Things like hair and skin, with polycystic ovaries, do take a little longer to respond, but pay attention to how you're feeling in yourself. Is your mood better? Are you finding it easier to lose weight? I’ve known Caroline for many years, and you will seen her mindset videos if you’ve been through our 30 days to Happy Hormones programme. I’ve always known how important mindset is to achieving any goals, and especially creating sustainable health changes. But in this episode, we go a bit deeper and explore how and why women in particular can self sabotage when it comes to improving their health, particularly around weight loss. Heat therapy has been appreciated for centuries all over the world for its wellbeing benefits. Red light therapy on the other hand is relatively new. It uses the power of infrared energy without heat (or very low levels) to rejuvenate your cells at the mitochondrial level. Fortunately there are many ways to get the benefits of both heat and light therapy. Reducing stress and learning how to manage the factors that cause you stress is vital to long term healthy hormone balance. As levels of oestrogen and progesterone drop, you're not just dealing with symptoms like weight gain, fatigue, and mood swings. Your body also faces challenges in absorbing and holding onto protein.

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If you don't have access to saunas or hot springs, there are various products available on the market, including infrared home saunas, lamps, red light face masks and vaginal devices, sauna suits and blankets, amongst others. Make sure to choose reputable products from trusted sources. If you're navigating the midlife or menopause journey, chances are you're not getting enough protein. And that's a bigger deal than you might think. It’s not just binge drinking that’s a problem either. Regularly consuming alcohol can have serious problems: "Two or three glasses of wine after work is still quite excessive and potentially affecting your health and fertility." Sugar Are you struggling to lose weight, despite doing all the right things? Firstly, don't beat yourself up. Midlife weight gain is very real, and it's not easy to shift. Our bodies are going through tough times. For both conditions there are mental health symptoms too. Too much oestrogen can cause mood swings and depression, as well as reduced sex drive.In many cases it’s easy to resolve these imbalances with lifestyle changes," says Burns-Hill. You might need to change things in your diet, factors affecting your stress levels, or even start taking supplements. Unfortunately our reptile brain hasn’t caught up with our modern lifestyles, which is why now, more than ever before, we’re experiencing a rise in unbalanced hormones and the conditions it can cause, from fatigue and depression to infertility. PCOS sufferers can have diabetes or pre-diabetes (insulin resistance), the condition that is linked to an excess of insulin, our blood sugar regulating hormone," adds the expert. Supplements aren’t designed to make up for an unhealthy diet or lifestyle, but adding in a few things to help during difficult periods can make a real difference.

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We look outwards for a lot of solutions, but we need to get to know ourselves inside out," advises Burns-Hill. "Pay attention to what is going on within and let that be your guide – then recognise when things are changing and resolve to carry on." The treatment for both is to be put on the pill, which isn’t a solution because it just regulates the cycle for the time you're taking it. When you come off pill, the symptoms return and if you then want to have a baby you might find you struggle with fertility," she says. Signs of hormonal imbalance Walking as a form of exercise is often snubbed by the fitness industry who try to persuade us to go big or go home! Alcohol can spike your oestrogen level to the power of three. And while a spike is temporary, if you keep drinking regularly then it’s having a long term impact on your residual levels," says Burns-Hill.Many things affect the delicate balance of our hormones including what we eat, our environment and how we feel emotionally. Most of the time our hormones just get on with it without us really noticing. It’s only when something goes wrong that we realise how important they are. This podcast is for you if you're struggling with 'unhappy' hormones! Whether you're pre, peri or post menopause, your hormones can be out of balance, and that can result in you feeling like you've lost control of how you look, feel, think and perform.