Hormonal imbalances often lead to anger, frustrations, and strange emotions with no evident reason, as hormones play a crucial role in health, affecting fertility, mood, and ovulation. Yet, their balance can be disrupted, often in perimenopause, puberty, and menopause, as well as due to improper lifestyle habits, pregnancy, contraceptive pills, menstrual cycle, and stress.
Hormonal imbalance and the mood swings it causes negatively affect the people around the person as well, so you should learn its early symptoms and thus diagnose it on time.
These are the six most common signs:
- Constant Hunger
Hormonal imbalances often lead to weight gain and food cravings, especially for sugar, which is a result of the high levels of the hormone ghrelin, which stimulates appetite.
- Mood Swings
Hormonal imbalances often lead to regular mood swings and feelings of anger, sadness, happiness, and madness for trivial reasons. Mood swings can also appear during the menstrual cycle and the menopause, but they are not so intense.
Progesterone is the happy hormone which gets reduced quicker, and estrogen leads to menopause.
- Fatigue
Constant fatigue often leads to feelings of tiredness, as a result of the higher cortisol levels. This hormone is responsible for stress.
- Constant Weight Gain
If you are exercising regularly and still gain weight, you might suffer from hormonal imbalance. When the hormones are normal, the metabolism dictates the weight loss.
Yet, in case the hormones are not regulated, the body cannot burn calories properly, and it becomes resistant to weight loss. In this case, you gain most fat in the abdominal area, since the body retains cortisol and estrogen.
- Libido loss
Hormonal imbalance reduces the sex drive, as the crucial hormones for the feminine libido, estrogen, testosterone, and the thyroid, are imbalanced. Despite the reduced sexual drive, your vagina might become dry, making the sexual intercourse uncomfortable and painful.
- Insomnia
Sleeping difficulties are common in the case of hormonal imbalances, especially during and after menopause, between 2-4 a.m.
The hormonal levels also cause night sweats, and the increased cortisol levels, and the reduced estrogen and progesterone levels influence the quality of the sleep.