What Your Short Cycle + Short Period Are Telling You | Ep. 137

I'm Bridget Walton, a Women's Hormone Coach helping ambitious women ages 25-40 naturally restore hormone balance, fix irregular periods, feel confident in their fertility, and resolve gut health issues without restrictive dieting.

If you struggle with missing periods, PCOS symptoms, bloating, or unpredictable cycles, this women's health podcast will teach you how to support your hormones through strategic nutrition and lifestyle changes that actually fit your busy life.

On I'm Hormonal, you'll discover natural solutions for period problems, learn how gut health impacts your hormones, and get practical hormone balance tips from a functional nutrition perspective - no more guessing what your body needs.

This episode walks you through what short menstrual cycles (25 days or less) and short periods (2 days or less) could be indicating about your hormone levels. You'll learn what's the most important question to find an answer to: are you actually ovulating? And you'll learn two methods to get more clarity on that answer so you can make the best next step to restore balance to your hormones. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome and Today's Topic
• 1:14 Understanding Short Cycles and Periods
• 4:15 Spotting, PCOS, and Hormone Connections
• 7:20 Confirming Ovulation: Methods That Work
• 9:46 Root Causes and Next Steps
• 11:17 Episode Wrap-up and Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello there and welcome to I'm Hormonal. This is episode number 137. I'm your host, Bridget Walton, and today we are going to be talking about short menstrual cycles. What does that mean or what could it mean? Where do you want to start investigating if you do have a cycle that is on the shorter side, a period that is on the shorter side, and help you make sense of what your body is trying to tell you with those signals? So this is a mini episode. We're gonna just get right into it. And I'll mention too that this question came to me after the training that I did earlier this week. So I'll give you a little summary of what this person submitted their question about, and then we'll dive into the rest of the context that you'll want to know. But in short, this gal is having short cycles, about 24 days and really light periods. So period just lasts two days, a couple days of pink spotting leading up to the period. And it had been suggested to her that light periods could be related to PCOS potentially, potentially inobulatory periods, potentially low progesterone. So that's what we're going to get into here. First, let's look at what does that mean when your cycle is on the shorter side? There are a couple of things that you will want to investigate, but for starters, you want to be thinking about okay, is this a sign that one, my progesterone levels are low or relatively low? Two, is my estrogen low or relatively low? And then of course, thinking about are you ovulating? So let me break down each of those and explain what those hormones do and how you can try to get some context about, you know, what those hormone levels are looking like absent from, you know, lab results. So let's start off with estrogen. Estrogen is the hormone that is dominant in the first half of your menstrual cycle. So between that first day of your period and about halfway through when you ovulate, estrogen is a hormone that is going to help build, right? It's going to help build the tissue that lines your endometrium. And so if you are having relatively low amounts of estrogen, that could explain why there isn't that much tissue to shed at the end of the cycle when your period starts again. So that's what I'm thinking about with estrogen. When it comes to progesterone, this comes into the conversation because progesterone is the hormone that your body releases after you ovulate or in that second half of the cycle. Or if you don't ovulate in a particular cycle, then you naturally would not have the release of that progesterone. Now, if you have low progesterone or perhaps no progesterone due to a lack of ovulation, then that itself could lead to a shorter menstrual cycle. And then tying it all together with ovulation, because as you may have deduced, right, your estrogen levels in the first half, those can prepare your body and that lead up to ovulation. Progesterone is the result of that ovulation. So being able to identify, okay, did you ovulate? Um, that is going to help you figure out what is the next step. And do you need to either support a ovulation? How do we get a good, like robust ovulation? What does your body need? Or on the other hand, how do you support option B of producing more progesterone on the back end? We'll talk more about how to confirm or predict ovulation in just un momentito here. I want to talk first about what is considered a short cycle. Okay, so officially, if your menstrual cycle is less than 21 days, that would be textbook short. I would say if your cycle is regularly less than 25 days, and if you're feeling a little bit like, okay, I think something might be a little bit off balance here, then that is the informal marker that I would go off of 25 days or less. And then when it comes to your period length, if you bleed for less than two full days, or otherwise, if you're like, I'm just barely bleeding at all, then that is another kind of parameter or rule of thumb that you can keep in the back of your mind. One other thing that this gal mentioned was spotting. So anytime that you spot in the lead up to your period, what that can signal is that progesterone is tapering off gradually, as opposed to a more acute drop, and then your like full period just starts. Another way to say that is at the end of your cycle leading up to your next period, both progesterone and estrogen levels are declining. When they get to their lowest point, essentially, that's normally when your period begins. But for somebody who may not be producing like gushes and gushes of progesterone, um, and then that leads to this