How Traveling Affects Your Period

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Traveling can affect a lot of things in a woman’s life, including their monthly period. Many women find that their normal menstrual cycle stops or changes while they are on the road. Keep reading if you can relate to this as the following article will tell you how traveling affects your period.

Similar to other lifestyle change, traveling could have an affect your monthly period because your normal routine is disrupted, even though it’s a temporary occurrence.

You could have problems such as delayed and missed periods because of stress, eating habits and more since the menstrual cycle hormones can be very sensitive to new things. International travel will have a greater effect as your body would undergo more of a shock.

How Traveling Affects Your Period

In general, your body, as well as its normal functions and rhythms, is dependent on or involved with your environment and situation. For this reason, you are going to see noticeable effects when you are on the go or in a new place.

When you are traveling, especially to a faraway city or overseas, the time change will interfere with your normal internal biological clock or circadian rhythm. This is what is referred to as jet lag, and rapid air travel across various time zones can lead to a number of problems. It can cause many problems, from exhaustion, irritability, and fatigue to stomach problems and lack of appetite.

A study was conducted on this, and it indicated that women have sleep disturbances seventy percent of the time after they cross a time zone. This is another example of how a major disruption in the circadian rhythm could have a huge effect on your period. As a matter of fact, the same study shows the well-documented fact that female flight attendants are commonly affected by irregular menstrual cycles.

Hormone release and various other vital bodily functions are influenced by your circadian rhythm. Whenever it’s off, your hormones such as progesterone and estrogen, which play an important role in your menstrual and ovulation, will be thrown off. Estrogen could spike to trigger ovulation or the spike might be delayed because of changes in your rhythm and cause your period to come later than normal.

Here are some other things that could change and affect your period when you are traveling:

Stress: Your menstrual cycle is very sensitive to stressful situations. Even though traveling can be fun, it can be stressful on your body. From the frenzy of deciding what to pack, leaving home to reach your location to the time that you should arrive at the airport, traveling comes with loads of stress.

Exercise: Lack of or not doing enough physical activities often causes changes in the body during travels. Like most people, you might have a set routine for exercising at home, but this could change when you are on the road. On the other hand, traveling might involve walking for long hours on unfamiliar streets or climbing mountains, and these things can jumpstart your system. Your periods could stop or you may have missed cycles because of increased exercise routines and weight loss. The same thing can also happen if you gain weight.

Diet: You will have many different places to explore when traveling, so it is highly likely that you are going to change your eating habits. It is not only the fluctuation in calorie intake that could affect your monthly period while you are eating everything around the world or you start to forget breakfast suddenly. You will be in new locations with new ingredients and menus that switches up the nutrients that you normally eat, so all these things are going to have an effect on how your body functions and feels.

Schedule: The lack of a nine to five routine or new sleeping schedules can have an effect on your body’s clockwork. In fact, a shakeup in your schedule could be another stressor that puts a strain on your body. Whenever you are not on a regular schedule, your period could also act the same way.

Bear in mind that these factors will affect different females in different ways. Your period might remain constant even though you are traveling all over the place or it could go completely out of whack.

The key is to take care of your body while on the road. It might feel difficult, but you should try to eat healthy, do some exercises as well as get enough sleep and relax.

This will not guarantee that your period is going to remain unchanged, but you are sure to feel better and be less vulnerable to PMS symptoms that are more difficult to predict on irregular cycles.

Now that you know how traveling affects your period, you don’t have to worry too much, especially if you are always on the road. Just remember that jet lag, change in eating habits and stress are things that come with traveling and can cause a delayed or missed period.

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