From Surviving to Thriving: My PMDD and Mindfulness Journey
Welcome PMDD Warrior! In this episode, you’ll hear how I struggled as a new mom—with PTSD and PMDD—and how mindfulness helped me move from hopelessness and self-loathing to acceptance and self-compassion.
-
PMDD is an outsized brain response to normal menstrual-cycle hormone changes (not a hormone imbalance), and symptoms often show up in the luteal phase.
Hear how mindfulness was an important part of my PMDD self-management toolbox before helping me make peace with PMDD and love myself just as I am.
And you’ll discover how mindfulness can help you:
Settle your nervous system when that PMDD luteal rage or PMDD anxiety sets in
Lean into your PMDD so you can honor your needs without feeling bad about it or less-than
Separate your identity from PMDD so you can rediscover yourself and the possibilities for your life
Perhaps even experience a mindset shift, so you can replace feelings of resentment and anger with acceptance for life with PMDD
I’ll also get into future plans to share Mindfulness for PMDD–as a trauma-informed mindfulness teacher–with all of YOU, so we can all live better with PMDD.
FAQ
What is PMDD? PMDD is an outsized brain response to normal cycle hormone changes, with symptoms that commonly show up during luteal phase.
Can mindfulness help PMDD rage or anxiety? Mindfulness can help settle the nervous system and reduce spirals—alongside other supports in your PMDD toolbox.
Is mindfulness a substitute for medical care? No—always seek medical support when needed.
Next listens (recommended)
Episode 2: Managing PMDD Stress with Mindfulness
-
Title: From Surviving to Thriving: My PMDD and Mindfulness Journey
Episode number: 1
Date: September 29, 2023
Solo episode: Diane is the only speaker
INTRO (00:00)
If you want to learn how you can live better with PMDD, this podcast was created for you. This is mindfulness for PMDD with Diane. I'm Diane and I'm a registered dietitian and lactation consultant. I'm also a mom, a PMDD warrior, and a trauma-informed mindfulness teacher. And this is where I discuss topics related to PMDD through the lens of mindfulness and meditation and where I share all about how mindfulness has gotten me to a place of greater peace and acceptance with my PMDD.
I also chat with people who have helped and inspired me along the way so they can share their wisdom with you, too. So, let's get started.
SAFETY NOTE / DISCLAIMER (01:00)
This podcast is not a substitute for psychological therapy or medical advice. Please take care when listening to this podcast, as some may find certain words or subjects triggering or difficult to hear. Take only what serves you and leave the rest behind.
WHAT PMDD IS AND WHEN SYMPTOMS SHOW UP (02:00)
Hello, friends, welcome to the first official episode of Mindfulness for PMDD with Diane. I'm Diane, and I am a registered dietitian, lactation consultant, mindfulness teacher, and a mom. And I'm a person who lives with PMDD or premenstrual dysphoric disorder. So today I want to give you a bit of an understanding of how I ended up here with a podcast about PMDD and mindfulness.
And I want to share a little bit about my own experience living with PMDD. And how mindfulness and meditation have helped me manage my own PMDD symptoms and ultimately get to a place where I feel like I've come to accept this diagnosis and am beginning to find a new, more sustainable way forward. But first, while I expect that most people who stumble upon this podcast will have some experience or understanding of PMDD, I do want to take a sec to just go over what it is.
So, PMDD is when the brain has an abnormal and outsized response to the normal hormonal changes associated with the menstrual cycle. So the IAPMD, which is the International Association for Premenstrual Disorders, describes it as a severe negative reaction, in the brain, to the natural rise and fall of estrogen and progesterone.
So, even though the condition is associated with hormonal changes, it's not a hormonal imbalance. And PMDD affects roughly 1 in 20 women, and people assigned female at birth, who are of reproductive age. So, it's often described as a severe form of PMS, but I find–and I think probably a lot of other PMDDers will agree with me–that that description really just doesn't do justice to how debilitating this condition is.
