The Perimenopause and ADHD Connection That Could Change Everything

Adele: 00:00:00

Foreign.

Kate: 00:00:06

Welcome back to another episode of More Yourself on the ADHD Women's well Being feed. And today I am bringing you the last clip from the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Live event.

And I really wanted to showcase all the different talks and topics because I didn't want anyone who couldn't be there on the day miss out on hearing what these incredible speakers and the topics were because it was really, really valuable information and I know from the feedback from the event how much people have taken away from it and what has helped them. So today is no different. We are sharing Adele Whimsit's sort of clip from her talk.

It's not all the talk because I I don't want to give too much of the magic away, but you get a really, really good insight into what Adele talked about on the day. Now you may have come across Adele in my community on the podcast before.

She's a good friend and I share her knowledge and her expertise because I trust it and know that she is so ahead. She really is. And everything that she talks about is always from a neuro affirming lens.

She's got ADHD herself and so much of her community and her clients also a neurodivergent. And so that really makes a difference because she gets it.

She understands our nervous systems, she understands our hormonal fluctuations, she understands our how we live and breathe in this quite difficult world actually that many of us find ourselves in and how often our hormones are the ones that are so impacted. So she is a women's health practitioner and she does specialize in the intersection of adhd, perimenopause hormones and the female nervous system.

And she's also co authored the book Essential Feminine Wisdom.

And Adele supports women whose mood, cognition, menstrual cycle symptoms and and nervous system become increasingly dysregulated during hormonal transition and helps them to understand what's happening in their bodies and make more informed, consent led decisions about hormone support.

And the most important thing is that her work is hormone literate and it's neurodivergent, informed and grounded in education rather than just this one size fits all protocol that so many women have found themselves in. So in this little clip you are going to hear Adele break down the study that she's been using and the tracking hormones and ADHD symptoms.

She's going to be explaining why neurodivergent women may face higher rates of pmdd, postnatal depression and a difficult perimenopause and talk about how these hormonal patterns work in the body and interplay with adhd and why perimenopause lowers our progesterone and affects estrogen balance and all of this is interrelated to our nervous system sensitivity.

So I really hope you enjoy listening to this clip from Adele Talk at the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Live event and don't forget that it is all available for you to buy on my website.

That's ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk, you head to the live event audio and all the information is there and you'll be able to download all four sessions and really get a feel for what it was like to be in the room at our very first community event. Just before we begin this session I wanted to share a quick and important note.

The information you're about to hear is for educational and informational purposes only. It's designed to support your understanding and awareness, but it isn't a substitute for personalised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Everyone's body health history and circumstances are different, especially when it comes to hormones, HRT and adhd.

So it is really important that you do speak hopefully with your neuroaffirming GP or a qualified healthcare professional before making any changes to your medication, treatment or health plan. And Adele has created a very helpful fact sheet to support you in preparing for conversations with your gp.

So I'd really encourage you to use that as a guide when advocating for your care.

So as always, please listen with curiosity and self compassion, take what resonates and always, always seek a personalised medical support where needed.

Adele: 00:04:16

There is so much that I want to talk to you about. I could just fill a whole week talking about hormones.

So I run an online clinic where I work with women all around the I work with all women who are neurodivergent, whatever their age.

But I undertook a study last year, it's the only study that's been done into perimenopause and ADHD because it's a massively understudied area in an understudied massive area around ADHD and women.

So I wanted to share a bit with you around that because there's a lot of misinformation on social media about hormones and ADHD and when I first started doing this work a few years ago I longed for the day where everybody was talking about hormones and ADHD because no one was giving it the time of day and now everyone wants to talk about it becomes it's a really sexy topic and they're doing it incorrectly, largely.

So some of the things I want to do today is to address some of the misinformation, particularly around my beloved hormone progesterone, which gets really bad air time. I've written an ebook on progesterone, which is available on my website. And I want to start with going.

Even though I'm going to focus on perimenopause today, we know from the teeny tiny bits of research that we do have that neurodivergent women are much more likely to have something called pmdd, which is a debilitating form pmt. We're much more likely to have postnatal depression. We're much more likely to have a significantly more challenging perimenopause.

And none of these things are by accident. Okay. There is a very strong link with our ADHD and our hormones and I could talk to you all week about one of those things.

So I'm going to be very specific today around progesterone and perimenopause. So this was the study that I did. It was in conjunction with mira, which is an at home testing device.

