Dr. Jessica Shepherd
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Jessica Shepherd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's designed biologically to do that function.
What I want to make sure that we understand is it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to do that.
But I think that society does teach us that that's what you're designed to do and that's what you're supposed to do.
And I would say that once you understand that, then you can embrace it for what it is. Okay.
Right. And work with it and not work against it.
Everyone is born with the amount of hormones or the hormones that we have. How they function changes during the life cycle. Wait, you are born with the amount of hormones you have? Well, not the amount, but you have the hormone. Okay, gotcha. How they function changes over the course of our lives, which is why we see those changes At adolescence and then perimenopause.
And that's why I love the body. It is so complex, but so elegant because it was always there. But the need for it to do the job that it was designed to do at that time in your life, that's when it knows I need to start doing this. So it's the onboarding. But that's what I love about the kind of basic fundamental part of the body. And that's why we should embrace every part of our lives.
Stress. And that's where cortisol is our stress hormone, and it responds to stress. And so when we have stressors that are showing up early in our lives... a lot of it has to do with the experiences that we have, environmental factors and food, then that's why we're starting to see that girls are starting to have their periods much younger.
It's more so that the cortisol is responding to these stressors and then onboarding much too early or much too high of a level. than when it's supposed to. Oh, gotcha. Yeah. It enters the scene when it shouldn't be.
And we're like, you're not really supposed to be appearing at this part of the script, but you're here. And so now we were going to respond to you.
Yeah.
So the roles that they're playing is getting the body ready for this now 30-year or maybe 20-year thing that they're going to be doing. So that's when you start to see like the breasts enlarge, you start to see hair growth, right? You sort of see changes in the external genitalia. And that has a lot to do with how the hormones are responding.
It's getting the body ready and also to do the thing that we talked about, to get ready for pregnancy. And that's what the body has the capacity to do in your reproductive years. And so that's when women start to see changes in their moods. I mean, how many times have you heard...
adolescent girls and going through puberty, again, yes, that mood is there because our neurotransmitters, which are also hormones, are responding to these changes when we start to onboard our estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone to do the function of the period. So when you move into your 20s, What is, what's going on with hormones?
Hormones are, at this point, should be functioning very consistently. We know what our job is. We're having a cycle. We may get pregnant, go through the pregnancy,
repeat baseline what we're doing again so that's when it should be kind of we should be okay this is typically when women might start to come in with issues with maybe pain with their cycles or maybe heavier cycles yes yeah and so it really should be kind of even keel during this time frame but that's not what we always see so
When women come in, I always like to peel the layers back. Okay. Because that's very subjective. And subjective meaning everyone has different experiences. What are their tolerance to that experience? What's going on in their life? How do they deal with stressors? And I'll give you an example.
And this is where I love the beauty of these conversations is to always recognize that everyone has a different template and everyone has a different experience in life. And so a lot of my women, especially women of color who come in, have different stressors.
And because of what's going on in their environment, whether that's racism, whether that's poverty, whether that's increased stress or that's the cortisol, a lot of what they're experiencing is a lot different to women who are not in those particular environments. And so that's part of peeling the layers back, especially as a physician.
When women come into me is not looking at just the issue that's going on and saying, what else is going on in your life? And that's the mind body connection. And so when we are able to look at those factors versus maybe it's a food issue, there are a lot of foods that can change how our hormones respond.
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