Symptoms of PMDD are both psychological and physical, and they come on during the luteal phase or the premenstrual phase. And the symptoms can start anywhere from five days before your period up to two whole weeks before the start of your bleed. And then they'll typically resolve within a few days of the start of the bleed.
So, the list of symptoms is quite long, so I'll try not to linger here but I do want to share this because symptoms of PMDD are quite wide ranging, I would say. So, you've got mood and emotional changes, like mood swings, feeling suddenly sad or tearful or increased sensitivity to rejection. You may experience irritability, anger, or increased interpersonal conflict.
You might have depressed mood, feelings of hopelessness, feeling worthless or guilty. You might experience anxiety, tension, or feelings of being keyed up or on edge. So for me, that can feel like my whole body is buzzing and I'm very hypervigilant. You might experience decreased interest in your usual activities like work or school or friends or hobbies.
Oh, this is, this is a big one for me: Difficulty concentrating, focusing, or thinking (what I like to call my PMDD brain fog). There's tiredness or low energy, which really I feel like tiredness and low energy just doesn't even encompass it for me. For me, it sometimes can be like, you know, a crushing fatigue or lethargy.
You might experience changes in appetite, food cravings, overeating, or binge eating. You may experience hypersomnia, which is excessive sleepiness or insomnia, trouble falling or staying asleep. There's feeling overwhelmed or out of control, and then physical symptoms like breast tenderness or breast swelling, joints or muscle pains and aches, bloating, weight gain, and in addition, you know, as if that's not enough, those with PMDD are at increased risk for suicide and suicidal behavior.
Now, for anyone who might be listening who doesn't have PMDD, imagine experiencing a variety of those symptoms every single month for up to two weeks at a time. It can very much feel like, fully 50 percent of your time and your life is being taken away from you and it can have a major impact on your relationships, your work, your feelings of self worth.
And I can tell you, I've experienced every single one of those symptoms at one point or another throughout my PMDD journey. This is probably a good time to do something that I'm, I'm going to try to do in every episode, which is to share where I am in my current cycle. And of course, on day one, on the very first episode, it's a bit of a tricky one because as I record this, I am day seven and usually day seven is a really good day.
But I'm experiencing something a bit interesting and I'm not sure if maybe it's what I normally would experience on day eight or nine or ten. So, this is a really good example of one of those things that it's really great to hear other people's experiences to sort of get an understanding of where your thing shakes out in the grand scheme of things. And kind of validate your own experience.
So, I have this thing, which I kind of call my breakout PMDD day, usually falling around day 8 or 9 or 10, and it's definitely stood out to me as a real pattern. It's definitely happening every month, day 8 or 9 or 10. And I've had a couple other people with PMDD kind of confirm or validate this for me by sharing that they experienced this as well, but it's just such a strange thing that I normally don't hear about in, like, the readings and the research on PMDD. So, basically, what happens day 8 or 9 or 10, I will typically have a breakout day where I have some of my symptoms of PMDD and it's kind of like on the lighter side, but it's definitely something different, something set apart from how I would normally be feeling in my follicular phase.
And I might have tearfulness, irritability, impatience. It's just feeling kind of like I have a short fuse or might just be feeling suddenly really physically like low energy or headachy or just really off. Right. Okay. So today's kind of weird because today's day seven, normally I would not be having my breakout day yet, but this morning was a pretty strange, rough morning where I woke up with that sort of like tearfulness and irritability and the exact kind of feelings I would have on day eight, nine or 10. So I'm not sure if maybe it's just kind of like a bit of an early breakout day or, as often happens with PMDD–and you know, maybe we can get into this in another episode–sometimes it's hard to like tease apart what's PMDD and what's just like a normal bad day or what's PMDD versus something that maybe anyone might normally experience just, you know, in the days leading up to their period. So yeah, today's a bit strange. It's day seven. I'm a little bit funky. Who knows what's going on, but I'd love to hear if anyone can relate to having a weird little breakout day, where there's definitely something going on hormonally prior to ovulation. And if you do want to share on that, you can find me, currently I'm on Instagram @mindfulnessforpmdd.
