The Secret to Managing PMDD Is Already in Your Medicine Cabinet
Antihistamines can provide the relief you desperately need
My life is stuck in a loop.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve experienced regular bursts of good feelings.
During those weeks, I’ll be brimming with creative energy and itching to take on an ambitious project. I’ll resolve to make major changes in my life and better myself.
I’ll get really into it, planning everything out, mapping a course of action, taking steps to building all the new habits I’ll need to get everything done.
And then, almost as soon as I hit my stride, everything falls apart.
I get hit by an abrupt wave of depression. I feel gripped with anxiety. My optimism drains away, my excitement slows down or dies away completely, and I lose the motivation to get things done.
I’ve tried all the fixes and none of them work. Affirmations wash right off me. Mindfulness exercises just means I’m ruminating even harder on all the negative stuff. I don’t have the energy for a supercharged morning routine. And every productivity tip is just painful to follow.
I feel weighed down, and all I want to do is disappear for a while.
Then, out of nowhere, I’m back. I pick myself back up, ready to start where I left off. More often than not, I scrap the whole thing and start a brand new plan.
I tell myself that this time, I’ll follow through. This time, I’ll be able to see it through to the end. At the very least, I’ll stay interested and happy.
It never makes a difference. One day, I wake up under the same cloud of horrible feelings. I lose all my energy again and free-floating, impossible to ignore anxiety would take its place.
Nothing in my life changed. My mornings were the same as all the ones before - they just felt different. Everything was off. Things that I could handle very easily the day before bothered me and brought me down.
I knew the cycle I was stuck in wasn’t normal. But until a few months ago, I had no idea which medical condition was holding me down.
Being a Medical Mystery Isn’t as Sexy as It Sounds
I’ve been through several doctors, each of them with different guesses as to what mystery illness was responsible for my symptoms.
If my horrible mood was constant, they might have been able to slap a label on me. It could be major clinical depression. They could’ve called it burnout. Generalized anxiety disorder would’ve fit the bill, too.
But it was harder to pin down because the bad feelings would come and go. And when they went, they stayed away long enough for me to wonder if I finally managed to shake them off for good.
Eventually, a doctor sent me for some tests that gave conclusive results. I had been suffering from hypothyroidism, combined with low levels of testosterone and progesterone.
That gave me a strange kind of relief. It’s never great news to find out that there’s a medical condition ruling your life, especially one with severe effects on your mental health. But at least now I knew what I was fighting against and that gave me hope that I could tame it.
The relief was short-lived. Months of hormone replacement therapy helped alleviate some of my symptoms, but my miserable weeks were still with me. And so was the mystery - low hormone levels didn’t explain the way my symptoms spiked and dropped.
But the diagnosis felt so conclusive that I kept looking for non-medical reasons for my mental state.
Ironically, it took me a real time to discover the real cause behind my problems because it was so easy for me to invent reasons for them.
I could wave away each sudden attack of anxiety or dip into depression by assuming that something triggered me emotionally. It could be a hateful response on one of my articles, some asshole tweet I’d run across in my timeline, or a text from my emotionally abusive father.
When I couldn’t identify any triggers, I could still pin it on general life stress. Having four loud, hyperactive kids who leave every room looking like it’s been ransacked by chimpanzees is bound to keep you on edge and wear you down. The financial stress that comes from living off unsteady sources of income didn’t help, either. Plus, I run on routine - maybe I was just bored and dissatisfied.
Other times, I’d convince myself that my hormones were out of whack because I wasn’t having enough orgasms. When I tried to manage my health with daily masturbation and still crashed, I told myself I probably overdid it. Maybe my hormonal conditions meant I couldn’t handle so many orgasmic peaks without recovery.
I got tired of explaining everything away and getting nowhere. So, last year, I finally started tracking my symptoms very closely. I recorded my emotional states, what my body was doing when my mood shifted, how I had been spending my time, and if anything had changed in my life.
As my notebook filled, I started to see a clear pattern. I brought it to my doctor and she saw the same thing I did.
She diagnosed me with PMDD.
PMDD Management Feels a Lot Like Giving Up
That diagnosis made sense of the roller coaster I was on. I was experiencing drastic highs and lows because I had a condition that ebbed and flowed along with my cycle.
The best way to describe PMDD is that it’s essentially PMS but far more debilitating.
Starting in my luteal phase, my brain spends about two weeks not absorbing serotonin properly. Instead of being myself, the serotonin crash makes me anxious and sad, it kills my motivation, and all the things that normally excite me seem pointless.
Like my hormonal imbalance diagnosis, it gave me some relief. I could finally put more of the puzzle pieces in place.
It explained why I suddenly felt miserable when it seemed like nothing changed in my life. Everything stayed more or less the same, except I no longer had the serotonin to appreciate it.
It’s also why the symptoms were manageable at times but occasionally unbearable. Apparently, PMDD works on a four-month cycle, with each month getting progressively worse. That certainly tracks with my experience.
But for all its helpfulness, this diagnosis left me with a lot less hope.
There’s no cure for PMDD. Spending half of every month feeling miserable is bad enough. Knowing I can’t do anything about it is the insult added to that injury.
When my doctor broke the news to me, she didn’t have her usual optimism. Normally, she has a positive demeanor. Her attitude shows that she’s convinced she can fix whatever’s wrong with me. This time, though, she looked sympathetic and her tone was almost apologetic. She stressed that the best I could do was understand what I was going through and find a way to live with it.
I decided to lean in. I might not be able to beat this condition, but I could at least keep it from beating me down.
The first step was to organize my work around it.
Anything that requires creativity, lots of brain power, and patience I do during my two good weeks.
