How your Menstrual Cycle affects your Nervous System

This took me years to understand, both in my own body and in the women I hold space for: your menstrual cycle and your nervous system are not two separate conversations. They impact each other, and these two systems are literally creating your day-to-day reality.

By getting to know these two biological systems, you will be able to better understand yourself and how to care and resource yourself for more ease and flow in your life.

As women, we unconsciously learned that our periods are an inconvenience to manage, and we learned about stress and regulation as something separate, maybe from a therapist, a yoga class, a wellness account on Instagram. What I haven't heard anyone speaking of, is that your female hormones are shaping your nervous system's capacity, day to day, every cycle.

The research gap behind women’s health and the female nervous system

Did you know, women weren't legally required to be included in clinical research until 1993.

Before that, for decades, women were excluded from medical and scientific studies with the assumption that the results would just automatically apply to us.

Why did they exclude us from research? Because our bodies are more variable, more complicated, and complicated takes more time. More time equals more money. Research is expensive, so they got through it quickly and left us out.

So the law passed in 1993, but think about how long it actually takes for new studies to happen, then for someone to write the book, then for that book to make it into the trainings everyone is doing right now.

As an example, the female nervous system wasn't researched until the early 2000s, hence why this information is only reaching you now, in a small pocket of the internet. 

The current reality? 

We are, quite literally, taking male principles and applying them as one blanket rule to humans. Even yoga, if you want a fun example, was designed for prepubescent boys and is now taught to studios full of women with barely any adaptation.

So if you've ever felt like using discipline, and a push forward approach works great for a couple of weeks and then completely falls apart, that is not a lack of will power or you doing something wrong. That's your biology being ignored by a framework that wasn't created with your female body in mind. 

I lived this myself. Seven years ago I was a full-time yoga teacher, ten years deep into my practice, teaching women's cycles, and I was completely unaware of the nervous system while doing it. I thought I was calm, but I was just meditating everything down, I spiritually bypassed my way through difficult conversations, and I genuinely thought I was being easy going.. It wasn't, I had a dysregulated nervous system and was using coping mechanisms.

How your menstrual cycle changes your stress capacity

Estrogen and progesterone don't just affect your womb. They influence your brain function, your metabolism, your heart rate variability, your pain perception, and yes, your nervous system.

As the hormones rise and fall across your cycle, your capacity to handle stress, stay regulated, and recover from activation rises and falls right along with them. Predictably, cycle after cycle.

Which means the version of you that can stay in a challenging conversation with presence and ease one week, might be the same version of you that feels flooded and reactive by that exact same conversation another week.

Why you feel more sensitive before your period

Take the days right before and during your bleed. Hormones are at their lowest, so you're the least "stimulated" by them, and your energy naturally drops.

But here's the part that surprises people - your nervous system often leans more sympathetic here, not less. It's compensating for the missing hormonal buffer, mobilising extra energy just to get you through the day, when what your body is actually asking for is rest. That heightened sensitivity to sound, light, touch, even pain, that so many of us notice right before our period? That's not just your hormones, it's a female nervous system asking for more nourishment.

What changes when you understand your cycle and female nervous system

Once you can see how your nervous system is interacting with your cycle, and you know how to recognize the nervous system states somatically, you stop asking "what's wrong with me that I fell apart this week" and start asking "where am I in my cycle, and what does this phase actually need from me."

This alone can change how you plan your week, how you resource yourself, how you talk to yourself, and how much compassion you're able to offer yourself when a challenging situation shows up.

This is genuinely one of the most useful resources I know for how you run your business, how you show up in your relationships, and honestly, just for how you get to experience being in your body.

This knowledge is not a nice to have. It's foundational female body literacy, and I truly wish every woman receives this self-attunement.

Learn more in Her Cyclical Nervous System

This article is just the beginning of what we dive deep into inside the 'Cyclical Nervous System' class. 

Over 2.5 hours, I go deeper into what I've touched on here: how each phase of your cycle is shifting your nervous system's capacity, why the luteal phase (my favourite, and the most misunderstood) is actually your truth phase rather than something to dread, the real difference between a dopamine-driven nervous system and an oxytocin-driven one, and why almost everything in wellness culture is optimised for the wrong biology.

We also move through a full somatic practice together, live in the body, not just in theory, so you feel the shift rather than just reading about it, and have tools to use on the daily to bring this into practice. 

Purchase the full Her Cyclical Nervous System class here.