Episode #181: Why Your Period Is Irregular (And What Your Body May Be Trying to Tell You)

If your periods are irregular, missing, or only show up when you take medication, then this episode is definitely going to be one you want to listen to. First of all, your body isn’t broken and it’s not punishing you. This is not a random symptom. It is happening for a reason. What your body may be asking for is something that it’s not getting.

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what that might be.
So first of all, ovulation is the problem that no one is talking about. Here’s the first thing I want to establish as we have this conversation today, because it really does change everything: a monthly bleed is not the same as ovulation, and ovulation is really what drives a regular cycle.

Ovulation is what happens in the middle of your cycle when an egg is released. Then, when progesterone drops, this is when a true menstrual cycle bleed happens. Other bleeding throughout your cycle, spotting throughout your cycle, or bleeding after medication are not the same thing.

Your cycle is not just about getting a period. When we were in high school or early puberty and learning about our periods, we were basically told we should have a period every 28 to 30 days, and that was what was highlighted. That was the cycle, right? Your cycle was your period.

But this is really a four-phase hormonal process, and ovulation is at the center of all of it. When ovulation is not happening consistently, or it doesn’t happen at all, your cycle becomes irregular. It gets too long, becomes too short, becomes unpredictable, or completely disappears.

With PCOS specifically, ovulation can be disrupted in a few key ways. Insulin resistance, inflammation, chronic stress, under-fueling, or even disruptive sleep can all interfere with the hormone signaling that triggers ovulation and the symphony of hormones creating the entirety of your cycle.

So when someone asks me, “Why is my period irregular?” my first question back is, “Is your body actually ovulating?” Because if it is not, this is where we need to start—not with the period.

It doesn’t really matter when your period happens. I know that’s a really frustrating concept, but it doesn’t really matter if you have a 21-day cycle or a 34-day cycle. That just determines the time period between one bleed and the next.
What really matters is: are you ovulating? Because that’s what indicates whether all of the different phases of the cycle are happening appropriately, with appropriate androgen and hormone levels, so that you’re able to mature an egg, release an egg, and have high enough progesterone to support a healthy pregnancy.

So the reframe I want us to look at is this: irregular cycles are not a problem. They are information.

I know they feel like a problem. They feel like our body isn’t working appropriately. But really, they are our body’s way of communicating with us. Your body gives cues and symptoms for a reason, and your cycle is one of the clearest forms of body feedback that we can get.

When something is off with your period, that is your body saying, “Something in my environment, my nutrition, my stress load, my sleep, or my metabolic health is not supported enough for me to prioritize reproduction.”
Reproduction is one of the very first things to go.

So this is not failure. This is not a broken body. This is not a random occurrence that we don’t understand. It is simply information, and this information can be worked with.

One of the things that really comes up for me over and over, and honestly bothers me, is one of the most unhelpful things we do in conventional medicine when it comes to irregular cycles. We tell women to wait six months. We tell them to wait a year. We tell them to give it time and come back if nothing changes.

I understand why that protocol exists. Hormones do need time sometimes. If you go off birth control, we can’t expect periods to instantly bounce back. And not every irregularity requires immediate intervention. Plus, the interventions conventional medicine offers aren’t always the best solutions anyway when it comes to irregular periods.

So having someone say, “Give it a little time, it’ll work itself out,” isn’t horrible advice considering what traditional medicine usually offers for irregular periods.
That said, there are many things we can do when we understand that our body is struggling with period irregularity. Waiting alone doesn’t really do anything for us.
Here’s the gap that causes so much confusion and suffering with PCOS: nothing changes while you wait—not because nothing can change, but because nothing is being done to understand why this is happening in the first place or what we can do to help it change.

Then when we do act, we skip straight to symptom management.
We jump to birth control to regulate the bleed. We jump to Clomid or Letrozole.
If you’re not familiar with those, in modern medicine, if you have irregular periods, we often say, “Take birth control. That’ll make your periods regular.” But that does not regulate the hormone cycle happening underneath the surface. It either overrides it or shuts down ovulation completely. Essentially, it mutes the cycle or takes over control.

