A reader asks, “Why isn’t my Hormone Horoscope correct 100% of the time?”

She goes on to ask if exhaustion from lack of sleep while taking care of three children under the age of three could be affecting her hormone cycle.

This reader asks an excellent question. It’s true that the Hormone Horoscope will likely not be in line with how you feel, your energy and other aspects of your life 100% of the time.

The reason for this is because hormones have a powerful impact on you–affecting your mood, energy, etc. However, hormones are just one of many factors impacting you.

Other factors can intensify, lessen or even eclipse hormonal effects altogether. These include how well or poorly you sleep, how nutritious or non-nutritious your diet has been, how much stress you’re under, if you’re taking certain medications, how much caffeine or alcohol you’ve ingested, your health, if you’re in pain and if you’ve recently fallen in love (which creates a whole sort of different brain response to everything from sleep to appetite to libido).

Since this reader has three children under three years of age, I’m thinking that a high amount of stress coupled with little sleep is probably throwing her off-kilter just a wee bit.

The upside is this: Even when your Hormone Horoscope does not line up exactly with how your day pans out, you can see immediately that there’s something wrong or different that’s throwing your usual body rhythms out of whack.

The Hormone Horoscope can, therefore, serve as a baseline. When the Hormone Horoscope is different from your own personal experience, you can ask yourself, “Why am I not matching up to it? Where’s my high energy or boosted mood or revved libido?” Then, you can try to pinpoint the reason.

Once you find the cause, you can either fix it if you can or, if you can’t fix it, you can simply acknowledge that this is the situation and gain a better understanding into what’s going on.

Personally, I like the practicality of all this: It used to be that we would just feel tired or energetic or happy or blue willy-nilly without knowing why. We’d wake up one day and just be that new thing without knowing what tomorrow would bring.

Now, when we understand and see the pattern in our hormone cycle–how our moods, energy and more go up an down the same way month after month–we can predict and anticipate what most of the facets of our life will be like. There are no more surprises. No more guessing. No more wondering.

And, better yet, when we’re not like what we predict based on our hormone cycle, we can instantly see that something is out of balance. Then, we can pinpoint the problem and fix it (if possible) to get back to “normal”. And, if we can’t fix it, then we can acknowledge what’s going on so we’re not left wondering.

I hope this helps explain why your Hormone Horoscope may not match up with your experience 100% of the time–and why realizing when it’s not could be a good thing.

Never miss a single Hormonology tip:
Click here to subscribe to the free Hormonology newsletter today!

[Photo: Tsahi Levent-Levi]