I recently had the honor of presenting to a group of women at the Hinman Dental Meeting. We had hundreds of women in the audience and two brave men who joined us for the course: Hygiene and Hormones: How to Optimize Oral Health in Any Age. I stood on stage and watched the audience eagerly take notes, lean in when we discussed how, when you regulate your hormones, unwanted weight can more easily be released from the body. As hygienists, we typically have gifts of being healers, an insatiable hunger to optimize the workflow of a situation, and of course, to help.
My two-hour program left me with a waiting line of over 30 people who had follow-up questions. Some started with, “My daughter needs your help,” others: “Can you help me understand my wife as she is going through perimenopause?” and other asked “ I have gone on Ozepmic® to help and now I am realizing it is a band-aid.”
The interesting thing about dental hygienists is that we seem to be wired differently. I attribute this default of fight-or-flight nervous system behavior to dental hygiene school. Mainly, because I am still recovering 16 years after graduation, when someone says something nerdy like ATP from mitochondria, and I get flashbacks of sitting in the doorway between my bedroom and bathroom floor because it was so uncomfortable I couldn’t fall asleep while studying.
As someone who grew up in a traumatic childhood, my nervous system was never really able to find homeostasis for long. With love in my heart, I can easily recognize it in others, especially in women, as we tend to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. The truth is, our bodies cannot heal, cannot function optimally, or serve without burnout if we cannot regulate the nervous system. Without time to reset, to recover, to fuel, we will be thrown into a default fight-or-flight state, which we can remain in for years.
If we do not feel safe, we cannot reset, we cannot detox, we cannot truly thrive both in and out of the op. I believe this is such an important message for everyone to understand in a world that glorifies being busy and productive, and phrases that encourage hormone dysfunction, such as “being tough like a girl.”
This led me to years of HIIT workouts and heavy lifting that, at the time, were only creating more cortisol and causing more harm than good. I am 38 years old, thousands of dollars into therapy and life coaching, and it wasn’t until my hormones finally caught up with the stress that the warning signs of my body became the same frequency as a foghorn- impossible to ignore.
I am happy to report that over the last six months, I have transformed my nervous system with the strategies I am learning with my functional nutrition training and will share with you simple ways you can do so, too.
Test your minerals with an HTMA test
If you are experiencing headaches during your cycle, mood swings, severe pain when menstruating, depression, weight gain, chronic fatigue, abnormal cycles, and infertility, your minerals may be out of balance.1 Feel free to reach out to me for more information. I am happy to support you with your testing journey, because it really changed my life!
Prioritize your sleep, as it is the way your body detoxes
Science tells us that cooler rooms and rooms without ambient light support optimal sleep, and avoiding screens two hours prior to bedtime will help regulate the body to the circadian rhythm.2
Walk barefoot while humming
I remember my Memere, I am French-Canadian, would often be found humming along to her own made-up tune or pretending she was auditioning for the chorus at Sunday church services. I now know that humming helps regulate the nervous system.3 This is why I pair it with walking barefoot in the grass in my backyard. It’s a nervous system reset within minutes.
It’s important to remember that as women in healthcare, we have the gift of serving others. We need to preserve that gift. I call this our cortisol boundaries. For me, I only call my mother while I am driving my car because I have created a home that is calm, peaceful, and helps me reset my nervous system. By calling my mom while driving, I have more patience for the story I have heard multiple times, for the recap of her week that is very similar to the week prior, and most of all, I show up in a way that I am proud of.
My personal cortisol boundary is phone calls with family while driving coupled with humming while walking my dog in the morning. Efficiency can be enjoyable when we are doing things to better ourselves. Let me know how I can support you and your hormones so you can stay happy and healthy in and out of the op!
Kapper, Celine, et al. “Minerals and the Menstrual Cycle: Impacts on Ovulation and Endometrial Health.” MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 29 Mar. 2024, www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/16/7/1008.
Trivedi G, Sharma K, Saboo B, et al. Humming (Simple Bhramari Pranayama) as a Stress Buster: A Holter-Based Study to Analyze Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Parameters During Bhramari, Physical Activity, Emotional Stress, and Sleep. Cureus. 2023;15(4):e37527. Published 2023 Apr 13. doi:10.7759/cureus.37527
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in RDH eVillage newsletter, a publication of the Endeavor Business Media Dental Group. and .