That’s when I brainstorm ideas, write outlines for articles, record as many podcast episodes as I can, take photos, and shoot videos.
I’ll do most of the hands-on research during this time, too. I take advantage of my half-decent sex drive to do all the sex toy testing and porn watching that I need to do in my line of work.
When I’m in the middle of a crash, the work doesn’t grind to a halt but it changes. I do the less creative stuff. I’ll proofread and set articles to publish. I’ll post the photos I took when I was feeling better. I’ll edit podcast episodes and write the shownotes with my husband.
It’s still tough. I’ll second-guess every article that goes out. The post I was excited to put up a week ago now seems too vulnerable or dirty. I’ll hesitate before posting photos of myself, sometimes for days.
And I basically need to be done by lunch. After that, I feel worn down and burnt out.
Once I took care of work, the second step was giving myself a break.
I feel a lot of guilt for doing so little when I’m going through my hell week. I have to remind myself that it’s not my fault - my chronic illness has the wheel and I’m just along for the ride.
I’ll get the minimum done so I can give myself permission to lie in bed, scrolling through TikTok or rewatching seasons of The 100.
When he’s not busy working or making food for our platoon of children, I’ll cuddle with my husband and either vent to him or watch YouTube videos.
Basically, I go in sad girl mode and I try not to get mad at myself for it.
That’s how I managed it for months, but it wasn’t great. Even when I take the pressure off myself and do literally nothing, I still have to do nothing while feeling depressed and anxious.
So, I do what I imagine every woman with PMDD does. I look for the cure that isn’t supposed to exist.
The Little Magic Pill Hiding in Plain Sight
I know there’s no way to get rid of PMDD, but holding on to a shred of hope feels better than giving in.
So, I google symptom management advice and keep looking, even though there isn’t supposed to be anything for me to find.
And I’m glad I do that, because I eventually found something. Not a cure, sadly. Not just an overly optimistic post advising sufferers to practice mindfulness and meditation, thankfully.
What I found was a simple pill that actually relieves some of the worst symptoms - and you probably already have it at home.
I came across it while scouring the PMDD subreddit. Someone posted that she manages her symptoms by taking antihistamines, and lots of women responded that they did it too.
Several people shared a blog post that explained the connection between histamines and PMDD symptoms. Specifically, that histamines might be behind the anxiety that we feel during those crashes.
I was cautiously optimistic. This wasn’t my first chronically ill rodeo. I’ve gotten my hopes up before after reading blog posts and forums. I’ve tried just about every natural remedy for hypothyroidism and tried every lifestyle trick to regulate my hormones. More often than not, it just ends in disappointment.
Still, I needed to try this.
I sent my husband on a quest to get me some as soon as he possibly could. He looked at all the allergy medication available through Instacart and had a box of Allegra delivered to our door by the afternoon.
I popped a pill out of the blister pack and took it immediately.
I went back to my usual hell week routine of scrolling through TikTok and feeling terrible.
Then, I realized that I felt — well, not good, but not quite as horrible.
It took about an hour for the Allegra to have its full effect. When it did, the difference was noticeable.
It didn’t give me back the positive feelings I have when my PMDD is dormant. I didn’t have a burst of joy, a jolt of creativity, or a surge in my libido.
But it subdued some of the worst symptoms. My anxiety toned down. The cloud of depression started to dissipate.
Overall, I felt numb. But numb is an amazing feeling when the alternative is feeling weighed down and on edge.
I’ve used it many times since then and it hasn’t let me down. I’ve read about women who pop an antihistamine every 12 hours to get through their PMDD drudgery. I haven’t tried that yet. I just take it when I struggle to manage, when I’m sinking into my bed, gripped with free-floating dread.
It feels almost like a miracle. After being told there’s nothing I could do about my condition, a simple over-the-counter pill that can wash away the worst symptoms seemed too good to be true. But it absolutely works and I would’ve never discovered it if it wasn’t for the generous advice of other women on Reddit.
People are often mocked or criticized for going to some deep corners of the internet to look for medical advice from people without medical credentials.
The people looking down on us for it probably don’t know what it’s like to feel completely adrift. To have doctors tell you there’s nothing you can do but knowing in your bones that you have to do something. Or worse, dealing with doctors who simply deny the gravity of your symptoms. I’m sure the multiple doctors who told me it was normal for a mom to feel stressed and anxious or that I just needed to take up meditation meant well, but being dismissed was less than helpful.
It’s especially difficult when you’re dealing with women’s medical issues. There is usually far less research on them and the accepted consensus is that being a woman just sucks. That’s why PMS is treated like it’s no biggie and there are still people encouraging us to give birth without any of the drugs that make such a harrowing experience more bearable.
Feeling like you’re not getting the treatment you need and knowing that your medical condition isn’t given the attention it deserves drives chronically ill people to look for any and every remedy that’s being offered.
Sometimes, it leads you to quacks with dubious solutions.
You can find yourself in cult-like online communities that low-key gaslight you into adhering to their lifestyle plans.
But if you’re careful, your search can help you uncover what I found on Reddit. Other sufferers. Other people who have tried every pill and every trick imaginable.
They’ll give you the hope you need to keep looking. And if you’re lucky, they’ll whisper about the off-label solution that will give you the relief you thought you’d never experience.
I’m a lurker, so those women have no idea who I am. But I’ll always be grateful for them and what they’ve done to give me part of my life back.
If you liked this article, you should check out the Premature Female Orgasms (Starter Pussy and Orgasm Embarrassment) episode of my dirty and intimate sex podcast, Pillow Talk With Emma Austin!