We don’t want to take over control if the goal is to regulate your cycle. We want your body to take over control, and we want to support it.

If we jump to progesterone or Provera, what we’re doing is simulating one little aspect of the cycle. We’re not giving your body a full cycle. We’re jumping to the very end right before the bleed would normally happen. We raise progesterone artificially, and then when you stop taking it, progesterone drops and your body says, “Oh, I guess progesterone just dropped. Time to shed the uterine lining.”
So we get a bleed, but we did not have a full cycle. We did not have a follicular phase. We did not have ovulation. We did not have a luteal phase leading into menstruation. We simply created an arbitrary rise and drop in progesterone that told the uterine lining to shed.

The other thing we offer in traditional medicine is ovulation-inducing medication such as Clomid or Letrozole. In this situation, we’re jumping to the center of the cycle and pushing ovulation.

This doesn’t necessarily bring everything else into harmony. These medications can be very helpful, especially if you’re having what I like to call a “shadow of a cycle,” where all the pieces of the symphony are there but they’re weak or timid and need support.

Sometimes with PCOS, our cycle irregularities can really improve with environmental changes and lifestyle adjustments. Then, if we still aren’t seeing a strong enough cycle for ovulation to occur consistently, medications like Clomid or Letrozole can be helpful.

But when we jump to those after simply waiting however long insurance says we need to wait, based on our age, we’ve essentially just been put on hold while nothing changes.

If our insulin wasn’t functioning well, if inflammation was high, if our stress response was causing problems, none of that got addressed. We just sat there and waited. In a lot of ways, stress gets worse because now we have this problem no one is doing anything about.

Just to be clear, I am not anti-medication or anti-intervention. But I want to point out the missing step between “your cycle is irregular” and “wait six months to a year.”

The missing step is asking:

Why did the cycle change?
What is the body responding to?
What is the body not responding to?
What is actually causing this?

This step is usually skipped in modern medicine, and without it, we end up managing symptoms while the root cause continues unnoticed. That’s not healing. That’s muting the conversation your body is trying to have with you.
When I say this, I’m not speaking theoretically. I’m speaking from personal experience and from working with many women.

After I stopped birth control, my cycle didn’t come back. I had a couple of very heavy periods somewhere between 35 and 60 days apart, and then I would go months without anything.

My doctor told me to wait. They said, “You’re only 28. Wait a year. If your cycle hasn’t returned in a year, make an appointment.”

So I went 12 months without anyone being willing to do anything—even run lab tests. They kept saying it was normal after birth control and normal not to get pregnant for up to a year in your twenties.

Every time I called to make an appointment for irregular periods, I was basically told there was nothing they would do until it had been at least a year.

To be fair, my providers were not bad people. They were following standard protocols. But while I sat there waiting—with irregular cycles, no ovulation, no answers, and a lot of fear about what my future fertility would look like—there was a lot no one talks about emotionally during that waiting period.

We feel helpless because we don’t understand what’s happening. And when you don’t understand what’s happening, you don’t feel like there’s anything you can do about it.

Eventually, it took months to get an appointment with a fertility specialist. First, I had to get into my OB to get the referral, and then it was another four-month wait after I was diagnosed with PCOS.

During all of that time, I finally got so frustrated that I stopped waiting. I started researching. I dug into the research about PCOS—which, at the time, was very limited—and I focused heavily on ovulation tracking.

At the time, there really weren’t good over-the-counter ovulation tracking tools like we have now. There were essentially ovulation predictor kits, which only measure LH.

Mine were basically always positive because LH is elevated in PCOS. Every once in a while it would spike a little more, but it happened three or four times a month. I knew I wasn’t ovulating three or four times a month, so I realized these tests weren’t actually helping me.

The one thing I kept seeing in the research over and over was the relationship between insulin and PCOS.

So I put myself on my own lifestyle protocol based on the best understanding I had at the time, and I followed it strictly for four months because I didn’t know what else to do.

