How Hormonal Changes Affect Stress Responses

Let me tell you a quick story.

A couple weeks ago, I hit one of those “why am I spiraling over something so small?” moments. A tiny inconvenience (one that wouldn’t have bothered me ten years ago) sent me into a full-body stress response. My thoughts got loud. My chest got tight. And I started snapping at everyone I cared about.

Then I realized what was going on. It was day 18 in my cycle. And because I’m in my mid-40s, my progesterone has left the chat, and estrogen is still deciding whether she’s in or not. When progesterone declines in perimenopause, so does GABA, a calming neurotransmitter that keeps us calm. When estrogen is fluctuating, so are serotonin and dopamine, which can make us feel more edgy and scattered than usual.

This dynamic, so common in many of the women I see, completely changes how we respond to stress.

Modern life (plus hormones, midlife shifts, past stress, and responsibilities we weren’t designed to carry alone) can literally rewire the brain to become more sensitive to stress. And the female brain in particular becomes even more responsive during perimenopause and times of chronic stress.

When stress piles up (whether it’s emotional stress, trauma history, lack of sleep, blood sugar swings, or the mental load of caring for everyone around you) the HPA axis (internal stress alert system) becomes overactive. Think of it like a smoke alarm that goes off way ahead of an actual fire.

This is true for all women, regardless of age. Stress plus hormonal imbalances create mental chaos.

But if you’re a female over 35?
Estrogen fluctuations can make your brain 20-30% more reactive to stress. That’s why you might feel more overwhelmed, overstimulated, forgetful, irritable, or anxious at various stages of your menstrual cycle.

This isn’t about you not being or doing enough.
This is about physiology.

And even better news: your brain is rewritable. Stress circuits can calm down, neural pathways can heal, and your resilience can grow again.

3 Action Steps to Support Your Hormones This Month (at any age)

1. Start your morning with protein, fiber, and light

Protein stabilizes blood sugar and keeps your HPA axis from spiking cortisol too high, too fast. Aim for 30 grams for breakfast every morning. Pair that with 8-10 grams of fiber (you need at least 25 grams each day), and 5 minutes of morning sunlight and you reset your brain’s stress clock for the day, activating serotonin production. This creates physiological safety for your body.

2. Build one daily “micro-rest” moment

That’s it. Set a reminder on your phone for your most stressful time of day. Just 60–90 seconds of slow breathing, humming, or hand-on-heart grounding can move your brain from a threat state into a regulated one. This rewires your brain and your stress response. Offer yourself a breath prayer. Use this verse: “You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you!” (Isaiah 26:3, NLT). Inhale: You are my peace. Exhale: I trust in you.

3. Add magnesium-rich foods (or supplements) to your routine

Stress depletes magnesium quickly, and magnesium is one of the minerals your brain uses to calm excitatory pathways. I take 3-4 capsules of Thorne Magnesium Glycinate every night (check out my Full Script store below). It’s great quality for an inexpensive supplement. For food sources, try adding 1 tablespoon of cacao to your coffee, add pumpkin seeds to a salad with spinach, and eat avocado regularly (yes, there’s magnesium but also it’s a great fiber source and healthy fat).

Your brain cannot “rest” without enough magnesium. This one shift alone supports anxiety, mood, PMS symptoms, and sleep.

Scripture Reminder:

In Matthew 11:28, Jesus says, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” He doesn’t say, “Come to me once you’ve regulated your nervous system.” He meets us in the dysregulation. Even when our hormones are all over the place.

God designed your body to respond beautifully to small, daily choices that bring safety back into your nervous system.

I hope this reminder brings you peace this month!

Book Available Now!
Don’t forget to preorder my new book, Live Beyond Your Label: A Holistic Approach to Breaking Old Patterns and Discovering a Healthier You in Mind, Body, and Spirit. It’s now available for preorder at most retailers, including Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Christianbook, Books-a-Million, and more. See this page for order options. It is also available on Audible!

Bible Reading Plan

Did you know that my seven-day reading plan, Reset Your Stress Response with Scripture, is available now in the Bible YouVersion app? Click here to get started with it. It’s also available on the Life Bible app, available here. I had a lot of fun writing this plan, and I hope it helps you reset your stress response as you read through it!

