🌚 Simple ways nature might soothe PMS 🌝
Serotonin is not just for mood, but also for reproductive health
Serotonin is about more than mood 🧡
Our bodies constantly seek information from the local environment and use that information to determine what processes to prioritize and give more energy to.
The circadian hormone serotonin is one of many pathways between the information coming from the local environment (like daylight hours, temperatures, and nutrient availability), with the reproductive system.
Serotonin levels vary across the menstrual cycle, and influence the mood changes associated with PMS.
We can take advantage of our body’s receptivity to environmental information by feeding it real cues from our locations.
This in turn can elevate serotonin production.
Serotonin is important for women and men’s reproductive health—and spending time together in Nature is the perfect way to bond and improve your fertility at the same time!
From the circadian standpoint, we usually think of nighttime melatonin as being counterbalanced by daytime cortisol.
However, daytime serotonin is also an opposite of sorts to nighttime melatonin.
While cortisol is made from cholesterol, melatonin is made from tryptophan—and so is serotonin.
Daytime production of serotonin is important because it literally turns into melatonin at night.
By the way, Fluoride (F) inhibits the conversion of serotonin to melatonin, so check your drinking water, toothpaste, etc, are free of F if you are trying to maximize your body’s natural melatonin production.
Read more about that here:
Here are some types of cues from your environment that inform your body’s wise decisions about prioritizing (or deprioritizing) cortisol, serotonin, melatonin, and fertility:
natural light codes
real temperature
locally grown foods and seafood, even if imported
NOT eating much after dark
earthing
These things all program circadian health, which in turn gives soothing signals that it may (or may not) be a safe time to make a baby.
Surrounding yourself with healthy time-based cues like these may even boost feelings of safety and increase desire for happy socialization, fun, laughter, parenting the children you have, and creating new life all over again via the link we are finding between the central circadian clock in the brain (SCN), the oxytocin system, and the reproductive system.
Circadian serotonin is also a key player in trance states, such as dance, sex, and childbirth.
Circadian disruption thus may help explain why these experiences can be so difficult in this era when it’s so easy to miss out on sunlight and spend insufficient time in Nature thanks to our busy lives and comfortable homes.
At the same time, all of this here is a very nerdy way to look at what you probably can already feel in your bones to be true: Nature is beautiful. Nature adores you. Nature fills you with life.
Learn more about the scientific specifics—and breaking ways this science may apply in complicated reproductive situations—in my Practitioner program. Jump in at Lesson 10: Quantum Biologic First Trimester to understand the specifics of what we know about changes in circadian and redox signaling across the menstrual cycle. It fits into why dietary antioxidants, surprisingly, show such conflicted results in research even though we know oxidative stress is such a challenge to health.