Before I even made it through all the fertility appointments and testing, I found out I was pregnant the night before my fertility appointment to get medication prescribed.

Now, I want to be really clear here. I’m not saying everyone can or should do this alone. That’s not the point.

The point is that when I finally understood what my body needed—and honestly, 12 years ago I didn’t understand it nearly as well as I do now—for the first time, instead of waiting, I listened. I tried to understand what my symptoms were telling me.

And I was alone. I had no idea what I was doing.

That’s one of the reasons I started this podcast. I don’t want you to feel that way.
The first step is recognizing that when something isn’t functioning properly, simply waiting, hoping it fixes itself, going back on the thing that caused the issue in the first place, or muting symptoms isn’t always the best approach.

Now, if we truly understand what’s happening in the cycle—if we’ve tracked ovulation, run labs, maybe done a DUTCH test, looked at the full picture—and everything is just slightly weak despite making the right lifestyle changes, then yes, medications like Clomid or Letrozole can be excellent options.
That’s when waiting becomes useful. You make supportive changes, then allow the body time to respond.

But simply saying, “Your cycle is irregular, let’s just wait and see,” isn’t helpful.
I began to understand that these symptoms were my body’s language. That realization completely changed how I approached my health from that point forward.

So the second time I came off birth control, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I wasn’t excited to go back on birth control, but certain life situations made it necessary at the time.

Coming off of it again to try for pregnancy, I was worried I’d go through the same struggles. So I proactively did all the things I knew my body needed for optimal health and fertility—and that time, I got pregnant very quickly.

That is the difference between understanding your body and ignoring its signals.
So before we wrap up today, let’s talk a little bit about what actually drives irregularities in your cycle with PCOS, because understanding this is really helpful when it comes to understanding your symptoms.

First of all, what does blood sugar and insulin have to do with your cycle?
Insulin resistance is a common driver of PCOS, but you don’t actually have to qualify as having insulin resistance for insulin and blood sugar to affect your PCOS and your cycle. Your labs can all be normal, but if you’re having enough blood sugar spikes throughout the day and your insulin is elevated enough repeatedly over weeks, months, and years, it can absolutely affect ovulation.
Basically, it increases androgen production, and this disrupts the hormone signals that trigger ovulation. It can make it harder for follicles to mature properly and be ready to be released as an egg.

This doesn’t mean that you need to go low carb or restrict carbs. It simply means that your timing, the composition of your meals, the consistency of your meals, and the quality of the foods that you’re eating matter more than most people realize. Women with PCOS are simply more sensitive to this.
Next, we have stress and cortisol.

Cortisol is your main stress hormone, and it has a direct suppressive effect on reproductive hormones. Your body basically prioritizes survival over reproduction, which honestly makes sense, right? We don’t really need our reproductive system functioning at top capacity if we are being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear.
So the body prioritizes, “Let’s survive now and reproduce later.”

But when your body perceives that you are under significant chronic stress, it can significantly downgrade the hormonal cascade needed for ovulation to occur.
And this doesn’t just happen with emotional stress. It can also happen from physical stressors such as under-eating, over-exercising, poor sleep, or inflammation. All of these register as stressful events in the body.

Again, women with PCOS tend to have a genetic makeup that makes us more susceptible to this.

Next is inflammation.

Chronic low-grade inflammation worsens PCOS symptoms, but PCOS symptoms themselves—things like cycle irregularities and excess weight—also increase inflammation. So this becomes an ongoing worsening cycle.

But here’s the interesting thing: as we start to get one thing under control, inflammation can often start to improve dramatically on its own. As we begin eating foods that are less inflammatory, as we begin creating an environment and lifestyle that is anti-inflammatory, as we improve sleep, decrease blood sugar spikes, improve recovery, and perhaps release some excess weight, inflammation itself often starts decreasing further.

Inflammation can be one of those things where you can go from feeling very inflamed to suddenly realizing you barely feel inflamed at all. It’s actually pretty incredible how much it can improve when the body is finally supported properly.
Now, of course, there are situations where someone may have a deeper chronic inflammatory disorder going on as well, but for many women with PCOS, inflammation can improve dramatically once the environment starts changing.
Then we also have thyroid function.

