Ep 568: The Intersection of Trauma & Hormones: What Every Woman Needs to Know with Paula Rastrick

In this eye-opening episode of The Health Fix Podcast, Dr. Jannine Krause sits down with trauma therapist Paula Rastrick to unpack the complexities of hormonal health for women. They explore why hormone therapy isn’t always the silver bullet it’s marketed to be — and how trauma, nervous system dysregulation, and the HPA axis all play a major role in hormonal imbalance.

Paula shares her deeply personal journey through hormonal struggles and burnout, and how she came to understand the nervous system as the foundation of hormone healing. Together, they challenge common myths and shed light on why so many women feel gaslighted by traditional medical approaches.

If you’ve ever felt dismissed, confused, or overwhelmed when it comes to your hormones — this conversation is your permission slip to dig deeper and advocate for a more holistic approach to healing.

🔗 Resources From The Show:

• Learn more about Paula Rastrick & get on her email list: https://thebrainbodymethod.com/
• Paula’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrspaularastrick/
• HRV Tool: https://www.heartmath.com/

Podcast Transcript

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Hormonal Health Misconceptions
01:58 The Complexity of Women’s Health and Hormones
04:02 Understanding Trauma and Its Impact on Hormonal Health
08:06 Personal Stories: Navigating Hormonal Challenges
11:57 The Role of the Nervous System in Hormonal Regulation
16:11 ADHD, Sensitivity, and Hormonal Changes
19:46 The Brain-Body Connection in Healing Trauma
27:39 Integrative Approaches to Hormonal Health
31:15 Understanding Hormonal Sensitivity and Nervous System Capacity
34:19 The Role of Estrogen and Inflammation
38:31 Childhood Trauma and Its Impact on Hormonal Changes
41:07 The Importance of Nervous System Regulation
45:54 Heart Rate Variability Training for Women
51:58 Empowerment Through Understanding and Self-Discovery

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Jannine Krause (00:01.202)
Welcome to the health fix podcast

Paula Rastrick (00:04.366)
Hello, welcome, thank you for having me.

Jannine Krause (00:06.772)
my goodness, I am so excited to have you on because I’ve been following you on social media, perhaps stalking a little bit because your information is so good. And I’m passing it to a lot of my clients and saying, hey, you have to see this. This is what is happening to you. And what I’m talking about is all those hormones and how we’re looking at hormones as the panacea, the cure-all, the one hit wonder.

We’re going to have amazing lives. Everything is going to go away. It’s going to erase our past. We’re not going to have any issues if we just take hormones. And I know you know that that is not the case.

Paula Rastrick (00:43.148)
Yeah, it’s definitely something that we’re seeing across social media and have done for a while now, but it’s not the reality for a lot of women. And I am very, very sort of strong in terms of fighting back to explain that there are a lot of women that are taking hormones that don’t understand the nervous system. And unfortunately, this is leading to side effects.

or just treatment not working but instead of this being recognised by the medical model it’s almost the woman’s fault. She’s an outlier. It’s her issue. She’s more complex. That is simply not true.

Jannine Krause (01:29.168)
of absolutely, absolutely. And that more complex women topic really speaks to my heart because I hear it over and over again from women coming to my office. And I’ll say over and over again on the podcast that I’m the one that people see when conventional medicine doesn’t really work for them. And when their doctor just is like, I don’t know what to do with you, your case is too complex. And there is that whiny, whiny woman, complex woman labels. And it makes me so sad because it’s not.

our clients fault. It’s misunderstanding of what’s going on in the medical model.

Paula Rastrick (02:04.588)
Yes, I completely agree with that. In fact, the book that I’ve written is an argument really against the oversimplification of women’s health when it comes to hormones. In particular, my area is trauma, but the oversimplification, which is now causing harm, right? So because it’s too oversimplified, it’s what I call cut and paste Stepford wives.

type of prescribing when it comes to hormones and this one size fits all and then when it’s not working or it’s going wrong it’s like the woman is more difficult, the woman is more complex, she is the one that’s causing the problem.

And this is then leading to medical gaslighting, which is then leading to more trauma, which is then leading to more stress. And women are then being misguided because they’re then told, we’ll take antidepressants on top of the HRT. And then they take antidepressants and then they’re told, okay, we’ll take anti-anxiety. I’m speaking to women that have been prescribed cocktails of medications.

because their hormones were not prescribed from a trauma-informed perspective and now they’re ending up just going round and round in circles full of medication.

Jannine Krause (03:34.706)
I see the same and it disgusts me and it disgusts me because folks like you and I get somewhat, let’s say, abused a little bit in social media and in other places because we’re like, hey, you can’t just give women a 0.05 estradiol patch and you can’t just give them 200 milligrams of progesterone and say every single woman’s gonna fit that. And unfortunately, with anything that I see that happens in the conventional medical model,

Paula Rastrick (03:45.528)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (04:02.886)
things do become one size fits all. This is the standard protocol. And I have women microdosing. I have women cutting patches in the slivers. I have women compounding things to microdose hormones. And I will catch a lot of flack from conventional docs to be like, what are you doing? That is not the standard of care. I said, well, your standard of care didn’t work. So what’s my option? And I’m sure you’re seeing this on your level with the trauma because trauma does so many things.

Paula Rastrick (04:23.777)
Exactly.

Jannine Krause (04:32.146)
to the body. it’s it and I’m probably saying this in not a very good NLP way, but this that’s that’s what’s coming off the top of my head. I want you to tell us a little bit about your story so that we can kind of weave folks into your mission and how you’re helping women right now because it does seem that this so many women have had trauma.

Paula Rastrick (04:44.866)
Hmm.

