Discover how your hormones and nervous system are not just tied to your physical well-being but deeply connected to your spiritual journey in this transformative episode with Adele Wimset. Adele reveals how hormonal shifts influence your intuition, emotional balance, and ability to connect with your higher self. By understanding these connections, you can align your body and spirit to create a greater sense of harmony and purpose. Learn practical strategies to balance your hormones, reduce stress, and tap into your spiritual potential. This conversation will empower you to embrace your body’s natural rhythms and live with more clarity, energy, and spiritual connection.

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Transcript:
Julie: [00:00:00] The woman inside that you know that you are, this powerhouse of a woman, this strong woman, the essence of who you are, suddenly isn’t matching up with how you’re showing up in life. You’ll look at things and go, how am I, why am I finding this stressful? I never would have found this stressful. This is progesterone deficiency.

Okay. Our capacity to cope is massively minimized. Our sleep gets disrupted. We’re not getting the good quality sleep. You know, we’re more reactive. We’re more irritated. Welcome to the angels and awakening podcast, where we connect you with your angels, loved ones, and soul self. I’m your host and author, Julie Jancius.

My journey began when I started hearing my late father before I knew he’d passed. Through my readings, membership, and Angel Reiki school, I help you awaken. Heal and master your unique spiritual gifts. If you feel called to work with me, it’s your [00:01:00] angels guiding you to discover your soul’s highest purpose.

Details at the. Angel medium. com. Thank you. Earth angels for the five star reviews. You’re entered into a drawing to win a free session. Now let’s see what messages your angels have for you today.

Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to the angels and awakening podcast. I’m your host and author, Julie Jancius and friends. If you’ve listened to this show for a while, you know, that, uh, ADHD hormones going through perimenopause, um, is something that’s really, really close to my heart. And so if you’re not a familiar listener with the podcast, it might feel like.

Oversharing today. Um, but today’s episode is really digging in [00:02:00] for all of the women who listen to this show to help them understand themselves, their own health, their own bodies, and how it ties into their own spirituality too. Um, I was so excited when this guest said that she would come on the show today.

I was almost literally in tears. Her name is Adele Wimsett. And if you don’t follow her over on Instagram, you absolutely should be. Um, she’s really transforming people with the education and the information that she has. Uh, you can follow her over on Instagram at harmonize you. Adele, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here today.

It’s an absolute pleasure. And Eva, just to speak to you, like this might feel like oversharing. I don’t think there’s any such thing when it comes to ADHD people. Oh my goodness. I think you’re right because the more information that we have and the more that we understand all of this, um, the more that, that we’re [00:03:00] empowered to live our lives more freely.

And I feel like on our soul’s path, because so much of what happens within ADHD and having, uh, I have. PMDD. So I want to explain these to people for a moment. Well, why don’t I have you explain them? Cause you’re more the expert. What is ADHD and what is PMDD? Yeah, so ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.

And most people right now who aren’t familiar with it are probably thinking of naughty little boys bouncing around the classroom, off the walls, on some kind of medication. And actually that’s not a very helpful understanding of what it is. Um, it’s a condition. where the brain works in a different way. I personally believe that we have always existed and actually the problem is the world and how it is.

It’s not in alignment with our strengths. Um, but it just, it can range as three subtypes to ADHD, to the complete hyperactive, to the [00:04:00] other end of the spectrum, which is much more inattentive, and then in the middle, the combined type. Which has both, so I’m combined type in both of those. And I think in the state they call it inattentive ADD.

We don’t use that term in the UK anymore, but that would be, tends to be where more females sit. Whereas males tend to sit in the more hyper end, but that’s very, um, there tends to be quite a mix. Yeah, I’ve heard it described recently, like, remember when we were young girls and you had that one type of pen in school where it had all these different colors at the top?

And when a person is neurotypical, their brain functions in a typical way, it’s just like they have a normal pen with just one ink thing that comes down when they click the top of the pen. And they can go. Think one thought and do one thing, but a person who has ADHD has like all of these different colors at the top, all of these different thoughts, and they’re all [00:05:00] fighting to be used at the same time and happen at the same time, which creates a lot of anxiety and overwhelm in the person.

But to your point, I think it’s so beautiful that ADHD doesn’t. present in women the same way as it does in men, um, women, yeah, yeah. And actually, you know, there’s, I mean, I could, I could talk about this a week, but there’s a massive gender bias that exists in the research around Women medically across the board, actually, but this is really stark in ADHD because everything we know to be true is based on that stereotypical because we’ve only ever researched males.

And it’s very, very, very new. In fact, I’m leading on a study at the moment to look at hormones in ADHD. It’s very new data. So effectively women are a bit like guinea pigs. They tend to be diagnosed a lot later. A lot of the hyperactive traits get internalized. I mean, you’ll probably already see I speak crazy fast.

I have really fast thought [00:06:00] processes. Our hyper, hyperness tends to be internalized because we have to deal with the stereotypes of women to be the good girl. So we learn to mask at a very young age and hide some of those traits that we know maybe aren’t as socially acceptable. So there’s lots of dynamics to consider for women around ADHD.

