Going With the Flow | Managing and Celebrating Menstruation

Mindful methods to manage menstrual cycles and help mitigate PMS, while celebrating a woman’s unique hormonal composition

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Here’s an enlightening experiment: text your five closest girlfriends and ask them if they’ve ever had a painful/heavy/too frequent/absent period. If you’re met with awkward silence or sheepish non-answers, follow up and ask if they’ve ever experienced irritability, headaches, moodiness, or other majorly inconvenient or even painful symptoms and simply chalked the issue up to “hormones.”

If you’re flooded with affirmative replies, you’ve successfully confirmed what science already knows: a staggering number of women suffer from menstrual symptoms. Thanks to pop culture stereotypes, you’re probably used to exaggerated rom-com representations of one specific issue: PMS. Premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, is usually characterized as an avalanche of symptoms including depression, moodiness, abdominal pain, breast tenderness, headache, and fatigue during a woman’s luteal phase (just before her period). Up to 85 percent of menstruating women report having one or more premenstrual symptoms, and 2 to 10 percent report disabling, incapacitating symptoms.

The syndrome is so commonly acknowledged and accepted as a normal consequence of femaleness that corporations have built big business on it: diuretics and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are considered run-of-the-mill treatments, and in extreme cases, doctors may prescribe antidepressants to blunt serious mood swings. Celebrities are in