Menstrual health and mental well-being -
Each phase is characterized by prominent hormonal shifts and changes within the body which plays a significant role in this intricate connection.
There is no hiding that the menstrual cycle is a hormonal rollercoaster. The rise and fall of estrogen and progesterone levels throughout the cycle have an impact not only on physical changes but also on emotional well-being.
During the follicular phase, which is the first half of the cycle, the estrogen levels gradually increase and as we know it, estrogen is known to have mood-enhancing effects, often leaving the person feeling more energetic and frequently balanced.
However, the luteal phase , which is the second half of the cycle, sees a shift in hormones. Progesterone levels rise while estrogen levels decrease. This hormonal shift can lead to mood swings, irritability and even feelings of depression and anxiety. These hormonal and emotional fluctuations are often referred to as Pre-Menstrual Syndrome or PMS.
Many women report feeling more anxious or sad during some days and the feelings might trigger emotions or memories which can lead to overthinking , overwhelmingness , etc. For some, these changes can be mild and manageable but for others, it can be severely distressing.
Menstrual health and overall bodily health are not that different. This is one of the many examples of how periods and overall bodily health are interrelated. There is not much that you can do when you get such feelings but one thing that might work can be incorporating exercising and meditation in your daily routine in order to improve the overall quality of your life.
Now that you know how your menstrual health and mental health are connected, here are a few tips that might help you deal with the changes that come about in your body. Making good lifestyle choices can also help to lessen the effects of hormone variations on mental health.
Regular exercise, a balanced diet, and stress-reduction practices such as meditation and yoga can help stabilize mood and ease PMS symptoms. Self-awareness is one of the most effective ways of reducing the effects of the menstrual cycle on mental health. You can better prepare for mood swings and other symptoms by keeping track of your cycle and seeing patterns in your emotional well-being.
This can be done very easily through a lot of apps available nowadays. Strine TW, Chapman DP, Ahluwalia IB. Menstrual-related problems and psychological distress among women in the United States.
J Womens Health Larchmt. Zeng H, Li Xiang N, Swapna B. Effects of Premenstrual Syndrome Related Psychiatric Disorder on Physical and Mental Health Status of Adolescents- A Short Review. Int J Womens Health Wellness. Matsumoto T, Egawa M, Kimura T, Hayashi T.
A potential relation between premenstrual symptoms and subjective perception of health and stress among college students: a cross-sectional study. Biopsychosoc Med. Tsegaye D, Getachew Y. Matern Health Neonatol Perinatol. Kim DR, Gyulai L, Freeman EW, Morrison MF, Baldassano C, Dube B.
Premenstrual dysphoric disorder and psychiatric co-morbidity. Arch Womens Ment Health. Alonso C, Coe CL. Disruptions of social relationships accentuate the association between emotional distress and menstrual pain in young women.
Health Psychol. Rasgon N, Bauer M, Glenn T, Elman S, Whybrow PC. Menstrual cycle related mood changes in women with bipolar disorder.
Bipolar Disord. University of Illinois at Chicago. Symptoms worsen around menses for people with borderline personality disorder.
Maryland, USA: ScienceDaily; , [cited ]. Peer M, Soares CN, Steiner M. The complex interrelationships of menstrual cyclicity and anxiety disorders: Premenstrual exacerbation of anxiety disorders. Psychiatr Times. Labad J, Menchon JM, Alonso P, Segalas C, Jimenez S, Vallejo J.
Female reproductive cycle and obsessive-compulsive disorder. J Clin Psychiatry. Vulink NC, Denys D, Bus L, Westenberg HG. Female hormones affect symptom severity in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Int Clin Psychopharmacol.
Quraishi SR, Waghachavare VB, Gore AD, Dhumale GB. Are Menstrual Problems Associated with the Mental Health? A Cross Sectional Study among the Graduation College Girls. Int Med J Malays. Reilly T. Some women with psychotic disorders are more vulnerable around the time of menstruation, our analysis suggests.
Parkville, Australia: The Conversation Media Group Ltd; , [cited ]. Joffe H, Kim DR, Foris JM, Baldassano CF, Gyulai L, Hwang CH, et al. Menstrual dysfunction prior to onset of psychiatric illness is reported more commonly by women with bipolar disorder than by women with unipolar depression and healthy controls.