Yeah, and what I found, I joined a lot of, um, Facebook groups on this because I have PMDD as well. And so, um, I’ve, I’ve started to figure out that the women in my family, older women, um, That I come from this line, I think it’s passed down that it’s kind of like an inherited thing. And I’ve looked at this from so many different perspectives because I used to say it felt like living with Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde growing up. I just didn’t know who I was going to get. But then as I started to enter into my late thirties, [00:07:00] early forties, I started to notice that my mood. Was really changing as I was entering perimenopause of, um, Oh my gosh, you have a four week cycle. And the first week with having severe endometriosis, I have a really long period and just intense, intense cramping.

I have the week after my period, which is like. Hallelujah. Heaven. It’s amazing. I feel great and like myself. Um, and then on day like 14 of my cycle, I could tell you exactly when it happens because I can feel my energy shift and, um, that it would start to get more moody. And the best way I can describe it is that I just don’t feel like myself.

And so as I began to track it, Um, I, what I was noticing is three weeks [00:08:00] out of the month, I don’t feel like myself and it, it was awful. And I think it’s really important just for those people who don’t know what PMDD is, it’s severe. PMT. It’s, you know, it debilitates women’s lives. It’s beyond feeling a bit snappy and irritable.

You know, it can be severe. For some women, it can be suicidal ideation, panic attacks, not being able to sleep, overwhelming anxiety. Like it affects every layer of your life. And there are some really interesting theories and ways of working this. I work with a lot of women with PMDD because ADHD women are 10 times more likely to have PMDD than, um, neurotypical women.

So it’s big, but there is so much we can do about it, which is great. Yes. So what are some of those things? Like the one thing that I’ve done that has made a difference is, um, [00:09:00] starting to take progesterone, uh, bio identical progesterone, because if women don’t understand this, there are some hormones that are more.

Synthetic, which your body recognizes, as I understand it, like an outside foreign body. Um, but then there’s some people who do better with bioidentical hormones, which the, the body recognizes as its own, so it, it takes it in more, maybe. Am I explaining that right? Yeah. So let’s go back a little step and explain the dance of hormones that are happening throughout the month in menstruating women.

Okay. Women assume because they have a period that they’re ovulating. Actually, the period is just a way of the body to communicate with us. What I’m really interested in as a women’s health practitioner is, is your body ovulating? Because if you are ovulating, your body will be doing a dance each month of estrogen rising in the first half and progesterone rising in second half.

So there’s this dance. We [00:10:00] want to know if a woman’s body is ovulating because this is where we know the body is then feeling safe and it’s producing the hormones, particularly when we’re looking at conditions like endometriosis, adenomyosis, fibroids, these very oestrogenic, heavy periods, clotty periods, painful periods.

This to me, I want to know what’s happening with progesterone in the body because I’m a massive, Geek on progesterone. It’s been my hyper focus for the last few months. And it really is a miracle molecule because Eastern gets all the light and actually progesterone. We need to look at because without progesterone, a woman’s nervous system cannot regulate.

It’s a mood stabilizer. Okay. So it does protect the lining of the uterus, but it does so many more roles in the body. And this is where we come up against problems medically around this. I personally have a very strong view that women should have their hormones addressed when they are presenting with lots of different symptoms.

So [00:11:00] anxiety, depression, sleep, achy pains in their body, so many things, palpitations, like what is going on with a woman’s hormones, but we’re not women. It’s a misogynistic medical system that isn’t looking at hormones as key for women. So we’re really struggling with getting our needs met. And what has happened is that Back in the 60s.

There was incredible research undertaken that showed how amazing body identical, which means the same molecule is your body. The same molecule that’s produced in plants and naturally by your body does incredible things in a woman’s body, but you can’t patent a molecule that’s made in nature. So they, they, yeah.

Pharmaceutical companies change the molecule slightly into a lab synthetic progestin. Okay. But unfortunately in the medical world, progestins and progesterones are used interchangeably. So women are often told, Oh, just take that. We’ll give you the depo. We’ll give you the implant. Take this [00:12:00] synthetic contraceptive pill or the Marina coil.

And that will give you your progesterone. And that’s factually incorrect. They’re synthetic progestins that come with a whole host of side effects and risks. Whereas body identical progesterone does not. But unfortunately, because of how they’re used interchangeably, there’s lots of misunderstanding around what does what.

So I just want to put that context in. And then, does that make sense? Does that feel clear? Oh yeah, completely. And I think people need to get that because it’s really an important question when you’re going through this, um, to ask your doctor, is it bioidentical or am I getting something synthetic? They might not even know.

So, you know, do your own research yourself. I’ve got, Oh no, I’ve had that with doctors. They’re like, Oh no, it’s body identical. It’s not. It’s a synthetic one. So a patch, if you’re using HRT, that’s estrogen and allegedly progesterone, it’s not, it’s a synthetic in that it’s a [00:13:00] synthetic in the marina coil.

You know, it’s, these are synthetic hormones and. You know, early in the early phases of perimenopause, progesterone is the hormone that drops off a cleft, right? So women start to feel a bit more scratchy about things, a bit more overwhelmed. Their capacity to do things isn’t quite the same. And this doesn’t happen overnight.