DIANE’S STORY - PMDD & POSTPARTUM PTSD (10:00)
All right. So moving on, because I do want to share about my PMDD experience and sort of like how it developed and how I got to this point here. So I developed PMDD after the traumatic birth of my son, which also left me with PTSD for a period of time (postpartum post-traumatic stress disorder). And at my absolute worst with PMDD, I have experienced inability to work, being barely able to look after myself or my household. Feeling unable to connect with my partner and my son in the ways I would like to. I've experienced so much self loathing and self doubt and low self esteem and so much social anxiety and just a feeling of general dissociation that led me to spend a lot of time just hiding out at home, mostly checked out of life.
And yeah, even suicidal ideations of the sort that my therapist calls “escape fantasies”. And at my very worst, what I kind of think of as my, you know, kind of like my, my rock bottom, my lowest point, I found myself in bed balling and just feeling completely hopeless and helpless and distraught because PMDD had just recently caused me to miss out on Halloween with my child, you know, at the time that this was happening.
ROCK BOTTOM & WHAT PMDD TOOK (12:00)
Now, as I was laying in bed bawling, it was also preventing me from getting on a plane to join my family for Thanksgiving, to also grieve the loss of a family member and, to also celebrate some major milestones in the lives of some other important family members. And yes, all of this was happening all at once and I couldn't be there for it.
It was a major holiday. It was a time of loss and mourning. And then there was also these like really great things happening with other family members. And there was just no chance in hell that I could board a plane and travel by myself in a confined space, surrounded by strangers, and then survive the demands and all the stimuli that would come with a trip like that.
So that's sort of, my kind of early experiences with PMDD and my low point. So my relationship with mindfulness also, I would say, started since the birth of my son. I suppose before that, you know, the extent of my experience with mindfulness was really probably just kind of doing meditations at the beginning or end of a yoga class.
HOW MINDFULNESS HELPED - RUMINATION, SLEEP, SELF-COMPASSION (13:00)
But with the traumatic birth of my son, I initially found that mindfulness helped release me from ruminating thoughts that would spiral out of control. It helped me to get to sleep at night. It helped me to feel less alone in the world. It helped me feel like my heart wasn't going to beat straight out of my chest after all.
And initially my experience with mindfulness was mostly with meditation. And then a little bit with mindful exercises guided by my mindfulness teachers. But eventually what I found was that I began to bring mindfulness into my life in a lot of different ways that I never would have imagined.
FROM SURVIVAL MODE TO ACCEPTANCE (15:00)
And that sort of just unfolded in a really natural way and became part of the fabric of my life. And I'll get into the kind of, you know, the details and all of the fun stuff about, you know, tools and practices that I developed as a result of that over time in this podcast. But I just, I really want to, you know, share how over time I went from, you know, kind of meditating to help me get through really tough times, kind of put on the brakes, get through the survival mode kind of phase of things.
And then over time, it developed into this thing that helped me to think more clearly in the moment, be a little bit less hard on myself, be kinder to myself more and more over time. And it was really a game changer. And eventually it was a life changer for me because it led me to this place that I'm at now, where I feel accepting of my PMDD.
And no longer trying to fight it.
And that's huge. That's the life changer part. Mindfulness got me to a place where I'm no longer trying to fight my PMDD and I can accept it and accept myself. With kindness and non judgment, and I think it's important to say that it isn't a magic pill and it's not necessarily for everyone and it is a practice and it is a journey for lack of a better word. And it is part of what is, most likely, for most PMDDers, a wider combination of treatments and self management tools that will look different from person to person.
Because everyone's PMDD is a little bit different and so the combination of treatments and tools that work for you will look a little bit different from those that work for the next PMDD warrior. So, for me, that combination looks like: medication, changes to my diet, changes to my exercise, cleaning up my sleep hygiene, getting back into therapy, and of course, mindfulness and meditation.