Paula Rastrick (04:57.005)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (04:57.252)
in multiple different ways and you don’t uncover that until you do try certain protocols and it doesn’t even have to be hormones. I’ve seen this with chronic Lyme and I’ve seen it with chronic mold and other things where trauma situations come up in the cell danger response. tell us kind of your, tell us your background here and your story because it sure hit me and was like, this is not uncommon for many.

Paula Rastrick (05:12.398)
Mmm.

Paula Rastrick (05:22.026)
No, I don’t think it’s uncommon. I think sometimes we have a little bit of a blind spot when we use the word trauma. The understanding of the word trauma is still potentially misleading. And so the work that I’ve done is really about understanding the development of the nervous system through my own story. So kind of in a nutshell,

Before menopause was sort of mainstream, if you like, back in 2017, I started to enter into that sort of perimenopause stage. I was running a business at the time. I’d just left my career in professional sport and I was running at 100 miles an hour, which to be honest with you has been my lifestyle. Push, push, push. And I started to experience…

first heightened anxiety and heightened stress and it was just a friend that said to me, look, if you thought you might be perimenopausal and to be honest with you, it wasn’t mainstream and I had the mindset, do you know what? I need it fixed. I’m trying to survive. I have a business here. My marriage is failing. We’ve just been through so much stress. I just wanted it fixed. So I went to a private menopause specialist at the time and she prescribed estrogen.

And she started me on what would be considered a higher dose and 100 patch, 100 MCG patch. And so off I went. Over a period of time, I started to feel worse. I started to feel worse. My anxiety started to increase. It wasn’t decreasing, it was increasing. My mood swings were increasing. Everything was becoming more heightened. So if I was already anxious, imagine turning the dial up.

you know, and continuously to highlight her. So I went back after three months and I said, I’m not feeling any better. In fact, I’m feeling worse. I knew nothing about perimenopause. And at that time she doubled my estrogen dose. And when she doubled the estrogen dose, she added in testosterone and then she kept my progesterone cyclically very low. So off I went. So this went on for a very long time, but I started to unravel.

Paula Rastrick (07:39.374)
The histamine responses, it became a mess. So the histamine responses, the heightened inflammation, because you’re adding in testosterone on top of estrogen and testosterone converts to estrogen and we don’t know how much of that converts for each woman. So all you’re doing is adding more stimulation to a nervous system profile that is already an

overstimulated nervous system profile. So you’re increasing excitation, you’re increasing that energy, you’re pushing the system, my nervous system outside of its window of tolerance, you’re pushing it up into sympathetic fight-flight, then you’re kind of burning that energy. So I’m starting to operate in a heightened fear response, a survival response, right? Because obviously I’ve been pumped full of

excitatory hormones. mean testosterone is an excitatory hormone and an inhibitory hormone but it depends on context so again that’s the thing that’s not understood. So I then start to unravel you know I’ve got all this going on I had to leave my husband I had to leave my child I didn’t want him to see his mum like that because I grew up in a very volatile traumatic childhood

So of course I was trying to protect my son from seeing me and I ended up suicidal. So I ended up suicidal and yeah, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good. And sort of had to go through recovery, had to be taken down off the oestrogen and the HRT, all of that stuff, antidepressants, all of this stuff. I was in a bad way. And it was only afterwards, after all of that, that I started to think,

you know what, something’s not right here. What happened to me? And COVID came along, which made my life easier because the world shut down. And it gave me time to sort of breathe. And then I started to map things out. I started to think, you know what, I had a traumatic childhood. I started looking at the research in ACEs, in adverse childhood experiences. So then I started to map out. Okay, so.

Paula Rastrick (09:57.846)
I had problems with my periods, verging on PMDD. don’t know if you know what that, that, that, yeah. So, wow, unrecognized, right? So I’m like, okay, my OCD, my binge eating, my alcohol, my addictions. I mean, I’ve done, I’ve done it all, you know, this is kind of, but not realized coming from my childhood, how that’s gone into puberty. Then I’ve got to postnatal depression.

So I had postnatal depression. Then I’ve charted to perimenopause. So what I’ve done is I’ve kind of started from the womb. So I started looking at how does this start from the womb? So I’m in my mum’s womb. How is her profile passed to me? Yeah, because she’s in a very abusive, narcissistic relationship with my father. So I’m born into the world and what I call more sensitive. So I arrive into the world with a more sensitive

nervous system and then you have these genetic and epigenetic changes to the nervous system that continue throughout life and I just don’t think we’ve even understood the significance of the nervous system and how childhood experiences and early life stress dysregulate the nervous system multiple variables and

we’ve ended up not understanding that that’s what causes a lot of the symptoms.

Jannine Krause (11:30.994)
Absolutely, your your story is so common, know different flavors of different things but So many women have gone through different things, especially around the PMDD So for those of you guys are like, what is PMD that is literally premenopausal dysphoric disorder and The one of my clients that experienced this kind of as one of them that really set this off to me Realizing that there is a lot more work

that has to be done before you even give someone a hormone to be able to be sure you’re not gonna push someone into a suicidal state. And I can’t say how many women have come to me and been like, know, doc, I don’t know what’s wrong. The hormones aren’t working. The doc keeps pushing my level up and up and up and up. You know, where you said 100 micrograms, mean, double that is the max max that is, you know, for conventional hormone.

Paula Rastrick (12:22.338)
and

Paula Rastrick (12:27.15)
Jannine Krause (12:29.924)
administration that that’s the max. It’s insane to think what that would do to someone. And I don’t think that in most intakes, these questions are even being asked about what was your period like before. And we’re

Paula Rastrick (12:31.404)
No.

