Welcome to Pain Free Periods with Stasha Podcast

This transcript is done by my video editing software and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

S1E5 Stress
Stasha: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Pain-Free Periods with Stasha. I am your host, Stasha the Period Coach, an endometriosis survivor, at least that’s what it feels like some days, and your guide to period pain solutions that actually work. So over the last few episodes, we have covered three out of the four root causes of period pain: hormonal imbalance, chronic inflammation, and nutrient deficiencies.
Today we are going to tackle the fourth root cause. Now, this isn’t to say that these are the only causes, but these are the four really big ones. These are what most of us, the vast majority of us, are gonna benefit from. And then of course, there can be some other things that we come along as we learn more, right?
So stress and the nervous system dysregulation is what we’re gonna talk about today, and this is something that affects so much of our bodies, and our lives, and our health, and our wellbeing, mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, the whole nine [00:01:00] yards. So this is a big one In the hormone imbalance episode, we talked about hormones as being dancers.
They need to be balanced and work together and partner well. And of course, inflammation is fire. That’s what it feels like in your body. It’s just, it really fires everything up. It makes it run hot. It makes it inflamed. It’s, it is fire. And nutrition is our building blocks. What we eat is literally what our cells are created out of.
Every single bit of your body is the culmination of the food you have eaten, so the building blocks. The nervous system, we’re going to say, is the conductor of the entire orchestra. It is very much in charge of what’s going on. When the conductor is calm and focused, the music flows beautifully. But when the conductor is frazzled, overwhelmed, and in survival mode, the orchestra’s going to fall apart.
Just, just everyone’s not gonna be able to pick up what’s going on. [00:02:00] So by the end of this episode, you will understand why stress is one of the biggest drivers of period pain, how your nervous system directly affects your hormones and inflammation, and the specific practical steps you can take to calm your system and reduce the pain.
All right. So let’s start with a question that might surprise you: Why does stress make period pain worse? It’s… You certainly may have not put those two together, or maybe you have noticed that when life got more stressful, your pain got worse. Well, it comes down to cortisol. Cortisol is your body’s primary stress hormone.
You’ve probably heard of it in some context out there on the socials. When you are stressed physically, emotionally, mentally, good or bad, I want to just specify here that there is good stress, but it’s still stress, and your body still reacts the same way. A wedding is stressful in a different way, but it is stressful as a funeral is stressful.[00:03:00]
Buying a new house and moving into a bigger, better, more amazing house is stressful in a different way, but it’s still stressful as losing your house, downsizing your house, right? There… It is a stress on your system, and it can be different, different amounts, different kinds, but it still affects your body and your cortisol levels So when you’re stressed, your body releases cortisol, which is good.
That’s what it’s supposed to do when you’re stressed out. But we’re, our body thinks of stress as life or death, and these are not life or death situations most of the time. So we’re generally not dealing with a short-term threat like the saber-toothed tiger, right? It’s every day going to work, dealing with home stuff, financial worries, especially these days with the recession and not knowing what’s going on and job losses .
Relationship challenges, those often get us. Social [00:04:00] media. I, I mean, social media in and of itself can be a stressor. I certainly find that I benefit from not scrolling, and my mental health is much better, my physical health is much better, my pain levels are not as high. So the stress of living with a chronic pain is itself a stress.
I want you to also understand that. If you are having period pain regularly, you have chronic pain, and if you have chronic pain, that’s a stress. It is a constant wariness that you have in your body. You are on alert. I often describe it as I am bracing for the storm. I know that the storm is coming, and so I, my body is braced for the storm.
That’s stress. If you can feel your body tense up, get ready, go into defensive stance, you are stressed. And when it’s stressed all of the time, which with chronic pain it is [00:05:00] all of the time. Maybe you have a good week here where you’re like, “Okay, I’m out the other side. I’m not gonna have another pain flare for two weeks.”
Right? So you’ve, you’ve got two weeks where you… that isn’t there. But in the back of your mind, you’re also rebuilding recovering, trying to get your feet back under you, and that’s a stress as well. So it really elevates that cortisol level and keeps it elevated. And it, that elevated cortisol does three things that directly affect your period.
It disrupts your hormones. Cortisol is made from the same raw material as progesterone. It’s made from pregnenolone. So pregnenolone is a master hormone. It makes hundreds, 150 hormones in your body. It makes a lot of hormones , cortisol and progesterone being two of those hormones.
But when your body is making cortisol out of your pregnenolone, it means it cannot make progesterone out of your pregnenolone. It’s it. So there’s a cascade. You eat good, [00:06:00] healthy fats. You have cholesterol. Your cholesterol turns into pregnenolone, and then your pregnenolone is gonna turn into whatever your body deems most important, and unfortunately, stress is the most important thing.
It truly thinks that this is a life or death. So if your body is debating life or death, it’s definitely not gonna worry about you having a healthy pregnancy. It’s just really thinking about keeping you alive. So when we learned in episode two when progesterone drops, estrogen dominates, the more estrogen dominance means a thicker uterine lining.
More lining means more prostaglandins. Prostaglandins mean more pain. Remember? You may have to go back and do a little refresher, but prostaglandins are those, again, hormones. They’re inflammatory. They’re actually quite good for you. They save you from infection and all sorts of things. They are also what moves the uterus [00:07:00] wall so that it releases the lining.
So again, one more time, just to go through this. Your pregnenolone is being turned into cortisol instead of progesterone. Your progesterone drops. Your estrogen becomes dominant, so you have a lot more estrogen than you should compared to your progesterone in your body.
More estrogen means a thicker uterine lining. More lining means more prostaglandins, and more prostaglandins mean more pain. Right? Okay. I feel like I need a flow chart, but this is audio. Two, it drives inflammation. Cortisol is actually anti-inflammatory in the short term, but when cortisol stays elevated for too long, your body becomes resistant to its effects.
So the result is your inflammatory pathway stays switched on, and that low-grade fire we talked about in episode three just keeps burning. Number three, it [00:08:00] increases pain sensitivity. When your nervous system is in a chronic state of stress, your brain becomes more sensitive to pain signals. I’m so sorry.
It’s like turning up the volume on a speaker that’s already too loud, right? The speaker’s blown, it’s crackling, it’s spitting, and you can’t turn it down. Again, I’m so sorry. Bearer of bad news in this case. So even if the physical cause of your pain hasn’t changed, your experience of it becomes more intense.
Yay. I know, yay. So to understand why this happens, we need to talk about your nervous system. Your nervous system has two main modes, your sympathetic mode, known as fight or flight, and your parasympathetic mode, also known as rest and digest. I have a hard time remembering the difference between these, and one thing that has helped me is sympathetic makes me think of empathy, right?
You’re sympathetic for somebody, so you wanna jump into the fight with them or help them run away, right? You wanna take action because you have [00:09:00] empathy.
So that sympathetic mode helps me remember that sympathetic is fight or flight, which means parasympathetic is gonna be the rest and digest as the opposite side to that. So when you are in a sympathetic mode, your body is on high alert, your heart rate increases, your muscles tense up, your digestion slows down, and your reproductive hormones take a back seat.
This is great if you’re being chased by a bear, not so great if you’re trying to have a healthy pain-free period. We do have bears where I live, so it’s a possibility. When you are in parasympathetic mode, your body is in a state of calm. Your heart rate slows, your muscles relax, your digestion works properly, and your reproductive hormones can do their job.
And here’s what most people don’t realize. Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a real threat and a perceived one, right? So again, your brain responds to a stressful email the same way it responds to a physical danger. So if you’re constantly stressed, your body spends most of its time in fight or flight,
Or, or [00:10:00] freeze or fawn, right? We know now that there’s a bit more to fight or flight, and I, I guess I’m just kind of using that as a shorthand. But we also do know that freeze, fawn, there are other reactions that we have and as women, our stress response can often be tend or befriend. We need to go hang out with our friends, we need to go help others, we want to do something with this stress, right?
So we wanna go help other people. We… Right? Like, I’m doing this. I’m… I would rather spend my time helping other people than be just stressed out about it, right? So tend and befriend can often be what is a remedy for us for our stress, can help reduce our stress.
It means that your reproductive system never gets a chance to function optimally. So bummer. How do you know if your nervous system is dysregulated? Here are some clues. Your physical signs are things like holding tension in your jaw, your neck, your shoulders.
I’m absolutely… That’s all three of [00:11:00] those are big ones for me. I can feel it go from my jaw to my shoulder blades, like the bottom of my shoulder blades just knots, tension. It sucks You have trouble falling or staying asleep. This definitely shows up with hormonal imbalances and in perimenopause, which is kind of like a long-running hormonal imbalance.
So trouble falling or staying asleep, like you might wake up at 3:00 in the morning and you’re just awake. You feel tired when you wake up. You shouldn’t feel exhausted as you wake up, and if that’s happening to you, that’s a really good sign that this is going o- or a part of something that’s going on.
Frequent headaches or migraines, big one. Your digestion is off, bloating, gas, constipation, diarrhea. It’s just, you know, you’re not having that good, at minimum one poop a day. Emotional signs. You feel anxious or overwhelmed most days. You’re easily irritated.
You’re snapping at people even when they don’t deserve it. [00:12:00] Not saying they don’t always, but feel like you can’t relax even when you have time off. I do know most of us in America, we get two weeks, if you’re lucky, for vacation, and everyone I know is like, by the time you’re on vacation, you’re just starting to relax, and it’s time to go back to work.
So I, I don’t blame you. So if you feel like that, two weeks is not enough to reset a system that’s been under siege for years, decades, right? You experience brain fog or have trouble concentrating. You feel disconnected from your body. Disassociation is very common. I’m very good at disassociation. I’m so good at disassociation that the first time that I went to a breath workshop where essentially you breathe to the point that you’ve, like, really oxygenated your blood, and you kind of float away out of your body.
I was very good at it. So good at it, the instructor or the guy who was running it had to come over and actually [00:13:00] touch my feet and be like, “Okay, it, it is time to come back to your body now.” I was out in the universe, literally flying in the stars. At least that’s how I felt, like I was not even in this world.
And one time, I was in the bottom of the ocean. It was amazing. Very similar sensation. Anyway, very good at disassociation from my body after decades of endometriosis and pain has taught me how to literally unplug my brain from my body. Harder to plug it back in after you get really good at unplugging it, but then also good for other things.
Like I, I have been exploring more of the spiritual things and somebody was like, “You would be amazing at astral projection.” And I was like, “You know what? You’re right. I would be really good at that.” So like whatever you wanna call it. In the Daoism, which is something I practiced for a long time, it’s very common in meditation.
So I was like, well, I kinda already do a Daoist meditation. I think that’s just like maybe the white lady word for what Daoist meditations are, Qigong, Tai Chi, those kinds of things. But anyway, I digress. [00:14:00] Period related signs. Your periods are irregular or painful, right? That’s why you’re here, painful. PMS is severe, mood swings, irritability, that bloating, all…
There’s 200 plus symptoms of PMS, so if you’re feeling like your PMS may even be borderline PMDD, really, really, really bad PMS, then we’re, you know… Stress. Every PMDD client I have, we learned many stress relieving and managing techniques to help manage their stress and also to move through that disassociation, that unplugging, those self-defense mechanisms that you’ve put together that saved you, but it now need to start to be faced and, and changed and boundaries and those kinds of things Spotting before your period is a really good sign that there’s something going on with the hormonal balance in your body.
Your pain gets worse with stress. If you’re charting, you’ll notice that pattern. You can chart [00:15:00] stress as part of your symptoms. You can chart it as part of your mood. You could change an entire symptom. Like, if you’re not charting… This is, of course, the mandala that I talk about in the episodes, and the link will be in the show notes below.
But there’s a cervix, and if you’re not using it to prevent or to become pregnant, you could not chart your cervix, but instead chart stress in that space, right? So you can really see how it’s affecting you. If any of these sound familiar, I promise you, you’re not broken. In fact, your body is doing what it’s designed to do.
It’s working as intended. It’s really actually, congratulations, your body’s doing what it’s supposed to do, except that the stress is all of the time, and it’s, bringing you down, right? Like, it’s taking you down with it. So it’s responding to the stress in the way that it is supposed to respond to stress.
However, good news, you can teach your nervous system to calm down. You can learn techniques to get out of fight or [00:16:00] flight. There’s so many different ones. I had a CEO who would go into her office and lock her office door, and lay on the ground and put her feet up the wall, because it pulls you into that parasympathetic nervous system.
So it was just a really great way when she would come back from a meeting, especially a board meeting or a fundraising meeting, ’cause she was the CEO for a nonprofit in downtown Los Angeles. It was stressful stuff, right? So it was a great way for her to come back from that meeting, reset before the next event, meeting, whatever was going on.
Sometimes you need a really quick, easy one. When I was bartending, I did 4-7-8 breathing and I would just do it as I was walking back and forth behind the bar so that I could just pull myself out of that stress response from time to time.
Doing these things are really helpful, and in the end will help reduce your pain. Doing these stress relieving techniques, these ways of pulling your body out of fight or flight in that sympathetic nervous [00:17:00] system is crucial to peeling away one of those pain layers of your pain onion.
Right? We talk about this because I don’t want you to think that this is an all or nothing situation. So we’re gonna go through this a lot, and I’m sorry if it gets repetitive, but I just want you to remember, it’s layers. Pain is an onion, and it is layer upon layer, and one thing will help reduce maybe a big layer, maybe a light layer, but you don’t do it all at once.
It’s layer by layer. And this is the layer, your stress and nervous system regulation layer. And it could be the deepest layer for a lot of people. It can be the one that makes the biggest difference, it can be the one that they get to last. But I can see over and over again with people how often this layer connects to other layers.
So it’s certainly something that we address in one-on-one coaching or my group programs pretty quickly because it’s part of it. In Flow Freedom, the spirit module is our last module, and that talks about [00:18:00] things that help reduce stress different kinds of meditations and, and actions you can take that are helping to connect you back into your body, back into your womb space and help you de-stress so you’re not as disassociated all of the time.
Your hormones, the inflammation, the nutrients, the other pillars we’ve talked about are all affected by stress. So if you only have the energy for one thing, this can be a really great place to start because it can help make everything a little bit easier. Deep breathing. So those two little quick examples I shared with you are breathing methods. It is a very powerful tool. It is completely free. You can do it very quickly. You can do it in a lot of circumstances and a lot of situations, and all you really have to do is breathe into your belly.
It’s, can be that easy. I know it sounds kinda crazy, but it really can be that easy. When you breathe deep into your belly, you [00:19:00] send a signal to your brain that says, “We’re safe and we can relax.” Really there’s no right or wrong.
It’s kinda what feels good for you. Going to sleep tends to be longer ones, so you inhale for six, you hold for eight, you exhale for 12. That can be a really good one for going right to bed. But no matter what you do, even if it’s just inhaling and exhaling circular, right? So you’re inhaling and exhaling and inhaling without the hold, as long as you are breathing into the very bottom of your being.
So when I teach breathwork, and I teach Tai Chi classes, I’ve taught yoga and Pilates and ballet barre and all sorts of things my entire life. In fact, as a kid, I traded teaching the younger kids dance classes in order to get a discount on mine. Like, I have taught my entire life. And I have taught breathing, because to dance you really have to learn how to breathe.
So teaching how to breathe is part of a professional dancer’s education. I really highly recommend a [00:20:00] visual of your pelvic cradle, the absolute bottom of your pelvic floor, and then seeing your body as a vase, and that pelvic floor being the bottom of it, and you are inhaling a vase.
You’re inhaling air, relaxing the belly muscles so that you can inhale from the very bottom of your being all the way up to the top of your head. And if that visual helps, which I know it helps a lot of people to have some sort of visual, that very base of your pelvic floor is your lower dantian.
It’s the battery for your body and your whole energy system. So bonus points if you can imagine in that womb area something, I don’t wanna influence you too much, something that is your battery system, where as you’re inhaling, you’re filling up that battery with really good, clean energy, and you’re exhaling any gunk out the top of your head.
Can really help to add a little bit of visual there, especially [00:21:00] for those of us who can’t just stop, especially, like, when you’re in follicular phase, ovulation, if you have ADHD, things that really ha- you need a few different things going on at once in order to, to really focus. I find the visuals help a lot.
But the longer exhale than your inhale tells your nervous system to calm down. So that’s why it’s often four, seven, eight, right? Four in, exhale eight. You’re holding for seven. Or you’re inhaling four, you’re holding for four, you’re exhaling for six. Or you’re inhaling for six, you’re holding for seven, you’re exhaling for 12.
It’s a, it’s a longer exhale than inhale I say start with one minute a day. It can make you dizzy, especially if you haven’t breathed deeply in a long time. It can make you very dizzy very quickly. Your goal is to do two to three minutes a day, but you may need to do it in one-minute increments. So after the morning [00:22:00] meetings, after the noon meetings, after the evening meetings when you get home from work, But three times a day for a minute, two to three minutes is really the goal just to give your body a break. It’s not a lot of time if you really think about it. So you deserve a few minutes in your day to do this. You deserve six minutes or even nine minutes. Three minutes three times a day.
You… I think you deserve nine minutes of time a day, don’t you? Yeah. Okay. I also will say that Qi cycling has helped reduce pain in a noticeable way, even when I was at the height and the worst of my pain.
And Qi cycling is where you inhale and you bring energy in through your third eye, something clean, calming, soothing, however it looks to you. It goes down the front of your body. It goes through that lower dantian, that womb space, that pelvic cradle, and then up your spine and out the top of your head.
Anything gunky or [00:23:00] junky comes out the top of your head. And you do it three times down the front and up the back, and then you do it three times down the back and up the front. Usually, when I’m not in pain, it feels like one side is soothing and the other side is, like, ruffled, like petting a cat the wrong direction, you know?
It’s not painful, but it’s not comfortable. When I’m in pain, going in one direction soothes that pain, and when I’m in pain, going the wrong way makes it worse. It’s within one cycle I can go, “Oop, that’s not the right way. Go back.” So one’s masculine, one’s feminine. It depends on your imbalances, and that can change minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day.
So I often say just do a cycle once one direction. If it doesn’t feel good, try the other direction just to see. One, if you’re in a pain flare, will often feel bad, and so you go the other direction and just stick with that. I have found it worked wonders. I have used it with a ton of clients, and it has worked wonders.
I hope that’s enough [00:24:00] description. I don’t wanna take too much time on it, but I hope that’s enough description for you to get started. If you have questions or you want, like, a longer or mini onion episode where we dive into it, let me know. Okay, so action step number two, gentle movement, not intense exercise.
Exercise, especially cardiovascular, running, things like cardio, HIIT, can spike cortisol. You need to lower your cortisol. So you need to do something like a nature walk where you stroll through the woods or a botanical garden or along the beach.
Restorative yoga, yin yoga, gentle stretching, tai chi, qigong, even just swaying to some music so that you can kind of feel things moving. I often visualize my pelvis having a water bowl in it, and we’re just swaying gently enough that the water doesn’t go over the sides, but we’re just making it move in the bowl.
Movement that feels good and not punishing signals safety to your nervous system. So [00:25:00] you really want your nervous system to feel good, and stretching can often help reduce that pain. When I’m in a pain flare in bed, if I can, I really like to sit cross-legged and just fold over to where it’s comfortable.
Sometimes I put a big pillow over my legs and then just sort of lay over the pillow. Sometimes I lay on my back and just do a twist with my knees just letting one side, breathing a ton and just letting one side really release and then doing the other side.
Or even just laying on tennis balls sometimes can be just perfection to loosen up the ligaments in the hips, can really feel much better. Action step number three, nervous system resets throughout the day. So your nervous system doesn’t get stressed all at once, especially if you’re in chronic pain. It’s just a consistent.
So adding in small resets throughout your day makes a big difference. Pause and take three deep breaths before you check your email. Step outside for one minute and look at the sky. Place your hand on your [00:26:00] heart and take a slow breath. Micro moments add up. And we do even know for exercise, three times a day doing ten minutes after meals has a bigger effect on your metabolism, insulin resistance, weight loss, all of those things, than one half an hour.
So micro moments can make a bigger difference than sitting in meditation for an hour once a day. These little things make a huge difference.
Okay, action step number four, sleep. Sleep is where your body clears stress and hormones. It repairs your tissues. It balances your hormones. If you’re not sleeping, your nervous system stays on high alert. As women, we need to aim for a minimum of eight hours. We need more sleep than our male counterparts.
So if you are a cyclical being, you’re aiming more for nine hours. Now, I will say in follicular, sometimes seven hours is, is fine, and in [00:27:00] luteal it is more like eight, nine, 10 hours, and that’s okay. I don’t want you to feel like, “Oh my God, I slept for 10 hours,” but I feel good. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Great. Fan-freaking-tastic. Period Besties podcast, Katie often sleeps for 10 hours. That is a good night of sleep for her. So… And I have done it as well many, many times, especially in deep luteal and menstrual. It feels better. So really know we need more sleep, and it fluctuates with our cycle. A consistent bedtime routine is absolutely essential to getting sleep in our outrageously stressed out, lit indoors life that we live these days.
So you really wanna try and go to bed at the same time every night. I’m not saying we don’t have movie night, you know, on Saturday nights here or there, but your body lives in cyclical rhythms, and that’s just a 24-hour rhythm of the going to sleep, the having a sleep ritual, the things that you do every time [00:28:00] to go to sleep.
So even if you don’t fall asleep right away, you really want to start bringing down the noise in the house. The rhythm signals safety to your nervous system. It knows, “Oh, right, we do this and then we go to sleep, and we have a lovely night of sleep. Let’s do that.” So action step number five, boundary setting.
Something that people overlook, but us coaches, we do not overlook the importance of a good boundary. It is essential. Stress often comes from saying yes to things that you really actually wanna say no to. It’s the over-committing, it’s the people-pleasing, the inability to say no, trying to make things work.
Learning to say no is an act of nervous system regulation, and it is a skill. That means that you will get better at it with practice. It’s not a talent, it’s a skill. Some people are talented, I will admit, but it is a skill, and you just start small, right? You [00:29:00] say no to something, okay, that’s gonna be probably when I’m gonna get my period or around my period.
I’m gonna be in pain. I’m gonna say no Just one little act of protecting yourself, your health, your body, snowballs. And when you go, “Oh, God, that felt really good,” you kinda wanna do it again. So notice how your body feels, check in with it, and don’t say yes to things if you don’t really wanna say yes to it.
Really feel into it. Check into it. Look at your cycle. You know, where are you? Are you in follicular? Yeah. Great. Sounds good. Oh, but that’s gonna be in two weeks? Oh, no, I’m gonna be in deep luteal then. No, thank you. Right? So really protecting yourself and your health, your mental, emotional, physical health, w- why wouldn’t you?
It… You deserve to protect yourself. You deserve to do what’s best for you and your body. No one… And if they get offended that you can’t do something, then we need to talk about your choice of [00:30:00] friends and people in your life. So pick one of these steps and practice it this cycle. Remember, we’re not trying to overwhelm ourselves.
Integrate something that you can do, so maybe it’s just taking three deep breaths three times a day, or it’s coming home and doing some light yoga instead of working out hard. Deep breathing before you go to sleep. I know I’m on the Finch app. If you’re on the Finch app, let me know.
I would love to have you on my bird tree. But I’m on the Finch app, and one of my bedtime things is to do their breathing exercise. And frankly, their free sleep one is my favorite. So love it. It’s absolutely fantastic.
But even just deep breathing, right? You don’t need an app to help you. I just… I have it as a, a thing to do as part of my evening ritual so that I remember and don’t forget to, you know, don’t skip it. A five-minute walk during your lunch break, right? Have lunch, sit, eat, chew your lunch, and then take a little five-minute stroll.[00:31:00]
It’s such an easy thing to do that can make a huge difference. Say no to something. But whatever it is, pick it. Feel free to share it with me. Notice if your next period feels any different, and that is how you peel the onion one layer at a time.
A quick recap. Chronic stress keeps cortisol levels elevated. Cortisol disrupts hormones, drives inflammation, and increases pain sensitivity. A dysregulated nervous system keeps you in that sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight, and that makes period pain worse. But you can calm your system with deep breathing, gentle movement, nervous system resets, sleep, and boundary setting, and so much more, by the way.
Your action step for this week is to pick one practice from the list and do it daily. Start small. Chart. Chart how you feel. Chart what you’re doing. And then next week I’m gonna do something a little different. I’m gonna share my personal [00:32:00] story. I’m gonna share my journey to an endometriosis diagnosis that is unusual, and yeah, years of dismissal, years of doubt, years that I didn’t think that’s what it was, and then finding out that actually I’m a poster child, and how I found my answers.
So if you ever felt alone in your pain, this is an episode you don’t wanna miss. This is gonna be a very raw, real, episode. But in my commitment to helping other women not go through what I went through, I am perfectly fine sharing my story and all of the trauma that went along with it so that you don’t have to live with it like I did.
And if sharing how bad it was can make it so that you don’t have to get to that level of that bad before you start caring for yourself, then good. You know what I mean? Good. I hope that that helps So if this episode helped you, please share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Feel [00:33:00] free to screenshot, post on social media.
I’m @StashaWashburn on all of the things, and tell me which stress practice are you gonna try first. If you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with clients to create personalized plans. I will put all the links in the show notes below. And also, don’t forget, in September, Katie and I are hosting Period Besties: Live & Unfiltered, and our last panel is going to be on stress and sleep.
We’re gonna have four experts and Katie and I there to talk about this, along with a world-class moderator, who we’re all gonna get together and share our absolute best techniques, ideas, and you can join live to actually ask questions in real time of all six of us as experts that will be there for you.
So it’s a free event. It’s a completely amazing event. I will put the link to it in the show notes as well, and I really hope that if you wanna go a bit deeper with sleep and stress, you will join us on Period Besties: [00:34:00] Live & Unfiltered and absolutely attend that panel live, although there’s seven panels, and I think you’re gonna like ’em all.
So remember, the revolution will be bloody, and calming your nervous system is an essential part of that revolution. Until next time, take care of yourself. You are worth it

