Free Me From the P M D D

A personal guide to how I alleviate my symptoms

Hello and welcome - if you’re new here, I’m Jolie and Messy She Wrote is a newsletter where I talk about life and parenting after divorce and religion. There are other topics thrown in, too, like today’s post about PMDD. Some of my content is free (like today) and some is exclusively for my paying subscribers. You can sign up for $5 a month if you skim the archives and decide you want full access, or just find my content helpful and want to support a single mom. I send out two pieces a month to subscribers via email.

Onward to PMDD!

[If you’re here just for the list of supplement recommendations, scroll to the bottom!] 

I remember the first time I understood that I had depression, and, what I later realized was PMDD. I was twenty or so, still living with my mother and extremely stretched thin with work, overtime college courses, church leadership involvement, and a long distance relationship. At that age I had little to no metrics for understanding mental health, knowing only that I seemed to struggle a lot with mood swings and irritability which I chalked up to personal failure. I had so much shame because I could see how I acted in real time and desperately wanted to feel and be better, but even my most concerted efforts fell short. I remember a turning point where in the midst of feeling my worst and snapping at my mother, she looked at me and said, “Something is really wrong with you.” 

From that point forward I sought help first from my father, who had a long history with understanding and treating his own mental illness. He taught me so much, from holistic approaches that centered my lifestyle to letting go of the shame I had in using medication. I have struggled with having major depressive disorder and anxiety throughout adulthood, along with postpartum depression and anxiety, and eventually, a diagnosis of PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder. 

PMDD is characterized by extreme PMS symptoms during your luteal phase that are so disruptive both psychologically and physically that they prohibit you from participating regularly in your life. I map my cycle religiously through an app, and discovered that most of my relational friction happened within the 10 days before I bled. In that window of time I was often depressed to the point of dissociating, highly irritable, and struggled keeping up with basic functions of home and work. The “good” weeks of my cycle always felt like a desperate attempt to recover from the bad ones. 

Exhibit A: moral support from friends during PMDD

I have found it disheartening how many women tell me they have also been diagnosed with PMDD, with little to no understanding of the disorder from their family, workplace, or doctor. My own (phenomenal) doctor didn’t seem to have much to offer me aside from the suggestion that I try intermittently using (or upping) an SSRI during my luteal phase (directly after ovulating, until bleeding). I haven’t found much success with this, and decided to experiment elsewhere. I’d love to share what works for me, and to let you know that anything I link here is an affiliate link, but all are products I have tried, regularly used, and found substantially helpful. An obvious caveat here is that I am not a medical professional and am simply sharing my personal experience.

Lastly I want to note that using supplements for your health can become expensive quickly. I will give you an exhaustive list of options I have found success with, but I encourage you to try the most affordable options first - I’ve managed to keep costs down now that I’ve narrowed down what I need most. Additionally, I often use these products on an as-needed basis, based on my own reading of the stress I am under in any given month, and how badly I feel I need help managing my PMDD. Some of these products I use only 6-10 times per month, so they last quite a while. 

Before I get to products, the unfortunate news we already know is that a huge factor of PMDD is hormones, and a huge factor of hormones relates to stress management. All of the basic building blocks you use to move smoothly through life will have an effect on how the worst days of your cycle play out. So if in the first half of your cycle you are not drinking water, getting 5-6 hours of sleep, highly stressed, not exercising, and eating a lot of processed food, it’s not going to flip the script fast enough if you only start dialing in when you feel the onset of PMDD. 

So the first answer is, get your stress ducks in a row. Take stress management seriously in your life. I don’t think anyone needs me to blog about what that looks like (but I can if I’m wrong there!) we all just need to assess how badly we actually want to feel better and what we can do to achieve that. For me, it meant that I took genuine stock of what I could reasonably change, and making approachable goals to baby step my way to a better place. I began tracking with a chart on my wall of how often I could hit the first two goals I chose (details below).

Like a potty training toddler, I got prizes for myself if I hit my goals 75% of the month. Over time, I added more things like upping my water intake, a measly five minutes of meditation, visualization, or journaling per day, and making a goal to read in the evening rather than be on my phone. I will list the lifestyle things I focused on as well as supplements below that I use when I need help taking my stress levels down. 

The next answer I stumbled upon is histamines! If you’re a woman you probably know there’s like….little to no research medically on issues exclusive to women. But one of my readers tipped me off to researcher Lara Briden, who has come up with a connection between histamine levels and PMDD. In a nutshell, it’s possible that for some people the extremeness of your PMDD can be decreased by lowering your histamine levels.

I make an effort to do this dietarily by avoiding high histamine foods and foods that raise your histamine levels after ingestion like alcohol, processed meats, fermented or aged dairy, tomatoes, bananas, beans, and a few other things. I also researched some supplements that help your body lower your histamine levels, listed below.