It’s like a slow erosion of your soul where this happens, right? And you’re suddenly like, how have I got here? You know, the things that you, what happens in perimenopause, and there’s a spiritual journey to this, which we can come to. But. The woman inside that you know that you are, this powerhouse of a woman, this strong woman, the essence of who you are, suddenly isn’t matching up with how you’re showing up in life.

You’ll look at things and go, How am I, why am I finding this stressful? I never would have found this stressful. This is progesterone deficiency. Okay. Our capacity to cope is massively minimized. Our sleep gets disrupted. We’re not getting the good quality sleep. You know, we’re more reactive. We’re more [00:14:00] irritated.

So to link this to PMDD, historically, and we need so much more research. Women are so under researched, I can’t tell you. But, Historically, we’ve kind of got this hypothesis that actually maybe it was one of the metabolites of progesterone that caused PMDD that was this problem, but actually there was some incredible work by Dr.

Katerina Dalton about 75 years ago, and she actually turned the coin PMDD. And she found that treating women with very high doses of body identical progesterone, not the pill, not synthetics, turned around PMDD in women. It, she was treating, um, and pioneered since, uh, looking at bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, all these things with this natural molecule because of the impact it has on the brain.

So, There has been this theory around progesterone causing it, but it’s interesting as you are now using progesterone with this to [00:15:00] get to the right levels. But the challenge is now coming that not enough prescribers are familiar with these protocols of high doses of progesterone to treat this condition.

So women might become, you know, listen to something like this podcast, become informed, and then not be able to access that. But you’re lucky in the States because you can buy it over the counter there, you know, in quite high doses compared to us Here in the UK, we can’t do that.

Exciting news friends are all new membership kicks off January 1st. And I couldn’t be more thrilled to invite you to join us this year. We’ve simplified everything with 12 powerful courses designed to help you connect with your angels. Take control of your destiny and use your intuitive gifts. To transform your entire personal world, your relationship, professional successes, your healing journey.

Plus you’ll get live weekly calls with me for hands on guidance [00:16:00] and support. Bonus for members, my January course manifest miracles with aligned co creation is free for you. Perfect for starting off 2025 with Aligned Miracles. Non members can grab one of the limited paid spots. And for those looking to start their own healing business, join the Angel Reiki School in person this April, or start your journey online January 1st.

You’re gonna learn mediumship, how to be an angel messenger, and energy healing all at once. And as a gift to everyone who listens to this podcast, on December 30th at 7 p. m. Central Time, I’m holding a free healing for you to clear out all All of the energy from 2024 and really clear out what’s not serving you.

And then again, on January 1st at noon, central time, I’m hosting a free two hour workshop where you’re going to learn how to invite miracles into your [00:17:00] 2025 and make this your best year yet. If you’re ready to step into a miraculous 2025, sign up for all of this and more@theangelmedium.com slash events.

That’s the angel medium.com/events, or email me at julie@theangelmedium.com for more information. I can’t wait to spend all of 2025 with you in the Angel membership. Love you, friends. Now back to the show. Um, I started off with, and I noticed, because I’m a great sleeper, but I started to notice when I turned 40, my sleep started to go down.

And, you know, I know that people are like, Julie, you can’t go through perimenopause that early, but I swear, everybody in my family was just, early into menopause. Um, and side note, some places here in the state’s gynecology offices, they’ll have you go in and they’ll be [00:18:00] like, Oh, well now you got to go over here for blood work on a different day and make a different appointment.

I didn’t realize until a couple of years ago that there are some offices that you can go into a gynecology office. I love female led gynecology offices, um, that have blood work centers right in them. So you just go over, do your blood work, and they’ve got it. It makes everything so much easier. Um, but they started putting me on a hundred milligrams.

of progesterone. And they said, once you get to day 14 of your cycle, then take 200. And then things changed a little bit more. So they just had me do 200 milligrams every day. I have a little bit of fear and trepidation about Okay, if this is how crazy my hormones are and how much they impact me in my early 40s, how much does that continue to change as I go through this process and enter [00:19:00] menopause?

What is the doses of progesterone that sometimes people go up to? Oh, huge. So we know that humans can tolerate incredibly high levels of progesterone. And we know this because when we’re pregnant, we are like our brain and body are swimming in progesterone. So quite often neurodivergent women find their traits go when they’re pregnant.

And that is largely to do with the progesterone. And so we have these very high levels that even in doses at that level cannot reach anywhere near that in a lab. We just can’t say fetuses in utero. They, um, are swimming around for months in these incredibly high doses of progesterone. So we can tolerate this.

And most women are progesterone deficient from a young age. We know women are starting menopause a lot younger. Okay. 40 is not unusual for that, for that to be happening. You might be gaslit medically about that, but we know that that is the case. And there’s a big link with [00:20:00] adrenals there, which we might be able to come back to.

But progesterone. is used with in cortisol production. Okay. So cortisol is the queen bee when it comes to how the body prioritizes hormone production. Most of us have a very dysregulated stress response. It’s called our HPA axis, and that is burning through cortisol and our 24 hour pinging and dinging lifestyle, right?

