Natural Ways to Regulate Your Menstrual Cycle

Delicious Living, October 2012

http://newhope360.com/women/natural-ways-regulate-your-menstrual-cycle

By Laurie Budgar

Whether you’re experiencing heavy, frequent bleeding or light, infrequent periods, we explain the top reasons your cycle may be off and offer expert-recommended natural ways to get it back on track.

Forget what the school nurse told you back in fifth grade—hardly anyone has a menstrual cycle that lasts exactly 28 days. There’s wide variation among women, says Marcelle Pick, an ob-gyn nurse practitioner and cofounder of the Yarmouth, Maine-based Women to Women holistic health program. What’s important is when your normal shifts. Even then, an occasional irregular cycle is nothing to worry about, she says.

But hormonal shifts that produce significant and frequent cycle disruption are signals to pay closer attention. “Healthy menstruation is an indication of a healthy state of mind and a healthy body,” says Bobby Clennell, author of The Woman’s Yoga Book (Rodmell, 2007).

Balance is key, says Alicia Stanton, MD, an integrative physician and coauthor of Hormone Harmony (Healthy Life Library, 2009). At the beginning of your cycle, estrogen helps the egg develop; the ovulated egg then forms the corpus luteum cyst, which makes progesterone. Estrogen helps thicken the uterine lining; progesterone stops growth and stabilizes the lining for embryo implantation, she explains. If you don’t get pregnant, progesterone declines sharply and the lining sloughs off during the next few days. Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. When it doesn’t, a few common causes are prime suspects.

Symptom: Heavy, frequent bleeding.

If your period suddenly starts coming more frequently for a few cycles in a row (say, every 20 days instead of your usual 28), or lasting longer (say, six days instead of three), or brings abnormally heavy bleeding that prevents you from doing your usual activities, it’s often a sign that your body is not producing enough progesterone to balance estrogen, Stanton says. So the lining keeps thickening until it breaks off and repeatedly sheds in fragmented pieces, she explains.

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One of the most common symptoms of hormone imbalance is trouble sleeping, and stress is probably the number one culprit because it sets off a chain reaction starting with increased cortisol to insulin resistance and adrenal fatigue, which then affects our sleep. We’ve talked about the two hormones that are related to sleep and weight gain in a previous issue, so today I’d like to focus on the steps you can take to improve sleep.

Making sure your sleeping conditions promote a good night’s sleep is the first step. This includes having a quiet room because if you’re woken up by sound it will disrupt your sleep cycle and make it difficult to fall back to sleep. If you live in a noisy city, consider earplugs or a sound machine. Set your thermostat to an appropriate temperature, not too hot or too cold. Keep your room as dark as possible since any light will disturb the production of melatonin, your sleep hormone. Lastly, make sure your room is comfortable and inviting.

One of the most important things about getting a good night’s sleep is making sure your blood sugar level stays stable throughout the night. If your blood sugar level drops during the night, your body interprets that as stress and releases cortisol, which wakes you up and then you have trouble falling back to sleep. Avoid eating refined sugars or drinking caffeine, especially close to bedtime. Despite popular belief that alcohol helps you fall asleep, it actually creates a drop in blood sugar during the middle of the night.

Set yourself up right by doing something relaxing before bed like reading a book, meditating or taking a warm bath. If you get up frequently in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, monitor how much you’re drinking in the evening. If it isn’t that much, speak to your physician because it could be a bladder issue or diabetes. 

Finally, if you’ve followed all of the steps and you’re still having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, there are a few supplements out there you can take – 5-HTP, GABA, Inositol, Magnesium glycinate or Melatonin. I suggest checking with your physician to see if any of these are a good fit for you.

In this country, it is normal for us to work at least 10 hours a day, try to exercise a few hours a week and try to get by on 5-6 hours of sleep a night. We use alarm clocks, coffee, chocolate, soda, energy drinks and many other tricks to help us “push through” the fatigue and get on with our day. Does this sound like you?

What you don’t know is how exceedingly important sleep is and how not getting enough sleep can cause us to gain weight. Just one or two nights of missed or inadequate sleep are enough to make you as insulin resistant as a Type II diabetic! While adequate diet and exercise can help, your physiology will never be normal without enough sleep. At the end of the day, neglected sleep or poor sleep quality is a significant stressor to your body. It compromises your immune system, reduces your memory and makes you gain weight.

In addition to insulin, two other important hormones related to sleep and weight gain are melatonin and prolactin. Known as the “hormone of darkness,” melatonin is secreted in darkness, at night and tells the body it is time to sleep. Prolactin is critical to our immune systems and one of our first lines of cancer defense. Research shows that longer periods of sleep with increased melatonin production enhanced immunity. Long nights also produced higher levels of prolactin. If we get less sleep at night, more prolactin is produced during the day. And if prolactin is secreted during the day, it leads to autoimmunity and carbohydrate craving.

If you put together the imbalance between insulin, cortisol, prolactin and melatonin, you have a recipe for disaster. The biggest problem with short night sleep is that insulin will stay higher in the dark when it should be flat and cortisol falls so late it will come up normally in the morning. This is the reversal of your normal hormone rhythms. You’re supposed to wake up with high cortisol in the morning to deal with the stress of the day and a low insulin so you’re hungry. However, with reversed hormone rhythms it is easy to skip breakfast because your insulin is high and you’re not hungry. The reversal also causes melatonin and prolactin to be too high in the morning and throughout the daylight hours making it difficult to concentrate. By 3:00 in the afternoon you crave carbohydrates, get inpatient and have even more trouble concentrating.

Now do you see why getting enough sleep is so important? It’s more than just resting. It recharges your body, controls appetite, supports the immune system, balances hormones and improves concentration.

Getting enough restful sleep each night is required to maintain optimum testosterone production, preventing cortisol levels from rising too high and supporting efficient burning of food as fuel. Plus our bodies need the rest to support its functioning and adequate sleep is needed so our minds can work at their best.

Here are some tips for getting not only more sleep each night, but better sleep each night.

1. Try to be in bed by 10 p.m.
2. Unplug from the digital world – limit use of computers and television shortly before bed as they increase stress levels
3. Get right nutritionally – limit sugars, white flour and caffeine, incorporate more lean proteins and complex carbohydrates into your diet
4. Decrease sources of stress – personal relationships, at work, other situations
5. Exercise in the morning so you have energy for the day, but by nighttime your body and mind are tired, so you can sleep better. Exercise also helps reduce stress, but be careful not to overdo it as pushing your body too hard can lead to adrenal fatigue.