make sure that your supplement has these things like biotin and zinc in it. Iron. Well, like I said, iron deficiency is a common cause of hair thinning, but I don't want you to supplement with that unless you've had testing done.
You can certainly work on your food intake, leafy greens, red meat, lentils, and the darker animal meats so even pork, the chicken thighs. They are excellent sources of iron as well. Liver, pate, go the pate. It's rich in all of these nutrients for you there as well. Or add it to your, meals.
If you're brave and bold, you can add some to your bolognese or something like that. Omega 3 fatty acids, so your fatty fish, walnuts, almonds, flax seeds, they help reduce inflammation, support your scalp health. You know I have a love affair with flax seeds and phytoestrogens are perfect for helping with hair loss, especially if it's that androgenic, alopecia that's related to your hormone change because those phytoestrogen rich foods and again, I've done a whole episode on it and I've done a whole episode on soy, which is another phytoestrogen rich food.
Lentils, flax seeds, apples, there's a whole bunch of fruits and other things that are really valuable there too. Bean sprouts. Like there's such a variety of different phytoestrogen rich foods but they also help increase the levels of your sex hormone binding globulin, SHBG, and that lowers that free testosterone and can reduce the impact of DHT on hair follicles.
Lovely modulating food don't interfere with your hormone production or balance. They just compete or in the case of testosterone, they're just binding it up as we want it, keeping it from causing mischief with our hair follicles. So we were talking about insulin resistance, so managing your blood sugar levels, managing your insulin is essential and eating in a way that helps promote or prevent spikes in blood glucose and spikes in your insulin is very important.
So three meals a day, no snacks. Making sure, like remember I talked recently in an episode about the perimenopause diet and it's what perimeno go is based around and my longer program, the chaos to garm method 2 is 3 meals a day, no snacks, having a sufficient amount of protein with your meal, having your healthy fats, your colorful veg and your phytoestrogens as well to keep your blood sugar levels balanced.
So avoiding the simple, the refined carbohydrates, choosing vegetables as your primary source of carbs, but also using whole grains or, prudently as well to provide your carbohydrates. Lentils, legumes, beans using some vegetarian proteins as well as those animal proteins across your day and your week.
And balancing your meals with the protein, with your healthy fats helps prevent those blood sugar spikes that helps really level it out and keep it like a nice smooth flow there. So it's episode 59 is the perimenopause diet for more info on how to do that. Pretty much every episode. I'm talking about it too.
Now there's some specific herbs and supplements that can help. So yeah, in your health food store, you're probably going to find a hair, skin and nails product that'll contain silica in it, which is lovely. We've got horsetail is a lovely herb that contains silica. But you might find it as a mineral in one of those supplements as well.
Beans like green beans, lovely and rich in silica. So they're coming into a sea into season in Australia in the next month or so. So do enjoy those with your meals. So saw palmetto is a herb thought to help block DHT, and horsetail, as I mentioned, they're rich in, in silica, other herbs like withania.
You might see it as ashwagandha at the shop, chamomile, lemon balm, holy basil, which is also called Tulsi. Really lovely to help manage stress and balance cortisol levels, which in turn helps support your hormone balance and hair growth. Like I've said with herbs before, though, they do work best when they're personalized to you and the underlying cause of what's going on.
Making sure they're in the right form and the right dose. That's actually going to be therapeutic for you. You can't get that just by buying something over the counter. You really need to talk with a naturopath or herbalist to get a personalized prescription for herbs and get the best outcome. Same with nutrient supplementation.
Ideally, naturopath nutritionist is going to be able to help you best with that and give you the right form and the right dose for those nutrients. And too often people come to me and they say, Oh yeah, I tried that. Or I tried the supplements or I tried herbs. It didn't work. And I would say most of the time it's because it's not the right form.
They're not the right dose or not the right herbal nutrient for the person and, the underlying problem. I'll talk about that more in the quick fixes podcast episode that I did in the last few months. So thinking about your lifestyle, of course, stress management, it comes up every time our stress resilience is starting to decline in perimenopause, we can't escape that.
And so we need to do something about building our resilience. And this is where self care. True self care, which is not having a wine at the end of the day, true self care is fueling your body and with nourishing foods at least 80 or 90 percent of the time and having rest, having hydrating, getting some safe sun exposure, moving your body gently and building muscle mass and flexibility, spending time with friends and, having a purpose.
And also, giving yourself something to look forward to and finding some joy in your day. Those are true self care, going to the doctor and asking for blood tests so you can see and try and find the cause of your hair loss. That's all part of your self care regime. Allowing you to have some time to plan and prep your meals at the start of the week and, do the shopping or do the online order.