This transcript is done by my video editing software and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

Onion Peel S1E4 Chi Cycling

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Onion Peel, a bonus miniseries that goes along with my regular podcast where I share one thing, a Q&A, a little tip, a trick, but one little focused thing. Today we’re gonna do a actionable tool that can help you peel back a layer, an onion peel layer, get it? Ha ha. Of period pain. I’m your host, Stasha the period coach, endometriosis survivor, and your guide to pain-free periods Today I’m gonna share something that’s been a lifeline for me when I’m going through my endometriosis flares, when the pain is small, medium, or large.

It’s something that I do no matter what if pain kicks in. It’s called Qi cycling, and it’s a really simple energy meditation that you can do anywhere. And I have done this everywhere from my bathroom floor, from my [00:01:00] bathroom tub, when I was working as a bartender behind the bar, when I was running kitchens and restaurants in Los Angeles.

I’ve used this in every condition and all over the world. I’ve used it on tour as I was speaking, as ways of reducing anxiety, pain, stress. I mean, truly, I have used this worldwide, and I have taught so many people how to do it as well. And it’s something that you can do if you don’t have access to pain meds or a hot bath, but it’s also something you can do in conjunction with taking some pain meds, a hot bath.

It’s one of those things that can only help, and unless you intentionally do it wrong, can hurt, but you would have to do that to yourself, so I can’t understand why you would do that. So no side effects, and just really helping reduce a layer of that [00:02:00] period pain. So this is something that absolutely has made a dent in my pain for decades now, and especially when I couldn’t keep anything down, like I was throwing up from the pain, so I couldn’t really drink tea, I couldn’t really hold anything down, I couldn’t take any painkillers.

This was something that I could use to reduce the pain, and then I could go ahead and drink my ginger tea. I could take a pain med. I could do those other things. So just to get us started so we’re all on the same page, Qi is spelled C-H-I or Q-I. At the end of the day, it’s energy.

It’s invisible energy. It’s what you talk about when people talk about acupuncture or acupressure, moving the energy channels through your body, in what’s called meridians. That’s what those energy channels are called. It’s a whole network of them. Think of… I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a body with, like, the nerves in your body.