You using your morning urine, so you pee on a stick in the morning, shove it in the device, 20 minutes later, it tracks exactly on an app, your estrogen and progesterone levels. So you can do that throughout the month and you can see exactly what is happening. And then what I encourage women to do is to get a tracker.

Again, you can download, download these for free from my website and it's one for your inattentive traits and one for hyperactive traits. And cycle tracking for ADHD women can be quite tricky because if it's on an app, if we don't see that app every day, it doesn't exist. Right.

Whereas a piece of paper, having it by the side of the bed with a pen, you just put a cross in the box where that thing was a trait or that thing came up that day. And then if you're testing your hormones alongside that through the cycle, you can go, oh my God, no wonder X, Y and Z happened. Okay.

And then we go deeper in clinic with that where we look at menstrual cycle awareness to go, well, this day is really tough or this week's really tough. What do we do with that data? So what?

So I'm just adding that bit in because I know lots, there's lots of questions around testing and that's what I suggest. And so I worked in partnership with them to work with a cohort of women in perimenopause to do exactly what I've just explained to you.

They tested every day for three months and then we tracked their traits alongside that. So that was study. And I called it the perfect storm, because it really is. So who am I to do this work? My background.

I spent 20 years in youth justice. I was in quite a senior position by the time I left, where one of my lead areas was sen.

So I was very familiar with ADHD in naughty little boys that we sent to prison, but not so much from the female perspective. Even though I used to joke and go, oh, that's my adhd, you know, I never really pulled that through.

However, when I began a new career in women's health, very ADHD style, sat on my clinic when I was diagnosed. Okay, where's the data? Where's the science around how my hormones are affecting my traits? I'm very conscious.

No one swore today, so I'm not going to lower the tone and start. But I wasn't very happy when I found out that there was practically no data to support what I knew my lived experience was.

So that is how I evolved into working specifically in adhd. But like many of you in this room, we were part of the lost girl generation. None of us were being supported or even looked at for our needs.

During the 80s. It was, mask up, get on with it, stop being a worry pot. That's what I got, basically. Yeah, I. No one would have looked at me anyway.

You know, I was in Mensa as a child. I was in the national papers, seven years old for being the cleverest little girl in Britain. Apparently no one was looking for me for neurodiversity.

You know, it wasn't then. So we've got to this season of our life and suddenly the lid comes off in perimenopause.

Lots of women have had strategies that have either been conscious or unconscious. And then we get to our late 30s because we know that ADHD women start perimenopause earlier.

And perimenopause is a reduction of progesterone production, the reduction of that because we are not ovulating as effectively, that is what's happening in perimenopause. And at that point our adrenals go through a 15 year recalibration.

Our whole body goes through a recalibration, including our brain and our gut microbiome and everything. This recalibration happens where the adrenals should take over production of your estrogen and progesterone.

I don't know about you, my adrenals aren't functioning that brilliantly after a lifetime of undiagnosed ADHD and rejection sensitivity dysphoria. So they're literally not able to keep up with the demand. So this is the pattern that we're seeing.

Why is it that women, ADHD women are reaching this season of their life and going, what is happening? Nothing I was doing before is working. I don't feel like myself. I'm overwhelmed all the time. My traits, the lids of my traits.

I'm not sleeping so well. I've got an inner scratchiness all the time. What is going on? So I wanted to find out, what are hormones? We use this word a lot.

They're basically messengers. That's all they do. They're in different glands in your body and they are released.

The brain sends a message to release them, to fly around the body attached to a receptor, and that's it. It's done its job. It gets on that receptor and that receptor goes, oh, that's progesterone. That means I need to calm down.

Or that's cortisol, pump up the heart, shut down digestion, okay? That's what. They're just messengers. And once they've done their thing, the body's very effective at just breaking them down and getting rid of them.

But they have a massive impact on our nervous system. They have a massive impact on our traits. I believe ADHD women have Rolls Royce nervous systems. And I often say this.

I bet you could all walk in a room, you'll know who likes you, who doesn't like you, what's expected of you. Mask, mask, mask, mask, mask. And you're not thinking about that.

That's your nervous system reading the things that neurotypical people are absolutely blind to, okay? We read things, we see the things that they don't. That is taxing on the nervous system. And this is tied in with our hormones.

So if you are on a contraceptive, and that could be the Mirena coil or the pill or any other form of contraceptive, this is what your cycle looks like, okay? There isn't a cycle.