When that cortisol starts to get depleted, the body says, well, we can’t have this because we need the cortisol to stay. to keep us alive. So it will steal progesterone. You know, it’s much more, it’s a very complex process, but that’s in a nutshell what happens. So we become progesterone deficient when we are stressed.

So for example, Julie, you may be on a dose of progesterone. I’d be like, Oh, this is lovely. I’m sleeping better. My mood’s a lot better. And then something stressful. Yeah. Happens in your life. Okay. And it’s going to be a holiday because it’s fun. It’s still like, could be quite stressful traveling and this kind of thing.

And then you’re like, Oh, I’m feeling [00:21:00] scratchy again. My sleep’s gone. This is because the progesterone is being moved in the body to serve a purpose of the cortisol. So women can find increasing their progesterone through periods of stress, really beneficial to stopping that cortisol the nervous system.

And then, you know, you might want to reduce it down once. Your everything’s settled down again. So this is really powerful. Wow. I did not know that, but that is just a huge aha moment. So when your adrenals are just running and you are so super stressed that the cortisone is cranking up, your body steals your progesterone reserves.

To, and so that just kind of leads you to feel completely depleted and just, wow. Yeah. Women without sufficient progesterone just don’t feel like themselves. You can’t hook into the [00:22:00] joy and it’s not because you’re depressed. You’ll sit there and go, it’s my child’s birthday party. I, everyone’s having a great time.

Why can’t I hook in? Like I should be excited about this. I should feel good about this. But all I’m thinking about is I’ve got to clear this away. Why is everyone going? Why can’t I just relax? You know, that’s like progesterone deficiency. Holy cow. So the reason that I wanted to have this, uh, conversation with you too, is how can you just be in tune with your spiritual self or just in your own energy?

If your hormones aren’t right, like you don’t feel like yourself. So I just don’t know that you can be. wanting to meditate and take care of yourself and do all of the things when you just feel so depleted. So I think this is such a big topic to me because I say I bridge the science and the woo because that’s my personality.

50 percent of me is a [00:23:00] nerd. I want the research, give me the data. And the other 50 percent is so in what I call the spiritual side of it. That’s really important to me to bridge these two as particularly as women. And there is a really spiritual, a real spiritual side to being a cyclical being going through these different phases each month when we are menstruating, but in terms of the spiritual element of the different phases of our lives, which I’ll talk about.

So I think that’s, that’s one element of it, but to speak to what you specifically asked there, it’s really easy to be good. When you feel good, right? Like when we feel good, we’re up making the smoothie, we’re doing the yoga, we’re doing the breathwork, we’re doing our spiritual practices, you know, we’ve got the capacity to do all of that.

When we don’t have the capacity, it’s really hard to hook in to make, because what we want to do is sit on the Netflix, right? That, that’s like, Oh, because our vibration has gone down because of how our body isn’t being nourished in the [00:24:00] way that it needs to be to feel good and be able to operate at specific frequencies to be able to do that spiritual work.

And then as women are in a critic gets loud and nourished, not by just like the stuff that we always hear, but nourished by the just general hormones that we need. Yeah. When I say nourished, I’m not talking about diet. Okay. I am so over this narrative that we need to deplete and take away and work hard to feel good.

No. Like particularly in perimenopause is what do we give back? What does my body and my soul need to operate in the way that my body needs to? And what I want to do to bring this together is to explain that from a human evolution point, um, It wasn’t that long ago that we were living very differently to how we are now.

And our body hasn’t caught up to with the evolution of what’s required of it. But as women, we were in tribes. Okay. And if [00:25:00] we were lucky enough to live this long to reach perimenopause, because we, a lot of us died in childbirth and disease and you know, all the things we didn’t all live this long. But our role within that culture would have changed.

We wouldn’t because our in alignment with our physiological hormonal changes. So we would have gone from very external givers, high on estrogen, high on progesterone, where we’re looking after the children, we’re cooking the food, we’re, you know, hunting, whatever we’re doing, which works really well with that physiology.

But we knew that as those hormones shipped out, we were being called inward. We were being called to activate our intuition. Maybe our psychic abilities would have been used for our wisdom and as space holders, which is exactly the alignment, the mismatch. It’s that our society and culture doesn’t allow for that.

So we are trying to still show up like we did in our twenties and thirties with these high estrogen and progesterone levels at a time that our body’s saying, no, this isn’t what you’re meant to [00:26:00] be doing. So that’s like a cultural shift that is affecting our ability to shop as we need to. Ideally, we’d be sat in red tents, round a fire, waiting for women to come in and seek our counsel.

That’s really aligned to a perimenopausal journey. Not going, I’ve got to be at work, I’ve got to get the kids, I’ve got, I’ve got, you know, the whirring white noise of our never ending to do list. So the way that I work with women around this, is to honor the different phases and to work with the female archetypes of that season of your life and that season of your cycle if you are still cycling.