There’s all these [00:03:00] channels that cross and branch off and come together, and it’s all connected to your organs, your skin, everything. Something that has come out over the years is that It’s more and more real. Science is more and more going, “Oh, oh, actually, there, there are actually channels.

There are actually things that connect.” Fascia, for example, was something that the scientific community didn’t really think was anything, and that it didn’t do anything except for hold organs in place. And then as they started putting things together, realized, “Oh, actually fascia moves fluid throughout the body.

It helps detox and move nutrients, and it moves nerves and systems, and it connects to literally everything,” so it went from this is nothing to, actually this might be the most important. We’ll see, but It’s definitely something that as science catches up, and it’s been around for all of [00:04:00] recorded history.

It goes back 3,000 years in Chinese medicine. So it’s certainly something that’s been tried and tested over thousands of years and works. People have had surgery that couldn’t have any kind of anesthetic or anything, have had acupuncture done and had surgery perfectly fine. So it is certainly something that is, is real it really makes a difference.

And it can actually physically change how your body responds, how your pain levels are. It can make a really big difference. So instead of thinking of this as some weird woo-woo thing off in the distance, science is catching up to it. It has been used for pain management for thousands of years, and it is used today in cases where you can’t use any kind of medications.

It may one day [00:05:00] go in place of medications that can often have terrible side effects. So really, truly not as much woo as as many people think. It is actually quite founded in discovery and science. So think of qi as a river. We’re gonna get a little metaphorical here so that you can visualize. When you have a river that’s flowing freely, it’s a really healthy river, right?

There’s clean water, you can drink out of it, it’s healthy, it’s balanced, it’s moving. But if there’s a blockage, so a, a dam or a log jam, something like that, the water backs up, it creates pressure. It can cause algae blooms to happen, which can kill off the life that’s in that water and then around that water.

It can become toxic. It can stagnate to the point where it becomes so toxic that it, it becomes a dead pool, a dead lake. So we want our [00:06:00] rivers to flow smoothly and well, and this is where pain in the energetic sense is stagnant. Your qi is blocked. Something is, is blocking it. There’s an imbalance, too much yin, too much yang, but you’re going to feel it as discomfort, as tension, as pain.

It’s … It will physically cause issues. So when your period pain is severe- Your, one of the things that’s going on is your qi isn’t flowing freely. It’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, and it’s not moving the way it’s supposed to be. Now I’m not saying that you not moving the qi is what’s causing your period pain.

It can simply be that endometriosis growths have caused blockages and stagnation, and now it’s making it worse . So it’s not there’s no blame here. There’s never blame when it comes to pain. It’s simply learn things, find out what works for you, and help move it and reduce it. So in this [00:07:00] case, we’re talking about qi that’s stagnant, and it’s not moving the way it’s supposed to, often in the pelvic cradle.

So this is what we would call the lower dantian. It’s an energy system that’s housed in the pelvis, basically below your belly button. I often joke that it’s what’s holding your womb. It’s that lower dantian, the energy center that’s really holding that whole area of your body, that, that pelvic cradle, the uterus, the ovaries, all of that.

So you really wanna think of this as moving through that pelvic area. So you’re trying to clear out the blockages and restore flow through the pelvis. And for a lot of my clients, especially endometriosis clients, I have noticed that they have a ton of extra yin. Very cold, so cold hands, cold feet.

They can feel, and I also felt that I was [00:08:00] freezing even if I was sweating, I was still cold. When I would ma- sa- kinda sink into my body and, and look, quote-unquote, at my womb area, it would be black, just pitch black, freezing, the coldness of space, which is yin. Yin is very cold. It’s very dark. So it was definitely an so much yin that we couldn’t even get the yang energy to move.

So it was definitely something I have seen. And ironically, endometriosis is often called a masculine disease. People with endometriosis tend to be leaders. They tend to have their own businesses, be CEOs, be in powerful positions, lawyers, doctors, masculine fields.

So often it’s this imbalance of yin and yang, and it’s so extreme. There’s too much yin and too much yang all at the same time. It’s completely separated in the [00:09:00] body, and they are creating all of the stagnation because nothing can move, nothing can mix. It’s very separate. So we’re going to do some qi cycling, and you can do this sitting down, laying down, anywhere.

Like I said, I did it lying on the bathroom floor as well as standing and working behind a bar hauling kegs. So quite literally, no matter where you are, you can do this. I do highly recommend, until you get used to doing it, closing your eyes. So not driving, not doing, but sitting or laying down, even standing up if you want to, but so someplace where you can close your eyes and just visualize in your own mind.

Now, I’m gonna say qi, but you can absolutely use whatever word in your methodology or religion or spiritual path, whatever it is that you wanna use. You can use that energy however you want. You can use [00:10:00] whatever words feel comfortable for you. When you start qi cycling, you’re going to start by bringing clean, clear qi in through your third eye.

So that space right between your eyebrows, just a bit above your eyebrows probably for most of us, depending on how you’re structured. But it’s that space between your eyebrows And it’s gonna feel right. So you’re just gonna inhale that third eye, that space between your eyes, between your eyebrows, whatever that looks like to you, wherever it is, it’ll be right because it’s you, and you and your body, you’re right.

So as you inhale, you’re gonna imagine that clean, clear energy coming in. It looks different to everybody, a lot of overlap for a lot of people. I don’t want to implant an idea into your head as to what your chi looks like, but it should feel fresh, clean, clear, beautiful, brilliant, whatever it is. So as you inhale, that chi is gonna come [00:11:00] in through your third eye, and it’s gonna travel down the center of your body.

It’s called the chi pillar, and it’s gonna fill your lower dantian. That’s the space around your womb, just below your belly button, resting in your pelvic cradle. And as you exhale, you’re gonna imagine any stagnant chi, dirty energy, bad juju, whatever you wanna call it, is gonna come up through the center of your body and out through the top of your head.

This is the absolute most basic, right? You’re a dolphin playing in the waves, and you’re blowing water out of the blowhole at the top of your head, at the crown of your head. It’s called the zenith point in acupuncture. And you’re just gonna let it go I felt like it had to go somewhere, so I let it, in my imagination, go into the earth below me and compost as if it was scraps, dirty, used, junky energy.

The fallen leaves, dust, uh, old [00:12:00] fruits and veggies. You know, it just, it composts into being a live rich soil, right? So to me, that really helped with the whole ecosystem of what’s going on. Like, I’m not just spitting dirty qi out into the world. It’s going into the earth where it’s gonna compost, and because

become beautiful, clean, clear energy again. So this is just the basic. It comes in through the third eye. It goes down the center of the body, fills up that lower dantian, that energy center in your pelvic cradle, pushing any stagnant junky qi out through the top, the zenith of your, of your head, and can fall into the earth or water or whatever is around you.

But just, you know, remember, nothing can block qi if you don’t want it to. So if you’re sitting in a house, it can still go into the earth below you. It’s qi. It can move through stone. It can move through whatever. There’s no physics. All right? So repeat this cycle coming [00:13:00] in through the third eye, down to the womb space, and then exhaling out through the top of the head, allowing that energy to flow freely.

As you are ending, you want to envision that lower dantian full of clean, clear qi. It’s not full. It’s not overly full. It’s not overflowing. It’s not half empty. It’s full. It’s just right. It is Goldilocks. It is a fully powered battery ready for what’s to come, whether that’s a restful night of sleep or a day of work, it doesn’t matter.

Now, that’s just going down through the central pillar. So that’s absolutely just sort of a basic start with that. But what I realized, and what I actually learned from my now husband, is that you can cycle this chi down the front of your body or down the back of your body.

It’s a yin versus a yang flow, and it doesn’t [00:14:00] matter because there is no right or no r- wrong. You’re not trying to add more or less because you physically, consciously can’t go, “I’m gonna increase my yin, and I’m gonna cycle this direction.” You have to feel which direction is right for you in that moment.

It can be as subtle as just feeling like somebody’s ruffled your feathers, wrong direction, versus somebody has smoothed your feathers, right direction. Petting the cat the wrong direction versus petting the cat the right direction. So it can be very subtle. Sometimes it can be screaming, and as soon as you go the right direction, you immediately feel pain relief.

If you go the wrong direction, you immediately feel like you have worse pain. So it can be very obvious, it could be very subtle. For me, if it’s… If I’m in pain, it’s very obvious immediately. If I’m not in pain and I’m just chi cycling as a meditation practice, it can be more subtle. And [00:15:00] sometimes you do just want to go.

You… It’s like, oh, I wanna do three in this direction, I wanna do three in that direction. Both felt fantastic, so I’m gonna do three in that direction and three in the reverse. In Daoism, in Chinese medicine, things are in odd numbers, three, five, nine. So if you’re going to do cycling, do three, do five, do nine, and then reverse the direction if you want.

But if it’s relieving your pain, just stick with that direction and just try and do it in threes.

So you’re going to… And we’re gonna do this together, and we’re gonna do three in both directions all right? So take a moment, maybe pause and see what minute and second this podcast is, so that if you want guidance, you can come back to right at this moment, skip forward and come back here and breathe together.

Just to remind you, the right direction can change minute by minute. So if it starts to [00:16:00] feel wrong, quote-unquote, switch directions and try the other way. Just keep going with us. Just try the other way.

Okay. Close those eyes. Get centered. Inhale through the third eye. Bring the energy down the front of your body. Visualize it in that lower dantian. Exhale up the spine and out the crown of the head. Inhale through the third eye, down the front of the body. Exhale that stagnant qi up through the spine and out the crown of the head.

Inhale through the third eye, bring it down the front of the body, move it through that lower dantian, and exhaling up and out the spine through the crown of the head. Inhale through the third eye, bring it down the spine, down your back into the lower dantian as you [00:17:00] exhale through the front of the body and up through the zenith and out the crown of your head.

Inhale through the third eye, bring it down the spine, through the lower dantian, push any junky qi up through the front of the body and out of the crown of the head. One more time this direction. Inhale down the back and exhale through the front. We’re gonna do three more. You pick the direction that felt best to you.

Inhale to the lower dantian. Exhale through the crown of your head. Inhale through the third eye, into that lower dantian, and exhale through the crown of your head. Last time. Inhale into that [00:18:00] lower dantian, and exhale through the crown of your head. I like to encourage you to do this as many times as it takes until you feel and you’re visualizing just clean chi going through the whole process.

There’s nothing stagnant, there’s nothing junky, there’s no bad juju left. You’re just moving clean, clear chi now through that lower dantian and out. When you are done, you are gonna rest your right hand over your lower dantian, so between your belly button and your pelvic cradle. Your left hand’s gonna go on top, and you’re just gonna inhale and exhale peacefully at your own pace, keeping your eyes closed, visualizing that lower energy center, that lower dantian, full, complete, beautiful And when you’re ready, [00:19:00] open your eyes and come on back.

So why does this work for period pain? Your body holds tension and emotion in your pelvic area. When you’re in pain, when your nervous system goes into flight or fight mode, your muscles tense up, your breathing becomes shallow, and the pain cycle will feed itself with that. So first things first, it calms your nervous system by giving your brain a focal point, something to visualize.

You’re visualizing that chi and that movement, so it gives your brain something functional and helpful to do, and it gives you something to do with your breath. So you’re not fixating on the pain. You’re not fixating on that spot. You’re breathing, and it gives your mind and your body something else to focus on.

And secondly, it moves energy. As much as it may sound [00:20:00] crazy to our Western scientific minds, stagnant energy is not going to help your pain. Moving energy is. So staying in that tight, clenched space where you’re not able to move energy, where you’re actually locking it down, is going to make pain worse.

So it moves it through. It moves that chi energy. There’s really advanced ways of doing this, where you can envision water and fire moving and mixing and steam. There’s all sorts of different things you can do with this. It gets really complicated the deeper you go into Daoism and Tai Chi and Qigong and all that good stuff.

I’m an absolute nerd, so I love it, and I’ve been studying it for decades now. So you can get really complicated with it, but that basic chi cycling I still do every single night. Sometimes, even to this day, decades of doing this later, I still sometimes just go down the center, that [00:21:00] chi pillar, the center in the body, and back out. So sometimes even just that very basic one is all I want or all my body needs, especially in times of stress or just exhaustion or had a lot of medical things I’ve been dealing with lately, so I’ve been going back to that very basic one over and over and over again in the MRI machine.

I did the same thing when I had to have the breast MRI done. I was face down, and I was in the machine, and my feet were sticking out, and I did that same Qi Cycling through the soles of my feet. So when I say you can do this anywhere, at any time I truly mean it, and you can even change the entry points and exit points.

One thing that I found really helpful for pain was to inhale that Qi through the third eye down into that Lower Dantian, and then exhale through the perineum the cold, stagnant, dark, [00:22:00] freezing water or yin or space or whatever the visual was for me in the moment. But I was inhaling through the third eye and exhaling out through the perineum, almost like peeing out the cold yin stagnant energy.

I have visualized it coming out through the vaginal canal. Anything with my blood, right? So I was like b- as I was bleeding, I was still Qi Cycling, inhaling through the third eye and then exhaling through the blood the stagnant Qi. So really, truly you can do this at any moment.

I definitely recommend it during a pain flare. I definitely recommend you doing it before your period or before you know a pain flare is coming. about four to six days before my period, I would start to feel a little light cramping, and that’s when I started immediately. Now, of course, I do it every single day, whether I feel like I’m getting close to a pain flare or not. And then if you’re [00:23:00] stressed, if you’re feeling tense, if you’re just feeling like, “Ugh, gosh, things are getting a little crazy,” perfect time to do it.

Any time you need to ground, if you’re feeling scattered, stressed, that just like shaky energy, great way of calming and recentering. So your action step for this Onion Peel episode is to try Qi Cycling at least once during your day. Definitely if you’re in a pain flare or even just a tense moment.

But just try to do three cycles in one direction and three cycles in the other direction. And if all you can do is three through that central pillar, three breaths through that central pillar, just do that. Try to do it once a day. Just once a day, breathe in, breathe out three times. That’s all you have to do.