Paula Rastrick (12:43.094)
No, there was never any talk to me about anything to do with my history. That is a fatal mistake in my opinion.

Jannine Krause (12:50.674)
Absolutely, absolutely. Now at the time, were you still cycling or were you? Okay, and that’s a whole nother beast, I think.

Paula Rastrick (12:59.692)
Yeah, I mean, you we could talk all day, couldn’t we, about all these different aspects, but I was still cycling. And eventually what happened was, unfortunately, I started to bleed and then I started to flood and then they thought I had womb hyperplasia because I was flooding everywhere. Now that is a sign of too much estrogen. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, that is it. It is too much estrogen, you know? And yet women are being told in the UK, a bit of bleeding is normal.

It’s not normal for some women and to dismiss that as being just normal is causing women to have to have surgery which could have been prevented had we understood that it’s a neuro-endocrine. It staggers me that we don’t understand the womb and the brain. were having women that are having surgery.

not understanding that it’s a nervous system issue as well as a… and it’s tragic really, it’s really tragic.

Jannine Krause (14:04.306)
Absolutely agree. One of the things that’s a theme and this comes with naturopathic medicine, we have these terms for the adrenals and it used to be called adrenal fatigue, I tend to call it more adrenal insufficiency. And really where I’ve kind of come to, and this is what it seems, where you’re probably going with the nervous system here, and I’d love to hear your take and kind of how you would speak to people on this. I tell folks we’re switching fuel from ovaries over to the adrenals.

just switch the fuel and if we switch the fuel to some adrenal glands that are already in fight or flight because they’re used to go go go go push push push

Paula Rastrick (14:30.019)
Yeah.

Paula Rastrick (14:37.346)
Nothing left.

Jannine Krause (14:38.948)
What are we gonna do? So I’d love to hear like, is that how you kind of similarly explain to folks? How’s your explanation of how things play out with the adrenals in the nervous system?

Paula Rastrick (14:50.574)
Well, I mean, one of the things that the mechanisms, of the primary in the book, I’ve got quite a few different primary mechanisms that we have overlooked. One of them is the understanding of the HPA axis and the understanding of the stress response and the understanding of survival and the understanding that, listen, if your HPA axis, your stress response is dysregulated.

If you’re pumping out more excitation, cortisol, adrenaline, all of that, this will just override and shut down any form of reproduction process anyway, because that’s how the nervous system is designed. So if you’re operating in kind of high functioning anxiety, which is what I think a lot of women are operating and have done, like me, their whole life, right? Not really understanding that until you get to perimenopause and it’s a huge crash.

You’re already depleted. Your nervous system is saying, I can’t do this anymore. I’m done. And unless you start to listen to me, unless you start to listen, no amount of pumping yourself full of hormones without understanding survival responses and adrenal fatigue and higher excitation and adrenaline and cortisol. It’s just patching. One of my things is you can’t put a patch over trauma.

You just can’t put a patch over trauma. And one of the biggest mistakes that’s happening in the UK is that when we get to perimenopause, which is typically a low progesterone state, not a low estrogen state, I mean, that’s a whole different conversation. I don’t know how we’ve managed to get this muddled up, but we have. Where doctors on social media will talk about estrogen. In perimenopause, that is not correct. You know, it’s not an estrogen deficiency state.

So if you start pumping yourself full of the wrong ratio of estrogen, all you’re going to do is push up cortisol. You’re going to push up your cortisol. And then we’re going round in this horrible loop of burnout, fatigue, and trying to keep the system push, push, push. It amazes me that we don’t understand the nervous system. I don’t understand how you can prescribe without…

Paula Rastrick (17:10.644)
understanding trauma and the nervous system. Not individually, you can do a cut and paste response, which is what’s happening, isn’t it? Everyone gets the same treatment pretty much, you know, and that’s why we’ve got so many women now who are having side effects and it’s not working and spending years of their life tweaking doses. It’s crazy stuff, crazy, crazy stuff. I don’t know how we’ve got to not even understand, as you say.

Jannine Krause (17:21.65)
Thank

Paula Rastrick (17:40.29)
the basics because surely it is the basics. I’m just a lay person and I understand the basics but I think women are being brainwashed because they’re almost being sold a dream that in reality is a lot more complex than what is being made out.

Jannine Krause (18:02.96)
I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. you know, we are being sold this like hormones are the panacea. They’ll fix all your issues. You’ll lose weight. You’ll feel amazing. Your skin’s gonna look great. Slap that stuff everywhere. Take a bath in it. You know? And sadly, makes it it harder for the women. But then we’re looking at trying to tease this out and getting the proper care.

for the women that are struggling because I don’t know if this is common in the UK, it’s common in the US. If the antidepressants don’t work and the anti-anxieties don’t work, now we’re moving on to ADHD meds. And it’s a hot thing right now is the ADHD.

Paula Rastrick (18:47.246)
ADHD is so, so right.