That said, mindfulness and meditation have played such a big role in helping me to stay afloat when I felt like I was drowning, and kind of helped me be able to hang in there with all my other sort of treatments and self management tools and hang in there through the process. And, you know, and get through those really tough times where nothing else was really doing the trick.
And I really can't overstate that, so much so that I decided to train as a 10 of Zen mindfulness teacher, and then as a trauma-informed mindfulness teacher. And at first it was just to help me in my own practice, you know? I felt like it would give me the structure and accountability factor to really develop a mindfulness practice that would stick and it did, but beyond that, eventually mindfulness led to this revelation that in order to find a sustainable way forward with PMDD, I needed to get to a place of acceptance with it and just truly align my life, my work, and my thoughts to that acceptance. And in no way am I saying that that needs to be your goal, or that acceptance looks the same for everyone, but for me personally, once I realized that acceptance was the only way forward, I felt pulled to make that the driving force of everything in my life for the time being, at least. And that's when I realized I want to help other people with PMDD learn how to use these tools in navigating their own PMDD symptoms and struggles.
Because the effect of mindfulness and meditation on my PMDD experience has really been that profound. And by the way, I will say, you know, I mentioned that acceptance doesn't need to be your goal right now, but also that I want to help other [00:20:00] PMDDers, you know, apply these tools to their own experiences and their own symptoms and their own struggles and what I'm saying, there is, you know, for me, the magic of mindfulness as it relates to my PMDD is that it's gotten me to this place of acceptance and compassion.
WHAT’S COMING NEXT (20:00)
But that's not the only point in the PMDD journey, or experience, that is useful, right? And so even if you're kind of still just feeling in like survival mode or the getting-to-know-my-own-PMDD mode or whatever it is, you know, trying to get a diagnosis, wherever you are in the experience, I do believe that there's a place for mindfulness, if it's something that you are feeling open to.
And so, in the next few episodes, I want to share why I'm such a fan of mindfulness as a stress management tool for PMDD and a nervous system regulator and why I like to focus specifically on trauma-informed mindfulness for PMDD. And I'll continue to let you in on what my own PMDD looks like, because I think that's really important.
And then what I'd love to do in future episodes is also really dive deep into topics that I like to call PMDD Mindfulness Adjacent. So these are topics that might not seem so obviously linked to mindfulness for PMDD, and yet I cannot stop seeing the connection and wanting to explore that link a little bit more.
So things like parenting with PMDD, work and career, entrepreneurship, nutrition for PMDD. I will discuss the self loathing and low self esteem and imposter syndrome that comes with PMDD. That's a heavy one. As well as how the stages of grief relate to acceptance of a PMDD diagnosis. I'm also really interested in exploring certain principles of mindfulness and even psychology that have had a big impact on me, but in a way that's really practical and applicable to a life with PMDD.
So things like radical acceptance and the idea of impermanence are things that have had a really big impression on me that I would love to kind of help apply in a really easily approachable way for someone living with PMDD. I also really want to learn about how mindfulness might perhaps help people with PMDD who also have ADHD or autism–because it's my understanding that there is an association there–or people with PMDD who identify as trans or non binary.
And of course I will be sharing guided meditations and mindfulness exercises with you throughout the way, throughout the episodes along the way. So if you're listening and you're particularly interested in any of those topics, or you have some other ideas for me about PMDD mindfulness adjacent topics, please feel free to reach out.
I'm on Instagram @mindfulnessforpmdd. Thank you so much for listening. I really, truly appreciate it. And I'm so excited and I hope you are too, and I'm really looking forward to connecting with you. So I will hopefully see you in the episodes.
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. For links to everything mentioned in this episode, you can check out the show notes and you can find me, Diane DeJesus on Instagram @mindfulnessforpmdd. Now I invite you to pause, take a breath and look around.
