Jennifer Smith: Welcome to you're not crazy. It's perimenopause. If you're a woman over 40 and feeling more anxious, not sleeping well or disconnected from your body, this podcast is for you. I'm your host, Jenny Smith, functional medicine, health coach here to help you understand what the heck is happening in perimenopause. Each week we're diving into real life conversations about how our changing hormones impact anxiety, sleep and stress. and I'll share simple strategies to help you feel normal again. So grab a cup of tea or beverage of choice, get comfy and let's dive in. Welcome back to you're not crazy. It's perimenopause. I'm your host Jenny. And today we are talking about progesterone. Progesterone is our calming, stabilizing hormone. And in this episode, I'm going to share what it looks like when progesterone is low. when it's high and when it's just right and provides you with simple tips that you can apply to keep progesterone more balanced, a more natural way. Okay, so first things first, progesterone's main role in our reproductive years is to prepare the uterus for pregnancy. It's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing. how the hormones work in a symphony to prepare for our reproductive years. It helps balance and oppose estrogen. It supports a calming mood and makes you feel more emotionally stable. It promotes deep and restorative sleep. It is one of our main hormones to fight back on stress. We have a more calming feel when we are stressed if our progesterone is balanced. It helps regulate our body temperature and it does, our body temperature does rise slightly after ovulation, which is why some people are able to know when they're ovulating by taking their body temperature and it helps support our thyroid function and metabolism. And it also plays a role in our breast health. So when you think of podestrone, you want to think of podestrone as the peacekeeper of the hormonal symphony. And just a little side note here, I wanna share that I really wish I would have known all of this when I was younger and when I was preparing for pregnancies and I just never had this level of education until I entered perimenopause. And so it's just so interesting to me that it would have been really helpful to know the roles of our hormones and what I could have done about it to not feel so blah. So let's go into what are the symptoms of low progesterone. And this is very common in perimenopause. The reason we start to have lower dips of progesterone is because ovulation becomes very inconsistent. And progesterone is usually the first to drop when we start to enter perimenopause. And if you remember in previous episodes, perimenopause can happen as early as 35. It's more common to happen in our early 40s up until we hit menopause, which is usually around age 50 to 53-ish. Everyone is different, but when we are entering perimenopause, this is when our hormones begin to fluctuate, and this is why we feel terrible at times. So let's talk about common symptoms. of low progesterone with our mood and our brain. We become more anxious, we have more anxiety, and we feel more tense inside. We are dealing with more irritability and mood swings. We can feel overwhelmed easily when we are typically able to be calm under pressure in any situation, whether it's, know, parenting our kids or at a work meeting or dealing with the public. We tend to be a little bit more patient and then all of a sudden we're not and we're like, what is happening to me? Why am I feeling so just tense and overwhelmed? And that is typically because progesterone begins to dip and we have a lower stress tolerance. Now, how does low progesterone show up when it comes to our sleep? You might have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep. Your sleep might not be as deep. It's more light and you're easier, easier to awake. you might wake up in the middle of the night, typically around 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. wide awake and you're like, what the heck, what's going on? And that is a sign of low progesterone. How does it impact our cycle changes? You might have shorter cycles, heavier or irregular bleeding. And if you remember my story where I shared how I knew that I was in perimenopause, that was my very first symptom. I was having very heavy periods that were uncommon for me, not the norm. And I was having cramping when I went to my doctor, he checked my uterus, he did all the testing on my uterus before he tested my hormones. So it's very interesting that the hormone testing was the last step on his part. And I understand why he did that likely because when you are peri-menopausal and you're cycles are kind of all over the place. You have to test your hormones at a certain time of your cycle to see where you're at. And it's, it is a very tricky situation. And I think that's why a lot of doctors say we don't need to test your hormones. And that that's the reason. And we, you can get by with just symptoms alone, trying to figure out what's happening with symptoms alone. So that was my very first symptom. Now how low progesterone shows up in the body is you might have more breast tenderness. You might be more bloated and have water retention. You're experiencing more headaches and migraines. I hear this a lot from women that they're getting migraines when they didn't used to and it's becoming more prevalent and they're not sure what's causing it. That very well could be your progesterone is dipping. And you might also have that feeling of you're wired, but you're so tired. You are exhausted from your day. You're trying to go to sleep and you can't because you're wired. Your brain is like on high alert. So the big theme of low progesterone is that you don't have enough of the hormone to give you that sense of calm, to make you feel a