gradual tapering or progesterone that's a little bit lower before estrogen totally drops down. That's what could result in some of the spotting. So, again, that's all to say that when there's spotting leading up to your full bleed, that is a signal that, okay, let's figure out what progesterone is doing. And that comes back to this question of are you ovulating? Right? That is the piece of information that will best direct you for your next step. The next thing that I want to talk about is PCOS. If you are not yet familiar with PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome, this is a syndrome that is characterized by a couple of things. One, irregular cycles or at least inconsistent ovulation, two, high levels of androgens, which are your hormones like testosterone. And then three, cysts on the ovaries. This is something that you would have a conversation with your physician about, um, and they would make an assessment on do you meet the criteria satisfactorily such that you may or may not have PCOS, regardless of any potential diagnosis from your provider, right? What do you want to know? If your cycles are really unpredictable, if you are having a lot of symptoms like excess hair growth or a lot of acne, those are two things that happen when you have really high levels of androgens. Um, those are some things to look for. You're probably not gonna know if you have a bunch of, you know, cysts on your ovaries unless you do an actual ultrasound with your provider. But those are a couple of clues for you to think about if you're like, hmm, PCOS, let me noodle on this. The common um, the common answer, the common piece of information that you should keep top of mind is again coming back to this question of are you ovulating? And how would you find out if you're ovulating? Well, let me suggest two different methods that you can use, one or the other, or both. And the first one would be using ovulation strips. So you can pick up at your local drugstore probably some ovulation strips. And the way that those work, you know, you would want to use them consistently throughout a cycle or two or three, and they will show if there is a spike in luteinizing hormone. We didn't talk about lutein hormone so far in this conversation because it's not one of the kind of big players, I'm doing air quotes over here, for your hormones or for your menstrual cycle, but it is really important in practice, you know, in the way that your body works, because when you have that spike in luteinizing hormone, that is uh something that happens before you ovulate. Therefore, if you're using ovulation strips and you don't see a spike in lutinizing hormone, then you may not be ovulating. The second method that you can try out would be keeping track of your basal body temperature. If you have a smartwatch that tracks temperature, then you may already have the ability to do this. Or there might be another thermometer that works really well for you. There are companies like Temp Drop. That's one that I have used for a couple of years now. You put this armband on before you go to sleep at night in the morning, wake up, sync it with your phone. It will tell you what the patterns are in your basal body temperature, which is that lowest temperature that your body reaches, um, really like just before you wake up in the morning. The reason why tracking your basal body temperature can be helpful is because after you ovulate, you will see a rise in your temperature for the remainder of your menstrual cycle. Once you ovulate, your body is releasing or producing that progesterone, your temperature is going to reflect. So these are two methods that you can use together or separate to help build that picture of are you ovulating? So you can decide, okay, do I need to figure out first why my estrogen is a little bit low, why my lutezing hormone maybe isn't doing what we expect it to do? Or on the other hand, are you ovulating and you need to support the progesterone part of the equation? In summary, here as we get ready to wrap up, this conversation about short cycles and really short bleeds, just I would want to dig into A, are you eating enough? Are you getting the right nutrients that you need? As the second half of that note is are you digesting your food properly? Like how is your gut health? Because even if you're eating all of the right things, if you're not actually digesting those foods properly and fully, well, you know, it's not really going to be help helping to nourish your body in the same way. I would also want to be thinking about stress levels. Do you have a lot of stress? And that could that be signaling to your body, you know, hey, this isn't a really great time to ovulate. Maybe you need to handle that stress. And then third and final, I would say, you know, what's going on with inflammation? How are you feeling overall on your day to day? Like, do you feel pretty well? Or do you have exposure to a lot of chemicals or pollution or other chemicals or factors that can be impacting your hormone signaling and go from there? So that is it for today on this mini episode. Thank you guys for listening. If you have any questions, if you have a situation that you want to hear my take on on the podcast, then you can connect with me over on Instagram, find me at I'm underscore hormonal. And that's it for today. I'm Bridget Walton, and I'll see you gals on the next one. If you loved today's episode and got something good out of it, make sure you subscribe so that these episodes show up automatically in your feed. No work needed on your side. Let's put it on autopilot. As always, I need to give you my reminder that the information I share with you here is for educational purposes only and it should not be used as a replacement for medical advice or diagnosis. Now, if you are, on the other hand, in the market for some one on one support, then I would love for you to take me up on my offer for a free strategy call. You can find these links and more in the show notes. Alright, we'll see you on the next one.