Wow. It, it, I felt this energetic release of just allowing and giving permission to yourself this freedom to step into a different phase and to, um, Just be in a way, you know, I think so many of us can [00:27:00] come into a phase where we can just be more release some of the worry, release some of the to do list and you’re right.

Let people more so come to us when they need us. And, you know, the, uh, the archetypes I like to associate with each season is the maiden, the mother, the enchantress, and the crown. And perimenopause is very much the enchantress. And each phase has strengths and shadows, right? And the shadow of this phase is big because Of our culture, you know, the snappy, the aggressor, you know, this kind of, but actually the, the strengths is empowerment.

It’s knowing ourselves, it’s boundaries, it’s releasing and shedding what no longer serves us. You know, it’s, this is the work of this time. Is. Trusting the self, you know, we’ve got this far in life with a lot of experience. You know, we’re no longer the naive maiden in our twenties out there. You know, we’ve moved through the mother phase [00:28:00] to a degree of that total dependency and creativity.

And we’re in this stage of our life where it’s like, who am I now? I can speak my truth, you know, the empowerment. And when those elements aren’t allowed to be expressed, it shows up, right. It shows up in our symptoms. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I think so many people hear about Maiden Mother Crow, um, Crone, but you don’t often hear about the Enchantress.

Uh, explain her more. Yeah, so she’s evil stepmother, right? She’s the one in fairy tales that no one likes. I mean, no one likes to be called the Crow. They’re like, oh my gosh, I like the old hag. And that’s not actually what it means. It’s a lot about wisdom and experience. But the Enchantress, she’s like, she’s powerful.

She’s the bit. The archetype in society that patriarchy doesn’t want because she doesn’t tolerate any crap. You know, she really stands in her truth. She’s a pioneer for social justice. She doesn’t [00:29:00] tolerate unacceptable behavior. We don’t live in a world that wants women to be well. Because when women are well and strong, we push for social justice.

We do good things with money. You know, all these things that our world is craving, actually a big patriarchal culture doesn’t want that. So the enchantress has almost been eradicated because we don’t want her. She’s powerful. I mean, women are powerful in each season, but there’s a lot of power in this phase because we have knowledge.

We have experience. experience. We have a voice. Estrogen, our people pleasing hormone is shipped out. You know, we’ve not got those levels, so we’re not here to keep everyone, you know, make everyone comfortable and people pleased. That season is gone. We’re here to speak our truth because it comes from a place of wisdom and experience and love.

And that is what we’re being called to do. Oh, I could talk to you for forever. I want to keep going because I have another half an hour, so I’m going to use it wisely. But, um, I just keep thinking I could talk to you for forever, [00:30:00] Adele. This is so amazing. Um, I have a friend who’s on estrogen, bioidentical estrogen, which I didn’t even know was a thing.

And, progesterone. How would they know that you need the estrogen too? Do a lot of people need that extra estrogen as you’re going through perimenopause? How do you understand that piece? So, um, your symptoms, okay. A good practitioner will be able to detect what’s going on for you largely through your symptoms.

There is no Test for perimenopause. If a practitioner says to you, we need to do a blood test to see if you’re perimenopause, it’s pointless. Do not work with that person. Okay. It cannot do that. Your hormones pulse. So the second that you have that blood test of that day of that cycle, it will be a very accurate reading, but five minutes later, it will look completely different.

But with the progesterone only, it’s really common because actually in the first phase of perimenopause, that’s the hormone that ships out. So it’s silly to add in all this extra oestrogen [00:31:00] when the body doesn’t need it, and actually oestrogen is a builder, we don’t want that in there, we just want to keep the mood going really well, right?

And protecting the body and the nervous system. So then, when we step into, like, usually the second phase of perimenopause, this is where Estrogen can be really high sometimes, really low, but generally much lower, and it does this, she kind of has a party by herself, okay, so you can have symptoms of too much and too little, so that’s a really fun time, but it will be at that point where you start to get symptoms of estrogen deficiency, okay, and this is going to look different in everybody, there’s not this set time, it’s just being really connected to your body and your shifts, and things you might notice, but estrogen is, um, a lower mood.

brain fog, although these can be related to progesterone as well, heart palpitations, um, painful vagina, hot flushes, um, these are very itchy skin starting to become, um, a bit more allergy. These kinds of things start to show us there’s [00:32:00] something going on with estrogen here. Estrogen’s like juicy. Maybe your eyes are starting to feel dry.

Maybe your joints are starting to feel achy, you know, these kind, all different kinds of symptoms. It could be tingly sensations in your hands. These are all estrogen. Interesting. So let’s go back to the brain fog because that ties in with The hormones and the ADHD, uh, it’s not easy for me to just pick one of the things that’s in my brain and go do it naturally, but then to have this extra brain fog, which is intense, like, it is much more, so much so, like, That I actually traded in, I still have my regular iPhone to do videos and whatnot for social media, but I traded it in on my day to day for a flip phone because I don’t like how much my phone takes me away and just the brain fog.

What [00:33:00] can we do for the brain fog? When I’m saying hormones, I’m not just talking about estrogen and progesterone, testosterone. I’m saying insulin, your blood sugar regulation, your adrenal function, your thyroid, your gut elimination, your liver detoxification, all of these things affect your hormones in the body.