It’s a very complex subject. And so I have been, I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD. Okay. So from a, from a medical perspective, I am ADHD. Now in my book, what I talk about is deconstructing labels in order to understand that we’re all individual when it comes to nervous system profiles. However, and there’s no

ADHD is very much has a heritable research, right? So I reckon my dad was, but there’s no gene, there’s no one gene set that says you’re ADHD, right? It isn’t, okay? There’s multiple genes, you know, as you know, from, you know, so we can’t say, well, this is an ADHD brain. What I’m kind of arguing about is that if we were to look back in history and we were to look at evolution,

we would all have different brains for different reasons, right? Because we’d have to survive as a tribe. Because when you’re in the hunter gatherer days, know, someone like me, for example, would have had heritable traits of ADHD, what we call, because I’m more hyper attuned to the environment. I’m more aware. I’m more dopamine seeking. I’m more adventurous. I might go and seek new land. Yeah, I would have to, we would be surviving because of these different brains. Then you’re to have different brains that stay back.

more cautious, more… I don’t believe it’s a disorder. I believe it’s an evolutionary, biological brains that we’ve been carried forwards. And this is going to sound controversial. The labelling that comes from psychiatry and the diagnostic standard manual is driven by pharmaceuticals and they have to prescribe based on tick box exercises. But when you start looking at

Paula Rastrick (20:52.512)
ADHD profiles, nervous system profiles, highly sensitive people nervous system profiles, autism, neurodivergence. Then you start looking at complex trauma from early life stress, complex, it’s all crossing. mean, I don’t know. This is my argument. I don’t know how we’re distinguishing these labels. How are you telling me, yes, I have behavior traits of…

complex trauma survivor, I have a more hypervigilant nervous system. I do zone out if I’m not interested in something there’s my deficit apparently but then I’m equally hyper focused when I’m interested in a conversation. So it’s not it’s not a disorder it’s a it’s very highly creative brain that that’s able to sense patterns and and I will not pay attention if you bore me. It’s kind of like

Jannine Krause (21:45.276)
Yes, I’m responsible.

Paula Rastrick (21:48.792)
the brain, you know, because we’re not all the same. And I just find it fascinating because what we do know, right, is that women that have been diagnosed with ADHD, autism, highly sensitive people and complex trauma, which is what my book’s about any of these have heightened sensitivity to hormonal changes. So when you look.

And I’m calling it, I’ve put it under an umbrella of sensitivity, right? So I’m trying to kind of strip back labels and say, you know, some women are more sensitive to hormonal changes. When we look at the research, if you start joining it up, these are the same women. are women with nervous system sensitivity. They are women with heightened stress sensitivity, women with heightened sensory sensitivity. Everything comes under.

Rejection sensitivity. You’ll see it’s all converging, but no one’s joined the dots. Does that make sense? It’s kind of all siloed off into labels. I don’t believe the labels are right. I believe it’s the nervous system profile. PMDD is heightened sensitivity to hormonal changes, but it’s heightened nervous system sensitivity.

Jannine Krause (23:10.3)
Yes, not heightened hormone sensitivity. Nervous system.

Paula Rastrick (23:13.548)
Yes, but it’s not the hormones. It’s the changes in the hormones. It’s the way that the nervous system is interacting with the hormones. And, you know, we can go very deep into it, but for example, some women will say, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, that they are more progesterone sensitive. for some women, right. So when we look at that, when we look at that, this is why you can’t treat every woman the same.

Jannine Krause (23:34.939)
Yep.

Paula Rastrick (23:41.794)
And this is why we have a problem with not understanding the nervous system in my opinion, because we start to look at, why is that? Well, when you start to really deep dive into it, you start looking at GABA receptors, you start looking at the nervous system, things like trauma can impact receptors. And if you dose progesterone, which converts to allopregnalolone, progesterone,

converts to a neurosteroid called allopregnanolone. And this is an anti-anxiety, anti-inflammatory neurosteroid. It’s probably the most underrated. No one really talks about it. But progesterone converts to that, right? Now, if that progesterone meets a GABA receptor or a receptor, not just GABA, but, and it’s blocked, for example, because the receptor’s blocked by trauma or it’s dysregulated and it doesn’t convert properly, women can have

a sort of paradoxical effect, but it’s not necessarily to the progesterone. It’s the way the nervous system has been shaped. And we don’t understand epigenetics. So we’re kind of just going along the lines of, it’s a progesterone problem. it’s an estrogen problem. These are not primary drivers of the nervous system. They are neuromodulators. They assist the nervous system. They are not the primary.

And I think unfortunately we’ve been kind of sold this idea that, for example, estrogen is the queen of the brain. Well, it’s not because estrogen is a male hormone as well. So it’s, you know, that kind of old marketing of estrogen is the, the elixir of beauty and youth. And we’re kind of regurgitating it back, but just repackaging it in a different way.

Jannine Krause (25:36.754)
You’re so right on there. Absolutely. Yeah. We’re putting lipstick on a pig.

Paula Rastrick (25:43.854)
We’re making it look pretty, we’re kind of going backwards. And for people that push against me, They don’t see that because the marketing is strong, right? But believe me, trust me, we’re going backwards. We’re going backwards, but we’re packaging it in a new way that makes like we’re going forwards. But we’re not because when you really understand the nervous system,

from a trauma-informed lens, that’s all I can talk about because I’m not a neuroscientist and people say that to me, you know, it’s like, you’re not a neuroscientist. I say, well, you’re not trauma-informed. So where does it start and begin and end? Like, who’s got all the answers? No one. There’s no one profession. The medical system doesn’t have the answers because they don’t understand trauma and they don’t understand the nervous system. So my pushback to that is it’s bio-psycho-social. We don’t understand that

It’s not just a biology. We’re dealing with our experiences, our psyche, our nervous systems. They’re wired. It doesn’t make sense to me that we just kind of treat everyone with levels. It’s like you’re just a static robot and here’s some testosterone and that’s going to increase your libido. It’s crazy that it’s been that simplified that we are now

I think we’re in more, we have more problems now because it’s been oversimplified. It’s more of a mess and it’s messy to unpick it because voices like mine get pushed back.

Jannine Krause (27:24.018)
Yeah, yeah, if you don’t follow the mainstream narrative, you will get pushed back. I’ve been pushed back. And it’s a bummer, and that’s why I’m here, to make sure the voices get out, because I want everyone to hear that it isn’t all sunshine and roses with hormones. And many people who are listening to this podcast probably have noticed that. I know I have plenty of clients that can say that.