You’re gonna breathe in and then breathe out three times, several times throughout the day. So try it. If there’s even just a [00:24:00] tiny little shift, you’ve started. And sometimes it takes a little while before you can feel that first tiny shift. Try getting to the point where you can do it with your eyes open, where you n- don’t have to visualize it with your eyes closed anymore, right?

That’s… You’re looking for levels as we’re peeling back those bits of onion peel one bit at a time. So if you’ve tried Qi Cycling, I’d love to hear how it goes for you. As always, tag me on Instagram, @stashawashburn, or TikTok, or any of the places. Always feel free to message me, email me, stasha@theperiodcoach.com.

And if you wanna go deeper into energy work and cycle syncing, we’re gonna do that in some main episodes, as they come up. I have, like, years’ worth of main episodes plotting out already. But we’re definitely gonna talk about it. You can also look at Flow Freedom, which is a great low-cost course where I take you through Qi Cycling as part of the spirit module.

So there’s a lot of ways you can dive into [00:25:00] it deeper. You’re always a- welcome to ask questions. But yeah, I love it. Something that I highly recommend, something that’s free, something that everyone can do, no tools, no equipment, no money needed, and you’re worth that, right? You’re worth a few deep breaths.

At least I hope you think you’re worth a few deep breaths. So until next time, take care of yourself. You are worth it.

This transcript is done by my video editing software and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

S1E4 Nourishing Nutrients for Pain-Free Periods
Stasha: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Pain Free Periods with Stasha Washburn, the period coach. I’m your host, Stasha. I’m also an endo warrior and your guide to period pain solutions that actually work. I am living proof. In episode one, we covered the four root causes of period pain: hormonal imbalance, chronic inflammation, nutrient deficiencies, and stress and nervous system dysregulation.
In episode two, we drove into the estrogen-progesterone balance. We talked about why estrogen dominance is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not always about too much estrogen, it’s also about the ratio. In episode three, we tackled chronic inflammation, that low-grade fire that makes everything worse. Today, we’re talking about the third root cause, nutrient deficiencies.
So if hormones are the dancers and inflammation is the fire, think of nutrients as the raw ingredients your body needs to create balance. Without them, your [00:01:00] body simply cannot do its job properly, and your period suffers because of it. By the end of this episode, you will know which specific nutrients are essential for pain-free periods, how to tell if you’re low in them, and the most effective way to start filling those gaps.
Let’s start with a simple question. Why do nutrient deficiencies cause period pain? Because your body is a complex living system, and like any system, it needs the right inputs to function well. When you are deficient in key vitamins and minerals, your body cannot regulate hormones properly. It can’t clear inflammation effectively or contract and relax your uterine muscles smoothly.
Each of those failures leads to more pain. Here’s an example. Magnesium is a mineral that helps muscles relax. When you are low in magnesium, your uterine muscles stay tense, and that tension creates more pain during your period
Another example, zinc is essential for hormone [00:02:00] production. When zinc is low, your progesterone drops, and as we already learned, when progesterone is low, estrogen dominates, and that leads to a thickened uterine lining. More lining equals more prostaglandins. More prostaglandins equals more pain. So nutrient deficiencies are not a side issue.
They’re often a driving force behind your period pain. Here’s the good news, nutrient deficiencies are among the easiest root causes to fix. You don’t need surgery. You don’t need a prescription. You need information and a plan. Let’s break down the most important nutrients for period health. I’ll give you why each one matters, signs you might be low, and where to get it from.
So nutrient one, Magnesium is your relaxation mineral. It calms your nervous system, it relaxes your muscles, and it lowers prostaglandin production. Signs you may be low in magnesium, muscle cramps or twitches, anxiety or trouble [00:03:00] sleeping, sugar cravings, and headaches or migraines. Magnesium’s tied to a lot, so it’s a really important nutrient.
Where to get it? Leafy greens like spinach and Swiss chard, nuts and seeds, especially pumpkin seeds and almonds. Part of the reason you see pumpkin seeds in seed cycling. And dark chocolate. Yep, dark chocolate counts. It’s one of my favorites. I also take a magnesium glycinate supplement. I take it before bed.
It really helps me sleep, and it prevents leg cramps. I wake up with leg cramps if I’m not taking my magnesium. It’s the first… It’s one of the first things that makes me go, “Oh, crap, I forgot my magnesium last night.” So nutrient two, zinc. Zinc is your hormone helper. It supports ovulation, it helps your body produce progesterone, and it reduces inflammation.
Signs you may be low in zinc are acne or slow-healing skin, thinning hair, hair loss, a weak immune [00:04:00] system, so if you’re getting sick often, digestive issues. So food-wise, getting in your zinc is oysters, the highest source hands down. I do keep tinned oysters in the cabinet and throw them on salads from time to time, throw them in soups or into sauces.
Gives a nice umami flavor to things. They’re a really good source of it. I know it’s hard to find good quality oysters as we destroy the bays and whatnot around the world, but if you can get your hands on some good ones, they are absolutely the best and is probably one of the reasons that it was the old, way of boosting libido and helping increase fertility back in the day.
It’s certainly really good at it because of zinc, because zinc increases your follicle health and your egg health. So anyway, very cool. Beef and poultry are another big one. Pumpkin seeds, again, that’s in [00:05:00] seed cycling for a reason, and lentils. So depending on where you get your protein sources, those are various good ones to do it Nutrient number three, B vitamins, especially your B6.
The B vitamins are your energy and your mood support, and B6 is particularly important for period pain. It helps to balance estrogen and progesterone because it helps support liver detox, and it also helps your body produce serotonin, your feel-good brain chemical. Well, one of them anyway, and most of your serotonin is made in your gut, so having a healthy gut really matters.
Some signs you may be low in B6, if your PMS feels severe, especially the mood swings, the irritability, the anxiety, the depression, breast tenderness, very classic sign, fatigue and low energy, very classic sign of low B across the board, and brain fog. Where to get it? Poultry, chicken and turkey are great sources.
Fish like [00:06:00] salmon and tuna, bananas, surprisingly. I know people don’t really think of it as a good source, but it is in there, and potatoes, also a good one, especially if you refrigerate them so that they have time to build up your resistant starch and then you can reheat them up if you want. Nutrient four, iron.
Iron is your oxygen carrier. It delivers oxygen to your tissues. When you are low in iron, you feel exhausted. You may be more sensitive to pain as well. So just keep that in mind. Not only are you inflamed and that’s causing pain, but also being low on iron can make you more sensitive to pain.
So any way that you can reduce your sensitivity, iron is a really good one. Signs that you may be low on iron are heavy periods with large clots. This is the biggest clue, hands down. Constant fatigue, pale skin or dark circles under your eyes, cold hands and feet, a classic, and shortness of breath with light [00:07:00] activity.
So if you feel like you’re getting winded quickly, that’s another reason for it. Where to get it? Red meat and organ meats. I’m gonna say this right now, liver is amazing for us, and it was reserved for the menstruating women in communities around the world. It was one of the constants that we see in food around the world, no matter where the group of people live, how isolated they are, on land, on sea, on islands, hot, cold.
Everyone saved organ meats, especially liver, for the menstruating women, and it is because it builds a strong, healthy reproductive cycle. And you want that. Even if you don’t have any intention of having kids ever, you want a healthy reproductive cycle ’cause it affects literally everything else, including your long-term health, like how long you’ll live.
So you real- and [00:08:00] how lo- how well you’ll live in that longer life. So if you are really resistant to it, I get it, fine, but if you’re at all interested in really upping your health, you can get liver, chicken liver at places like Whole Foods for really cheap, organic, good quality. You can also get them from local butchers.
Local places do it really well, really easily. In LA, there were amazing places to go to. So if you’re in a big city, you wanna look for, like, a halal place or, A kosher place or some, like a lot of those kinds of places have them just ready to go for people because it is still part of culture. Put it in things.
grind it and put it in your marinara, especially a beef bolognese or a beef marinara sauce, in chili, in soups, in stews. You can really hide it in things to get it going. Burgers, all that kinda stuff. It can really make a difference to your health [00:09:00] and your wellbeing and how you feel. So I’m gonna get off my soapbox right there, but I do encourage it.
Dark poultry, lentils and beans, and dark leafy greens like spinach. All right, nutrient number five, omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3s are your anti-inflammatory superheroes. We talked about them in our last episode. They directly lower prostaglandin production, so they are important, and they reduce overall inflammation in your body.
Signs you may be low in omega-3s, joint pain or stiffness, dry skin or brittle nails, that’s mine, difficulty concentrating, brain fog, and mood swings. So this is another one. We talked about this last time. You get it in fatty fish like salmon, sardines, and mackerel, walnuts, flaxseeds and chia seeds, and high quality fish oil supplements. So one thing that I do wanna say is testing is better than guessing, and with a quick word of [00:10:00] caution, it’s easy to look at this list and think, “I’ll just take all of those as supplements.” You might need to do that, but please don’t start there.
Please don’t do that. More is not always better, and increasing something rapidly can be really hard on your body. Taking too much zinc can deplete your copper. Taking iron when you don’t need it can cause oxidative stress. And taking supplements without understanding your body’s unique needs can create different imbalances.
So my recommendation is that if you can get tested, get tested. Ask your doctor for a complete blood count to check iron status, a magnesium and a zinc test, and a B vitamin panel, at the very least B6 and B12, but a full panel would be great. But if testing is not available, start with food, not supplements.
Food first. Food works better. I, just food works better. Your body absorbs nutrients from your food more effectively. And food contains [00:11:00] cofactors, other vitamins and minerals that help your body use the main nutrient towards it.
A supplement gives you one thing. Also, if you’re in the process of repairing your gut, a supplement is just washing through, and you’re just flushing money down the toilet literally. Food gives you an entire symphony of nutrients that work together and is part of the gut-healing process and the keeping your gut healthy process.
So let’s talk about what you can do this week, and as always, I’m reminding you that pain is the onion. You don’t peel it all at once. I’m gonna say this a lot because it… I had to hear it a lot, an embarrassing amount of a lot. So you have to be gentle with yourself, and you have to do this step by step, and if you want this to stick, to be really, truly in remission, it has to stick.
You have to stick with it. So some things can kinda ebb and flow, but some things really do need to stick. Eating better food is something that needs to stick. [00:12:00] Nutrient deficiencies can feel like it’s a big layer because there’s so many nutrients to think about, but you do not have to fix them all right now.
You just need to start with one. So look at the list of nutrients we just covered. See if one of them stands out to you. Maybe you have a lot of those symptoms, the signs that you’re deficient in something, and it’s just like, “Oh, boy, I have all of those.
Let me start there.” Or maybe it’s just a feeling. Maybe you’re standing in the grocery store and certain foods are calling to you, and you realize, “Boy, a couple of these are the ones that really help build iron. I think that I’m gonna really focus on making sure I eat those iron-rich foods for at least the next cycle and see if I notice a difference.”
So again, picking one, right? Just picking one thing to pull into your body. You could do pumpkin seeds in your breakfast for magnesium. Add in some dark chocolate. I would say that if you’re gonna add in some dark chocolate, you can do something else as well. [00:13:00] But you can do that. So whatever it is, pick it, do just that one thing and for your next cycle, track it on your chart.
Again, free chart in the show notes below. Notice if your next period feels any different, and start seeing those small changes add up. This is how you peel the onion one layer at a time. That’s it for Pain-Free Periods with Stasha. Here is a quick recap of what we covered today.
Nutrient deficiencies are a driving force behind period pain. Five key nutrients are magnesium, especially magnesium glycinate, zinc, B vitamins, especially B6, iron, and omega-3 fatty acids. Before you supplement, start with food, and if you can, get tested to know where your levels are right now. Your action steps for this week are to pick one nutrient from the list and one food source to your routine for this cycle.
Start small, track how [00:14:00] you feel, and next week we’re diving into the fourth root cause, stress and nervous system dysregulation. We will talk about why stress is one of the biggest drivers of period pain and how you can calm your nervous system to reduce that pain. If this episode helped you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it.
Always take a screenshot and tag me on Instagram or TikTok or wherever, @StashaWashburn, and tell me which nutrient are you adding first. And if you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with clients to create personalized plans. Head to theperiodcoach.com or click the link to sign up for a deep dive chat where we can talk for an hour and see what’s going on.
You will leave with actionable steps to take. And remember, the revolution will be bloody, and it starts with giving your body the raw ingredients it needs to heal. Until next time, take care of yourself. You are worth it.

This transcript is done by my video editing software and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

Onion Peel S1E4 Chi Cycling

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Onion Peel, a bonus miniseries that goes along with my regular podcast where I share one thing, a Q&A, a little tip, a trick, but one little focused thing. Today we’re gonna do a actionable tool that can help you peel back a layer, an onion peel layer, get it? Ha ha. Of period pain. I’m your host, Stasha the period coach, endometriosis survivor, and your guide to pain-free periods Today I’m gonna share something that’s been a lifeline for me when I’m going through my endometriosis flares, when the pain is small, medium, or large.

It’s something that I do no matter what if pain kicks in. It’s called Qi cycling, and it’s a really simple energy meditation that you can do anywhere. And I have done this everywhere from my bathroom floor, from my [00:01:00] bathroom tub, when I was working as a bartender behind the bar, when I was running kitchens and restaurants in Los Angeles.

I’ve used this in every condition and all over the world. I’ve used it on tour as I was speaking, as ways of reducing anxiety, pain, stress. I mean, truly, I have used this worldwide, and I have taught so many people how to do it as well. And it’s something that you can do if you don’t have access to pain meds or a hot bath, but it’s also something you can do in conjunction with taking some pain meds, a hot bath.

It’s one of those things that can only help, and unless you intentionally do it wrong, can hurt, but you would have to do that to yourself, so I can’t understand why you would do that. So no side effects, and just really helping reduce a layer of that [00:02:00] period pain. So this is something that absolutely has made a dent in my pain for decades now, and especially when I couldn’t keep anything down, like I was throwing up from the pain, so I couldn’t really drink tea, I couldn’t really hold anything down, I couldn’t take any painkillers.

This was something that I could use to reduce the pain, and then I could go ahead and drink my ginger tea. I could take a pain med. I could do those other things. So just to get us started so we’re all on the same page, Qi is spelled C-H-I or Q-I. At the end of the day, it’s energy.

