Feeling Terrible isn’t Just “Part of Being a Woman”

This is the first myth we need to squash right here, right now.

Having heavy, painful periods, cystic acne, and/or extreme PMS symptoms like mood swings, fatigue, irritability, headaches, and migraines, are NOT just “part of being woman”. In fact, this list of symptoms that many doctors like to blame on the joys of being a female continues: anxiety and depression, emotional lability, insomnia, endometriosis, lack of or irregular periods, midcycle pain, and weight gain.

If the whole of womankind earned a nickel every time a doctor told us that what we’re experiencing is just part of being a woman, or even better “all in your head”, we’d have enough money to get Elon Musk to build us a spaceship to Mars, to colonize our own planet, and leave all the misogynists behind.

A joke, of course, but you get the point.

The truth is when something doesn’t feel right, when you have a symptom related to your cycle (or any other body system, for that matter), it’s because your body is trying to send you a message in the only way it knows how.

Sadly, your ovaries can’t text you to tell you that their estrogen and progesterone levels are out of balance due to over-exposure to the endocrine disrupting chemicals in your body and beauty products (more on this later).

But they can send you a message in another way—by presenting with symptoms like heavy bleeding and painful periods, like little SOS signals telling you “’Scuse me! Something’s not right here!”

The truth is, when our hormones are balanced, periods should come and go on a regular schedule with barely any signs to alert you of it’s presence.

When your hormones are balanced, you know your period is coming just like you know your paycheck is coming—not because you mysteriously get a massive headache the day before, like clockwork, but simply because it just shows up more or less on the agreed upon day every month.

So, what exactly does a period look like for a woman with a harmonious hormonal system? You’ll find out in the next few lessons.

Listen. I want to make something very clear. I do not believe that all doctors are evil, or uneducated, or anything like that. I simply think a lot of them are listening to our symptoms and trying to help by prescribing something (hormonal birth control) that they’ve learned is able to quiet these SOS signals our bodies are sending us, so that we aren’t in pain anymore. And some of them may simply be underinformed, diagnosing based on what they learned in medical school years, or decades, in the past.

This must be what’s happening. Because hormonal birth control is prescribed way more to women for non-contraceptive reasons than to do what it was actually designed to do—keep you from getting pregnant!

And, the saddest part, in my opinion, is that so many girls and young women are prescribed the pill as a quick fix without being fully informed of the side effects they’ll experience not only while they’re on the pill, but for months, years, and decades once they decide to quit taking it, as well.

This needs to change. (Hence, why I’ve created this course and why you’re now reading this! Woohoo!)

According to Beyond the Pill by Dr. Jolene Brighten, the most coming reasons women take the pill include the following:

Menstrual cramps or pain: 31%
Irregular, sporadic periods; period problems: 28%
Acne, skin conditions: 14%
Endometriosis: 4%
Unspecified hormonal symptoms: 11%

In a subsequent lesson we’ll explore these symptoms more and what happens when hormonal birth control is used to deal with them. But first, the lowdown on how your period actually works and what a healthy period feels like.