little bit more steady as far as your moods go, your energy, and to be able to sleep. You just feel a little bit more edgy and unstable and it's quite frankly, very annoying. Okay, so now let's talk about symptoms of a high progesterone. And high progesterone is a little less common in perimenopause because usually when we experience high levels of progesterone, we are experiencing ovulation. That's when it tends to peak about five to seven days after we ovulate and when we are experiencing a pregnancy. Other... Other situations where progesterone might be higher is when you are using a supplementation like an oral progesterone or creams. And depending on each person, everyone's individually very different. They might have certain hormonal imbalances where their progesterone might be higher. So it is completely normal and healthy during pregnancy, after ovulation. And when you are experiencing a good normal of higher progesterone, you're feeling calmer, you have slightly warmer body temperature, and you might feel a little bit more introspective. And this is the time where you might want to stay indoors and do something calming and maybe watch a movie or read a book in your cozies next to your pet. I mean, that's like my My dream night is to stay indoors in my cozies and just relax. So what are some of the symptoms of having elevated progesterone where it might be too high? And let's talk about the mood and the brain. You might have more fatigue and feeling a little bit like a sedated feeling. You might be experiencing brain fog, ⁓ low motivation to really get up and do anything because you have that high level of the hormone that you're just not really wanting to do much, but just chill. You might also feel a little bit emotionally flat, high progesterone symptoms showing up in your body. You might experience dizziness. This is also another symptom that I experienced of ⁓ dizziness and feeling very sleepy during the day. And this is when I was dealing with those fluctuations of, you know, the high and lows of progesterone. you might experience bloating and lower libido. You are having so much calm, like the theme of high progesterone is there's it's too much calming and your body feels very slow, heavy and sedated. As you can see with low progesterone, it's more anxious feeling, more edgy, more tense, more irritability, where high progesterone it's very like flat affect, you're just like zoning out very low level, like ⁓ feeling just very calm and, and very slow down. You don't want to move. You don't want to do much. Your motivation is like, no, it's like, no. What does progesterone feel like when it's healthy? You will notice that it's a happy medium of both. You're feeling really calm. You're very emotionally even keel. Nothing kind of triggers you. things obviously will trigger you because life, but you are feeling a little bit more like you're capable and can handle it. It's not something that you're feeling like you're walking on eggshells and you're feeling very tense. You're just a little bit like you're at perfect level of calm and emotionally steady. Sleep is easier. Sleep comes easier to you. You're not waking up in the middle of the night. You're able to fall asleep, stay asleep. your stress resilience is higher. Like I had mentioned, you have clearer thinking. You're, you're not dealing with that brain fog of just slow thinking. You have a little bit more alertness to you and just feeling a little bit more grounded and just feeling overall calm and, and content. That's the word I want to use with that. You just feel very content. Like nothing can shake you. That's ideally when it's healthy. That's kind of the goal of where we want to be. And so when we think about. Pogestrone and estrogen and their relationship. Estrogen is our stimulating, activating hormone. That's what gets us like out and being social and getting ready for preparing for reproduction. And progesterone does the opposite effect. It calms us. It stabilizes us and it's our balancing hormone. So when they're in sync and they're working really well together, it's a great ebb and flow of how we should be feeling overall. And when they are out of sync and out of balance, that's when you're experiencing the anxiety, the irritability, the heavy cycles. oftentimes flat mood, poor sleep, low energy, things like that. So I want to talk about some natural ways to support progesterone. Obviously, you can turn to hormone replacement therapy, which I did, and it was a huge game changer for me. And I am a proponent of a progesterone replacement therapy. However, there are many women that are not ready for that. And there's some trust issues. Around that, there's some doctors that don't feel comfortable prescribing it. And I plan to go deeper dive into this in future episodes about hormone replacement therapy, the fears, the myth, the truth, and the studies that actually promote how they can be beneficial for women so that they don't have to struggle. As you can see, the symptoms of low progesterone, it's a lot. you know, it's just really finding balance of what's going to be right for you and knowing what your options are. And one of the best ways to support our hormones is through lifestyle. I'm not going to talk about that in this episode. I'm going to talk about some nutrients that we might want to add into our diet if we haven't already. I will be talking about lifestyle in future episodes because lifestyle plays a huge role in balancing our hormones and how we're feeling. So we want to make sure that we are incorporating key ingredients into our diet. Progesterone production depends on certain nutrients such as vitamin B6, magnesium. If you are not taking a magnesium supplement before bed, run, get out there and go buy it because it will make a huge difference in how you sleep, how