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Rushing Woman’s Syndromedescribes what is scientifically known as Sympathetic Nervous System Dominance and the biochemical changes this drives in the body (see extended explanations of the science below). I wanted women to understand the significant way stress can impact the chemistry of their body, the many body systems it can affect, and offer them practical solutions to this. Progesterone acts as an anti-anxiety agent, an anti-depressant and a diuretic, allowing us to excrete excess fluid. However, our adrenal glands are also where we make our stress hormones from; namely adrenalin and cortisol. As you now know, adrenalin communicates to every cell in your body that your life is in danger, while cortisol says that food is scarce. As your body links progesterone to fertility, the last thing it wants for a woman is to bring a baby into an environment where it perceives she is not safe and that there is no food. The body, therefore believes that it is doing you a great big favour by shutting down the adrenal production of progesterone.
The perceived need to rush is changing the face of women’s health in a detrimental way. From PMS to IBS, from losing our tempers to feeling like we can’t cope.Whether a woman displays it on the outside or keeps it under wraps, more are suffering. It's not just the physical health consequences that concern me for women. It's that they live their lives so out of touch with their beautiful hearts, out of touch with how extraordinary they are. So many arelost in the cloud of false belief that they aren't doing it properly. This constant need to rush – this feeling that we’re never doing enough – is causing significant health problems in women. The issue is so bad, I had to write about it. One of the biggest challenges facing women’s health today is the way stress hormone production is interfering with sex hormone balance. Too many women now suffer with premenstrual syndrome (PMS), PCOS, endometriosis and experience debilitating menopauses, which can have both physical and emotional health consequences. There is suggestion that a lot of the stress that women experience is due to the expectations that we place upon ourselves – the expectation that we can and should be able to do it all….
Your mood changes before your period, everything annoys you and/or you feel like crying but for no reason. As well as our period, another canary in the woman’s health mine can be our thyroid, because the thyroid also plays a huge part in our overall wellness. What to look for? Park the fertility aspect of what I’ve just said and consider the additional biological impacts of this: we make too little of a hormone that helps us not feel anxious, not have a depressed mood and allows us to efficiently mobilise fluid. If a woman retains fluid, she usually feels “puffy and swollen” and this discomfort can impact the food choices she makes for the rest of the day, the way she speaks to the people she loves the most in the world and intimacy can fly out the window. That’s just the first half of the cycle!
Whilst we can all feel a bit stressed at times, constant/ongoing/worsening symptoms should not be ignored. Most stress can be better managed and psychologists are trained to teach you effective coping strategies and skills. From painful periods to fluid retention, from anxiety to yelling at the people we love the most in the word and berating ourselves afterwards, it has been a long time since women’s health has faced such an intense hormonal challenge. This interference of stress hormones with sex hormones is one of the major biochemical factors I describe in Rushing Woman’s Syndrome. When we make estrogen, it’s got to cling onto an estrogen receptor to exert its effects. Once that unit of estrogen has run out of puff, it is sent to the liver for detoxification. The liver has to change the structure of estrogen before we can excrete it by going to the loo. Many of them are tiredtoo. Tired yet wired. They’re living in a stateof relentless urgency.There’s never enough time in the day, and the to-do lists arenever completelycrossed off.Women get to blame rushing women's syndrome or PTSD or some other hormonal or psychological problem. Men get to shut up and tolerate it or else pay for the divorce and see their life's work get carved up so their ex-wives can "find" themselves in a two bedroom apartment, take trips to Bali with their girlfriends and go in with dates with men they meet on Tinder then complain all the men want of a single mother is sex.
Unless you have Wonder Woman’s (or Wolverine’s) powers, then don’t try and imitate the original. This undertaking is bound to fail. You are a unique, graceful and fragile human being (male or female).
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And then the nervous system gets involved, because when we constantly produce stress hormones, it activates the sympathetic nervous system – which then moves us away from parasympathetic nervous system activity. That’s the part that’s responsible for digestion, sleep, repair work and reproduction, which is one of the reasons all of those parts of our bodies – and then our lives – get wobbly when we’re stressed. It all boiled down to one simple truth that so many of her patients shared: “None of it was a disease; it was just that nothing was working as well as it once did,” Libby says. “What I then realised is that what was basically driving it was the constant and relentless output of stress hormones and that was very, very new to us as a species.”
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