Thyroid function affects nearly every hormonal process in the body, including cycle regularity. It’s not uncommon for thyroid issues to either be missed or dismissed when someone has PCOS.

So it’s always important to make sure that a full thyroid workup has been done to make sure there isn’t something else occurring alongside the PCOS.
So here’s the question that’s probably on your mind after hearing all of this:
What actually helps the most?

Unfortunately, I can’t just give you a list of supplements or a specific protocol because that’s not really how this works. What we want to do is learn to listen to what your body is needing, and that is going to look different for every single person and even different for the same person during different phases of life.
Right now, for example, my body probably needs more wind-down time and better sleep more than anything else. But that wasn’t the case when I was trying to get pregnant with babies one, two, and three. Back then, my body needed much more dietary support.

At this point, my nutrition is pretty dialed in, so if I see little fluctuations in my PCOS symptoms, they tend to be more stress-related.
Things change over time.

So the first step is to start learning your cycle patterns. Pay attention to your cycle data, your symptoms, and your energy patterns. You don’t have to get super nerdy about all the science immediately. Just start noticing the high-level symptoms your body is giving you.

This is the beginning of learning how to hear your body instead of just viewing symptoms as annoying problems to get rid of.

The PCOS Root Cause Quiz can also help significantly with this process.
And here’s really the challenge I want you to take away from this episode:
One of the most important things when it comes to using lifestyle to improve our health is learning to stop viewing our symptoms as proof that something is wrong with us and instead viewing them as communication from the body.
We already do this naturally with other symptoms.

If your stomach growls, you think, “Oh, I’m hungry.”
If you start shivering, you think, “I’m cold.”
If you’re yawning and your eyes feel heavy, you think, “I need more sleep.”
We hear those symptoms and respond to them.

But in modern life, we’ve even started overriding those basic signals with things like caffeine, cravings, and pushing through exhaustion. We’ve become disconnected from many of our body’s natural feedback systems.
I’m honestly amazed at how many women I work with who have become so disconnected from hunger cues that instead of feeling hungry, they just feel low energy, shaky, anxious, or crave sugar and caffeine.
Their body is asking for nourishment, but instead we’ve trained ourselves to override the signal.

So the first step is to stop assuming your body is malfunctioning and instead begin recognizing that it is communicating.
This changes everything.

Because when we start looking at our symptoms this way, we become curious. We start recognizing patterns. We start noticing things like:
“When I eat this way, I feel this way.”

“When I sleep this way, my energy changes.”
“When I push too hard, my cycle shifts.”
And those observations begin giving us answers even before fancy lab work or supplements come into the picture.

So if there’s one thing I want you to take away from today’s episode, it’s this:
Irregular cycles are not happening randomly. They are happening because something is going on underneath the surface, and your body is giving you feedback.

And when we understand that feedback, it can lead us directly toward understanding which root cause needs support.
The issue usually is not a lack of effort. It’s a lack of clarity around what your body specifically needs.

Once that clarity becomes available, it becomes so much easier to actually support your body in a way that works.

One of the best places to start with this is the PCOS Root Cause Quiz. Even taking the quiz itself starts creating awareness. You may notice yourself thinking:

“Oh, I never thought about my headaches this way.”
“Oh, I never connected my energy crashes to my PCOS.”
“Oh, I never realized my cravings might actually be clues.”

You can find the link in the show notes below. It’s free, it only takes a few minutes, and it can help you begin identifying some of the patterns your body has been trying to communicate.

If this episode was helpful, please share it with someone else who needs it and leave a review on the platform you’re listening on. It really helps other women find this information and support their PCOS health.

And next week, we’re going to be talking about PCOS and weight loss resistance, which I know is one of the most commonly asked questions.

So if you’ve ever felt like you’re doing everything right and still not seeing results with your weight, next week’s episode will be a really good one to tune into as well.

And until then, bye for now.