Painful periods at best are annoying, and at worst, can kill your day (or a few days!). So I want to give you some quick tips to resolve your painful periods. We’re going to talk about something you can do to prevent painful periods, but then we’ll also talk about what to do if you’re already in the middle of experiencing a painful period. 

So first of all, a painful period can really be the result of not having enough blood flow or adequate blood flow throughout the whole month. So that’s important because if we’re having periods of high stress or a tendency towards poor circulation, that will decrease the amount of blood flow to the uterus throughout the whole cycle. So the whole month, what happens is we’ll have some blood flow and it stops and we have some more blood flow and it stops. Every time that happens, it allows the body to go ahead and set up for clotting. So you might notice with your period that you have some pieces of coagulated blood, which we would call clots. They might be round(ish), or they might be stringy. This is a sign that stress is high or there’s poor circulation. In my experience working with patients, it’s usually some combination of both of these things. 

So we wanna go ahead and address these issues. One way we can address the poor circulation is by exercising! Exercise will help increase blood flow to the pelvis all month. So it’s really good to be consistent with our exercise as a way to really take care of ourselves. 

The other thing is helping to lower stress. So anything we can do to go ahead and help lower stress throughout our cycle will help improve the quality of our period, which is going to improve the quality of our uterine lining throughout the month. So this can be as simple as doing exercise because it helps increase blood flow to the pelvis, but it also manages stress levels. So you’re getting more bang for your buck which makes it really important.

Something else you can do is just really pay attention to your self-care. For some folks, this may be some daily meditation. Meditation is a great choice because it’s been shown in research to be helpful in lowering cortisol levels. And it can be super simple – just set a timer on your phone for five minutes and focus on your breathing. Every time you have a thought, just acknowledge, “that’s thinking I’m going to go back to the breath”. It’s that repetitive nature of actively reminding yourself to stay present, and reminding yourself to go back to the breath that helps lower cortisol levels.

So if you have a whole bunch of thoughts while you’re meditating, that is okay, as long as you’re bringing yourself back to the breath at some point. (If you want a guided meditation Circle+Bloom has some great guided meditations and you can find those here.) Any sort of self-care that lowers stress, such as meditation or exercise is great, just make sure to be consistent with them.

Now, let’s say you’re around cycle day 21, or about a week out from expecting your period. Something you can do for this week, in particular, is really pay attention to cutting out caffeine and sugar. Both of those things are going to cause inflammation, and I find with my patients and my coaching clients, that if we can at least cut back on caffeine and sugar, it makes a big difference with their painful periods. 

Side note, if we’re trying to conceive, you’d ideally cut it out for the whole cycle as that’s better for fertility. But if we’re just working on getting rid of these painful periods, and we can’t cut it out all cycle, at least cutting out any processed sugars and caffeine for the week before your period, will help immensely with getting rid of those painful periods. 

Now, maybe there’s another scenario you’re currently experiencing – you just started your period. You’re currently having a really painful period, and you don’t know what to do besides maybe get out the heating pad, take Advil, or something else like that. Well, another great tool is to apply castor oil to your lower abdomen. You’re going to apply a little bit to your hand and then rub it on your lower abdomen. Then you’ll wash your hands (it’s really oily!) and put on some old yoga pants, shorts, or pajama pants. Castor oil will stain, so put on something that is dark or something that you don’t mind if it gets stained. After you apply the castor oil you can put a heating pad on top of your abdomen it if you want, or you can just go straight to bed. 

Castor oil is great at increasing blood flow in the area and also reducing inflammation. So you can imagine, if that painful period is being caused by poor circulation allowing clots to form, then your body has a really hard time getting rid of that clotting and/or shedding that lining with your period. So the castor oil’s going to help improve blood flow in the area, which will help you shed that lining easier, which should help decrease the cramping or at least get your period moving a little bit quicker so that we can shorten the duration of it.

So to recap there are some things you can do to help with those painful periods:

1. Make sure that you’re exercising consistently to improve blood flow to the pelvis.
2. Make sure that we are using good self-care techniques like meditation to keep stress low throughout our whole cycle. (Read more about meditation and fertility on my blog here.)
3. The week before your period, you want to go ahead and really decrease or completely cut out caffeine and processed sugar. 
4. When we’re on our period use castor oil on the lower abdomen to help get rid of those painful cramps. And if you need directions for castor oil, go to my blog at www.AustinAcupunctureStudio.com/blog. 
5. You can also use castor oil on your lower abdomen during your cycle to help improve blood flow. Again go here for castor oil directions. (If trying to conceive, just use it CD1 – Ovulation.)

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As always, reach out with questions, comments or requests for other topics that you’d like me to discuss.