And when you get a woman’s hormones, right, so many of the other things fall off, right? They’re much better. You know, these symptoms we’re carrying kind of go. Now, brain fog conventionally is linked through to estrogen. Okay, because oestrogen sensitizes dopamine and serotonin, a woman’s brain is covered in oestrogen and progesterone receptors.

And if a receptor has, a cell has a receptor on it, it means that cell depends on it that to do its job properly. So as these hormones decline and they’re not in the right ratios to each other, of course the symptoms are going to flare up. Perimenopause is this recalibration that takes about 15 years of the body and the brain of going, Oh gosh, how do we do this now?

Okay. Okay. So. Estrogen can be effective at supporting with that, and if you are a [00:34:00] neurodivergent woman, your traits are going to flare up without it. You know, we’re going to have a trickier perimenopause in most cases because we’ve coped or thrived or survived, whatever your journey has been this far, thanks to our hormones and suddenly they go.

So where so many women get diagnosed in perimenopause. And suddenly it’s like, Oh my gosh, what is this? So it’s always been there, but the hormones are protected. So I’d look at estrogen. I’d also look at testosterone or cognitive function. Testosterone plays a big role for mood and cognitive function, confidence, assertiveness, all these amazing things.

But also what’s your blood sugar regulation like? If your blood sugar is dysregulated, as estrogen declines, insulin doesn’t work so well, and we see inflammation. Okay. Inflammation affects the brain. What is going on with your gut health? There is a really strong gut brain link. And if your gut is inflamed, your brain, you’re going to have neuroinflammation because the bacteria is going to come through the gut, get into the blood, cross the blood brain barrier.

And we’re going to see neuroinflammation [00:35:00] there. You know, are there any nutrient deficiencies? What’s happening with your adrenal function? Okay. So what’s happening with your thyroid? We really want to look at all of these things because they can play a role. And something I see happening with women is they try to use HRT to treat symptoms being caused by something else.

So if you are having issues with your sleep and your energy levels and your mood because of insulin resistance, no amount of oestrogen is going to change that. But unfortunately, They’re not going to look at that. They’re just going to go, Oh, up your estrogen. And that can be quite harmful. So it really is the systemic response to get to the bottom of what’s causing that in your body.

Friends, I’m pausing for 30 seconds because I love, love, love connecting with you. And I want to connect with you more. Got a question? Let me answer it for you on the podcast. The link to submit your questions is in the show notes. Also, we need your angel stories. Share your angel stories at theangelmedium.

[00:36:00] com backslash contact. And last but not least, leave a five star review and you could win a free 20 minute session. Last year, I did 56 free readings for review winners. All links are in the show notes. Thank you for listening. Now back to the show when I, so I’ve been, I haven’t told the podcast community this yet, but I’ve been going through some health stuff and it’s scary at first because you’re like, do I have the big C and your brain starts going and you don’t know exactly what’s going on.

And I don’t know about the UK, but something happened here. You know, I know we’re in almost 2025 here, but, um, And, and it’s been a while since COVID, but you can’t get in to see your doctors right away. Like it’s two, three months, you know, sometimes to get in to see a specialist. I can’t get into see my primary for eight weeks.

Um, basically in my area and we live in the suburbs of Chicago, which is one of the [00:37:00] bigger cities of the world. Uh, you have to go to basically like an urgent care for any little thing. Um, It is. It’s a complete mess. So, I’m just wondering, what is it that, what tests this? What tests blood sugar regulation?

How do you know if it’s blood sugar regulation? What tests adrenal function? And how do you really look at those two things? When we deal with adrenal function and blood sugar regulation, about 70 percent of the symptoms kind of go, okay, because this is so fundamental to what’s happening. In fact, there’s a big argument, I think, for menopause to actually be called adrenopause because it’s an adrenal issue.

But I can come back to that. So to answer your question, It’s through symptoms, you know, it’s looking at if you want to look at what your blood sugar is doing, you can get a continuous glucose monitor at home, they’re about 50 pounds in the UK for two weeks, you put it in your arm, you get instant data, and you can see what your blood sugar is [00:38:00] doing.

Is it going up, down, up, down? Or is it more of a gentle rolling wave? Are you noticing your mood, your emotions, your energy being really different depending on whether it’s peaking or troughing? Is that what’s waking you up at three o’clock in the morning? This is usually blood sugar regulation. And with your adrenal function, one of the biggest things that I’m looking at is what is your energy pattern during the day?

You know, are you someone who wakes up and feel like you’re staple gun to the bed? Are you somebody who gets this second wind of the evening? Are you somebody who has like a 3pm energy crash in the afternoon? Mo I am Very rarely meet a woman whose nervous system is not dysregulated. And what is the best way for that adrenal function?

I would think like meditation and spiritual practices and somatics and. Definitely for me, you know, there are these practices, you know, I have quite a strong view around meditations for women can look different to, you know, maybe some of the more conventional teachings, but somatic practices, but how you eat.