Live Beyond Your Label: A Holistic Guide to Mental Health

My new book, Live Beyond Your Label: A Holistic Approach to Breaking Old Patterns and Discovering a Healthier You in Mind, Body, and Spirit, is now available for preorder at most retailers, including Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Christianbook, Books-a-Million, and more. The official release date is September 16, but you can preorder here.

This is the book I wish I had when I was struggling with my mental health as a young adult, stuffing down feelings and burying trauma in order to survive.

This book blends psychology, science, scripture, and my own personal experience living with the labels of PTSD, depression, and bipolar disorder. I hope this book helps readers see that they are so much more than a cluster of symptoms on a DSM checklist. I hope they feel seen, heard, and validated in these pages. Every chapter is packed with helpful tools and ends with mind-body activity to tune into our body’s unique needs.

But guess what? You don’t have to wait for September 16 to add new tools to your toolkit! You can grab my preorder gift, a Nourishing Habits Guide, now!

Continue reading “Live Beyond Your Label: A Holistic Guide to Mental Health” →

New Website, Same Podcast!

If you’re looking for the latest podcast episodes to download and listen to, please head to this website here.

While this blog site will still be up and running for information about mental illness recovery, health coaching services, and my upcoming book, I will no longer be posting updated podcast episode summaries on this feed. Instead, go to my new website for an updated list of the latest episodes.

Reminder: you can download and listen to my podcast episodes on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, I Heart Radio, Spreaker, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

It has been an honor to host my show since 2019. From the beginning, my goal has been to provide information that sparks hope and healing and ultimately, wholeness in your life. For potential guests or sponsors, reach out to sparkingwholenessradio@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Find the latest episodes here.

Keeping Bipolar Disorder in Remission

Twenty-five and a half years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I’ve been living symptom-free for over a decade. I consider myself to be in “remission” from my mental illness, because I no longer have symptoms that plague me, so I no longer fit the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder comes with a heavy stigma and is often confused with a personality disorder. For me, it meant I had seasons of depression (lasting weeks) or seasons of hypomania/mania (that didn’t last as long). Hypomania was “fun” and led to productivity, but mania was dangerous. If I didn’t sleep, it got worse.

People frequently message me, wanting me to know what I did to become symptom-free. Concerned parents reach out to me, asking me to help their child heal. I think it’s important to note that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Everyone’s illness affects them differently, and every diagnosis has a different cluster of root causes. My root causes were trauma-based and psychoneuroimmunological (I was diagnosed with mono the same month I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and I had immune challenges all throughout childhood).

Another factor that is important in my story is personality. I’m a go-getter and a very determined, curious, research-driven person. When I was first told I would always struggle, I believed what I was told. When I began to see research that indicated otherwise, I dug deeper. I realized that I wasn’t as powerless as I once thought. That brought out a “fighter mentality” in me, and I refused to let my label limit me from living out my purpose.

I understand that for many people struggling for years, the exhaustion of fighting with symptoms can leave you hopeless, and that feeling is paralyzing. I hope the information I share next doesn’t fill you with a greater sense of hopelessness. Instead, I want to spark your inner curiosity to dig into what may be helpful for you to incorporate.

Continue reading “Keeping Bipolar Disorder in Remission” →

Calm Your Nervous System Using This Simple Device

Sigmar Berg is an entrepreneur, artist, photographer, and fashion designer. Sigmar has spent his life seeking to bring wellness and balance to the world through art, design, and conscious consumerism, which brings him to his most exciting venture yet: the Lovetuner. The Lovetuner opens the door to personal healing by way of the 528hz frequency, also known as the love vibration. The Lovetuner brings the ancient art of sound healing to today’s world through an easily accessible, mindfulness tool. Through this new and transformative tool, Sigmar hopes to heal the world through spiritual and physical attunement, mindfulness, and a stepped path to renewal and growth for every human.

Download and listen to this episode here or find wherever you get podcasts.

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How to Manage Parenting Stress

Julie Potiker is a mindfulness expert with extensive certifications and teacher training in a variety of tools and methods, including Mindful Self-Compassion. Julie details strategies for coping with anger, anxiety, grief, political strife and disaster, parenting struggles, and your inner critic from her new book, “SNAP! From Chaos to Calm.”