It’s invisible energy. It’s what you talk about when people talk about acupuncture or acupressure, moving the energy channels through your body, in what’s called meridians. That’s what those energy channels are called. It’s a whole network of them. Think of… I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a body with, like, the nerves in your body.

There’s all these [00:03:00] channels that cross and branch off and come together, and it’s all connected to your organs, your skin, everything. Something that has come out over the years is that It’s more and more real. Science is more and more going, “Oh, oh, actually, there, there are actually channels.

There are actually things that connect.” Fascia, for example, was something that the scientific community didn’t really think was anything, and that it didn’t do anything except for hold organs in place. And then as they started putting things together, realized, “Oh, actually fascia moves fluid throughout the body.

It helps detox and move nutrients, and it moves nerves and systems, and it connects to literally everything,” so it went from this is nothing to, actually this might be the most important. We’ll see, but It’s definitely something that as science catches up, and it’s been around for all of [00:04:00] recorded history.

It goes back 3,000 years in Chinese medicine. So it’s certainly something that’s been tried and tested over thousands of years and works. People have had surgery that couldn’t have any kind of anesthetic or anything, have had acupuncture done and had surgery perfectly fine. So it is certainly something that is, is real it really makes a difference.

And it can actually physically change how your body responds, how your pain levels are. It can make a really big difference. So instead of thinking of this as some weird woo-woo thing off in the distance, science is catching up to it. It has been used for pain management for thousands of years, and it is used today in cases where you can’t use any kind of medications.

It may one day [00:05:00] go in place of medications that can often have terrible side effects. So really, truly not as much woo as as many people think. It is actually quite founded in discovery and science. So think of qi as a river. We’re gonna get a little metaphorical here so that you can visualize. When you have a river that’s flowing freely, it’s a really healthy river, right?

There’s clean water, you can drink out of it, it’s healthy, it’s balanced, it’s moving. But if there’s a blockage, so a, a dam or a log jam, something like that, the water backs up, it creates pressure. It can cause algae blooms to happen, which can kill off the life that’s in that water and then around that water.

It can become toxic. It can stagnate to the point where it becomes so toxic that it, it becomes a dead pool, a dead lake. So we want our [00:06:00] rivers to flow smoothly and well, and this is where pain in the energetic sense is stagnant. Your qi is blocked. Something is, is blocking it. There’s an imbalance, too much yin, too much yang, but you’re going to feel it as discomfort, as tension, as pain.

It’s … It will physically cause issues. So when your period pain is severe- Your, one of the things that’s going on is your qi isn’t flowing freely. It’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, and it’s not moving the way it’s supposed to be. Now I’m not saying that you not moving the qi is what’s causing your period pain.

It can simply be that endometriosis growths have caused blockages and stagnation, and now it’s making it worse . So it’s not there’s no blame here. There’s never blame when it comes to pain. It’s simply learn things, find out what works for you, and help move it and reduce it. So in this [00:07:00] case, we’re talking about qi that’s stagnant, and it’s not moving the way it’s supposed to, often in the pelvic cradle.

So this is what we would call the lower dantian. It’s an energy system that’s housed in the pelvis, basically below your belly button. I often joke that it’s what’s holding your womb. It’s that lower dantian, the energy center that’s really holding that whole area of your body, that, that pelvic cradle, the uterus, the ovaries, all of that.

So you really wanna think of this as moving through that pelvic area. So you’re trying to clear out the blockages and restore flow through the pelvis. And for a lot of my clients, especially endometriosis clients, I have noticed that they have a ton of extra yin. Very cold, so cold hands, cold feet.

They can feel, and I also felt that I was [00:08:00] freezing even if I was sweating, I was still cold. When I would ma- sa- kinda sink into my body and, and look, quote-unquote, at my womb area, it would be black, just pitch black, freezing, the coldness of space, which is yin. Yin is very cold. It’s very dark. So it was definitely an so much yin that we couldn’t even get the yang energy to move.

So it was definitely something I have seen. And ironically, endometriosis is often called a masculine disease. People with endometriosis tend to be leaders. They tend to have their own businesses, be CEOs, be in powerful positions, lawyers, doctors, masculine fields.

So often it’s this imbalance of yin and yang, and it’s so extreme. There’s too much yin and too much yang all at the same time. It’s completely separated in the [00:09:00] body, and they are creating all of the stagnation because nothing can move, nothing can mix. It’s very separate. So we’re going to do some qi cycling, and you can do this sitting down, laying down, anywhere.

Like I said, I did it lying on the bathroom floor as well as standing and working behind a bar hauling kegs. So quite literally, no matter where you are, you can do this. I do highly recommend, until you get used to doing it, closing your eyes. So not driving, not doing, but sitting or laying down, even standing up if you want to, but so someplace where you can close your eyes and just visualize in your own mind.

Now, I’m gonna say qi, but you can absolutely use whatever word in your methodology or religion or spiritual path, whatever it is that you wanna use. You can use that energy however you want. You can use [00:10:00] whatever words feel comfortable for you. When you start qi cycling, you’re going to start by bringing clean, clear qi in through your third eye.

So that space right between your eyebrows, just a bit above your eyebrows probably for most of us, depending on how you’re structured. But it’s that space between your eyebrows And it’s gonna feel right. So you’re just gonna inhale that third eye, that space between your eyes, between your eyebrows, whatever that looks like to you, wherever it is, it’ll be right because it’s you, and you and your body, you’re right.

So as you inhale, you’re gonna imagine that clean, clear energy coming in. It looks different to everybody, a lot of overlap for a lot of people. I don’t want to implant an idea into your head as to what your chi looks like, but it should feel fresh, clean, clear, beautiful, brilliant, whatever it is. So as you inhale, that chi is gonna come [00:11:00] in through your third eye, and it’s gonna travel down the center of your body.

It’s called the chi pillar, and it’s gonna fill your lower dantian. That’s the space around your womb, just below your belly button, resting in your pelvic cradle. And as you exhale, you’re gonna imagine any stagnant chi, dirty energy, bad juju, whatever you wanna call it, is gonna come up through the center of your body and out through the top of your head.

This is the absolute most basic, right? You’re a dolphin playing in the waves, and you’re blowing water out of the blowhole at the top of your head, at the crown of your head. It’s called the zenith point in acupuncture. And you’re just gonna let it go I felt like it had to go somewhere, so I let it, in my imagination, go into the earth below me and compost as if it was scraps, dirty, used, junky energy.

The fallen leaves, dust, uh, old [00:12:00] fruits and veggies. You know, it just, it composts into being a live rich soil, right? So to me, that really helped with the whole ecosystem of what’s going on. Like, I’m not just spitting dirty qi out into the world. It’s going into the earth where it’s gonna compost, and because

become beautiful, clean, clear energy again. So this is just the basic. It comes in through the third eye. It goes down the center of the body, fills up that lower dantian, that energy center in your pelvic cradle, pushing any stagnant junky qi out through the top, the zenith of your, of your head, and can fall into the earth or water or whatever is around you.

But just, you know, remember, nothing can block qi if you don’t want it to. So if you’re sitting in a house, it can still go into the earth below you. It’s qi. It can move through stone. It can move through whatever. There’s no physics. All right? So repeat this cycle coming [00:13:00] in through the third eye, down to the womb space, and then exhaling out through the top of the head, allowing that energy to flow freely.

As you are ending, you want to envision that lower dantian full of clean, clear qi. It’s not full. It’s not overly full. It’s not overflowing. It’s not half empty. It’s full. It’s just right. It is Goldilocks. It is a fully powered battery ready for what’s to come, whether that’s a restful night of sleep or a day of work, it doesn’t matter.

Now, that’s just going down through the central pillar. So that’s absolutely just sort of a basic start with that. But what I realized, and what I actually learned from my now husband, is that you can cycle this chi down the front of your body or down the back of your body.

It’s a yin versus a yang flow, and it doesn’t [00:14:00] matter because there is no right or no r- wrong. You’re not trying to add more or less because you physically, consciously can’t go, “I’m gonna increase my yin, and I’m gonna cycle this direction.” You have to feel which direction is right for you in that moment.

It can be as subtle as just feeling like somebody’s ruffled your feathers, wrong direction, versus somebody has smoothed your feathers, right direction. Petting the cat the wrong direction versus petting the cat the right direction. So it can be very subtle. Sometimes it can be screaming, and as soon as you go the right direction, you immediately feel pain relief.

If you go the wrong direction, you immediately feel like you have worse pain. So it can be very obvious, it could be very subtle. For me, if it’s… If I’m in pain, it’s very obvious immediately. If I’m not in pain and I’m just chi cycling as a meditation practice, it can be more subtle. And [00:15:00] sometimes you do just want to go.

You… It’s like, oh, I wanna do three in this direction, I wanna do three in that direction. Both felt fantastic, so I’m gonna do three in that direction and three in the reverse. In Daoism, in Chinese medicine, things are in odd numbers, three, five, nine. So if you’re going to do cycling, do three, do five, do nine, and then reverse the direction if you want.

But if it’s relieving your pain, just stick with that direction and just try and do it in threes.

So you’re going to… And we’re gonna do this together, and we’re gonna do three in both directions all right? So take a moment, maybe pause and see what minute and second this podcast is, so that if you want guidance, you can come back to right at this moment, skip forward and come back here and breathe together.

Just to remind you, the right direction can change minute by minute. So if it starts to [00:16:00] feel wrong, quote-unquote, switch directions and try the other way. Just keep going with us. Just try the other way.

Okay. Close those eyes. Get centered. Inhale through the third eye. Bring the energy down the front of your body. Visualize it in that lower dantian. Exhale up the spine and out the crown of the head. Inhale through the third eye, down the front of the body. Exhale that stagnant qi up through the spine and out the crown of the head.

Inhale through the third eye, bring it down the front of the body, move it through that lower dantian, and exhaling up and out the spine through the crown of the head. Inhale through the third eye, bring it down the spine, down your back into the lower dantian as you [00:17:00] exhale through the front of the body and up through the zenith and out the crown of your head.

Inhale through the third eye, bring it down the spine, through the lower dantian, push any junky qi up through the front of the body and out of the crown of the head. One more time this direction. Inhale down the back and exhale through the front. We’re gonna do three more. You pick the direction that felt best to you.

Inhale to the lower dantian. Exhale through the crown of your head. Inhale through the third eye, into that lower dantian, and exhale through the crown of your head. Last time. Inhale into that [00:18:00] lower dantian, and exhale through the crown of your head. I like to encourage you to do this as many times as it takes until you feel and you’re visualizing just clean chi going through the whole process.

There’s nothing stagnant, there’s nothing junky, there’s no bad juju left. You’re just moving clean, clear chi now through that lower dantian and out. When you are done, you are gonna rest your right hand over your lower dantian, so between your belly button and your pelvic cradle. Your left hand’s gonna go on top, and you’re just gonna inhale and exhale peacefully at your own pace, keeping your eyes closed, visualizing that lower energy center, that lower dantian, full, complete, beautiful And when you’re ready, [00:19:00] open your eyes and come on back.

So why does this work for period pain? Your body holds tension and emotion in your pelvic area. When you’re in pain, when your nervous system goes into flight or fight mode, your muscles tense up, your breathing becomes shallow, and the pain cycle will feed itself with that. So first things first, it calms your nervous system by giving your brain a focal point, something to visualize.

You’re visualizing that chi and that movement, so it gives your brain something functional and helpful to do, and it gives you something to do with your breath. So you’re not fixating on the pain. You’re not fixating on that spot. You’re breathing, and it gives your mind and your body something else to focus on.

And secondly, it moves energy. As much as it may sound [00:20:00] crazy to our Western scientific minds, stagnant energy is not going to help your pain. Moving energy is. So staying in that tight, clenched space where you’re not able to move energy, where you’re actually locking it down, is going to make pain worse.

So it moves it through. It moves that chi energy. There’s really advanced ways of doing this, where you can envision water and fire moving and mixing and steam. There’s all sorts of different things you can do with this. It gets really complicated the deeper you go into Daoism and Tai Chi and Qigong and all that good stuff.

I’m an absolute nerd, so I love it, and I’ve been studying it for decades now. So you can get really complicated with it, but that basic chi cycling I still do every single night. Sometimes, even to this day, decades of doing this later, I still sometimes just go down the center, that [00:21:00] chi pillar, the center in the body, and back out. So sometimes even just that very basic one is all I want or all my body needs, especially in times of stress or just exhaustion or had a lot of medical things I’ve been dealing with lately, so I’ve been going back to that very basic one over and over and over again in the MRI machine.

I did the same thing when I had to have the breast MRI done. I was face down, and I was in the machine, and my feet were sticking out, and I did that same Qi Cycling through the soles of my feet. So when I say you can do this anywhere, at any time I truly mean it, and you can even change the entry points and exit points.

One thing that I found really helpful for pain was to inhale that Qi through the third eye down into that Lower Dantian, and then exhale through the perineum the cold, stagnant, dark, [00:22:00] freezing water or yin or space or whatever the visual was for me in the moment. But I was inhaling through the third eye and exhaling out through the perineum, almost like peeing out the cold yin stagnant energy.

I have visualized it coming out through the vaginal canal. Anything with my blood, right? So I was like b- as I was bleeding, I was still Qi Cycling, inhaling through the third eye and then exhaling through the blood the stagnant Qi. So really, truly you can do this at any moment.

I definitely recommend it during a pain flare. I definitely recommend you doing it before your period or before you know a pain flare is coming. about four to six days before my period, I would start to feel a little light cramping, and that’s when I started immediately. Now, of course, I do it every single day, whether I feel like I’m getting close to a pain flare or not. And then if you’re [00:23:00] stressed, if you’re feeling tense, if you’re just feeling like, “Ugh, gosh, things are getting a little crazy,” perfect time to do it.

Any time you need to ground, if you’re feeling scattered, stressed, that just like shaky energy, great way of calming and recentering. So your action step for this Onion Peel episode is to try Qi Cycling at least once during your day. Definitely if you’re in a pain flare or even just a tense moment.

But just try to do three cycles in one direction and three cycles in the other direction. And if all you can do is three through that central pillar, three breaths through that central pillar, just do that. Try to do it once a day. Just once a day, breathe in, breathe out three times. That’s all you have to do.

