Life has been topsy turvy for the past couple of years and I am seeing an increasing amount of women who have stopped ovulating and are having anovulatory cycles or ovulation is delayed over this time due to feeling very anxious and stressed.
Stress greatly affects the female hormonal system and our body can stop or delay ovulating if it perceives it is under threat. Our period could also be signalled to start earlier or not come at all if we are going though a time of stress.
Stress can come stem from a variety of sources such as physical, mental or emotional, often it is a mixture of all of these.
Traumatic events, work, relationships, family dynamics and not to mention world events can all take their toll on us.
If stress happens in the follicular phase (first half of our cycle) our body may not get the signal to release the correct hormones for ovulation to occur. In fact if you have been though a prolonged stressful time this can have an impact on your hormones for months to come.
Ovulation is an important sign of a woman’s overall health and is needed to make progesterone which is vital for long term health. If our bodies are not receiving the hormonal signals that they should due to being under physical, mental or emotional strain then this can have a knock on effect on not only ovulation but also our period and can make trying to conceive tricky as our cycle is out of synch.
Additionally our body can also go into a stress response if it feels it is not being provided with enough nutrients and I often see women who are cutting out nourishing foods as this is what the diet industry has told us to do for many years.
Our bodies need good fats and nourishing whole foods in order to ovulate and have happy hormones. Restrictive low fat diets do not make for a well functioning hormonal system!
It can take 100 days to develop healthy follicles (eggs) and therefore healthy amounts of oestrogen and progesterone. We need to see our hormones as a long term project to work on, this is important to understand as it takes at least 3 to 6 months of looking after your hormonal health, nervous system and nourishing your body to create healthy oestrogen and progesterone levels.
In homeopathy we have remedies that can help trigger ovulation again, balance hormones and get your cycle back on track and through the consultation we look for the root cause of why you may have stopped ovulating.
But there are important things that you can do to help yourself also:
- Prioritise sleep, this is so important and something most people aren’t doing.
- Eat nourishing whole foods such as nuts, seeds, avocado’s, coconut oil, olive oil plus eggs and oily fish if you are not veggie.
- Treat your root cause with Homeopathy, here we would look at why you are not ovulating and prescribe remedies to help kick start your normal ovulatory cycle again. For example it may not be stress related, perhaps your periods have not returned after being on the contraceptive pill.
- Do relaxing activities such as meditation, yoga and journaling. These really do help get you back into a more relaxed state where you are not producing so much stress hormone cortisol so it is a must to calm your nervous system daily.
- Take Vitex agnus-cactus, I make up Homeobotanical blends for many of my clients containing this herb which is great for a healthy menstrual cycle, PMS and so on.
Hopefully this provides a brief insight into how stress can have an impact on ovulation and the rest of your menstrual cycle. If you would like to find out more about how Homeopathy can help you then please do get in touch to book free 15 minute discovery call.
Helen xx