You haven’t had your period in a long time, but you told yourself that it was because you were busy and stressed. Or you’ve been struggling with RED-S / REDs (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport), and assured yourself that once your life was less hectic, you’d get better. But things have slowed down, and you still have amenorrhea. What should you do now?
Overcoming amenorrhea and RED-S / REDs is going to take work; it won’t happen on its own. And we all have a natural tendency to push things aside and say that we’ll deal with them later, when we have more time. But sport psychologist Marissa Norman points out that realistically, our lives will remain busy. She shares advice on establishing what’s important to you and on making room in your life to address those priorities.
Read the transcript
[Tina] My period has been absent for a long time, or I’ve been struggling with RED-S for a while, and I convinced myself not to worry about it. And I thought, “Well, when I slow down, then I’ll take care of it; it’s just a busy period. But I have slowed down, and it hasn’t come back, and now I’m thinking, “What should I do now? I thought it was stress, but maybe it’s not.”
[Marissa] Well, one thing I would definitely say is, in this situation, if you’re concerned about your health, that you absolutely are going to want to consider working with a professional there. And the other piece of this idea of pushing it off, because we thought things would slow down and things would get better, I will say that it is so common for us to just be consumed by the chaos of our day-to-day, the hecticness of our schedule, the vast amount of things we have on our plates, and so we fall into this trap of putting our emotions to the side or putting our needs, I should say, to the side, with every intention to get to it. “I’m gonna get to it when things slow down,” right? And we just never do. We don’t get to it, and in my experience, when we wait for the perfect moment or for things to slow down, we are never going to get to those things, because the reality of our life is that it’s still gonna be really busy. Things don’t tend to slow down the way we would really wish, and the things like our needs are always going to kind of feel inconvenient. So if this is something that is important to your health, and it sounds like it is important to you, we have to be intentional about creating the space, creating the time, because if it’s important to you, it is worth the investment.
[Tina] What would you say, what would you suggest, to someone who has maybe typically pushed those thoughts and feelings aside? Especially as you mentioned, it’s easy to do, to say, “I’m busy now; I’ll deal with it later,” but is that where you would say journaling or meditating, is that the kind of thing you’re talking about there, to work through those?
[Marissa] So you’ll hear me talk a lot about values, because I do truly believe that our values can really put us on the right path. And so when we think about our day-to-day and our priorities, sometimes it’s helpful to actually just write down, “What are my priorities?” and then, “What are my values?” Put them right alongside your priorities, and what is a discrepancy here? I think that process can be very eye-opening for many of us, and then again, it’s like sitting down and planning, “Okay, this is what’s important to me. How do I make these things a priority, and how do I make room for these things?” Because room is not going to naturally happen, as we know, so we can’t just wait for room to kind of come up. So how can I intentionally make room for the things that are important to me, because I do want to prioritize them.
[Tina] Yes, thank you for that.
check it out
Recovering from RED-S is hard. It’s even harder if you’re working through it alone. Even if you have professional support, they’re not available 24-7, and that can lead to going down search engine rabbit holes that have the potential to derail everything.
Our online resource, RED-S: Realize. Reflect. Recover, will answer all those questions swimming around in your head about recovery. It will give you the opportunity to connect with the experts you’ve come to know here, and to surround yourself with a community of others who are going through it too.
THANK YOU! to Athletic Greens and Tracksmith for supporting this YouTube series and RED-S: Realize. Reflect. Recover.
Go to athleticgreens.com/reds to get five free travel packs of AG1 and a free one year’s supply of vitamin D3+K2 with your subscription!
When you go to https://tracksmith.com/tina and use the code TINA15 at checkout, you’ll get free shipping and Tracksmith will donate 5% of your order to Rising Hearts, the Indigenous-led nonprofit founded by Jordan Marie Daniels.
more about Marissa:
Marissa Norman, Psy.D, CMPC, is a Sport Psychologist in the New Jersey area. She has her own private telehealth practice, and works with youth to professional athletes from mental skills training to mental health services. She’s a former college track and field pentathlete who loves to laugh, to eat, and adventure. You can find Marissa at https://www.topformpsychology.com/team-sport-psychology.
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