Is stress making your period more painful?

Stress can make periods painful, irregular or extremely heavy. Mary-Claire Mason offers practical tips and advice in her book Coping Successfully With Period Problems

The first thing to ask yourself is whether or not stress could be responsible for your period problems or making them worse. Recognising that you're stressed is the first step towards doing something about it.

Taking action

You may be vaguely aware that you're having more problems than normal coping with the world, but spotting the signs and symptoms of stress isn't easy - especially when you're all knotted up. Sometimes it's easier to spot if, for instance, you've suffered a bereavement. Making a connection between the bereavement and how you're feeling and behaving is usually pretty clear-cut. Stress can be harder to spot, though, especially when it's become long-term and you're so stressed that you can't recognise it any more because it is your normal state.

Keeping a diary of how you're behaving and your mental and physical symptoms for a couple of weeks should provide clues to your stress levels. Identifying what may be causing you problems is the next step. Are you exhausted by work and family pressures, do you feel stuck? Can you do anything about the problems you've identified? Can you get more help at home if you're struggling to cope with the demands of a family and a job? Unpicking what you can do about the problem isn't always obvious. When it comes to stress, there's a useful saying: you should change those things you can and accept those things you can't. Just recognising you're under stress can also help you to destress!

Your approach to life

Change is an important cause of stress and some of us are better at dealing with it and more resilient to it than others. Dealing with several changes at once only adds to the problem. Change is a part of life, but the pace of change is getting faster and dealing with the adjustments that change requires can be very stressful for some people. There's a long list of stress-inducing life events. Some of those are the death of a partner, divorce, separation, illness, marriage, pregnancy, being made redundant and gaining a new member in the family.