We’ve made more progress in the workplace than we have in the home. Research shows that if a woman and man both work full time and have one child, she does twice the amount of housework and three times the amount of childcare he does. So essentially, she has three jobs and he has one. It is time for the dawning of new era for women, which means it has to be for our men as well. Yogi Bhajan says about speaking to a man: “The first rule of talking to a man is to keep it simple. (…) Men like direct talks except when it is aimed at their egos.” Whilst we can all feel a bit stressed at times, constant/ongoing/worsening symptoms should not be ignored. Most stress can be better managed and psychologists are trained to teach you effective coping strategies and skills.

For this first edition of 2018 I thought we should discuss something I heard on the radio last week: The Rushing Woman Syndrome. It’s not just the physical health consequences that concern me for women. It’s that they live their lives so out of touch with their beautiful hearts, out of touch with how extraordinary they are and in the cloud of false belief that they aren’t enough. The nervous system plays a significant role in the stress response and it has a number of parts. The two branches related to this concept are the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), also known as the amped up “fight or flight” response, and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), the calming “rest, digest, repair and reproduce” arm of the nervous system. The challenge for too many women today is that they live in SNS dominance and this can play havoc with weight management, food cravings, sleep quality, patience, moods, self-esteem, and overall quality of life. Acute stress situations cause an increase in stress hormones – adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol. Cortisol is important to blood pressure regulation and the normal functioning of several body systems including cardiovascular, circulatory and reproduction. During stressful times our heart rate increases and blood vessels dilate (to allow increased blood flow to the big muscle groups), increasing blood pressure. If this stress continues and therefore the release of stress hormones, this can increase the frequency of symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, and depression. For example, long-term exposure to cortisol can contribute to weight gain.

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One of the biggest challenges facing women’s health today is the way stress hormone production is interfering with sex hormone balance. Too many women now suffer with premenstrual syndrome (PMS), PCOS, endometriosis and experience debilitating menopauses, which can have both physical and emotional health consequences. Unless you have Wonder Woman’s (or Wolverine’s) powers, then don’t try and imitate the original. This undertaking is bound to fail. You are a unique, graceful and fragile human being (male or female). For the first half of the cycle, we make a small amount of progesterone from our adrenals glands, walnut sized-glands that sit on top of our kidneys. Progesterone’s job reproductively is to hold the lining of the uterus in place, yet it performs a host of other biological functions aside from those involved in reproduction. So, how can we look to support our thyroid? “When it’s not working, I’ll often use the phrase ‘the road in is the road out,’” Libby says. “The first thing is to find out what’s leading your thyroid to not function at its best.” An excess of estrogen is what can be responsible for the heaviness and clottiness of periods and it becomes a bit of a vicious circle. A heavy period can mean a lot of blood loss, which means your body is losing a lot of iron – and iron is crucial to keeping the thyroid healthy.

Women get to blame rushing women's syndrome or PTSD or some other hormonal or psychological problem. Men get to shut up and tolerate it or else pay for the divorce and see their life's work get carved up so their ex-wives can "find" themselves in a two bedroom apartment, take trips to Bali with their girlfriends and go in with dates with men they meet on Tinder then complain all the men want of a single mother is sex.Immediately I related to the concept of the “Rushing Woman” and thought of numerous clients who have presented in my therapy room feeling overwhelmed by the demands of their daily lives. I thought of my friends that have spoken about their struggles in balancing their work/home lives and I considered my own journey where I have at times felt that I was trying to juggle a hundred different things and failing miserably. The Cause of Our Stress

It’s been over a decade since Dr Libby Weaver’s game-changing book Rushing Woman’s Syndrome first came out – and women have been rushing even faster in the years since. Libby talks to Capsule about how the past years have taken a greater toll on us, the messages our body keep trying to tell us and why her new course was designed with rushing women in mind. And so, then the pituitary gland might just tell the ovaries to shut up the ovulation shop completely. “If you don’t ovulate, you don’t produce the lovely big surge of progesterone, and progesterone not only plays a huge role in fertility, but it also is a very powerful anti-anxiety and anti-depressant, and it’s a diuretic, so it allows you to get rid of excess fluid.” For the first half of the menstrual cycle, estrogen is the dominant hormone, laying down the lining of the uterus. Estrogen wants a menstruating female to get pregnant every month of her life, whether that is on her agenda or not! It is important to realise that the way we eat, drink, move, think, believe and perceive impacts our need to rush. As a scientist and health professional I aim to help people live their lives with more PNS activation because this alone can have the most profound effect on health. From that place sex hormones are far easier to balance, liver function (detoxification processes) and digestion work closer to optimal so there’s far less bloating, and the thyroid works better which is also important for metabolic rate and the ability to burn body fat.

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And then the nervous system gets involved, because when we constantly produce stress hormones, it activates the sympathetic nervous system – which then moves us away from parasympathetic nervous system activity. That’s the part that’s responsible for digestion, sleep, repair work and reproduction, which is one of the reasons all of those parts of our bodies – and then our lives – get wobbly when we’re stressed. There is much to be said about slowing down, and stopping with rushing through life. Once that you have come to the edge of life you will notice it. Whether you are a man or a woman doesn’t matter. You are an infinite soul experiencing the finite human experience. The moment you realise that it’s the Now that counts – then you have finally come to a turning point in Your Life, and I will congratulate you with all my heart. One of the biggest markers for how our hormonal system is handling our lives is our period shifting, and Libby says there are some clear things to look for. It all boiled down to one simple truth that so many of her patients shared: “None of it was a disease; it was just that nothing was working as well as it once did,” Libby says. “What I then realised is that what was basically driving it was the constant and relentless output of stress hormones and that was very, very new to us as a species.” For too many women, estrogen is dominant (to progesterone) leading into the menstrual period and this is the typical hormonal imbalance that is the basis of PMS – heavy clotty painful periods, swollen tender breasts, and mood swings that can oscillate from intense irritability to immense sadness, sometimes in the same hour and often for reasons that cannot be identified! This can feel like chaos for a woman… and everyone around her.

When we live on adrenalin we tend not to sleep restoratively. We also constantly cravesugar, because when the body wants to get out of danger, it burns glucose rather than stored body fat. And even though our body is begging for it, we chastise ourselves for succumbing to sweets. So why do we do it? One reason is because we care so much for the people in our lives. On one level this way of living comes from such a beautiful place. It happens because we have beautiful hearts, but even deeper than that it happens because we made up a story a really long time ago that we aren’t enough the way we are; that we aren’t good enough, tall enough, slim enough, pretty enough, brainy enough, on time enough, that we’re just not enough the way that we are, so we spend our lives trying to please everyone in our realm, putting their needs ahead of our own. We rush around and do all we can to make sure that others love and appreciate us so that we never, ever have to feel rejected, ostracised, unlovable, criticised, yelled at, and like we’ve let others down. Between deadlines and financial responsibilities, school runs and household duties, caring for loved ones of all ages and intimate relationships, our lives can be demanding. We’re often wound up, running ourselves ragged in a daily battle to get things done, feeling as though there’s so much to do, and yet never quite getting on top of things.The Rushing Woman Syndrome was coined by Australian author, speaker and nutritional biochemist Dr Libby Weaver – and it does sound like an excellent book to get my hands on soon. There are basically weekly headlines about how much wine is good for you – ‘But the French have a daily red wine!’ we cry – but Libby puts it very simply: there isn’t a healthcare provider in the world that advocates daily wine. “That doesn’t mean ‘don’t have wine’, but it means, get honest with yourself,” Libby says.