Her Hormones | What does “balance your hormones” even mean?

 If you spend any amount of time in the women’s health corner of the internet, eventually someone is going to tell you that you need to “balance your hormones.”

There are hormone-balancing diets, supplements, powders, teas, workouts, seed-cycling schedules, morning routines, and probably a hormone-balancing water bottle by now. The phrase gets used so often that it sounds like an actual medical goal. Your hormones are out of balance, therefore you need to put them back into balance.

Except that’s not really how hormones work.

Your hormones aren’t supposed to stay at one perfect level. They change throughout the day, throughout your menstrual cycle, and across your entire life. Cortisol should be different in the morning than it is at night. Insulin changes after you eat. Estrogen and progesterone rise and fall throughout a menstrual cycle. Thyroid hormones are regulated through their own feedback system. Pregnancy, postpartum, breastfeeding, perimenopause, and menopause all come with major hormonal changes. So if “balanced hormones” means keeping everything steady, we definitely don’t want that.

What women usually mean when they say their hormones feel out of balance is much more reasonable: something feels off. Their periods have changed. They’re exhausted, gaining weight, breaking out, losing hair, waking up at 3 a.m., struggling with their mood, or wondering where their sex drive went. They may have already searched those symptoms online and found hundreds of people telling them cortisol is too high, progesterone is too low, estrogen is dominant, or their blood sugar is wrecking everything.

Sometimes there really is a hormonal piece to what they’re experiencing. The problem is that “hormone imbalance” is such a broad phrase that it doesn’t tell us very much about what that piece actually is.

Hormones are chemical messengers, and your body uses them to coordinate an enormous number of processes. They help regulate metabolism, reproduction, stress response, blood sugar, sleep, appetite, growth, body temperature, and more. They also communicate through feedback loops, which means one part of a hormonal system can influence what happens somewhere else.

Your thyroid is a good example. The brain and pituitary communicate with the thyroid gland, the thyroid produces hormones, those hormones are converted and used throughout the body, and feedback from that system helps determine what happens next. Sex hormones have their own rhythms and feedback loops. Insulin responds to glucose. Your stress-response system communicates between the brain and adrenal glands.

This is one of the reasons we built Her Hormones around multiple systems instead of teaching estrogen, cortisol, thyroid, and blood sugar as completely separate subjects. Bodies don’t care which chapter of the textbook we put them in.

If you’re chronically undersleeping, for example, that can affect your stress response, appetite, glucose regulation, and how you feel throughout the day. Thyroid dysfunction can affect menstrual cycles. Changes during perimenopause can affect sleep, which can affect blood sugar and energy. That doesn’t mean every hormone is secretly causing every other problem. It means context matters.

And yes, hormones can absolutely be too high, too low, produced at the wrong time, or not responded to appropriately. There are real medical conditions involving hormonal function. Thyroid disorders, diabetes, polycystic ovary syndrome, adrenal disorders, and reproductive hormone conditions are just a few examples. Perimenopause and menopause also involve significant changes in ovarian hormone production, although those changes are part of a normal life transition rather than a disease that needs to be “balanced” away.

What we don’t have is one universal state called hormone imbalance that can be diagnosed from a symptom checklist and fixed with the same protocol for everyone.

Take fatigue. Fatigue shows up on almost every hormone-imbalance list online, but it can have a lot of causes. Thyroid function might be worth looking at. So might iron deficiency, sleep, blood sugar, nutrition, medications, chronic stress, depression, sleep apnea, or something else entirely. Adding an adrenal supplement because an Instagram graphic told you fatigue means high cortisol skips quite a few steps.

The same goes for weight gain, acne, irregular periods, low libido, hair loss, and mood changes. Hormones may be involved, but the symptom itself doesn’t tell you which hormone, whether that hormone is actually abnormal, or what you should do about it. We want women to be curious about those connections without feeling like they have to diagnose themselves.

If your symptoms suggest that a hormonal system might be involved, testing can give you useful information. What should be tested depends on what you’re experiencing, your age, your cycle, medications, health history, and what your provider is trying to evaluate.

Timing can matter too. We’ve talked about this with sex hormones because estrogen and progesterone are supposed to change throughout the menstrual cycle. Cortisol has a daily rhythm. Food and medications can affect certain tests. A number without any context can be technically accurate and still not answer the question you thought you were asking.

This is also why ordering every hormone test available isn’t necessarily better. More data is only helpful when you know what question you’re trying to answer and what you’re going to do with the result. If something does come back abnormal, the goal still isn’t necessarily to push that number into the exact middle of a reference range. The goal is to understand why it’s abnormal, whether it fits with what you’re experiencing, and what treatment or support makes sense for you.

Then we get to all the things that promise to “balance” those hormones.

Food matters. Sleep matters. Movement matters. Stress matters. Getting enough protein, fiber, micronutrients, and overall energy matters. Treating an iron deficiency matters. Building muscle can improve insulin sensitivity. Consistent sleep supports metabolic and hormonal health. If you’re under-eating, overtraining, or living on coffee until 2 p.m., changing those things may absolutely affect how you feel.

But supporting the systems your hormones depend on is different from claiming that one food, supplement, or morning routine will “balance” them.

If someone tells you a product balances estrogen, lowers cortisol, fixes insulin resistance, supports your thyroid, improves your metabolism, and clears your skin all at the same time, we’d like you to ask a few questions before entering your credit card number. What exactly is it supposed to do? What evidence supports that claim? Is there a reason to think you actually need it? Could it interact with medications or a health condition? Is the person telling you that you need it also the person selling it?

That doesn’t mean supplements are useless or lifestyle changes don’t matter. Both can be incredibly helpful when they’re being used for a reason. We just want the reason to be better than “your hormones are out of balance.”

A more useful place to start is asking what has actually changed. Maybe your cycles are becoming irregular. Maybe you’re having hot flashes. Maybe your energy crashes every afternoon. Maybe you’ve developed new facial hair and acne along with irregular periods. Maybe you’re exhausted despite sleeping enough, or your heart is racing and you’ve lost weight without trying.

Those details give you somewhere to go. From there, you can look at the pattern, consider what systems might reasonably be involved, and decide with your healthcare provider whether anything needs to be tested or treated. Sometimes the answer will involve hormones. Sometimes it won’t. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is treat a diagnosed hormonal condition, and sometimes it’s eating breakfast and getting more sleep. Those aren’t competing philosophies. They’re different answers to different problems.

We understand why “balance your hormones” became such a powerful phrase. A lot of women have spent years feeling like something is off without understanding why, and the idea that there’s finally an explanation is incredibly appealing. You deserve that explanation. You also deserve something more useful than a catch-all diagnosis followed by a shopping list.

Your hormones don’t need to be perfectly balanced. They need to be understood in the context of your body, your symptoms, and the stage of life you’re in.

– Dr. Liane + Lena

Want to Actually Understand Your Hormones?

If you’re tired of hearing that you need to “balance your hormones” without anyone explaining what that means, Her Hormones is where we start putting the pieces together.

Inside Her Hormones, we break down your adrenals, thyroid, blood sugar, and sex hormones so you can understand what each system does, how they connect, what testing can actually tell you, and what questions are worth asking about your own health. No magic hormone-balancing protocol required.

– Dr. Liane + Lena

Explore Her Hormones and start making your body make sense.