You know, one of the places that really all of the trauma informed therapists out there can really help is helping folks to look at, right, how do I make peace with the trauma? How do I help my nervous system not be as hypersensitive to it? How do we help heal this? So I would love to hear. I know you’ve got a step, a multi-step method. And of course my brain is kind of going to the brain. Yes, the brain body method. want to make sure I said it right, because I was trying to say something different.

Paula Rastrick (28:20.034)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (28:23.378)
But the brain body method is fascinating to me in terms of the multi-step process that you’re helping walking people through to really reduce the sensitivity.

Paula Rastrick (28:35.374)
Yeah, think first of all, the reason that I’ve kind of integrated different approaches is just based purely on, I like evidence, I like science, know. I worked in professional sport, so I’m used to sort of working within elite kind of environments where, you men’s sport, I worked in professional football. And a lot of my work comes from that because…

I would be involved in pain science. I’d be looking at the brain and body connection. So what I’ve done is amalgamated lots of different things. And then the understanding of what I’m saying is hormonal sensitivity based on the research that I’ve looked at and joined up. And yes, we need far more research. It’s not a definitive thing. You know, it’s growing and evolving, isn’t it? But when you look at some of the things that I am integrating within the work that I do, one of them

that I’ll talk about first of all, one of them is EMDR. So EMDR is, yeah, is a trauma therapy and it’s a way of reprocessing trauma, okay? So eye movement desensitization. So that is evidence-based. So we’ve got good evidence that that helps. Now it doesn’t help everyone. Some people will report it, but I personally, I quite like somatics. I like the body stuff. This is why I kind of integrated brain and body. From a…

From a nervous system perspective, where I think we need to start integrating is heart rate variability training. So when I worked in professional sport, this would be something we would be looking at, right? So if you’ve got a player who’s injury prone or has, they would be wearing a vest, monitor, right? And so what would happen is they’d come off training, okay?

Jannine Krause (30:11.634)
Cool.

Paula Rastrick (30:28.01)
and you’d have your data and the data would say this player is in the red zone which means that player is pushing outside of his window of tolerance. We know that that system, that nervous system is stretched, it’s in the red zone. That makes him more injury prone. We know that from pain science. So what do you do with that player because you’ve got a massive game on Saturday. So what you do is you rest and recover the player to increase

his capacity, his window of tolerance to go back out to perform on Saturday. You don’t push against the system because the system is built on balance, isn’t it? Rest and digest, rest and recover, and then push, right? So everything works in balance. The whole world works in two forces, you know? So the system is the same in simplistic terms. And when you look at the science,

heart rate variability and vagal tone, the vagus nerve.

That is evidenced, starting to become evidenced in hormonal sensitivity. No one talks about it, right? So what we’re really looking at is to increase the capacity of the nervous system, just like you train your muscles. You want to train your nervous system. Now, by expanding your nervous system, you’re able to cope with stress better, but you are

coping more with hormonal changes because hormonal changes are internal stresses. They are internal stresses to the system, right? If you’ve got a very small window of tolerance, people with a trauma background, people, neurodivergence as well, tend to have a narrow window of stress tolerance, you have lower vagal tone and you have lower HRV, you are struggling.

Paula Rastrick (32:25.58)
to regulate the nervous system under pressure when it comes to hormonal changes. That is a whole different concept to what we’re being told, which is you need to add your hormones back in. I’m arguing you need to increase your nervous system capacity to handle the stress because you’re not handling it. wasn’t. It’s almost a completely different way of looking at it because it’s not

your hormones that drive the symptoms. I’m going to get pushed back on this. It’s not the hormones that drive the symptoms. It’s the inability of the nervous system to handle the fluctuations of those hormones. And that’s why some women get HRT and it doesn’t work or it makes things worse because what they’re doing is they’re saying, well, your levels of hormones. We need to be careful with levels because

Levels measured from blood don’t tell you what’s happening in the nervous system. They don’t tell you what’s happening in the brain. They don’t tell you how much is being stored in tissues. In fact, we don’t know how well you’re metabolizing those hormones and excreting them out of the body. And my argument is that a lot of women have higher estrogen ratios. They have higher estrogen ratios already.

Does that make sense? And this is where the non-medical community would say they call it estrogen dominance, right? But it’s been, you know, it gets pushed back. I don’t call it estrogen dominance, but I can tell you now from the research I’ve looked at and the dots I’ve joined up, it’s a strong argument to suggest that some women, in fact, a lot of women already have higher ratios of estrogen. And you’ll see that in endometriosis. You’ll see that in polycystic ovary because

The nervous system is running on higher ratios of stimulatory hormones, adrenaline, and estrogen fits under that side. And it’s just not being recognized. And that is crazy to me.

Jannine Krause (34:41.154)
It seems wild. It seems wild. I will definitely agree with you 100 % on that because when I do test cortisol and I do a saliva test, I can see a lot of what’s going on. can test cortisol in blood too, but I like to see the saliva, but I also like to compare it to the urine metabolites of the hormones. That’s where it’s like, you can get quite a big like, okay.

But here’s the thing, you’d almost have to test every single day to be able to see what exactly is going on. And that’s the bummer.

Paula Rastrick (35:15.244)
That’s the problem. That’s one of the problems. And so what I’m doing in the book is trying to equate symptoms, what we’re calling symptoms, to nervous system states and nervous system profiles, which then starts to help you understand why have I got heightened anxiety or why have I got this sympathetic arousal? What is the body telling me? Why am I higher in histamine? Why am I higher in… Because it’s inflammation.

