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Many women struggle with PCOS, and the symptoms related to it can certainly challenge their mental health.
Symptoms from thinning hair, difficulty conceiving, acne, weight gain, and excessive hair growth to irregular periods make many women deal with mental health issues.
A natural supplement for PCOS that contains all the vitamins, minerals, and herbs to alleviate the symptoms of PCOS may be your best bet after consulting with your doctor and making healthy lifestyle changes. However, one of the most overlooked ways of dealing with PCOS is meditation, as it helps deal with stress and anxiety better while overcoming some of the symptoms of PCOS, too. Therefore, in this article, we will share everything related to meditation and how it can help with PCOS for a happier, healthier life.
Relation Between PCOS and Stress
Before understanding the power of meditation in PCOS, you need to be well-familiar with how stress and anxiety have an effect on PCOS. There’s no doubt that when you have acne or excessive hair growth or are obese, it can drastically affect your self-esteem, and you may not feel good about yourself at all. All this can lead to stress, anxiety, and even depression.
Not to mention, PCOS is caused by hormonal imbalance, and changes in hormones can also affect your emotions since they are related. Most women with PCOS are also insulin resistant, which means their blood sugar levels are higher. This can cause the body to change how it produces certain types of hormones. This can all cause prolonged stress and depression. Furthermore, inflammation in your body increases in PCOS, which encourages your body to produce more stress hormones (cortisol). These stress hormones can further boost the risk of insulin resistance.
What Are the Health Benefits of Meditation for PCOS?
Just like physical exercise keeps your body fit and healthy, meditation helps your mind achieve the same. You train it to learn to cope with a certain situation, help change your mindset, and even relax. Meditation helps you lower cortisol levels and calm down, which can be indispensable for PCOS. Here are some of the health benefits of meditation for PCOS.
1. Encourages Deep Breathing
When you’re extremely stressed out, you have worse control over your breathing, which can lead to shallow breathing and trigger the release of stress hormones (cortisol). Meditation helps you learn deep breathing by practicing it repeatedly so your stress hormones remain under control and don’t worsen your PCOS symptoms over time. Lowering stress hormones also helps you with inflammation, insulin resistance, insomnia, and more, which is important to keep your PCOS symptoms under control.
2. Improves Sleep
It’s essential to remember that during sleep, your body repairs skin cell damage, which can help you keep your skin looking healthy and combat acne. Healthy sleep levels also keep your blood sugar levels under control, which may be a major problem for some women with PCOS.
Of course, stress hinders a healthy quality and quantity of sleep. To prevent PCOS-related symptoms from aggravating due to poor sleep, meditation can greatly help declutter your mind and relax deeply. Meditation also naturally boosts the melatonin levels to ensure your sleep is undisrupted.
3. Helps in Weight Loss
Meditation teaches you to be mindful of whatever you do. Sometimes we tend to binge eat without even knowing. With PCOS, obesity is a major concern for women. Many doctors recommend losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight to combat PCOS symptoms, as it greatly helps. With meditation, you can learn to be mindful and prevent overeating while listening to the needs of your body. You can find plenty of mindfulness meditation videos or playlists online, including mindful eating.
4. Controls Glucose Production
Of course, stress increases the levels of stress hormones (cortisol). When you’re extremely stressed out, your body goes into fight or flight mode. In such a case where you have to run for your life, your body naturally produces extra glucose to provide you with the necessary energy to do so. However, in the case of PCOS, you probably won’t be doing this, but your body will still produce that extra glucose, which will be stored as fat. Since meditation controls the stress levels in your body, you don’t have to deal with all this process, which leads to additional weight gain and worsened PCOS symptoms.
5. Reduces Anxiety
Continuous stressful events or prolonged stress can lead to anxiety and, in some cases, depression. Both insulin resistance and increased levels of androgens (male hormones) are common in women with PCOS and are also related to anxiety and depression. What’s great about meditation is that it quiets your brain and overcomes your fear of the future or relevant situations going on in your life that can exasperate your PCOS symptoms.
Conclusion
Stress can aggravate PCOS symptoms and trigger risks to some health conditions, like increased insulin resistance. Meditation is like an exercise for your mind to help it remain calm and mindful while lowering the symptoms of PCOS. Even 15 minutes of meditation daily can help with PCOS.
This content is part of the HWM Partnership.
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