There's an important link between sex hormones and women's cycling moods. Understanding the connection can help you improve your emotional stability.
By the end of the nineties mounting evidence had begun to show a unique and persistent connection between women's sex hormones and almost all forms of mental illness. For example, binging and purging behaviors in bulimics worsened during the premenstruum, when estrogen levels go down. So did panic attacks in women with panic disorder. Impulse disorders, too, seemed to get worse during that week or ten days before the period begins--kleptomaniacs went on more stealing escapades, trichotillomaniacs pulled more hair, skin cutters cut more skin. All of these illnesses are related to serotonin dysfunction, and, as we’ve seen, serotonin and sex hormones are inextricably linked.
Women are more than twice as likely to become depressed. Research shows that they’re also more likely to suffer from anxiety. More develop phobias. It’s the same ratio for agoraphobia: nearly 8% of women become agoraphobic, compared to only 3% of men. More succumb to post traumatic stress syndrome. Seventy percent of those with social phobia are women. What could be happening here? Could it be our sex hormones?
When estrogen levels rise, as they do during the first week of menses, a tantamount increase in serotonin becomes available in the brain. That increased serotonin improves mood. Estrogen, Dr. Sherwin theorized, may act as a natural antidepressant and mood stabilizer.
Two researchers at Harvard Medical School looked at a large number of studies on the relationship between women’s reproductive-cycle hormone changes and their mental states. In study after study they found that women with histories of depression are more vulnerable to mood changes whenever their hormone levels change.
Neuro-imaging has shown lightening flashes of activity in different parts of the brain during what used to be called, dimly, “that time of the month.” It is the dance between sex hormones and brain hormones that determines how symptomatic a woman will become during different times of her reproductive cycle--at puberty, premenstrually, postpartum, and perimenopause.
The ebb and flow of womens’ menstrual moods is orchestrated not by the moon but by secretions in her brain and ovaries. What we now know is that the sometimes negative outcome of these secretion changes is not inevitable. Just as medicine has learned to protect against changes in insulin and and thyroid levels, so too can it buffer the effects of extreme ovarian changes. For example, women who are known to have low serotonin levels because they have a history of depression can be protected against the abrupt drop in serotonin that occurs postpartum, when estrogen levels drop.
(See more on how to treat postpartum depression.) The more we learn about how reproductive hormones affect women's mood states, the more we can gain control over changes that until now have seemed unpredictable. Much can be done to influence hormone-serotonin shifts, including exercise and getting adequate sleep. diet