Right? And this is the problem that I have as well. I know we’re kind of jumping, but if you’ve got a higher inflammation profile, which comes, starts way back in childhood, not at menopause, right? So you’ve been, you’ve been going through changes, nervous system, epigenetic changes, but you started life prior to puberty with a higher, higher excitation in the nervous system, higher inflammation. When you get

to perimenopause and then you’re told you need more estrogen, you need more estrogen. Well, that’s not correct because too much estrogen is inflammatory. No one is saying estrogen is inflammatory. They’re all saying estrogen is anti-inflammatory. It’s only anti-inflammatory in the context of the whole nervous system. You can’t just pick a hormone out and go,

Jannine Krause (36:26.085)
Thank

Paula Rastrick (36:42.144)
look, this is anti-inflammatory for every single woman on the planet. Estrogen is just one chemical within hundreds of… So to simplify it to the point and say, estrogen is anti-inflammatory, it’s only anti-inflammatory within the context of the individual’s nervous system profile. And for a lot of women, estrogen, too much estrogen, is inflammatory. And that is not a good thing.

And yet we’re kind of telling everyone that it’s always anti-inflammatory. I don’t know if that’s the messaging that you’re sort of seeing.

Jannine Krause (37:17.67)
I’ve heard, yeah, same thing. Yeah, yeah. I’m like, wait, what happened to Estrone? The inflammatory estrogen.

Paula Rastrick (37:25.418)
Exactly. this is the other, it’s just this kind of like, this kind of, that’s not, you know, I mean, I’m no way, I’m your medical, you know, it’s the oversimplification, isn’t it? And for me, we have the research, right? We know, okay, that women, like me, women who have had what I’m calling adverse childhood experiences, but again, even that’s been expanded now. So we need to move away from sort of what is an adverse childhood experience.

So we’ve got the research, all neuroendocrine issues are underpinned with trauma research. Done, end of, they are, right? But no one’s talking about that. So what is that mechanism? And I’m telling you that I believe it’s the nervous system, right? It’s the nervous system. Why these women like me struggle more with these hormonal changes. And when we look at the research, PMDD, underpinned by emotional

trauma. Now I also believe, this is just me, I believe that there’s links between growing up with parents who were emotionally unavailable or emotionally dysregulated themselves. So my father would have an unrecognised, what we would call an ADHD profile. Along with that came alcoholism, along with that came domestic violence.

Along with that came narcissism. And I believe there’s a link. I believe that narcissistic profiles, and I’m talking about not narcissistic traits, we’ve all got narcissistic I’m talking about dysregulated, emotionally unavailable, parenting the parent, having to cope with their emotional dysregulation like me.

I believe there’s a huge link that’s being missed which is combining narcissistic parenting, emotional unavailable parents, emotionally cold parents, childhood trauma, nervous system dysregulation and neurodivergence. I think it’s all crossing over.

Jannine Krause (39:46.994)
I can totally see it. I can totally see it in the clients I’m thinking about, the folks I’ve asked about their history and parents and how childhood was and how, you know, when you have a model of a parent that’s not regulated, of course you’re not gonna develop a regulated nervous system. Cause your model is not.

Paula Rastrick (40:05.742)
can’t. Your environment, so for me the environment is unpredictable, the environment is unsafe. Our nervous systems are wired for safety, end of. that is what your nervous, so survival comes before reproduction. So your nervous system from the womb up until puberty is being wired for survival and safety, not reproduction. Reproduction comes, reproductive hormones

Jannine Krause (40:17.468)
Mm-hmm.

Jannine Krause (40:32.722)
Mm-hmm.

Paula Rastrick (40:35.412)
surge at puberty. Well, you’ve already got a blueprint of a nervous system profile here, which is why I believe that risks for depression in females starts at puberty, not menopause. Right. So if we don’t understand the neurodevelopmental years, how will we? We’re almost starting in the middle, aren’t we? We’re almost kind of like going, here, midlife. Well, it didn’t start in midlife. It started way back in the womb.

It’s a trajectory. It’s a story. It’s a nervous system story. Not just, everyone arrives at perimenopause and all of a sudden we’re all the same and we’re all kind of Stepford wives and robots. you know, I mean, I’m big into, you know, personalities and psyches and all of that. That’s all in my book. But, you know, there’s no conversation about any of this, is it? It’s just about, you know, your hormone levels are…

low and so we need to top you up off you go.

Jannine Krause (41:38.532)
Exactly, I mean, it’s exactly how it is. And, you know, that’s how we were taught really. And honestly, the truth is most of us weren’t even taught in school. We had to go to advanced training to be even, you know, like a weekend conference to learn what to do here, you know, unless you’ve taken advanced training. And I’ve taken advanced training and yes, in the naturopathic realm after I got out of school, because it wasn’t talked about when I was in school. I really…

don’t like barely remember any vagus nerve conversations in school. And granted, I graduated in 2007. okay, it’s, you we’re almost 20 years past. But the point that I want folks to hear is like most of your docs, nobody to like, we haven’t talked about the nervous system. This is new. We didn’t talk about trauma other than, you know, the big T’s I’m gonna call it. We didn’t talk about someone developing, you know,

Paula Rastrick (42:30.499)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (42:33.836)
little tease in response to how they responded to certain things.

Paula Rastrick (42:37.506)
how they’re, yeah, because attachment. So I mean, we could go on. I mean, it’s just something I could talk about all day, but attachment, okay? So when you start looking at the biology of attachment, there’s a lot of sort of, you know, understanding of attachment later in life. So you have this attachment style, you’ve got anxious attachment style, you are an avoidant attachment style, you know, all of that stuff. Go back, go back. Your attachment,

starts with your nervous system co-regulation with your parent, naturally your primary caregiver, which in this instance we’re going to say is the mother. Okay. I had no attachment to my mum. Now the nervous system is developing through nervous system to nervous system. Right. And we’ve now got the evidence again, no one talks about this emerging traumatic births.