You’re gonna breathe in and then breathe out three times, several times throughout the day. So try it. If there’s even just a [00:24:00] tiny little shift, you’ve started. And sometimes it takes a little while before you can feel that first tiny shift. Try getting to the point where you can do it with your eyes open, where you n- don’t have to visualize it with your eyes closed anymore, right?

That’s… You’re looking for levels as we’re peeling back those bits of onion peel one bit at a time. So if you’ve tried Qi Cycling, I’d love to hear how it goes for you. As always, tag me on Instagram, @stashawashburn, or TikTok, or any of the places. Always feel free to message me, email me, stasha@theperiodcoach.com.

And if you wanna go deeper into energy work and cycle syncing, we’re gonna do that in some main episodes, as they come up. I have, like, years’ worth of main episodes plotting out already. But we’re definitely gonna talk about it. You can also look at Flow Freedom, which is a great low-cost course where I take you through Qi Cycling as part of the spirit module.

So there’s a lot of ways you can dive into [00:25:00] it deeper. You’re always a- welcome to ask questions. But yeah, I love it. Something that I highly recommend, something that’s free, something that everyone can do, no tools, no equipment, no money needed, and you’re worth that, right? You’re worth a few deep breaths.

At least I hope you think you’re worth a few deep breaths. So until next time, take care of yourself. You are worth it.

This transcript is done by my video editing software and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

S1E2 Estrogen-Progesterone Balance for Pain-Free Periods

Stasha: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Pain-Free Periods with Stasha. I’m your host, Stasha the period coach, and your guide to understanding why your period hurts and what to do about it. So last week we talked about the four root causes of period pain. Hormonal imbalance, often estrogen dominance, chronic inflammation, nutrient deficiencies, stress and nervous system dysregulation.
So I promised you we’d take a deep dive into each one, and today we’re starting with the one I see most often in my clients and the ones that… most misunderstood, the estrogen-progesterone balance By the end of this episode, you’re gonna understand exactly what estrogen and progesterone do, why estrogen dominance is a bit of a misnomer, how to tell if your ratio is off, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it.
So let’s start with a metaphor I use with all my clients. Think of your menstrual [00:01:00] cycle like a dance. I have a degree in dance, so I know what I’m talking about here. Estrogen and progesterone are your two principal dancers, your two lead dancers. The estrogen growth, right? So estrogen is the growth hormone.
The growth dancer builds up your uterine lining, gives you energy, makes you feel social and vibrant. Progesterone, the calming dancer… Remember my Cheech and Chong hormone from last week? It’s the one that makes you feel chill and relaxed. So the calming dancer balances estrogen, prevents the lining from getting too thick, calms inflammation, helps you sleep.
In a healthy cycle, these two dancers move together in harmony. Estrogen rises in the first half of your cycle, that’s the follicular phase, building the lining. Then after ovulation, progesterone rises to balance it out and prepare the lining for a potential pregnancy. So you do get a [00:02:00] secondary little rise of estrogen in that luteal phase, so that’s after ovulation, and it’s not as high as when it’s in the follicular phase, but it is a little bit of a rise, and that’s normal in that luteal phase.
However, progesterone is supposed to be higher, and this is where we see the dance get disturbed. And this is where a lot of the online information gets it wrong, which I know, I’m online right now, so I get it. But you’ve probably heard the term estrogen dominance, and you might think that means you have too much estrogen, but that’s not always the case.
Sometimes estrogen dominance is actually a ratio problem, not a testing numbers problem. So if you were to say that you had high estrogen and normal progesterone, yes, you have too much estrogen relative to progesterone. Classic estrogen dominance Normal

Estrogen. Sorry, I said progesterone when I recorded this the first time, so I’m just popping back in. Normal [00:03:00] estrogen and low progesterone
Speaker: Is your estrogen is fine, but your progesterone is too low to balance it.
So your estrogen would be considered normal if you were testing, but because your progesterone is low, you’re going to feel the same way as if your progesterone was normal and your estrogen was high. So regardless of how the testing numbers would come back, how you feel would be very similar. It’s the same problem.
You don’t have the progesterone to balance that estrogen. So it does still feel like estrogen dominance even though the numbers would be different. Does that make sense?
So high estrogen and low progesterone is the worst of both worlds, right? High estrogen and just rock bottom at progesterone is also estrogen dominance. So again, in that case, you would have two things that are testing out of balance. And again, you’re ending up [00:04:00] in that same place, but worse, right? So Those symptoms would be even worse if you have high progesterone and low…
Or sorry, high… So everything, all- So all of those symptoms would be worse if you have high progesterone
The worst of both worlds, which creates the worst symptoms. So here’s the key takeaway. Estrogen dominance doesn’t always mean you’re full of estrogen and that you need to reduce your estrogen. It could mean that you’re just not producing enough progesterone, and I absolutely do see that in clients.
So that’s good news because it gives you more levers to pull. When your ratio is off, your uterine lining could be thicker than it should be, and then when it’s time to shed that lining, your body has to produce more prostaglandins to contract hard enough to get it all out, Because prostaglandins is what helps your uterus contract to get that out. It’s also the same thing that runs to a cut to puff it up. It causes inflammation in order to protect your body from further damage. So prostaglandins are very important. If you cut yourself, that area around it puffs up so that there won’t be anything that gets into the cut to infect it, or at least to reduce [00:05:00] what can get into that cut and affect it, until the white blood cells and everyone else can move in and start doing the repair work.
So it’s an immediate protective shield through inflammation. So you need prostaglandins. They’re absolutely critical. You also couldn’t have your period and shed the lining at all if you didn’t have them, but if you get too many, more prostaglandins equals more pain. And it’s not just pain, it’s an imbalanced estrogen-progesterone ratio, which is also linked to heavy bleeding, large blood clots, PMS that feels like emotional whirlwinds, just mood swings everywhere, breast tenderness, bloating and water retention, fibroids and ovarian cysts.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to that have ovarian cysts that are thinking about having their ovaries removed when, in reality, it could be better for them in the long run to reduce their estrogen or get that progesterone back into [00:06:00] balance so they can keep their ovaries and their healthy cycles.
We need these hormones for not just our short-term, but also our long-term health. Endometriosis progression, so the more estrogen, the quicker the endometriosis grows, so it increases the progression. So when we talk about hormonal balance, we’re really talking about getting that estrogen to progesterone ratio into a healthy range, whether that means lowering estrogen, raising progesterone, or both I hope that makes sense.
That’s how I mean hormonal balance is getting these two to being into that, divine ratio. I want you to listen to these signs and symptoms and see if any of them feel familiar. Remember, it’s about the pattern, not just one random symptom. So if you see two or three of these showing up cycle after cycle, it’s really worth paying attention to.
So period symptoms, heavy periods, large clots, cramps that start before your period, longer cycles, so [00:07:00] definitely 35 days plus, but even into that 30 day plus, it’s something that I would certainly be looking into.
PMS symptoms, there’s over 200 symptoms, so if it’s coming and happening to you in those deep luteal, which is those few days before your period, it’s probably a PMS symptom. Severe PMS, which turns into PMDD when it gets to be really debilitating to your life. Irritability, anxiety, mood swings, depression, all of those mood changes absolutely go along with PMS.
If they get even worse, like anxiety, that you’re having anxiety attacks, or depression that you can’t get out of bed and you’re not going to work, that’s when we’re looking at PMDD. And then if it lifts when your period starts, that’s also a pretty good indication… When those mood symptoms lift when your period starts, that’s also a very good indication it’s PMS, it’s too much estrogen or maybe you’re moving into PMDD, which also [00:08:00] benefits from that hormonal balance of estrogen and progesterone being in the right ratio Breast tenderness, swelling, super classic sign of this ratio being out of balance.
Bloating, weight gain, especially in the hips, thighs, headaches or migraines, fatigue fibroids, cysts, endometriosis, irregular cycles. We… I mentioned those a little bit earlier. Fertility struggles, though a lot of times people find these things out while they’re struggling with fertility. Low libido, brain fog, hair thinning, cold hands and feet, those can also mean that the thyroid’s out of order, and that can happen when your ratio’s out of order because your body is compensating and your thyroid starts to get burnt out.
So you can end up putting yourself in a state of adrenal fatigue, thyroid burnout, these kinds of things from having this ratio be off for too long. So you can start to see it bleed into other parts of your life and your body. Something that most people don’t know is you can have [00:09:00] normal estrogen levels on a blood test and still have an unbalanced ratio.
Even doctors don’t realize this. Most of them don’t even know when to test for progesterone to get an accurate test if you’re doing blood work. So i- a lot of times my clients, before they go into the doctor, we talk about, okay, when should you test for this? When should you test for that?
It’s really important, and unfortunately a lot of doctors don’t actually know that. So tracking your symptoms is super important, and a lot of my clients don’t wanna test. They don’t have the excess money for tests, or their insurance won’t test for things outside of certain specific things.
We do a lot of symptom-based work, and I’m not prescribing medication, so that’s okay. We can actually do symptom-based work. If it works, you feel better. If it doesn’t work, then we do something else, right? So it’s certainly something that works for most people, and I always say PMS is the easiest thing to fix.
I can fix anybody’s [00:10:00] PMS. That’s not a problem. Fixing harder, more complex things like pain can take a few rounds of trial and error to find exactly what works and what doesn’t work for your particular body and the things that you need. So your body is gonna tell you far more than a single blood draw will.
In my last blood draw that I had about six months ago, I had perfect hormones. She was like, “You’re not in perimenopause.” And I said, “Okay. Well, I’ve only ovulated three times in the last year. My cycles have been 49 days, and they used to be 24 to 26.
And now they’re… They went through a year of going every two weeks, every six weeks, every two weeks, every six weeks, to now it’s just 49 days. 49 days. Oh, there was a 48 day. Obviously I’m in perimenopause”. Like, that’s not even subtle. Despite the fact that day at that moment my blood work was perfect So what do you actually do about this?
I’m gonna give you a framework that I use with [00:11:00] my clients, and this is the exact approach that helps women go from an imbalanced ratio to feeling like themselves again, dancing a beautiful dance. I want to remind you of something I mentioned in episode one, pain is like an onion. You don’t peel the whole thing at once.
You take one layer at a time. You might cry a little. And sometimes you have to set it down and come back to it. So I just want you to remember, it’s bit by bit, layer by layer, one level of pain removed. Sometimes you do need a breather. Sometimes you need to walk away.
Just stick with what you’re doing, and then come back to try the next thing. So it’s okay, and that’s true for balancing your hormones as well as just coping with pain. You don’t have to do everything today. In fact, it’s probably in… Most people cannot make that many changes at once and stick with them, and that is something that I need you to understand is pain management is going into remission, not cure.
You have to make lifestyle changes, and some things you can step back into a little bit, but you’re never gonna be able to [00:12:00] do again. Like, when I worked for the Obama campaign in 2008, I drank a lot. I was in my late 20s. I had been a bartender in New York City for, like, a decade. I was a professional drinker and I was in an incredible amount of pain, and not drinking didn’t make the pain worse or better. So it was like I rather not, pay attention to it than pay attention to it, right? So I definitely knew how to drink. I was fine. I worked and everything, but, I certainly was a professional drinker in my 20s. And when I came out to work on the Obama campaign, I was like, “Okay, let’s do it,” and I drank. We all drank. We were going door to door, knocking on people. We turned a red county blue for the first time ever. We were one of the top fundraising offices to help Obama get elected. I’m very proud of the work that I did.
That said, once I started figuring out that I could actually reduce my pain [00:13:00] through just my everyday life, food, that kind of thing, I don’t drink anymore. I occasionally have a glass of wine if I’m having a big meal. New Year’s Eve, I will have a glass of bubbly. Probably won’t make it to midnight, but I’ll have a glass of bubbly before I go to bed. So, you might be able to have some things, but you may not be able to have them in the excess that you did.
You just pick one layer, one action, start there, and that’s how real lasting change sticks. That’s how it ma- it happens. Here’s the framework. I’ve split it into two categories, lowering estrogen and raising progesterone, ’cause depending on your ratio, you might need to focus on one more than the other.
And I definitely would say start with raising progesterone
So here’s the framework. I’ve split it into two categories, lowering estrogen and raising progesterone, because depending on your ratio, you might need to focus on one more than the other. You may need to do both. So lowering estrogen if you need to clear excess, and this is something that everyone can try first, and if it makes a difference, then you know you’re on the right track.
So if you’re producing or holding onto too much estrogen, these steps are gonna help your body eliminate it. You need to support your liver. Your liver is what clears used estrogen [00:14:00] out, so you need to eat cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and I would consider a vitamin B, zinc, and magnesium glycinate supplement.
Support your gut.
Your gut bacteria help process estrogen. So eat fiber-rich foods like beans, lentils, oats, and berries. And another thing I like to do is refrigerate anything like potatoes, rice, anything starchy, because that helps build resistant starch in that food. And then when you eat it later, even if you reheat it, it’s still in there, which helps get into the deeper intestinal tract and really help that flora, fauna, biome flourish
Reduce your environmental estrogen, so avoiding plastics. If you can, switch to glass containers or stainless steel. If you have plastics in the house, like I still have plastics in the house, nothing but cold can go into them, and then you have to get the food out of it if you’re gonna reheat it.
So if [00:15:00] you’re putting away hot leftovers, they gotta go in glass or stainless steel, something that doesn’t have plastic on it. And if you wanna reheat food, you gotta reheat it in a bowl, ceramic, glass, something like that, right? Try and cut back on beauty products. All of those cosmetics and shampoos and all that stuff that you put onto your body is just a way for the patriarchy to make money off of making you feel bad about your body.
I’m not saying don’t have a luxury item. I have face masks that I do from time to time, that kinda thing. Lotion, sure, but try and get clean versions of it, not, like, scented and full of chemical versions. It’s honestly such a money saver when you get rid of a- so much of that junk that’s really just out there because that’s how they make money.
The beauty industry is the number one industry. It’s just sucking money out of women by making you feel bad. And I love to do makeup and have [00:16:00] events, but in the rest of the time, no. It’s just… Stop giving them money. Cut back on alcohol. Like I said, I didn’t notice a difference between my pain when I drank or I didn’t drink, but when I did it over the long term, it gave my liver a break, and then it was able to actually get rid of that excess estrogen.
So it takes time for that to really be noticeable, but it absolutely makes a huge difference. So give it a break. And if you have to, try and do things where in the second half of your cycle you’re not drinking, and if you’re gonna go do fun stuff, go do it in your follicular phase when you’re feeling outgoing and extroverted anyway.
So try and give your liver that break. Raising progesterone if you need to bring up the progesterone, which is certainly something i- that I see in people a lot. And we do see benefit in reducing the estrogen load even if the estrogen is normal [00:17:00] while we work on getting that progesterone up, just so that it have…
It’s a sense of immediate feeling better, which makes it easier to do the other things, right, that take a little bit more time. So these steps can help your body produce more progesterone, more of that nice cheech and chong action. you have to manage stress if you wanna make progesterone. Your progesterone is made from a master hormone, pregnenolone, and pregnenolone turns into 150 hormones in your body, including cortisol and including progesterone.
So we talked a little bit about this before. When you’re stressed, your body is gonna take that pregnenolone and make cortisol instead of making progesterone out of it. It’s gonna prioritize your stress. So progesterone is only produced after you ovulate, so you need to ovulate and you need to work on that stress I’m gonna do an entire episode on ovulation and progesterone because it’s just so freaking important after we get through some of these root [00:18:00] causes for pain.
If I can impress on you one thing, it’s that your ovulation is what you really should be tracking and paying attention to more than anything else. Because if you do not ovulate, you do not make progesterone. If you do not make progesterone, in the short term, hair, skin, nails all of these things, progesterone is your best friend.
So feeling good, feeling relaxed, feeling calm, feeling grounded, feeling stable, all of that is progesterone. And in the long term, it protects your heart health, which is the number one killer of women, your brain health, which 70 to 80% of dementia and Alzheimer’s patients are women, and your bone density.
Women suffer from higher rates of osteoporosis, earlier onset osteoporosis, all of these things, and those are progesterone’s long-term post-menopause. So you need as much progesterone now as you can possibly get if you wanna have a healthy, strong post-menopause half [00:19:00] of your life. It’s gonna hopefully be half of your life.
So if you’re not doing it now, like if you’re on hormonal birth control, then you will have problems later in life. There are things you can do to mitigate it, but it causes a lot of problems. So you absolutely need to ovulate so that you can see how you’re doing and making… So then you’re going, “Okay, I am producing progesterone.”
You can confirm your ovulation, and then focus on making sure that you’re making enough progesterone after you ovulate. Vitamin B6, vitamin C, zinc, they all support progesterone production. And zinc supports follicular health, and it can take 100 days of taking zinc before you see an improvement in the follicular health.
So if you aren’t ovulating consistently or every other month or any kind of inconsistency with ovulation, you absolutely wanna try getting some more zinc in. And Vitex, also [00:20:00] known as chasteberry, can support progesterone. Always talk to your doctor before you add in minerals, vitamins, anything.
It’s just always best practice to run them by, a doctor and especially if you take supplements because they all have a contraindication of some sort. When I did the supplements class for my perimenopause coaching students, every single supplement I talked about I was like, “I need to just start with a disclaimer that all of these have a contraindication.”
There’s something. Somebody who has kidney damage, right there you have a lot of issues. Autoimmune disorders, there’s a lot of contraindications for autoimmune disorders. So Run it by your doctor. Just be safe. But chasteberry helps you produce progesterone.
It was called chasteberry because it reduced libido in men. But for us, it can actually increase it. It can reduce it if you’re taking it too long, and it does need to be pulsed to get the best out of it. I’ve taken it on and off for a long time, and I always see [00:21:00] help and support when I take it, and then you have to pulse it a little bit, and then when I go back on it.
So it’s certainly something that’s been very helpful for myself and several of my clients. And in fact, one of my clients couldn’t get pregnant, and we put her on chasteberry, and she got pregnant quickly. So just throwing that out there. But here you go. Chasteberry can be helpful, but it like zinc, it takes about three months, 90 to 100 days, to kick in.
So you need to see it happening. And the dosage can really differ depending on what you’re using it for. So for some people, they just need, like, the dosage on the bottle. Some people need twice the dosage that’s on the bottle. I do twice the dosage that’s on the bottle for me because my endometriosis and my pain is so severe.
Now what’s on the bottle is fine. So as I’ve gotten deeper into remission, my needs have lessened in that respect So pick one layer from the list, just one. Maybe it’s adding a serving of broccoli to your daily lunch. Maybe it’s swapping your plastic water bottle for glass. Maybe it’s [00:22:00] five-minute breathing exercise to lower stress.
But just pick one thing to do the cycle and chart it, and then notice how your next period feels. That’s how you peel the onion one layer at a time. Now, this might make no difference to you at this stage because maybe there’s something that’s triggering the pain that you have to deal with first.
So for me, it was a gluten intolerance, probably celiac, but by the time there were tests for it, I had already figured it out and I’m unwilling to eat gluten for two weeks and put myself through that pain and then my next period will be horrific again just for a diagnosis when I know I can’t eat gluten.
That makes a huge difference. One of my early clients had a dairy issue. So if you find that you are leaning on one food source really heavily, that may be your trigger food. We’ll talk about food down the line. But I just wanna say that these actions can really help in the moment. They can help in the long term.
They’re [00:23:00] worth starting and getting them sorted out now. These are easy things that you can do without having to upend everything. So see if they work, see how you feel. And like I said, if it’s not making a difference, there’s probably a bigger trigger that we’re gonna need to work through first, and we will go through those triggers as we go through this podcast together.
So that’s it for episode two. Oh my gosh, two of Pain Free Periods with Stasha. We talked about estrogen dominance and why it’s actually a ratio problem. It’s about estrogen relative to progesterone, not just too much estrogen. We talked about the thick uterine lining equaling more prostaglandins, equaling more pain, signs of heavy bleeding, clots, PMS, breast tenderness, fibroids, and more.
Action steps are split into two layers: lowering estrogen through liver support, gut support, and reducing environmental estrogen, raising progesterone through stress management, ovulation support, and targeted [00:24:00] nutrition. So pick just one layer and pick just one action and start there. Next week we’re diving into the second root cause that I talked about on our first episode, chronic inflammation.
We’ll talk about what’s driving it, how it makes period pain worse, and the specific foods and habits that can cool it down. So if this episode helped you, please share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Take a screenshot, tag me on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or whatever, I’m @StashaWashburn, and tell me which layer are you peeling first.
And if you’re ready to go deeper and figure out what’s going on for you, your exact ratio, I do work one-on-one with clients to help them understand their hormones and create a personalized plan, and I always do a free consult call with anyone with painful periods. It’s one hour. You get to pick my brain.
I will overwhelm you, but you will walk away feeling seen, heard, and with a ton of things that you can try. So I’ll put the links in the show notes. You can always head to theperiodcoach.com to learn more about me or Period Coaching [00:25:00] School if you decide maybe you wanna help others too. Remember, the revolution will be bloody, and it starts with understanding your hormones one layer at a time.
Until next time, take care of yourself. You’re worth it

