MENSTRUAL CRAMPS ARE REAL: HOW YOUR MOOD HAMPERS YOUR HORMONES

The pituitary is a very sensitive gland that responds to every rise and dip in a woman's emotional makeup. Since the pituitary starts and stops the hormones that regulate menstruation, if the pituitary is thrown off, so are your hormones and so is menstruation. It's the domino principle applied to biology. One thing sets off another, that sets off another, that alters menstruation. And no one can say what that first trigger might bea mood that overtakes you, a stressful situation, even a flight in an airplane can make the difference.

It's not at all extraordinary for college students living away from families, pressured by exams, to experience amenorrheathe loss of their periods sometimes for a whole semester. When she was a counselor at a freshman dormitory, Dr. Dorothy V. Harris, director of the Research Center for Women in Sports at Penn State University, used to tell her female charges, "Don't worry, when you go home for Christmas vacation, your period will come." As soon as they left their tense campus lives and returned to the relaxed atmospheres of their homes, these young women sent tranquil messages to their pituitaries, and the pituitaries responded by orchestrating normal hormonal flows.

The pituitary reacts with a woman. In extreme cases, women have been known to be in such intense emotional states that they have not only arrested their periods, they have created false pregnancies. As a resident I was called in to evaluate a woman who had entered into labor. She had never been seen in our hospital before. She said that she had been without her period for nine months and she was swollen, as if she were with child, but I could not hear the heartbeat of the baby. I was afraid the unborn might be dead so I sent her for an X-ray of the abdomen. There was no sign of a fetus. The woman had never conceived. The expectant father, who was waiting outside the labor room with brand-new baby clothes, refused to believe the news. The "mother" screamed, cried, breathed in gasps, and began to menstruatewhich shows how a drastic mood change can start as well as stop a period.

Women who haven't menstruated and are worried that they're pregnant often begin to bleed the second they hear that their pregnancy tests are negative. In an unusual instance of menstrual breakthrough, a bride's maid-of-honor began bleeding between the wedding and the reception, because during the service she had fallen down the altar steps, ripped her red silk dress, and damaged her shoes. The embarrassment of losing her balance and dignity in front of three hundred wide-eyed viewers had overturned her inner equilibrium too. And the feminine cycle reflects feelings.

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Women's Health