Through her Mindful Methods for Life program offerings, Julie helps others bring more peace and wellness into their lives. Julie’s first book, “Life Falls Apart, but You Don’t Have To: Mindful Methods for Staying Calm in the Midst of Chaos,” is now available on audiobook.

You can listen to this interview here or download wherever you get podcasts.

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You Are Not Your Diagnosis

As a mental health advocate, functional medicine practitioner, and someone who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 18, there is a frequently used phrase about bipolar that makes me crazy.

When someone says, “he is bipolar” or “she is bipolar” or “she’s acting bipolar,” I’ll likely get pretty defensive pretty fast. Bipolar disorder is NOT a personality trait. 

Mental health awareness is important, but current awareness and discourse sometimes comes at the expense of the over-identification of our personality with symptoms of an illness.

You don’t say “she IS diabetes” or “she IS depression” or “she IS rheumatoid arthritis.” For some reason, bipolar disorder is the only diagnosis and physical illness that becomes an identity statement and personality trait.

A lot of people who use that phrasing don’t understand that for most people with bipolar disorder, they’re not having constant mood swings. They may have one or two mood episodes a year. For example, in the past, I tended to get depressed in the late fall and winter and then I would head into hypomania/mania in the spring/summer. Some of that was triggered by trauma, diet, poor lifestyle choices, and substances. Even the wrong  medication caused psychosis and hallucinations in me. (Yes, prescribed medication made my symptoms worse, which isn’t discussed enough.)

Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder rooted in many physiological issues that causes fluctuating episodes of mania or hypomania (which is milder than mania) and depression. Episodes can last several days to weeks, and between episodes there may be seasons of stability. Mania and depression are broken down by the following symptoms below.

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Timeless Ayurvedic Principles to Bring Nutritional Balance to the Whole Body

Monika Sharda is a Holistic Health Coach who has spent the last decade studying the traditional wisdom of Ayurveda and Yoga. She is a certified Ayurveda Health Counselor and Yoga Instructor. She helps busy professionals uncover the root causes of their health challenges and create personalized, sustainable wellness routines. Through workshops, talks, and 1:1 coaching, Monika makes holistic wellness accessible and impactful for modern lifestyles.

In this episode, Monika breaks down what Ayurveda is and how an ancient healing modality can be useful in the modern world today. Download here of find wherever you get podcasts.

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How Learning to Forgive Can Transform Your Health

Dara McKinley is a forgiveness expert who has created a new paradigm for forgiveness—as a healing modality. In 2012, with two decades of psychology and spirituality behind her, Dara McKinley faced a difficult situation that none of her previous knowledge could improve. Feeling called to try forgiveness, she searched online for a forgiveness ‘how-to’ and quickly discovered that there was so much about why one should forgive, but nothing about how. Needing directions to follow, she decided to make her own forgiveness step-by-step, which upon completion, left her feeling peaceful for the first time in three years. Impressed by forgiveness’ effectiveness she quickly became a devotee. Over the coming years, her experience with forgiveness would deepen and so would her awareness of popular forgiveness understanding. Specifically she saw that most people had something they wanted to forgive but they didn’t know how. She also saw that mainstream forgiveness definitions were actually obscuring the forgiveness path. In Dara’s program How to Forgive, Dara guides participants beyond mainstream forgiveness understandings.

Download and listen to this episode here or find wherever you get podcasts.

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Rethink Your Relationship with Alcohol and Make Changes That Stick

Silvia Subirana is a clinical psychologist and the Head of Content Development at MyDry30, an innovative app that empowers users to transform their relationship with alcohol and discover greater meaning and fulfillment in their lives. With a Master’s in Clinical Psychology and specialized training in grief and sexual therapy, Silvia integrates tools like hypnotherapy, journaling, and exercises to support lasting change. Silvia is passionate about holistic well-being and leverages her lifelong dance experience to more deeply understand the mind-body connection. Through MyDry30, Silvia inspires individuals to develop healthier coping mechanisms and build supportive communities, guiding them on their journeys of personal growth and self-discovery.

Download and listen to this episode here or find wherever you get podcasts.

Continue reading “Rethink Your Relationship with Alcohol and Make Changes That Stick” →