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How to Handle Hormone Hell

Watch what you eat. If you’re trying to tame your inner fire-breathing dragon, gulping down sugar, caffeine, chocolate, or all of the above may be like gargling with gasoline. Eliminate foods that can throw your body off balance and see if it helps smolder your emotional flames.

Keep food on hand at all times. One surefire way to incite the wild animal in you is to let yourself get good and hungry. When that happens, pity the fool who stands between you and your next meal. Show mercy on the minions by making sure you have snacks on hand at all times.

Rest! Everything seems a little harder to bear when you’re cranky. Get as much beauty sleep as you can finagle. It’ll help you to remain resilient.

Pamper yourself. Hormones aside, pregnancy can be stressful—especially since you probably have to trudge through everyday responsibilities regardless of how you’re feeling (unless you’re on bed rest, which can be stressful for other reasons). Carve out some pamper time just for you—downtime is likely to make you feel better about yourself and give you a refreshed perspective.

Go ahead and have a good cry. Long before I became pregnant I fell into a deep depression over some unresolved family issues that were magnified during a trip to Europe with my father. My deadline for my first solo book, The Last-Minute Party Girl: Fashionable, Fearless, and Foolishly Simple Entertaining was looming and I couldn’t type a single word. Struck with writer’s block for more than a month, I embarked on walks of my neighborhood each morning, fighting back tears and searching for a lifeline to pull me out of my darkness. When it didn’t come, I went to Plan B: I gathered every single pillow I owned, placed them on my bed, and punched and screamed all of my anguish into them until I was too weak to even make a fist. I emerged from the bedroom a new person—lighter, relieved, and borderline giddy as I walked into my office, sat down at my computer, and marveled at how the words immediately began to flow onto the page. Whether pregnant or not, I believe that repressed emotions can bubble, ferment, and become truly toxic when they’re not released. Given that you need all the help you can get right now—and the fact that your fetus feels everything you feel, including anxiety, depression, and anger—it’s worth cleansing your emotional house whenever the dirt starts to build up. While it may not be safe to go full-on Mohammed Ali when you hit an especially rough patch, finding ways to free pent-up emotions—such as screaming into a towel or crying on the bathroom floor, as I did more than once—may be just the ticket.

Watch for deep depression. It’s perfectly okay if you feel like a Jane of the Jungle wildly swinging through the forest of pregnancy emotions while bellowing and beating your newly enlarged chest. But the beauty of mood swings is that they do just that—sway from one end of the emotional spectrum (fear, sadness, anger) to the other (elation, joy, optimism), and usually include plenty of time spent somewhere in between. But if you find that you plunge tummy-first into the deepest parts of your emotional jungle and can’t reemerge and see the forest for the trees, seek help from your practitioner. Depression is not uncommon during this very pivotal time (or afterward, for that matter) and a professional is likely to have some ideas on how to pull you out of the pregnancy dumps.

Don’t make any rash decisions while you’re feeling crazed. Making any major commitments while in the midst of hormonal heresy is like getting a tattoo while drunk. Spelling “O-Z-Z-Y” across your fingers may seem like the perfect thing to do while you’re riding the crazy train, but the next day you’re in for one hell of a hangover—and potentially permanent repercussions. Plainly put, hormones can drastically skew your perspective during the maternity and postpartum months. (I know one mommy who inexplicably couldn’t stand her husband for the entire duration, but felt just fine about him afterward.) Make a point of thinking things through and perhaps getting a second opinion from someone you trust before doing anything drastic.

When asked about their wildest pregnancy mood shifts, mommies gave us some prime examples. Read on...

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