This transcript is done by my video editing software and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

The Onion Peel 3
Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to The Onion Peel, a bonus miniseries where I answer one question or share one quick insight to help you peel back the layers of period pain. I’m your host, Stasha, the period coach and endometriosis warrior, and your guide to pain-free periods. Today’s question is, how do I start tracking my cycle?
I don’t even know where to begin. Very good question, and it’s where I start with everyone. Tracking, not just noting when your period is on the calendar, but really charting. Noting some key things is super important to reducing any period issues, uh, or just so that you know when you’re ovulating so you can plan and schedule your life in flow with your cycle to make your life easier.
So it’s one of the most common questions that I get, and it’s a great one. Tracking your cycle is the single most powerful tool you have for understanding your body. The difference between your random Tuesday today and your random Tuesday when you’re [00:01:00] tracking is enormous. You might be off-kilter trying to get things done, struggling, and when you’re tracking your cycle and you know what’s going on and where you’re gonna be and how you’re going to feel, instead, y- that random Tuesday is easy, it flows, it feels great.
You feel accomplished. You feel like you really w- won the day. So it makes a bigger difference than you can even imagine, and I can’t explain it. It’s just that powerful. So here’s how to start. I have a tracker. It is a mandala that you color. I don’t love period tracking apps because first of all, they’re guessing, and even with all of the algorithms and everything, they’re telling you, not you noticing.
So if you really want a good mind-body connection, it is pen and paper. It is the coloring mandala. It is something in your hand that you’re actually writing and putting words down [00:02:00] or notes down or coloring symbols in, so you really are cementing it. I don’t love the apps as well because in the United States, they’re all subpoena-able.
There is no such thing as a HIPAA compliant app. They can be HIPAA compliant, but they are all something that you can dive into. It does not matter where they are based. They can be in a different country. It’s still data that can come up in, in a subpoena case, and the more this country goes, the more I get a little nervous about that.
So I don’t love them, but honestly, they just don’t create connection, and they don’t give you the insights that you really need about your own cycle. You are a unique individual. So I don’t love them for that matter. But pick something that works for you and track the first day of your period. So day one is the first day of your period.
With the mandala, that would be a brand-new mandala on day one of your period, the first day of your period. If you’re really have truly irregular periods, then you can track with the moon cycle and [00:03:00] the new moon would be your day one. You’re gonna track your pain levels. So for like the mandala, I have a couple different colors that represent painful cramps.
There’s just a little light cramping. There’s a I had to get under the heated blanket cramping, and then there’s one that I have not used in ages, but there is a color for it was real bad. So do a pain level 1 to 10. Somehow differentiate what your pain levels are. And then on the mandala, there’s a space for your flow.
So was it light, medium, heavy? And you wanna note things like clots, if they’re really big, if there’s a lot of them, that kind of thing. It can be really helpful information.
On the mandala as well, you want to track your energy levels, I suggest high, medium, or low, and picking a different color for those different energy levels.
But you definitely wanna note that. You can start with those, and if you can get into the habit of noting those, then you add in things like mood. Were you anxious, happy, sad, irritable? Sleep. Did you sleep [00:04:00] well? Add in things like stress, anxiety into your symptoms area. Add what you ate. Really consistently tracking that can make an enormous difference on how you’re feeling.
So on the mandala there’s an apple, and I suggest you focus on one thing. Do one cycle where you’re giving up caffeine, or give one cycle where you’re eating really dark, leafy greens. Just note that, make sure you’re really incorporating it, and then see what it’s like for your next period. So consistently tracking it and then sw- you know, maybe switching it up if it’s some, it, hey, it worked, I’m gonna keep doing it, and now I’m gonna try this next cycle.
Or, this didn’t really seem to make much of a difference, I’m gonna try something else next cycle. Really starting to see those patterns. And when you notice your patterns, like your pain is spiking on day two, or your mood crashes the day before your period, or you have to have a nap two days before your period, you have clues.
All of these clues lead you to answers, [00:05:00] and that’s where the power of tracking comes up. If you don’t know where to start, just go download the mandala. I’ll put it in the show notes.
It’s got email support so you can have support along understanding what and why and how and where to get started. If you need to, you’re always welcome to email me or slide into the DMs, whatever you need. But just get started. It is more data and better than anything else you’ve ever done. You probably know what your astrology sign is.
I’m a Leo. You probably know what your Hogwarts house is. I’m Ravenclaw. You probably know a lot of those things, but what you don’t know is what phase of the cycle you’re in on any given day, and that matters far more than any personality quiz you’ve ever taken. It tells you everything. It shows you everything.
It gives you what you’re gonna feel like tomorrow, what you’re gonna feel like next week, all laid out for you. So start tracking. I really… This, the tracker that I have is [00:06:00] free forever. That’s how important I think charting is.
So that’s it for the Onion Peel episode today. If you have any questions you’d like me to answer, send it to me on Instagram or email. And until next time, take care of yourself. You are worth it.

This transcript is done by my video editing software and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

The Onion Peel 2

​[00:00:00]

Welcome back to The Onion Peel, a bonus miniseries where I answer one question or share one quick insight to help you peel back the layers of period pain. I’m your host, Stasha the Period Coach and endometriosis survivor, and your guide to pain-free periods. Today’s question, is there anything I can eat during my period to help with pain?

And I would argue that what you eat will help reduce your pain more than any pharmaceutical or over-the-counter medicine, and in some cases, what you choose to eat right before or during your period can be more impactful than any of those in your immediate pain. So absolutely yes is the answer. While you can’t erase all of the pain with food, you can reduce the inflammation and support your body’s natural pain-fighting mechanisms.

So here’s three things, just big ones that I see work over and over again that I talk to my clients about and anyone who comes to me that has a [00:01:00] painful period. First things first is gonna be magnesium-rich foods. You need magnesium to relax your muscles, which includes the uterine muscles, right? So dark chocolate, yay.

Pumpkin seeds, leafy greens. Google magnesium-rich foods, find things that you really like, and try to incorporate them all the time. Don’t just survive off of dark chocolate. Do get in the leafy greens, especially those dark ones. And pumpkin seeds is in seed cycling, so if you’re seed cycling, that can be right there, you’ve already started.

The second thing that I really like is omega-3 fatty acids. These are anti-inflammatory. They directly lower prostaglandin production, which we talked about in the very first episode. So think about salmons, sardines, walnuts, anything that’s rich in omega-3s.

Again, have a Google, find things that really work well for you. I love salmon and I loved little tinned sardines. I can’t eat walnuts, but [00:02:00] I put them on anything and everything. And the third is my secret weapon, ginger. It’s a natural anti-inflammatory and it also blocks pain receptors. So when I was in the worst of my pain, I found ginger to actually peel back a layer of pain bigger than ibuprofen and the prescription ibuprofen and the prescription narcotics I was given, any of those things.

I still found a really strong cup of ginger tea made a bigger impact on my pain in the moment than anything else. So try ginger tea, add some honey if you need to. I found a great company that has CBD infused honey that I often add to my ginger tea when I’m in a pain flare. It’s really helpful.

