|
The book |
Table of Contents and Chapter Summaries Introduction: Coming Unhinged Every month, millions of women enter a period of time when they no longer feel like their usual selves. Suddenly, they’re unable to stay on an even emotional keel, maintain their typical productivity at work, handle the various aspects of their lives comfortably, or relate to their families, as they’d like to. Unfortunately, relief from these distressing symptoms has been extremely hard to come by in the past. With the benefit of new research, many new treatments have cropped up for PMS—and research suggests that a customized combination of treatments may be more effective than any single one. Part One: The Ups and Downs of PMS Chapter 1: The Puzzle of PMS Contrary to once-popular belief, PMS isn’t a figment of a woman’s imagination, and it’s not a form of mental illness, either. It’s a condition of complex origins—namely, neurological, hormonal, and behavioral interactions in the body—that can produce a wide array of physical and emotional symptoms. More than 150 symptoms of PMS have been identified in the scientific and clinical literature. To be considered premenstrual, these symptoms must occur regularly during the luteal phase—or second half of the menstrual cycle after ovulation occurs—and must be relieved by the onset of a woman’s period or within a few days of the beginning of bleeding.
PMS is not always a predictable or linear condition. It can come and go from one month to the next. It can occur for the first time or worsen during certain phases of a woman’s life such as during adolescence, after having a baby, and during perimenopause. And it can flare up during periods of physical or psychological stress. When the source of that stress eases up, PMS may or may not retreat. Part Two: Learning to Manage These Cyclical Shifts
Chapter 3: Getting In Touch With Your Symptoms There’s no diagnostic test that will reveal that you have PMS. It’s generally diagnosed based on the cyclicity and severity of your symptoms and their recurrence on a monthly basis just before the arrival of your period. Tracking your symptoms is the first crucial step in identifying these patterns. Once you recognize the clusters your primary symptoms fall into, you can tailor your treatment accordingly.
Everything you put in your mouth—from foods to beverages, from vitamins to other nutritional supplements—can have an impact on premenstrual symptoms. Your eating habits can have such a sweeping effect on premenstrual symptoms because during the premenstrual phase, many women’s bodies are especially sensitive to various stimuli, including the food that enters their bodies. While there is little scientific evidence that dietary changes alone can eliminate PMS, women who modify their diets during the second half of the menstrual cycle often report substantial improvements in their symptoms. Approximately 90 percent of the women in my own research made changes to their diets; among the symptoms that were helped the most were irritability, fatigue, anxiety, bloating, and food cravings.
Heading to the gym may be the last thing you feel like doing when you have PMS. But regular aerobic exercise can ease many premenstrual symptoms—including bloating, abdominal and muscle cramps, headaches, and lower back pain—as well as helping you feel like you can cope better. Exercise can also help ease depression and anxiety, according to recent studies. For women suffering from PMS, participating in physical activity throughout the month but modifying the regimen one to two weeks before the arrival of their periods may work best to alleviate symptoms. While stress doesn’t cause PMS per se, research does suggest that stressful events can exacerbate premenstrual symptoms. This is due, in large measure, to the fact that many of the neuroendocrine secretions that are associated with the human stress response are also associated with aggravating PMS. On the other hand, there’s no question that premenstrual symptoms can be stressful in their own right. Just as stress management is now considered a vital part of leading a healthy lifestyle, the same is true when it comes to managing PMS. This chapter explores different ways to elicit the relaxation response, including deep breathing, meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, autogenic training, and imagery, among others. Women with PMS often describe their minds as racing or as feeling as though they “can’t stop certain thoughts.” During the premenstrual phase of their cycles, this cognitive tension can be exacerbated as irritability and other unpleasant feelings set in. The good news is, a woman can short-circuit this cascade of cognitive stress by changing her ways of thinking so that she doesn’t come to expect the worst and so that she’s not so reactive to stress. What this entails, in a nutshell, is cognitive restructuring—identifying negative thought patterns and critical assessments then correcting these distortions. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to internalize this process, step by step.
While time-management conflicts are often a chronic problem for working women, they become particularly paramount during the premenstrual phase. If a woman isn’t feeling her best in the days before the onset of her period, the extra stress that’s sparked by poor time management can push her symptoms over the edge—into the debilitating zone. Time management is an essential skill in managing external sources of stress—and in carving out the time you’ll need to implement your personalized PMS solution. We show you how to figure out where your time goes—and how to reclaim it by resetting your priorities, cultivating delegating powers, being willing to say No, and taking other essential steps. It’s hardly surprising that PMS can create problems in your relationships at home or at work. When interpersonal conflicts arise, these sources of stress can increase the severity of your premenstrual symptoms—and cause you to be more short-tempered or impatient than usual. Before you know it, you’re engaged in the edgy dance of PMS. What can you do to stop the dance? Plenty—but it requires good communication and problem-solving skills, which you’ll learn in this chapter.
This is where your personalized PMS plan finally comes together. In this chapter, we show readers how to create their own treatment program, one that caters to their most distressing symptoms, step by step and week by week. There’s also a “Symptom-Solution Section”, which addresses nearly every conceivable premenstrual complaint from head to toe with advice on how to obtain relief. We also show readers how to assess what’s working and what’s not after they’ve tried their initial treatment plans for two or three months. This puts the PMS solution squarely in their hands. Part Three: The Next Step Chapter 11: Emerging Therapies for PMS Those who haven’t found sufficient relief with the tried-and-true techniques may want to consider trying some of the more promising alternative or complementary treatments for PMS such as acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, homeopathy, light therapy, herbs or other nutritional substances. In this chapter, we explore the benefits and drawbacks of these approaches to treating PMS, as well as what’s been proven and what’s still unknown about how they work.
For those women who experience severe PMS or noncyclical mood disorders as well as PMS, lifestyle interventions alone may not be enough to make them feel their best. In that case, they may want to consider combining certain hormonal therapies, antidepressants, anti-anxiety agents, or other medications with their PMS management strategies. This chapter reviews the most commonly used medications for PMS-related woes and those that have the most evidence for safety and effectiveness.
Unfortunately, there’s no law of nature that says that women can suffer from only one health condition at a time. The reality is, premenstrual symptoms or full-blown PMS may coexist with other conditions such as depression, anxiety disorders, asthma, migraines, and thyroid disorders. Many of these conditions can actually increase in severity during the premenstrual phase, a phenomenon that’s called Premenstrual Magnification (PMM, for short). When a woman has both PMS and PMM, it’s as if the two conditions are superimposed on her menstrual cycle. This chapter helps readers figure out if they have more going on with their health than simple PMS.
Glossary Appendix: References & Further Reading Resources Charts:
|
||
|
Copyright 2002, Taking Back the Month |