Cardoso LF, Scolese AM, Hamidaddin A, Gupta J. Period poverty and mental health implications among college-aged women in the United States. BMC Womens Health. Purse M. Effects of Premenstrual Symptoms on Bipolar. New York, USA: Verywell Mind; , [cited ]. Komada Y. Sleep Biol Rhythms.
Miura J, Honma R. Daytime sleepiness in relation to gender and premenstrual symptoms in a sample of Japanese college students. Bertone-Johnson ER, Hankinson SE, Johnson SR, Manson JE. Cigarette smoking and the development of premenstrual syndrome.
Am J Epidemiol. Zengin Y, Calik M, Buyukcam F, Sen J, Akpinar S, Erdem AB, et al. The Relationship Between Suicide Attempts and Menstrual Cycles in the Emergency Department and the Sociodemographic and Clinical Characteristics of These Patients.
Eurasian J Emerg Med. Jang D, Elfenbein HA. Menstrual Cycle Effects on Mental Health Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis. Arch Suicide Res. Yonkers KA, O'Brien PM, Eriksson E. Premenstrual syndrome. Romans S, Clarkson R, Einstein G, Petrovic M, Stewart D. Mood and the menstrual cycle: A review of prospective data studies.
Gend Med. Navigate to. Connecting the Dots Between Mental and Menstrual Health: An Exploratory Review authors:. Journal of Health Reports and Technology: Vol. From these workshops, we identified five themes and then held further online workshops to generate research questions and ideas relevant to each theme.
All our workshops were live illustrated by illustrator Laura Sorvala www. com ; examples on the 4M website www. The illustrations serve two purposes: firstly, as a concise aide-memoire for 4M researchers; and secondly, as an accessible output that we share with other researchers and non-researchers via email, our website, and our Twitter page.
We also developed an animation to summarise our research questions under each theme, and used these accessible outputs to invite stakeholders to feedback on our ideas through an online form and a series of hybrid stakeholder workshops. The themes and examples of initial questions are presented in Table 2.
Relevant files are shared with members via a Google Drive. These include a members' directory with names, contact information, affiliations, job titles, and research interests of all members , minutes from meetings, and guides for finding 4M collaborators, describing 4M in funding applications, and reporting outcomes from 4M facilitated research.
Members are updated on activities and opportunities via a regular online meeting and an email newsletter. The meeting agendas are also emailed to all members and archived alongside minutes on the Google Drive.
Potential new members can express an interest in joining 4M via a Microsoft Form, which is linked from the 4M website and in a pinned Twitter post. In line with our inclusive values, all researchers, regardless of discipline, career stage, or affiliation, are accepted as members if their research aligns with the 4M vision and mission.
All events have been co-led by ECRs, giving them a valuable opportunity to build their experience of designing and co-ordinating events, increase their visibility, and contribute to their CVs. All members, including ECRs, have been invited to present their work at these workshops.
We hoped that the seminar series would enhance the visibility and reach of 4M, and this seems to have been successful because our membership and Twitter following has increased since the series was established in early The 4M website www.
uk provides public-facing information about the consortium for members, other researchers, and stakeholders. It includes a blog through which relevant research is shared, for example, news from 4M members about new grants or papers, calls for research participants for relevant studies, and advertisements for our seminar series.
In November , 4M held a series of online workshops for stakeholders, that is, people or organisations that could be affected by or inform our research. The list of invitees was compiled by 4M members at the time. It included people who had already worked with members, as well as completely new connections.
We invited individuals and organisations via email, providing a brief description of what 4M was trying to achieve and how we thought their perspective and insight would be valuable.
The workshops were highly generative and successful in helping us shape 4M's vision, mission and approach. We have kept in touch with many of the stakeholders and organisations and are planning future engagement events and co-produced research projects.
We have also expanded our stakeholder network through our activity on Twitter and through invited presentations at events hosted by organisations including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and the South West International Development Network.
Several project grant applications have been developed and submitted through 4M-facilitated collaborations. This includes five applications to the Medical Research Council two successful, two unsuccessful, one in development and four to smaller funders one successful, two unsuccessful, one awaiting outcome.
We have also put forward collaborative projects for the GW4 Doctoral Training Programme in order to attract PhD students that would be co-led by 4M researchers. These are a necessary and useful first step to identify gaps in the literature and opportunities for 4M researchers to address them.
We are currently developing protocols for reviews of prospective studies of PMS, experiences of menstruation in people with autism, and the impacts of the menopausal transition on mental disorders. The utility of the consortium is already apparent from the wide-reaching impact we are generating.