If you have a bleed whilst you're on the pill, it's because you're having a withdrawal when you stop taking the synthetic hormone for a week, okay? Because people say to me, oh, my periods are so much worse because I'm not on the pill. Well, that's wasn't your period. It's not an accurate.

You can't make that distinction.

So what we're talking about when we talk about the cycle is this pattern and this is really outdated, this image, because it suggests that progesterone is doing nothing in the first two weeks. So here we've got day one, hormones are quite low. Around day three, estrogen starts to rise. And I call her the party girl of the hormone world.

When she is behaving herself and she doesn't usually in ADHD bodies, she makes you feel sexy, confident, and you'll probably see online, oh, ADHD women need estrogen because it sensitizes dopamine and serotonin, which is true. However, on the flip side of that, which isn't talked about so much, is it also stimulates histamine and it stimulates glutamate.

These are very excitatory neurotransmitters. So when we're talking about a nervous system that is already very sensitive and then we start stirring things up.

So for some women with this, it can be overstimulating. It's really, really misunderstood.

And I think it's probably important to capture right now that in my opinion, we're about 60 years behind where we need to be in NHS prescriptions of HRT. It's very, very misunderstood.

So estrogen rises and rises and you'll see lots of, if you're watching anything around cyclical work, you'll think, oh, everyone tells me I'm meant to feel amazing at the center of my cycle, but I feel horrible. That's the histamine, probably, that's the glutamate.

Okay, so we're getting this estrogen dominance, this estrogen buildup, which has a really negative effect on your nervous system, your traits and your mood. Now, if we are ovulating, and only if we are ovulating, we produce progesterone. So if estrogen is the party girl, progesterone is balanced to that.

She's like the mama who comes back to the house party and goes, calm down, it's time to go to sleep.

So if we're not ovulating properly and we're not producing enough esion's just going to party, that is going to feel pretty grotty by the time your period comes that week leading up to your period, maybe that two week.

And what's really interesting, because we have a system that does not understand our bodies, the theory has become that if you suffer in this phase of your cycle, oh, it's the progesterone, it's the progesterone coming in, that's when you've ovulated.

Well, that's not true, actually, because I have analyzed hundreds of mirror Data results for women with a number of of challenges with their hormones. And what I see every single time is that it's insufficient progesterone to keep the estrogen in check.

And that is where you see pmdd, that is where you see pmt, that is where you see perimenopausal cycle. That feels like you are perpetually in your lute to heal phase.

Okay, it's lack of progesterone, but because it just goes, oh, that's where progesterone is. So it must be the progesterone making it. That's not scientifically based statement at all.

So these hormones to bring this in relation to ADHD have a direct impact on the neurotransmitters in the body. So progesterone works with something called gaba, which is like Valium for your nervous system.

Progesterone comes in and through a biochemical process creates a GABA effect which is like, oh, that's really nice. Everyone is different. So everything I'm sharing with you today is going to come down to what we see for most women, okay? Everyone is very different.

And it's so important that if you go down a hormone replenishment route, you work with someone who's going to work with you. To me, a specialist is someone who's going to sit with me and look at my unique circumstances and responses to the type, the dose and the timing.

Okay? So just to caveat that with what I'm saying today,.

Kate: 00:14:40

Thank you for being here and listening to today's episode. I just want to remind you that if you are looking for more support on your ADHD journey, there are so many resources waiting for you over at ADHD.

ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk so inside the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Workshop Library, you'll find practical and compassionate guidance on topics such as nervous system regulation, rejection, sensitive dysphoria, perfectionism, emotional regulation, hormones, parenting, and so much more. All designed specifically for late diagnosed neurodivergent women.

You can also explore my my new book, the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, which was published by dk, which is also available in ebook and audiobook, which is packed full of tools to help you feel calmer, more regulated and more like yourself. And if you do crave a bit more deeper connection and ongoing support, come and join us inside the More Yourself community.

It's a gentle space for learning, reflection and connection with other neurodivergent women.

And you'll also find the recordings from our first ever ADHD Women's Wellbeing Live event, which brought together incredible speakers and a room full of inspiring women for a truly special day. We have recorded it all for you, and it's there to buy.

So whether you're just starting your journey or looking to go deeper, there's something there for every stage. Just head to ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk to explore every stage. Everything.

And as always, thank you so much for being here and for being part of this community.