So if I come into the world in a traumatic way, forceps delivery, for example, which isn’t that can create epigenetic changes, which causes my nervous system to become more stress sensitive. Now, you know, and it’s like then if I have then my primary caregiver, my mum who has postnatal depression, so it’s not blaming parents. This is, you know, she’s in an abusive relationship, right? She, me and my mum don’t bond.

because she’s not holding me, she’s not with me, she’s not co-regulating me, she’s not well, I’m left to survive because I don’t have that touch, I don’t have that… Your nervous system is developing through attachment and it’s learning pre-verbal, does this feel safe? Because that’s… I always try to liken it to like if you get a puppy, they don’t take the puppy away from the mum.

for the first eight to 10 weeks. That’s because the puppy is regulating from the mum. And yet we have procedures where the mum, it happened to me, I had a traumatic birth with my son, we’re then separated and they take the baby away, right? I then get the baby back. I’m in a bad state because it was a triadic birth. That’s why one of the reasons I had postnatal depression. I’m trying to breastfeed my baby. I can’t. All of my past traumas coming up.

Paula Rastrick (44:55.798)
about my own attachment with my mother, I’m not a good enough mum, I’m never going to be good enough. know, all this is coming back up in my system because that’s the reality. Trauma comes back at these vulnerable times. Then you’re reliving a lot of that trauma, right? And we just don’t understand how that happens. And if we were to start looking at it from a nervous system development, we could probably catch young people like me before

Jannine Krause (45:07.846)
Okay.

Paula Rastrick (45:25.526)
we get depression and especially girls before they start cycling because your hormonal cycles after puberty will if on a dysregulated nervous system can cause things like addiction, OCD, this is all my cycles right OCD addiction binge eating this is all this is because hormonal changes and fluctuations are

disturbing my mood and my cognition and my behaviour. Stuff like that. If you don’t join it up, how are we going to treat? To get to midlife and start to try to dose people full of hormones when you don’t understand their nervous system profile, to me is verging on, well, the stories that I’ve got is negligence, to be honest with you.

Jannine Krause (46:18.278)
I agree. I absolutely agree. I was taught to treat the whole person. The whole person includes the nervous system. And I’m seeing it as…

crucial for care for anyone at you know hormones but also all the other things all the other yeah

Paula Rastrick (46:31.758)
100%.

Paula Rastrick (46:35.65)
Yep, autoimmune, autoimmune diseases, pain. In my book, I’ve kind of linked together sort of conditions that we treat separately, right? So, know, mast cell activation, POTS, you’ll see these in neurodivergent communities. You’ll see them talking about histamine intolerance. You’ll see them talking about mast cell. You’ll see them talk. This is a nervous system profile. They’re not isolated.

medical conditions and then you’ve got women with PMDD actually no women with ADHD have a higher rate of PMDD that’s because of the nervous system it’s not they’re not separate

Jannine Krause (47:20.818)
Yeah, yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. I’m seeing this too. I’m seeing this too.

Paula Rastrick (47:30.422)
It’s crazy really when you think about all of the female health conditions, know, PCOS, endometriosis, you know, women’s pain. We know it’s all under research, right? Women have been, I mean, my book talks about the fact that we don’t, we didn’t get researched, you know, and we’re too complex to research because of our hormonal cycles. We’re difficult to, it’s difficult. There’s too many variables. There’s too many, but that’s no excuse for under simplifying it.

which is the issue that I’ve got is the under, simplifying it to the point where it’s too simplified and it’s now causing harm.

Jannine Krause (48:10.45)
Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t agree more. couldn’t agree more. So I think the next thing we need to talk about so folks can have some action steps coming out of here. I’m very curious about how you were how you’re recommending looking at HRV.

Paula Rastrick (48:28.888)
Yeah. So for me, HRV is, is yeah. Okay. So I can talk about that. Yeah.

Jannine Krause (48:33.596)
Yeah.

Paula Rastrick (48:34.978)
So when we look at the research and we look at heart rate variability training, I believe this is an area that can help women to help themselves. So you can access this, okay? So vagus nerve training and heart rate variability training. Now, when you look at heart rate variability training, you can do that through various…

ways. To me it makes sense to strengthen your, it’s like strength, going to the gym and doing strength training. Strength train your nervous system, right? Let’s get your capacity, let’s get stronger, right? So that’s what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about looking at it from a, need to relax, I need to relax, I need to calm down. That doesn’t work. What works is,

stretching your nervous system capacity and strengthening your nervous system to deal with the everyday shit that you have to go through because you’re not going to get rid of the stresses. Life is stressful, isn’t it? You know, we’ve got so much stress in our lives. So my argument is you want to increase your capacity to handle stress. Right. So when you look at heart rate variability training, and I’ll give you some ideas on that.

You can spend money on it or you can do it without spending too much money. One of the sort of apps that I looked at is called HeartMath. HeartMath, right, so I use HeartMath. Now I use HeartMath because I like data. I like reports. I like to look and say, I managed to do this and look at my data.

Heart math is very good because it’s got evidence behind it. It’s science driven. If that’s your thing, that’s my thing, right? So heart math is a very good one that I would recommend and you can do 10 minutes a day and that is you working on your nervous system. And it’s a game changer, right? Even if you just did that alongside. The other thing you can do and a lot of people have got this, they’ve got watches, haven’t they? So they’ve got their sort of HRV. I’m not sure on the data on that.

