Can stress delay your period?
Stress comes in many forms and has many effects on both the mind and the body…including your periods. But exactly how and why does stress affect your period? How can you tell if a late period, or another period issue, is caused by stress or by something else?
When your body is stressed, reproductive function is de-prioritized.
Because of how humans evolved, when you experience a stressful situation, your body thinks it’s in immediate physical danger. Back when we lived in the elements — with lions, and tigers, and bears (oh my) — a highly stressful situation often meant that our physical safety, and our life, was at risk. So our body kicked into a fight-or-flight response to do absolutely everything possible to make it out alive.
When your body believes that it’s being faced with life-threatening danger, the resulting cascade of stress hormones causes the body to prioritize only the systems necessary to get you out of harm’s way — meaning it temporarily de-prioritizes things like reproduction, digestion, and immune function. All of its energy goes toward keeping you alive in the face of what it believes to be a threat to your survival — funneling energy to your heart, your lungs, your brain, and your muscles.
Reproducing (and having periods) doesn’t exactly make the list of priorities when you’re face-to-face with a hungry tiger. Unfortunately, your body doesn’t know the difference between a hungry tiger and an upset partner.
It doesn’t matter if the stressor is a lack of sleep, an overwhelming project at work, a breakup, or anything else that feels out of the ordinary for your body. It will still react the same way: to protect itself and survive at all costs.
Are you someone who has a “nervous stomach”? Or have you ever noticed that when you have a lot going on, you feel constipated or irregular? That’s because digestion also gets bumped down your body’s priority list.
If your body thinks it’s in physical danger, having a period isn’t a priority.
Even though we no longer face such physical threats, anything that triggers stress inside of our body still triggers that exact same fight-or-flight response, temporarily shutting down your reproductive system.
This de-prioritization of reproduction can cause things like:
delayed ovulation
your period being late
an irregular period
a skipped period (amenorrhea)
improper hormone production
and, in more severe cases, a cascade of other period issues
How do I know if my period is late because of stress or because of something else entirely?
If your period is late, the first thing to ask yourself is: Did something unusually stressful happen about two weeks ago?
Period-delaying stress can include:
travel
lack of sleep
an illness
extreme emotional disturbance
or really anything that creates a feeling of upset or overwhelm
If something super stressful did happen, and if it happened about two weeks before you were supposed to get your period, your late period just might be due to stress.
Stress can also cause chronic period issues, but it’s usually chronic stress, or even unresolved trauma, versus acute, one-time stressors that make your period late.
The only time you should be worried is when your period issues are ongoing — like period pain, heavy bleeding, chronically irregular cycles, a lack of periods, PCOS, fibroids, infertility, endometriosis, chronic vaginal or urinary tract infections, PMDD, pelvic pain, or any other number of problems — or if the there’s been a sudden, drastic change.
In these more severe cases, stress is still likely a big culprit, and a more comprehensive approach is needed to fully heal. I’ve been helping women heal their periods for nearly a decade, and lasting healing is possible.
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