Your Menstrual Cycle Affects

Your Nervous System

Here's something that 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 almost nobody speaks of, is that your hormones are shaping your nervous system's capacity, day by day, all cycle long.

A reality check on why this knowledge is missing 

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? 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.

The female nervous system specifically wasn't researched until the early 2000s. And think about how long it actually takes for a law to change, then for 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.

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 the discipline-and-push approach works great for a couple of weeks and then completely falls apart, that is not a personal failing. That is your biology being ignored by a framework that was never built with your 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.

What's actually happening?

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 hold a hard conversation with total steadiness in one week might be the same version of you that feels flooded and reactive by that exact same conversation another.

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 you being "too much". That's a nervous system working overtime with less support than usual.

Why this matters beyond just "knowing more"

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." That shift alone changes 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 hard moment shows up.

This is genuinely one of the most useful lenses 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 attunement.

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 replay here.