To date, we have developed and submitted several collaborative grant applications, co-supervised student projects, and been invited to take part in public engagement events and talks to stakeholder organisations.
We are aware of four members three ECRs who were successfully promoted, having included their affiliation with 4M on their applications as evidence of interdisciplinary cross-institution research and stakeholder collaboration.
Our seminar series and social media activity has been instrumental in growing our membership, which has increased from around 30 members at the start of to over six months later.
Although 4M members are geographically distributed, this has not proven to be a significant challenge. The consortium was established during the Covid pandemic, when most members were working from home regularly. The first workshops were online, as are our monthly meetings and our seminar series.
This way of working has been a strength as it has allowed us to run workshops and grow our membership with minimum costs. Nevertheless, the value of our hybrid events cannot be overstated. These have provided an opportunity for less formal networking and collaboration, for example, allowing one-to-one or small group conversations that do not naturally occur online.
Funding for these in-person events has allowed us to commit to our inclusive values by paying for childcare and travel expenses. We have encountered some challenges to managing and sustaining the 4M consortium.
By far the largest is ensuring the consortium is sufficiently resourced in terms of staff time and funding to support activities. Running the consortium, largely without administrative support, takes a substantial amount of time, which is difficult to protect in a busy academic workload without buy-out from external funding.
Without funding, it can also be difficult to publish in open access journals, to run in-person networking events, to enable ECRs and researchers with childcare commitments to attend, and to pay non-academic stakeholders for their time.
We are grateful to the GW4 for generously covering the direct costs needed to help establish the network. There are very few similar funding schemes to support research networks. Unfortunately, there are also limited funding opportunities for women's health research 1 , We are currently approaching other research funders directly and exploring opportunities to crowdfund specific activities.
We heartily echo recent calls for more dedicated funding for research in women's health 2. A second key challenge is in maintaining the interdisciplinary nature of the consortium. As with most research that aims to be interdisciplinary, there is a risk that researchers will retreat to their disciplinary silos or work only with those from closely linked disciplines Interdisciplinarity is one of the key values of 4M and previous research has shown that it is positively associated with research impact Strategies to maintain interdisciplinarity include: ensuring the seminar series showcases research from a breadth of disciplines, direct invites to researchers from underrepresented disciplines to join, and ensuring no technical discipline-specific language is used in our internal communications.
Although this is integral to our vision and mission, maintaining interdisciplinarity is not as much of a challenge as funding and time because it is to some extent more within our control, and there is a strong willingness and desire amongst the 4M members to collaborate with others from different disciplines.
Finally, stakeholder engagement is an important part of the 4M approach, but it can be challenging to develop and maintain relationships with non-academic partners. Again, this is not, in our experience, due to a lack of enthusiasm on either side.
We are exploring what support is available from our institutions to assist stakeholder engagement, and we are establishing a Head of Stakeholder Engagement role to help develop this area of our activity.
However, the issue of funding remains a challenge, as with no salary attached, the role-holder will need capacity within their current workload and approval from their institution to engage in work that is not directly generating revenue. The consortium has grown significantly since it began and evidence of success is clear across the key components of 4M's approach collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and ECR support.
The main challenges are around securing resources to sustain the consortium and its activities, including funding for researcher time, in-person events, and to support stakeholder engagement. Ensuring research interdisciplinarity is also a key challenge and we are taking care to avoid researchers retreating back to their disciplinary silos.
Overall, the 4M consortium represents an important tool for advancing knowledge and impact in menstrual and mental health. It contributes to wider attempts to increase the representation of menstrual and women's health concerns in research, and to develop evidence-based approaches to close the gender-health gap.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers.
Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. Mirin AA. Gender disparity in the funding of diseases by the U.
national institutes of health.
Blue raspberry electrolyte drink you Menstural visiting nature. You are using mfntal browser version Diabetic neuropathy medications limited support Vitamin K benefits CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. From menarche to menopause, menstrual health is intrinsically linked to general health and must find regular attention in clinical practice. how to cite: Ajari E E. Fasting and mood improvement the Diabetic neuropathy medications Between Mental well-bding Blue raspberry electrolyte drink Health: An Well-beingg Review. J Health Rep Well-beinng. Menstruation Menstrual Health Menstrual Hygiene Period Poverty Mental Health Mental Disorder. Current societal assumptions about mental health and menstruation have generally been negative. Apart from the common-shared widespread misunderstanding about them, these entities are intricately linked in the biopsychosocial domain as well.
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