What Every Woman Needs To Know About Hormones

For a long time, women have been taught to treat their hormones like a problem to fix – something unpredictable, random, inconvenient, or even broken. But what if they’re not random at all? What if they’re actually doing their job, responding to how we live, eat, rest (or don’t), and cope with stress?

Hormone and nutrition expert Jessica Shand shares her own health journey here, which was marked by chronic dieting, burnout, gut issues, anxiety, and irregular cycles that inspired her search to truly understand her body, and what it was communicating to her. After being dismissed by doctors and eventually diagnosed with PCOS and an under-active thyroid, she stopped chasing quick fixes and started listening more to her body. She now deeply backs that our hormones aren’t working against us, they’re always communicating with us. And more often than not, the way we live is the most integral factor of all.

Yes, so it all started in my early twenties. I spent over a decade struggling with chronic dieting (classic undernourishing and overtraining), gut issues (IBS), at times debilitating anxiety and panic attacks, skin breakouts and irregular/non-existent cycles for a long time. I knew something wasn’t quite right, but I was living my life on auto, focusing on work (I had founded a PR agency, so it was crazy times) and definitely not focusing on my health!! I truly didn’t even think about my cycle. It wasn’t until my husband started to think about wanting to start a family that I realised how vital a healthy, regular cycle was in making that happen – and it really highlighted how disconnected I felt from my own body.

So, after being repeatedly dismissed by my GP, whom I went to for support, I eventually saw a gynaecologist who ran blood tests and scans, and I was diagnosed with PCOS and an underactive thyroid. That moment was a turning point – a wake-up call that pushed me to stop searching for quick fixes and start asking deeper questions and gave me the incentive to make some serious changes to my hormonal health.

I discovered naturopathic nutrition and began using food and lifestyle as medicine. I started cooking from scratch and making considered choices about the food I was putting (and not putting) into my body. By taking a root-cause, whole-body approach, I slowly healed my gut, supported my hormones enough to regulate my cycle and went on to fall pregnant naturally! I couldn’t believe it, the power of food- it blew my mind! That transformation completely reshaped how I viewed the body and my health. It’s what led me to the work I do today, helping women reconnect with their bodies and health in a way that feels supportive, empowering and sustainable with tasty nourishing food at the forefront.

Hormones are chemical messengers. They send signals that travel around the body, telling different systems what to do and when to do it. They influence everything – from energy, mood, metabolism, sleep, appetite, stress response, libido, to mental health and emotional resilience.

What makes hormones feel overwhelming is that they don’t operate in isolation. They’re DEEPLY responsive to how we live, how we eat, sleep, think, move, and cope. So when life feels intense or unsupported, hormones often reflect that. Hormones quite literally respond to the internal environment we CREATE which is actually such an empowering way to think about it because we can easily change that environment.

Yes, hormonal patterns naturally fluctuate and evolve over time, but what many women experience in their late 30s, 40s and beyond isn’t simply ageing. It’s often the cumulative effect of years of stress, responsibility, under-resting and self-neglect finally reaching a threshold. From a hormonal perspective, this is also the stage where progesterone is often the first hormone to decline, while oestrogen can become more erratic rather than steadily decreasing. This shift can amplify symptoms like anxiety, sleep disruption, heavier or irregular cycles, and increased emotional reactivity.

That’s why supporting hormonal health in our 20s and 30s matters so much – it helps build resilience and creates a more stable foundation as these natural changes begin to unfold. When the body has been well supported earlier on, it’s far better equipped to adapt.

Midlife often coincides with increased mental load, caregiving roles, career pressure and less recovery time. The body becomes less willing – and less able – to compensate. Hormones are incredibly adaptive, but they can only stretch so far before they start asking for change – often quite loudly.

I do believe we’re seeing more hormone-related symptoms, but not because women’s bodies are failing. If anything, bodies are responding exactly as they should to a world that demands constant output with very little restoration- we live in a stressful world so we have to go out of our way to intentionally create a lifestyle and way of nourishing that supports us.

Chronic stress, disrupted sleep, ultra-processed food, constant stimulation, environmental toxins, and the pressure to be everything to everyone all feed into hormone disruption. The body is communicating a need for safety, nourishment, rhythm, and support – not another thing to fix or override.

The most common symptoms I see are fatigue, anxiety, low mood, disrupted sleep, weight changes, cycle irregularities, struggles conceiving, PMS, low libido, brain fog, and feeling emotionally reactive or disconnected.

These symptoms are often the body asking for more balance – more rest, more blood sugar stability, better stress regulation, and less pressure to constantly push through.

“Normal” lab ranges don’t always reflect what’s actually OPTIMAL (these are two very different things), nor do they capture how hormones interact with stress, inflammation, nutrient status, or nervous system health.

Hormones also fluctuate throughout the day and month, so a single snapshot doesn’t tell the full story. A woman can have results that look ‘within range’ / fine on paper, but if her nervous system is chronically activated or her body feels unsafe, symptoms will still appear. The body doesn’t lie and the signs and signals it gives us is the most valuable feedback and data we could possibly get, even when tests don’t explain everything.

I see hormone symptoms as adaptation, not malfunction. The body is always trying to keep us alive and functioning. When stress is high, it reallocates resources. Reproductive hormones, digestion, and repair often take a back seat to survival the body is not interested in regular cycles, wanting to have sex or making a baby if it’s just simply trying to cope.

Working WITH the body means listening before overriding, it means gathering information on what your body is actually trying to tell you instead of just going straight in with intervention. It means prioritising and nailing the basics; the mundane stuff that we often take for granted but these really are the real needle-movers in our hormonal health. This looks like supporting blood sugar with balanced meals (protein, fibre / complex carbs & fats), prioritising sleep, regulating the nervous system daily, eating in a way that nourishes rather than restricts (eating enough).

It doesn’t require perfection. Perfection does not exist. It requires awareness, compassion, and consistency. Small, supportive shifts done regularly can be far more powerful than extreme interventions. To take this one step further, in my book The Hormone Balance Handbook,  I write about how you can sync your cycle to your nutrition to promote internal balance and to support hormones as they fluctuate throughout the month as well as a guide on how to seed cycling to regulate your cycle and give your hormones targeted support.

Lifestyle has a profound influence – often more than women realise. Genetics load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger. Stress, in particular, sits at the centre of hormonal balance because it affects every system simultaneously.

Ageing changes hormones, but how we move through those changes is largely shaped by how supported – or depleted – the body feels. You cannot optimise a stressed body. Never underestimate the power that stress has on the body and ageing.

Medicine can be incredibly supportive and, for many women, life-changing when used in the right context/situation. The key is context! Hormone therapy can relieve symptoms, but it shouldn’t replace addressing stress, nutrition, sleep, and nervous system health; the two can coexist.

When we don’t explore why symptoms developed in the first place, treatment can sometimes silence the message rather than resolve the imbalance. Ideally, medical and holistic approaches work together, not in opposition.

For any woman who sees herself in this, I want her to understand that symptoms aren’t a flaw or something to push through – they’re information. Before reaching for a fix, it’s important to get curious about what the body is responding to and why. When we shift from frustration to understanding, meaningful change becomes possible.