[00:39:00] You know, if you aren’t getting up and eating 30 grams of protein within an hour of waking up, you’re going to stress your adrenals. If you are having a very carb based meal, you are going to stress your adrenals. Is there an underlying virus or infection in your body? Your adrenals will be stressed. It’s not just this typical, um, You know, the things we tend to perceive as stress, a lot of women can’t control their conditions that are stressing them out.

Right. So we have to find practices like, you know, that we can weave in during the day, these little resets and nourish ourselves. Women are depleted. Women are, you know, Doing diets where they’re removing whole macro nutrients. I mean, I could do a whole podcast with you on that and the stress that causes.

Women need carbs, fats, and proteins. Okay. We need a good amount of calories. We don’t need to be on calorie restricted diets. We shouldn’t be doing fasted exercise. All these things annihilate your adrenals, drinking caffeine on an empty [00:40:00] stomach. You know, all these things that so many women do as the norm are stressing their adrenals.

Even if they don’t have any stresses in their life, they, their body will be stressed. Where is the playbook on all of this? Like, I’m a rule follower. Give me the rules, I’ll follow the rules. Where are the rules? It’s understanding that a lot of the advice that we’re given around our health comes from studies based on men.

And therefore very well meaning practitioners share advice that works really well for men on women’s bodies, but actually depletes our hormone function. I mean, it’s not boring to you to like, basically women have this second sensor in their brain that men don’t have. And this sensor is what kicks off ovulation and hormone production.

And this is all your body’s trying to do as a woman. It just wants to get you pregnant. It doesn’t realize you’re a super woman out here doing your thing. It just wants to get you pregnant, right? So this sensor is going. Is there, are all the macronutrients here to make a baby? Is cortisol high? Is [00:41:00] cortisol low?

Is there inflammation? Is there infection? X’s aren’t ticked. I’m just gonna go, don’t make a baby this month, don’t ovulate, right? It would have been a great contraception when we were cave girls. It would have protected us. But the problem is that’s going off all the time because our phone doesn’t stop pinging and we’ve got a thousand things that need to be achieved in a day.

And we’re not eating properly and we’re over exercising and we’re restricting our diets and, and, and, and, and, and that sensor is going, don’t, don’t ovulate, it’s dangerous out there. Fascinating. It is because I noticed a huge, huge difference on days when I only use my flip phone versus the days when I get sucked in on my iPhone.

Um, because you’re right. Like it’s constantly triggering you to just be on and we need to be able to turn ourselves off. Um, okay. I’ve got so many more questions. So one [00:42:00] of the things, um, That has come up for me. They did a surgery when I was younger, maybe 17, 20 years ago, I get cysts and had one inside my ovary blew up from the size of a golf ball to the size of a grapefruit one weekend, and they went in to take it out and when they did, they go, okay, and by the way, you’ve got a lot of endometriosis all over in there.

Um, And I’ve been going in because I think that, looking back, I’ve had endometriosis flare ups, which to me, almost feel like fibromyalgia, but just from like your lower back to your, your lady parts all in the front, um, and it’s just, Imagine having a chronic level four or five pain that you just can’t do anything about, can’t get rid of.

Um, how, how do you [00:43:00] work with endometriosis? Because everybody that I go into is like, we’ll just get everything removed, like just get a hysterectomy. And, and then they’re like, but. You can’t get your ovaries removed because that could cause cardiac issues. And you’ve already got cardiac stuff in your family.

But then if you don’t get your ovaries removed, then, um, you, the endometriosis can keep growing. First of all, medically, they can’t really do anything about endometriosis or most women’s health issues. Actually, they’re just not equipped to deal with that. So surgery can be an option for some women, but it doesn’t cure it.

Now endometriosis for me, although it gets lumped in women’s health and I obviously see a lot of it has more of an autoimmune type feel to it. Okay. And I just get the sense, I haven’t done a consultation on you. So, you know, this isn’t like a professional opinion, but just more and more information that you give me, I just get this sense that you’ve spent your life probably in an oestrogen dominant state.

Okay. [00:44:00] This is something that we see with cysts. We see like, you know, it doesn’t cause endometriosis, but they have this interplay together. And that doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily produce too much oestrogen, just that there hasn’t been sufficient progesterone. You’re You know, you bring your progesterone in your body’s like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing.

Thank you. And, you know, with endometriosis, there are some incredible practitioners out there who specialize in this, but I’m really curious for me as a practitioner with this, I want to have a look at how is your body methylating and processing the hormones inside it through the liver? Cause this can have a big impact.

What is going on in your gut? There’s usually a big gut link here. Um, and that’s really important for how the body is eliminating hormones. We have a specific microbiome in the gut. Um, and quite often endo women tend to find that they have, um, got issues like SIBO, for example, alongside it. So it really is a whole body approach, a lot of nervous system work.

I’m really moving away from, again, [00:45:00] this restrictive diet and lifestyle finding, you know, ways to really nourish yourself. So I work quite differently with women, but progesterone would feature a lot in there. Yeah. One other piece, you know, at the beginning of this, we kind of linked and, and I wanted to say it earlier, but I really do believe that there are a lot of people here within the States who are telling women that they are bipolar when they really just have PMDD.