Ok, what you came for! Tools to help manage stress, mood, anxiety, and histamines:

Sam-E Sam-E is something I have found useful for when I prefer not to be on an SSRI. It is traditionally used for mood stabilization, among other things like joint health and, amazingly, histamine management! So this one is killing two birds with one stone. I take this from the time that I ovulate until I bleed, and if I’m particularly stressed with work or life, I take it for the whole month as it is fairly affordable ($28 bucks for three months supply.)

OLLY Ultra Goodbye Stress Years ago I saw a naturopath for GI issues and inadvertently discovered my hormones were also fucked (lol, of course.) He recommended a laundry list of supplements (like GABA, L-Theanine, etc.) to help manage my anxiety and stress without an SSRI, and they were all really expensive. This OLLY supplement has almost all of them at the most affordable price. I will include one other that was useful to me that is much more expensive if you’re looking to bring out the big guns, but this one has really helped me, and it lasts me 2 months because I only take it for the luteal phase of my cycle. 

SeroSyn This is the aforementioned big guns of naturopath anxiety and stress supplements. I eventually opted for a more affordable option, but this is very effective if you have the means! It contains a shitton of vitamin B-12, B-6, and also Chinese skullcap, L-Theanine, L-5-HTP, and ginseng.

Fish oil / Vitamin D I take vitamin D September through March or April! I don’t always take fish oil (it’s kinda expensive, that’s the theme) but I do buy a honking thing of vitamin D capsules from Costco that lasts like, a decade. If you’re into fish oil, my dad swears by Carlson’s actual oil in a bottle and only Carlson’s, which I have linked. When I buy fish oil, I take it like once a week to make it last. Eating salmon is also a great way to get that vitamin D and the omega fatty acids more naturally. 

Relax Max  Another successful recommendation from the naturopath I saw. This is one of the priciest supplements on my recommendation list and I definitely use it sparingly, typically before bed when I feel especially frayed. It definitely helps! 

To help your body process histamines specifically: 

Vitamin B-6, Magnesium, Vitamin C, Zinc, and for acute need (like say you feel yourself actively having a noticeably bad PMDD day) an antihistamine, like Pepcid-AC. 

Lifestyle: The more of these you can make into a habit, the better. Please don’t focus on total mastery. Just be lovingly happy for yourself anytime you get around to these more. Focus less on getting an A+ and more on just increasing the amount that any of these things happen consistently throughout the month. Please don’t give yourself an eating or lifestyle disorder trying to be perfect, ok? I have found personally that it feels so fucking GOOD to feel good and not rocked constantly by hormones, and that is motivation enough for me: 

• Appropriate water intake

• Eating real breakfast! And before I drink coffee!

• Eating regularly throughout the day

• At least 8 hours of sleep (I KNOW, EW.)

• Movement, including lifting weights

• Getting outside (sitting or walking)

• Less caffeine and alcohol 

• Less processed foods + sugar

• Managing stress (turn off phone, say no more, journal, somatic stretching/tapping)

• Unwinding - I lay on a needle mat at the end of the day and love it

Lastly, if it helps any, my personal routine is below. This has taken me from 7-10 days of extreme PMDD (depression, parental and relational upset, inability to focus at work and at home, malaise, excessive crying) to maybe 2-3 days of feeling poorly but manageably so.

Day 1 through ovulation of my cycle:  I take care to manage my lifestyle and take a daily vitamin and probiotic, and, in the winter months, a vitamin D. Let me be clear, this isn’t me suggesting you have a 3 hour influencer lifestyle morning routine. This means I aim for 75% success rate at drinking two of my 40 oz. cups of water a day, intentional movement - ideally outside - 4x a week, executing loose meal planning that doesn’t have me in the Wendy’s drive through, and getting to bed by 10:30pm. I also sometimes integrate somatic tapping, stretching, dancing, or kundalini yoga to release stress and emotion from my body.

Ovulation through bleeding of my cycle: I maintain my lifestyle mentioned above, and begin integrating the OLLY ultra goodbye stress, Sam-E, Vitamin B-6, and Magnesium. I take these after I eat breakfast, and I also minimize my caffeine intake to ideally one cup of coffee a day. If I drink coffee, I do not drink it until I’ve eaten breakfast. My exercise focuses more on walking and weight lifting, less on high energy cardio, and when I feel like I’m going to fall asleep at 8:45pm, I let my body do that! On days when I’ve used all my resources and still feel terrible, I take a Pepcid AC (antihistamine).

I hope this helps - please, please feel free to share with me and others below any additional success you’ve found managing your PMS/PMDD.

XO,

Jolie