It’s warming, it’s soothing, and it can absolutely help reduce your pain. On the flip side of the coin, you will need to avoid some things. One of them is caffeine. It’s one of the last things that I gave up when I was working on [00:03:00] reducing my pain. I really love my caffeine. I don’t know if it’s ’cause I’m a Brooklyn baby and I absolutely love coffee, but getting rid of the caffeine was a big one for me.

It constricts blood vessels so it can make your cramping worse. Sugar can spike your inflammation, so really trying to reduce sugar, it’s so hard to do in that phase when you’re already, cravings and cranky and everything else. So one of the things that I really like to do is make a sweet potato pudding, chocolate pudding.

It doesn’t have any sugar in it. It satisfies that sweetness, and I’ll put the link to my recipe in the show notes. It really, having it on hand and ready to go when I’m getting close to my period makes an enormous difference in my grabbing junk versus eating something that will help reduce the inflammation.

Processed foods, especially highly processed foods, can worsen period pain and bloating and all of the intestinal distress that’s going on. So the next time your period starts, try [00:04:00] swapping your morning coffee for a ginger tea. Add some dark chocolate for magnesium and just because it’s delicious.

So just try and pick something, get started, have it on hand, and make your life a little bit easier when you get into that painful period area. That’s it for this week’s Onion Peel. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, send it to me on Instagram or email. Until next time, take care of yourself.

You are worth it.

This transcript is done by my video editor and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

The Onion Peel: When is Period Pain Normal or Time for a Doctor? S1E1

Stasha: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Onion Peel. This is a bonus miniseries, and I’m gonna do this throughout hopefully the entirety of this podcast, where I’m gonna answer one listener question or share one quick insight to help you peel back the layers of period pain. So just because we’re getting started again, I’m your host, Stasha the Period Coach, fellow endo warrior, and your guide to pain-free periods.

Today’s question comes from one of my email list people, as I haven’t really gotten this podcast out. You know, today is only day two. So I asked my email list, “Hey, do you have any questions about period pain?” And one of them said, “How do I know if my period pain is normal or if it’s time to go to the doctor?”

Which, fantastic question. So the short answer, if your period pain stops you from living your life, so if you’re missing work, school, or social plans, that’s not normal. And if you’ve been told it’s just bad periods and you have to live with it, that’s not true either. Now, I do absolutely think that [00:01:00] during our periods, having some downtime, some rest time, not going out to do those social things, not showing up to everything that you don’t necessarily have to show up is probably a great thing to do.

You do want to give your body time to rest and relax and just do… you know, bleed. Just do what it’s doing. But pain is your body’s signal that something needs attention. It’s not a character flaw, and it’s not weakness. It’s information. This was tough for me. It’s not weakness, it’s information. Definitely a mantra that I have had to use over the years.

So if you’re asking that question, I want you to trust yourself. If you’re in a space where you’re going, “Boy, is this bad enough?” The answer is yes. It’s time to go to the doctor. You know your body best, and if it feels wrong, it is wrong. So here’s what I recommend. Start a symptom log. Track your pain level every day, not just during your period.

Write down what you eat, how you’re sleeping, and how you’re feeling mood-wise, emotions, introverted, extroverted, angry, irritated, sad, [00:02:00] happy, glad, whatever it is. Bring that log to your next appointment so it gives you the data, not just feelings. And when you get into that doctor’s office and it gets eh feeling, it’s nice to have the data to lay back and go, “Hey, here’s what I’ve got.”

And if your doctor is dismissing you, find a new doctor. Just period. I don’t care what’s going on. If your doctor is dismissing you, find a new doctor. So that’s a nice quick little onion peel for this week. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, send it to me on Instagram or my email, you’re anywhere, just get in touch.

Uh, we’ll have another one for you tomorrow as part of our kickoff for the first week of this launch of the new podcast. Until tomorrow, take care of yourself. You’re worth it.

This transcript is done by my video editor and I look it over during editing, but the audio is my focus when I’m editing. It’s just me, so please forgive any mistakes.

S1E1 Pain-Free Periods with Stasha: Root Causes Unveiled

Stasha: [00:00:00] Have you ever felt like your period pain is running your life? Like you’re just surviving that week instead of actually living? If that sounds familiar, you’re in exactly the right place. Welcome to Pain Free Periods with Stasha. I’m your host, period coach, endometriosis warrior, and your guide to understanding why your period hurts and exactly what to do about it.

This podcast is different from the chatty interview style shows you might have heard. This is your weekly audio masterclass. Every episode, we’re going to dive deep into the physical, the emotional, and the mental sides of menstrual pain, and most importantly, we’re talking about prevention, real solutions, not just coping

You can expect actionable takeaways every single episode. No fluff, just the tools you need to stop surviving your period and start healing it. You might be wondering, what exactly [00:01:00] is a period coach and why do I need one?

I’m so glad you asked.

A period coach is somebody who helps you understand your cycle, not just the bleeding part, but the whole hormonal symphony that happens every single month. We look at nutrition, stress, movement, lifestyle, everything to figure out what’s driving your pain, and we create a personalized plan to address it.

I’m not a doctor. I don’t prescribe. I don’t diagnose. But I do help you become the expert on your own body, so you advocate for yourself, make informed decisions, and finally get the relief you deserve. I’m not just a coach. I’ve lived this journey myself. I know what it’s like to be dismissed, to be told it’s normal, and to spend years searching for answers.

That’s exactly why I became a period coach. I help women just like you figure out what’s really going on and take back control. Now let’s get into it. Today I’m giving you a sneak peek into four root causes of period pain that I work on with all of my clients.

By the end of this episode, you’ll have a [00:02:00] much clearer picture of what might be going on in your body and a roadmap for what to do next. When I work with a client, I don’t just look at their cramps in isolation. I look at the whole picture, and almost always the period pain falls into one or more of these four categories.

So root one, hormonal imbalance, most likely estrogen dominance. The first and most common cause I see is hormonal imbalance, specifically too much estrogen relative to progesterone.

So what’s happening and why does it cause pain? Estrogen is a growth hormone. It makes the uterine lining thick. A thicker lining means more prostaglandins are produced when it sheds, and more prostaglandins equals more pain. Progesterone is the calming, balancing hormone. I often jokingly refer to it as the Cheech and Chong hormone because it’s the hormone that helps you chill.

When it’s too low, estrogen runs unchecked and inflammation goes up. So some signs that this might be [00:03:00] you: heavy periods with large clots, breast tenderness before your period, PMS that feels emotionally chaotic, shall we say, or pain that starts before your period actually begins. So if this is you, this is where diet and lifestyle come in.

Supporting your liver, which clears excess estrogen, and adding foods that support progesterone can make a massive difference. Root cause number two, chronic inflammation. This is something I absolutely battle with with endometriosis Chronic inflammation is a big one for anyone with endometriosis, but it can affect anyone with painful periods.

So adenomyosis, PMDD, all of these things can have this as one of their root cause. Might not be the only one, but it certainly can be chronic inflammation that’s causing it, and in all of my clients, I’ve absolutely seen this particular thing help. So that [00:04:00] constant low-grade inflammation, not great for your body.

Inflamed tissues are more sensitive to prostaglandins, so the pain signal is amplified. This can come from diet, stress, an underlying condition, and without addressing the inflammation, you’re kinda just putting a Band-Aid on the pain. So some signs that this might be you is if you have other inflammatory conditions, so skin issues, digestive problems like Crohn’s or celiac or ulcerative colitis, joint pain, achy knees, achy elbows, old injuries that you notice around your period start to get more achy.

If your periods are heavy and painful or you feel bloated and puffy all the time. Also, frequent headaches or migraines can be a real clue that you’re dealing with chronic inflammation. So you wanna do an anti-inflammatory diet to just get started with this. [00:05:00] Omega-3s, magnesium, and definitely cutting back on your sugar, processed foods, even caffeine and alcohol can help lower your overall inflammation.

Okay, root cause number three, nutrient deficiencies. This is something that I have seen in every client and every other period coach, doctor that I have spoken with has also said the same thing. Every client that’s come in has had nutrient deficiencies. So it’s definitely overlooked, and most people don’t realize it’s going on, but it really is something that I have seen over and over again.

So when you’re low on magnesium, for example, that relaxes your muscles and lowers prostaglandins, your cramps are more intense. Zinc supports hormone production and reduces inflammation, so if you’re ,low on zinc, it makes pain and PMS worse. Vitamin B, especially B6, helps balance hormones and helps regulate your mood, so if you’re feeling a lot of mood swings, vitamin B could [00:06:00] be helpful.

Your PMS can get worse when you’re low on any of these, but definitely your B vitamins. Your iron, low iron can make you more sensitive to pain. It can make you feel more exhausted and achy. So if you’re always tired, you have muscle cramps or twitches, your skin, your hair, or your nails are brittle.

If you crave sugar or salts, what you can do is go get tested. Y- just ask. It, hopefully in your blood work every year you can do this. But even without testing, focusing on nutrient-dense foods like leafy greens, nuts, seeds, and high-quality proteins can be a game changer. I didn’t have insurance for a long time, so I didn’t do any testing.

I just really ate assuming I had these deficiencies and added in some supplements, and it made an enormous difference. When I was able to finally get tested, things were in the good zone, so I keep on with all of my supplements and good ways of eating. [00:07:00] And our last root cause that we’ll dive into today is stress and nervous system dysregulation.

It’s one that connects everything. Stress and a dysregulated nervous system also are gonna inflect inflammation, chronic inflammation, all of these things, so it really is a bit of a we all work together or we all go down together sort of situation. So when you’re chronically stressed, your body produces cortisol, and cortisol disrupts your hormones.

Your body literally steals from progesterone to make cortisol. It’s called a cortisol steal. So if you’re getting more cortisol than progesterone, it increases your inflammation, and if you’re stressed out, your body will make cortisol instead of progesterone, which increases your inflammation.

Your nervous system stays in fight or flight mode, and your body doesn’t feel safe, so it can’t relax. That means your pain signals get amplified. So if you feel anxious or overwhelmed most days, you have trouble sleeping, your [00:08:00] periods are irregular or painful, you hold tension in your neck, your jaw, your shoulders, those are all signs that this could be you.

So this is where your nervous system regulation comes in, deep breathing, gentle movement, creating space for rest. Your body can’t heal if it’s in survival mode. You have to absolutely get into that rest and digest state where you feel safe so that you can, in fact, heal. So your action steps. Figure out which one is you.

So take a pause, take a moment. Which one is you? And I have to say that most of my clients have a combination of these four causes, so you don’t have to pick just one, and if all four of them are like, “Oh, boy, that sounds like me,” don’t worry. You’re in the same bus as I am. You’re in the same boat as many of our clients are, and there are certainly things that will always come up and can also affect each other.

So if you have one, if you don’t start to manage it, you’re [00:09:00] going to have two, three, four, right? So listen to your body, pick the categories that feel the most familiar with you, and pick just one thing to focus on. You can’t do everything at once. You have to just do these things one at a time, making one really easy thing.

So- Maybe it’s just adding in magnesium. I recommend magnesium glycinate. So maybe it’s just saying, “All right, I’m gonna start taking magnesium glycinate before I go to bed.”

Maybe it’s starting a daily breathing practice. You just start the day with three deep breaths, or you take a lunch break and you do some inhale for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight. We call it 4-7-8 breathing. But maybe it’s just simply starting a breathing practice. It’s free, it’s easy, you can do it every day.

So track it. We’re gonna talk a lot about charting on this podcast. You need to chart and track what’s going on. What are you doing and what are you feeling? So notice how your period feels. Notice how you feel each day. Did it [00:10:00] change after you did your breathing cycle? Did you sleep better after taking magnesium?

Did something shift? So you ha- don’t fix everything and all at once, you just need small, consistent changes to add up for big results. And the more data you gather, the more empowered you become to advocate for yourself. So what are you gonna pick? Feel free to email me, slide into the DMs, whatever it is, but let me know what felt…

root cause felt like you, and what are you gonna pick for your first thing to try to reduce your pain? And remember, pain is like an onion. You have to peel it off layer by layer. Rarely does one thing take care of the whole problem. For myself and all of my clients dealing with really bad pain, it’s one level, one layer at a time.

So pick one thing and just get that one thing going so that we can get to the next layer of the onion. So thank you for tuning in. This is it [00:11:00] for episode one of Pain-Free Periods with Stasha. We talked a little bit about what a period coach is. It’s the difference from seeing a doctor. It is that gap that needs to be filled, where you are actually listened to, heard, understood, and somebody will work with you and your life to get to the root cause and help bring that balance and pain relief in Your four root causes that we talked about today, hormonal imbalance, so an estrogen dominance, though I hate using that word because it’s really in relation to your progesterone, but excess estrogen in relation to your progesterone, so we’ll just say hormonal imbalance.

Chronic inflammation. Number three was nutrient deficiencies. Four was stress and nervous system dysregulation. So your action steps, pick one cause to focus on in this cycle and just try that one. Next week, we’ll talk about a deep dive into the first root [00:12:00] cause, that hormonal imbalance, and I’m gonna walk you through exactly how estrogen and progesterone work, and how to tell if you’re experiencing what’s known as estrogen dominance, uh, and the specific steps you can take to rebalance your hormones naturally.

You’re not gonna wanna miss it, so stay tuned. If this episode helped you, please share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Take a screenshot, tag me on social media. I’m @StashaWashburn. Yes, Washburn. As a kid, my bullies called me, “Go wash your burn.” So hit me up there. Let me know which of the four root causes resonated with you, and like I said, you’re absolutely welcome to slip into the DMs or email me.

I’m stasha@theperiodcoach.com. And if you’re ready to go deeper and figure out your exact root cause, I work with one-on-one with clients to create personalized plans for pain-free periods. If you want to, I always do one free hour to pick my brain with anybody who has painful periods. [00:13:00] All you have to do is reach out.

So again, email me, slide into the DMs, and we’re absolutely happy to send you that link, and we can chat. Remember, the revolution will be bloody. It’s the name of my first book, and it’s absolutely something I believe in. And that revolution starts with you understanding your own body. Until next time, take care of yourself.

You’re worth it.