Um, so. And part of that for me is with the PMDD, I’ve had suicidal thoughts off and on since I was 14 years old. And the way that I explain it to my doctor is I have a higher than average set point of joy. I’m more happy go lucky. Um, but there are times, especially when I’m on medicines too, that say may cause suicidal thoughts.

Um, but also when I [00:46:00] started tracking my periods, noticing that the closer that you would get to that period, um, these thoughts that you just don’t want to be having start to creep in. Um, what can you tell us about this? Where I work with women around PMDD is getting the progesterone right. but also looking at blood sugar regulation, gut and inflammation generally.

And when we work on that relatively quickly, we make significant improvements in symptoms. And, and it’s, it’s quite simple. It’s not always easy, particularly if there’s ADHD mixed in with that because consistency and change is not always our friend. But you know, there are huge changes that you can make through lifestyle, but no one’s teaching you this.

So that’s the approach that I would take. And when we get that right, things like the intrusive thoughts, they all calm down. Interesting. So you talked about liver process, [00:47:00] gut, figuring out if you have like SIBO or different things. What are the testing protocols or where do people go in order to figure those things out?

So unfortunately, it’s through conventional medicine testing. You’re probably not going to get a lot of help. Um, sometimes the gut tests that they do can shine a light on some things, but for me, it’s very much about functional testing. So the best test, in my opinion, to look at the liver methylation is something called the Dutch test.

Which is a urine test that tests your hormones, but for me, and your adrenal function, which is really helpful, but for me, the gold in that test is looking at what the body is doing with these, with these estrogens. So that’s a really effective, um, test for some women. Um, and then if you want to look at what’s going on in the gut, then there’s some amazing gut tests that look at parasites, viruses, yeasts, all the different bacterias, and you can really see what’s going on in there.

You know, for full disclosure, I’m not a practitioner [00:48:00] who is like, Oh my gosh, we have to test everything because they’re expensive. These things, you know, are a privilege to have access to, but sometimes they give you that information that is really invaluable. So I will always take approach of going, look, this is what I think is going on.

Let’s do some work on that. Um, and things should start to improve. And if they don’t, we need some more data of what’s going on. You know, if there’s somebody with symptoms like yours, you’ve had these lifelong debilitating symptoms, like let’s really see what’s going on and take a really clear evidence based approach so that we can speed the healing process up.

Oh, so fascinating. Um, I know that you, you’re just so amazing at all of this. I wonder if there’s anything that’s just calling to your heart to let our listeners know, because it’s 99. 99 percent women listening and they’re either going through this, have just been through this and need to feel like they’re not crazy or they know somebody who’s going to be going through it.

And it makes me feel quite emotional, like [00:49:00] connecting in with this. I see so much suffering. In women, and I want women to know they don’t need to suffer. It’s like it’s ingrained in us that just by being a woman. That we’re meant to suffer, you know, and that’s not true. There is so much that we can do. You deserve to feel really good no matter what season of your life you are in.

So I think it’s one really checking in with how bad are you waiting for it to get before you get help for this and reach out for it. So that’s one thing that you don’t need to suffer. But also I think I want to shine a light on something I’m very passionate about at the moment is how traumatic it can feel for a woman to ask for help medically.

If they have had a history of being gaslit, if they’ve had a history of kind of being made to feel like they’re hypochondriacs, that it’s in their head, they’ve had bloods done that have just said, there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s normal. Like, this is such a traumatizing experience for women and leaves [00:50:00] women feeling so alone and so scared about what do I do with this then?

Why do I feel like this if there’s nothing wrong with me? And from a medical perspective, sometimes they’re right because they’re not. For them, they’re not meeting a diagnosis level, so they’ve got no medication to offer them. So they’re like, I haven’t, there’s nothing wrong with you, but that’s not true.

It’s just that there are symptoms there that the medical world isn’t capable of dealing with. It will be dealt with in another way. And I think we have to trust that. Trust our intuition. Trust when something doesn’t feel right. We are intuitive beings. You know, our superpowers are when our body tells us something or we get that feeling and our intuition, you know, and your luteal phase and perimenopause is the power Connecting with that intuition, you know, don’t let anyone else shut you down around it.

Oh, you’re amazing. Adele, tell everybody where they can find you, your business, and please consider writing some books in the future because, uh, I can tell you as an avid [00:51:00] reader, this information is just not out there enough and in the way that you frame it, which is the way that we need it. Thank you. Wow.

I’m, I’m. I’m Harmonize You on Instagram where you’ll often find me ranting about the failings of women’s health, but hopefully, you know, I love to connect. I’ve got an amazing community of women there and there’s loads of free resources on my website, which is harmonizeyou. co. uk. Oh, wonderful. We’ll put all of that in the show notes below.

Thank you for being you. And thank you so much for dedicating your life to this and, and just showing us all the way. I so appreciate you. Thank you. I appreciate you having me. You too. If this podcast aligns with you and you feel called to work with me, thank you. Your support keeps this angel podcast alive.

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