Is hormonal health important for reasons other than getting pregnant?

Should you worry about imbalanced hormones if you aren’t trying to get pregnant?

As unfortunate as it is, we live in a time that most people don’t have great hormonal health. It can get pretty complicated, but here are a few contributing factors:

• Stress
• Sleeping with light
• Not following natural circadian rhythms
• Poor food quality
• Endocrine disruptors

Because of this, most people’s hormones tend to be a little off. Since I teach the sympto-thermal method of fertility awareness, which helps you track your hormones and understand what is going on cyclically, I see a lot of women noticing these hormonal imbalances when they begin practicing this method, either for birth control or because they want to get pregnant.

If you aren’t trying to get pregnant, you may wonder how big of a deal it is to have hormones that are a bit wonky. Other than the fact that healthy hormones do make practicing fertility awareness easier, I want to illustrate how important your hormones are, even in the case of our non-reproductive health, using progesterone as an example.

Progesterone levels being low is pretty common nowadays. Like I said above, there are a lot of factors that may be making this is the case. Progesterone can help your weight stay stable, can reduce or eliminate PMS, and can reduce some spotting. In other words, things that would bring immediate benefit to you.

Besides those things, though, progesterone also has some sneaky health benefits. By that, I mean that these aren’t things that you are going to notice right away, but that may build up over time. Progesterone helps breast tissue not have unopposed growth, helping reduce the incidence of breast cancer. Progesterone helps stimulate the growth of bones, making them less susceptible to osteoporosis. Progesterone also promotes heart health, which is important considering heart disease is a large killer of women.

In addition, progesterone can calm stress, oppose inflammatory prostaglandins (these can be the cause of period cramps for some women), help with fat metabolism, and maintain thyroid function. What would we do without you, dear progesterone?

Overall, your health is going to be much better when your hormones are in check, regardless of whether you are trying to conceive or not. I know that it can be tough to get your hormones balanced because of how prevalent things that do not support our hormonal health are in our society, but once you get the ball rolling a lot of women see a difference rather quickly and are motivated to keep making changes.