you fall asleep and how you stay asleep. So I'm a big proponent of magnesium glycinate. There are tons of magnesiums out there. So you want to, and we can do an episode on this. I will certainly do an episode on magnesium because it's confusing due to the fact that there are hundreds of types of magnesium supplements that we can be using. And the issue is we're just not getting magnesium through our soils. Our soils are so depleted. So we have to supplement. We have to supplement with certain foods and we have to supplement with actual supplementation. The other nutrient you want to focus on is adding zinc. Zinc helps support ovulation and it helps support hormone production as well as vitamin C. So vitamin C helps promote progesterone synthesis to make sure that it is working the way that it's designed to work. So vitamin B6 supports progesterone and mood. Magnesium helps support calm. and helps improve your sleep. Zinc supports ovulation and hormone production, and vitamin C supports progesterone synthesis. Also, you want to focus on adding the right foods into your diet. You want to think of leafy greens like chard, spinach, dandelion greens, anything like that, leafy greens, pumpkin seeds, salmon, avocados, eggs, grass-fed meats, citrus, sweet potatoes, those are all excellent sources for balancing your progesterone. And you have likely heard me talk about this in previous episodes, but you know, sometimes we have to keep hearing the same things over and over again. You wanna make sure that you're keeping your blood sugar stable, because when it swings, it stresses out the body and it will suppress progesterone. So how you can make your blood sugar stable is to make sure that you are eating protein at every meal, especially at breakfast. And if you haven't downloaded my protein guide yet, I'm going to link it in the show notes. I have tons of ideas and options to get in at least 30 grams of protein at each meal. And I'm not talking about cooking meals and following recipes. I'm talking about throwing things together that make it easy and simple for you to hit your protein goals at each meal. You also, if you're feeling stressed and exhausted, you don't want to be skipping meals. That is only going to tax your body more and suppress progesterone. And you also want to make sure that when you are eating carbohydrates, this is important for blood sugar, that you make sure that you pair your carbs with a protein and fat because that will keep your blood sugar stable and making sure that you pair protein and fat with any kind of carbohydrates that you're eating. And you want to avoid caffeine for breakfast all day, especially if you're dealing with symptoms of low progesterone. It's going to make it worse. You're going to feel even more irritable. You're going to feel more stressed. And I'm not saying give up caffeine. If you're going to have caffeine, make sure that you are eating breakfast so that you are feeling a little bit more stable because the caffeine does ramp up our metabolism. It ramps up our stress hormones and we might feel more jittery. more irritable, less patient and more anxious. You can also look at things that will support your adrenals such as ⁓ ashwagandha. And I want you to know that I'm not a doctor. You have to do your research. You need to talk to your doctor on whether or not supplementing with any kind of natural herbs is going to be right for you based on your own medical history and your own needs. Ashwagandha will help support your adrenals and it's really great for lowering stress and it can improve your sleep. Passion flower is another calming support and it helps with lowering anxiety and promoting sleep. So there's a lot of options for passion flower teas out there. I have one and occasionally we'll sip on that before bed and just helps get the body ready for sleep and to calm your mind and your body. Chastaberry, you've probably heard of this. This is a supplement that can help regulate cycles and support progesterone production in cycling women. So if you are postmenopausal, I don't know how much good this will do for you. So it's really helpful for women who still have cycles to help support progesterone. So that is what we have today for progesterone. We talked about the lows, the highs, and the just rights and the natural ways that you can support progesterone production so that you're feeling a little bit more calm, more even keel, and most importantly, can sleep at night. I love sleep. Next week, we are going to talk about the symptoms of high and low estrogen, what it's like when it's balanced, and what we can do, simple tips to balance it out. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend who might need it too. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for being here with me and I will see you next week. Wait, before you go, I'd like to invite you to the five day meal planning challenge that I'm hosting beginning on March 31st. The challenge is for women over 40 who want simple, realistic strategies to take the guesswork out of healthy eating without spending hours in the kitchen. We don't have time for that. You probably know that what you eat or don't eat matters a whole lot. You wanna feel clearer, calmer, and more energized, but when life gets busy, it's easy to grab whatever's convenient, and sometimes it's not healthy. That's why meal planning is such a game changer, and it doesn't have to be complicated or time consuming. I'm gonna show you how. If you want to reduce brain fog, stabilize your mood, and feel steady energy throughout the day, With my support and a community cheering you on, I would love for you to join us. We start on March 31st and the signup link will be in the show notes. ⁓ and did I mention it's completely free? You've got nothing to lose. I'll see you there.