Many of the folks we see are high achievers, perfectionists, or highly ambitious people. You're dedicated and disciplined. So we wrote this for you.
In this article, we talk about how high standards and stress can contribute to our menstrual health disturbances or Hypothalamic Amenorrhea.
Stress is one of the major contributors to Hypothalamic Amenorrhea. When we experience stress, our bodies initiate the stress response, triggering the release of cortisol, commonly known as the stress hormone. In small bursts, cortisol helps us cope with challenging situations, preparing us for the flight-or-fight response. However, prolonged or intense stress can disrupt the production of our hormones that regulate menstruation.
Here we've outlined 5 Ways That High Achievement and Perfectionism Can Cause Menstrual Health Disturbances:
1. Daily dose of achievement
As high achievers, it can be easy to get hooked on a daily dose of achievement. This could be in the form or little wins, like getting a workout in or feeling like we ate healthy.
Overtime, it can start to feel rewarding for continuing to invest in these behaviors, until we feel like we need to do them every single day as a way to get that daily dose of achievement.
(internal competitiveness)
2. "I'll be enough when..."
When we hold high standards for ourselves, we put a lot of weight on our achievements as a way to climb the latter towards a feeling of fulfilled and "enough". This can make an every day work challenge or a lower effort workout feel like a complete failure. It can also cause us to feel like we have to work like we have something to prove, never satisfied with what we've accomplished or completed.
In doing so, the stresses that we experience on the regular basis carry a lot of weight, so it can feel harder to manage our stress or our reaction to things that stress us out.
3. Disciplined routine
We can get caught up in a very rigid, consistent routine. This may involve doing the same exercise on the same day of the week regardless of how our body feels. It may involve eating at certain mealtimes even if we get hungry earlier. It could involve checking emails first thing in the morning so that we don't feel like we're already behind for the day.
These routines actually disrupt our ability to check in with our bodies, our emotions, and our minds to see how we need and how we can adapt based on how we feel.
4. Rest is laziness, productivity is key
When we view rest as boredom or laziness and we demonize rest, we avoid taking rest in any form. This can put our nervous system in overdrive and contribute to a chronic feeling of being on high alert. It can also lead to burn out in which we're overworked or fatigued but not providing ourselves permission to rest.
We may feel anxious about the idea of taking a day off, so we avoid rest further in order to stay productive.
5. External validation
For many high achievers, we are striving to achieve in order to feel that enough, and that can lead to looking externally for validation that we're doing well or that we're enough. This can look like anything from needing to get promoted at work, needing to beat our previous time on a workout, or even needing to ask others for their opinions on decisions we make.
Rather than knowing and trusting where we are now and what we are drawn toward, we ensure that we are meeting other people's perceived standards or guidance.
The Takeaway
Many of the people who struggle with menstrual health disturbances and Hypothalamic Amenorrhea are also very accomplished, ambitious, and high achievers who set high standards as with perfectionism. Therefore, we can be tempted to view our challenges as shameful or failures, or we can ignore the warning signs in order to keep pushing forward.
However, it can be helpful to recognize that some of our biggest strengths are also correlated with some of the challenges we face physiologically, and it's okay to seek support in navigating how some of behaviors show up in our body.
You can be strong and high achieving and determined and also struggle with Hypothalamic Amenorrhea.
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