How to Balance Your Hormones

First, What Does It Actually Mean to Balance Your Hormones?

“Balancing hormones” is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot — especially on the internet — kind of like gut health. But what does it actually mean to balance your hormones, and how do you do it?

When we’re talking about hormonal balance, we’re typically talking in the context of reproduction and menstrual health, fertility, so that’s the context I’m mostly focused on here.

The hormones that directly affect menstruation and reproduction are your steroid sex hormones. That’s your estrogen, your progesterone, your testosterone. And these are typically the hormones that get referenced when discussing balancing your hormones.

But zooming out, you want to understand that those hormones live in a system with dozens of other hormones — and all those hormones together are influencing each other.

Think of it like an orchestra. Everybody’s involved and everybody plays a role. One instrument is going to affect how the other instrument sounds and performs, and vice versa. So balancing your hormones actually means providing the environment for this orchestra to be able to perform. Let’s talk about it! 🙂

The Mistake People Make When Balancing Hormones

So when we’re thinking about balancing hormones, and there’s an issue rooted in hormonal dysregulation- like painful periods, irregular cycles, PMS, heavy bleeding, infertility, hormonal acne, mood issues — whatever it is — the part where people get lost and essentially miss fixing the root pattern is that we isolate those sex hormones and focus on them alone.

Because those hormones are living in synergy with dozens of other hormones that influence your blood sugar, your sleep, your skin, your appetite, your digestion, your repair, your immunity, etc. There are all these other systems living in connection with reproductive hormones. Nobody is isolated or working alone. So when we isolate systems in the body, we might see changes in symptoms for a bit, but we’re not actually resolving the root patterns driving the problem.

So in this case, whether you’re using drugs to affect these steroid hormones, or you’re trying to take a more natural approach to manipulate or affect estrogen, progesterone or testosterone, you are missing the bigger picture.

A Common Example: Estrogen

A great example of this is people doing seed cycling or eating a certain diet, or taking specific herbs to try to have an effect on there being too much estrogen in their body. They may eat carrots or flax seeds to try to bind to the extra estrogen and remove it, because it’s causing symptoms like painful breasts, premenstrual irritability, painful periods. The idea is to get rid of the excess estrogen, so this will be effective and reduce these symptoms. 

But the more important question is—why is there too much estrogen in the first place? Why can’t the body get rid of it itself? That’s the real pattern you need to address—and the solution is not carrots and flax seeds. So balancing hormones is actually not so much about balancing in the sense that “we need more of this and less of that,” but rather, it’s about restoring efficiency to the whole hormonal orchestra. In the case of excess estrogen it’s typically really rooted more in chronic stress and a detoxification issue.

If you’re doing seed cycling, you might see improvements in your symptoms. But if you stop seed cycling, symptoms returned and nothing really got fixed. It’s not good or bad or right or wrong — it’s just efficient or inefficient. Are you addressing a branch pattern, or addressing a root pattern?

The Hormonal Pyramid

You want to think of the hormones that directly influence menstruation and reproduction as living quite far down the chain from a lot of other hormones.

Picture a pyramid.

At the top of the pyramid, you have hormones like insulin, cortisol, melatonin, leptin thyroid hormone.

If those hormones aren’t doing their job effectively (and if you have menstruation or reproductive issues and you know they aren’t- because the sex hormones down here aren’t doing their job) — then the issue at the bottom of the pyramid can’t ever get resolved.

What people often do when they’re not aware of that is they go down the chain to try to manipulate those sex hormones — and they miss everything happening up the chain.

This issue with the steroid sex hormones can’t ever get resolved if everyone up the chain isn’t functioning properly as well. And the way you get everyone up the chain functioning properly is by thinking from a holistic mind, body, spirit perspective.

• Hydration.
• Nutrition.
• Sleep.
• Light exposure.
• Relationships.
• Safety in the body.
• Breathing.

All of these things influence your hormones. Remember, hormones are messengers so all of the inputs you’re giving your body are signaling those messages.

The Holistic Band-Aid Cycle

When you start messing around with herbs — again using estrogen as an example — if you’re trying to influence estrogen with herbs but you’re not addressing why there’s too much estrogen, the body is always going to continue adapting and compensating around this root issue.

If there’s too much estrogen and you start manipulating it (and I say “manipulate” because you’re going in through almost like a side door) then the other hormones that are compensating and being affected by estrogen are also going to start shifting.

You may start having other issues like spotting or irregular periods. This is how people enter into what I call a holistic band aid cycle. They’re using herbs, certain diets, certain therapies but they are really just putting a more natural bandaid over something that has a deeper root cause. Then they end up going from protocol to protocol to protocol, from this doctor to that practitioner to this person… in an endless search of answers. When really, the solution is usually rooted in simple things that they’re doing every day.

Just having a simple understanding of how your body works can open the door to true, sustainable, long term resolution of chronic issues. And it’s usually a lot simpler than people think!

Simplify Your Health Through Understanding

It’s what you do every day and who you are that makes up your health — or your lack of it. Download my free ebook, Foundations for Radiant Health and start living the medicine. Simplify your health through understanding and application 🙂 

In abundant health,

Chelsey

❤️