That is self care my friends. Like it's that simple and also can be that boring and basic. Sure. Have a massage, spend some time out, go out with your friends. That's all part of it too. But. The real heavy lifting grunt work, self care is those basics. Some people you'll find products I'm sure in the shop or the health food store to help boost circulation to your scalp.
You might use a little bit of peppermint oil or something lovely like that. Or drinking ginger tea is really beautiful to help stimulate circulation through the body. There's lots of different things that you could find. But I'm not necessarily promoting that you need to go and buy something or buy a product to help with that.
You could just gently massage your scalp next time you put your conditioner on or when you're in the shower. Or get your partner to give you a beautiful head massage. There's nothing more relaxing than having your scalp massaged. I don't think. And sleep, of course, sleep, it is essential for your hormone regulation.
It's when your body rests and repairs and regenerates there as well. So looking for seven to nine hours per night, you'll know what you need or what works best for you. But generally speaking for our whole body health and not just hair growth, we do need some good quality sleep. And I know it's difficult to get in perimenopause because your hormones are wreaking havoc with it with you.
But again, balancing your blood sugar levels and your insulin levels is a big part of being able to sleep through the night and stay asleep. Too many times women come to me, they're waking up and it's because they're either not eating enough or they're eating the wrong things in the evening or the afternoon and spiking their blood sugar levels and they're crashing in the middle of the night, waking up and they can't get back to sleep.
So if maybe you're not there, like you haven't noticed any hair thinning yet, or it's not, maybe you're not quite in perimenopause enough or close to menopause for that to be happening. You can start thinking about it now to prevent that future hair loss there as well. So I would suggest if you have a regular cycle, keep monitoring your cycle, because that can help keep you, that can help you keep an eye on where you're at in that, those phases of perimenopause and what's happening with your hormones and, what might be going on for you there. So you can use my freebie, the perimenopause decoder that's useful to help you track and notice changes in your hormones via your symptoms.
And it also helps you work out which phase that you're in based on those symptoms that you've identified. And there is a tracker in there too, so that you can over the long term track and report back on your symptoms each day. But yeah, also regularly having your thyroid checked. Like I said, that they, you want to do a full thyroid panel, not just TSH.
So do see episode 17 for more information on how to do this, but yeah, do track your symptoms. Track your cycle, see what's happening. So tracking your cycle is really valuable because it can help you see when you're getting, starting to get those shorter cycles, so more frequent periods or heavier bleeding.
That's that early perimenopause, as opposed to when they get further apart and you get longer cycles and more scant periods there as well. So, yeah, you can see where you're at and what might be happening or what might be underlying what's going on for you. And that helps you take action, that's going to be effective and going to work because it's actually going to address the underlying issue.
Like I said, nutrient dense anti inflammatory diet is going to be really helpful for preventing hair loss before it starts. So episode 62. Wait a minute it wasn't 62 because that was when I talked with Fiona. Episode 59 it was, the perimenopause diet. Or have a look at PerimenoGO my four week program that gives you lots of guidance and nutrition plan and recipes on how to eat best for this phase of life to help support balanced insulin levels, reduce insulin resistance, keep your blood glucose level, in a healthy range and provide all the nutrients that your body needs for healthy hair, skin, nails, healthy body and healthy hormones.
So yeah, hair loss is really common. It doesn't have to be inevitable. I think understanding the factors that contribute to thinning hair is really valuable for you. So you can try and work out what it is, what's underlying it, what's driving it for you, and then take a proactive approach with your diet, with your lifestyle, making sure you're providing those building blocks, giving your body what it needs so that your, hair follicles can do their job and keep growing beautiful hair for you.
Yeah. And so maybe you think that perimenopause might be contributing to your hair loss, but not sure. Maybe you've been told you're too young for perimenopause or it's something else or your hormone tests are fine. Then have a look at my free guide, the perimenopause decoder. It'll help you get to identify if perimenopause is the underlying problem so that you can, as I said, make the right decisions and, use the right solution.
That's going to help you feel more comfortable in your body and your mind and your clothes, but also help support healthy hair growth. In the years to come. So don't forget, check out the show notes for the links to the other episodes.
www.chaostocalmpodcast.com. You'll also find the link for PerimenoGO there. And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe and share the episode with a friend who needs to know more about hair loss or just perimenopause in general. Thank you so much for listening and sharing your time with me today.
I am looking forward to talking with you next time all about, premature menopause. So that's exciting. And unfortunately happens too frequently, but I will look forward to seeing with you then speaking with you then thank you again for sharing your time with me today.