Paula Rastrick (50:48.458)
I’ve looked at it and I’m like, it’s mixed, it’s mixed. So you can definitely look at your Apple watch or you can look at, you know, something like that because they will track HRV. So that’s another option. But you can also look at Vegas nerve training. So there’s multiple things. mean, yoga, there’s, you know, that’s kind of one of my things really. If you practice yoga, then look at people like Dr. Arielle Schwartz. She’s a, yeah.

So she’s got loads of YouTube. I would like to get to that point. She’s got loads of YouTube videos that are free in which she does Vegas nerve yoga. And to me, she’s just amazing. She’s one of my mentor, kind of like, you know, just a beautiful person. So you can go and look up Dr. Ariel Schwartz. looking at HRV expansion and training to me is the way forwards because

That is now evidenced in hormonal sensitivity. So I’m not just making it up, it’s evidenced. And I believe that’s the next wave of where women should start looking and investigating.

Jannine Krause (52:05.5)
I absolutely agree. Because telling women to like slow down, relax, know, it’s more trauma I think for some people.

Paula Rastrick (52:09.206)
It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.

Yeah, I think this is a really good point and I think this is you know, if you’ve got a profile look I’m a I’m a yogi and I’m a you know, I’ve done everything in my life, right? Because I’ve always been somebody that’s you know, high energy high functioning anxiety I think it’s just the best way to encapsulate People will know what I’m talking about right running on higher excitation burning out Up I get push push push burning out of it and the older you get

the harder it gets, right? Because your nervous system is so thin and your window of tolerance is so small that life becomes, you know, hard, really hard. So I think I forgot the question now. What was I saying? Yes, if you say to someone, just meditate or calm down, if you’ve got a very busy brain, like an ADHD brain, right? There’s constantly on the go, right? It’s really hard.

to do that and people get frustrated and then they ditch it because they can’t get the benefits and they think this is a waste of time and it’s not for me. That is a completely different thing I think when you say to somebody you need to calm down and do some relaxation stuff it just doesn’t work, you’re right, it doesn’t work. What people need to do is strength training for the nervous system. That’s different, that’s a whole different psychology isn’t it than telling somebody

You need to calm down. mean, telling a woman to calm down is… Sometimes my husband’s like, chill out, chill out. Do you know what mean? Like, don’t necessarily respond really well. I mean, obviously I do meditate and I do do that stuff, but only because I’ve learned to do the nervous system stuff first. And I would suggest that you start with the nervous system HRV training.

Jannine Krause (53:47.324)
Doesn’t go well.

Jannine Krause (54:07.47)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, that’s funny. You say that about that. Because I mean, yeah, telling a woman to just breathe or chill out. I mean, I’ve tried with many women to do the whole breathing methods and different that. And I’m like, no, no, we need something. We got to pre-cursors first. And HRV is great. I used to do a lot. And I’m curious what your thoughts are for women who are athletes. I used to do more HRV specific cardio training to work on resilience that way. Have you worked with folks in that?

like manner.

Paula Rastrick (54:38.124)
I haven’t worked with women, I haven’t worked with women to be fair doing that, but I have worked with men and athletes and this is where it all came from. I’ve been doing this a long time, it’s not something that I’ve just kind of, it’s taken from my work and I do believe that it’s, it depends on your psychology, right? Who is the woman you’re dealing with? Who is the woman in front of you? Because we’ve all got intrinsic.

You have to be intrinsically motivated, don’t you, in order to drive any form of behaviour change. Because really what we’re looking at is behaviour change. We’re looking at implementing more empowerment internally and going inside, as opposed to keep looking outside on Instagram and being told by the woman on Instagram in the comments section that you need to increase your dose. This is the problem we’ve got. So going internally…

and starting to understand what’s your psyche. If your personality is sport and you’re an athlete, 100%, because that would make sense, wouldn’t it? To train yourself under that kind of, but if you’ve got a woman who’s not sporty and doesn’t like exercise, that’s not gonna work, right? So then you need to drive it towards the woman. What do you enjoy doing?

What is it that drives you? What is motivating you? And I think when we get to midlife, this is my own experience, perimenopause is an absolute, can be such a roller coaster, right? I’m through that now and I can absolutely tell you the other side is different. It’s not that roller coaster, right? And you’ll find, which is what I’m going through at the moment, that I’m sort of at the point where I’m shedding all of the stuff.

and I’m stepping into a new sort of era, if you like, of who am I? What’s my purpose? What am I here to do? So again, you’ve got to always think about who is the woman in front of you? What’s her drivers? What’s her psyche? What’s her, you know, her motivation? Once you can tap into that, which is not what the biomedical model does, is it? You know, it just treats the, you know, you’re looking at it differently. So in answer to your question is yes, 100 % because

Paula Rastrick (56:55.8)
They’re going to be intrinsically motivated as an athlete. It’s going to, it’s the way they’re wired, isn’t it? So it’s, it’s, it’s knowing how to play it to the person in front of you, I think.

Jannine Krause (57:07.974)
love your response because it brings us back to empowering ourselves to take action for ourselves versus looking at social media and being like, so and so said this is what I need to do. I got to do this. We’ve now as it got not coming full circle in our conversation. We have many influencers who a lot of folks are just following willy nilly and and giving their power over to the statements.

Paula Rastrick (57:35.784)
you know, it’s a controversial subject, on particularly Instagram. and what I see and what I hear is, and I get it myself, is women coming to me saying, what do I do to fix it? There’s this almost like this, this, this culture that’s been developed, right? That is coming through social media doctors and influencers in my opinion, that has kind of falsely led women to believe that this is just a simple, quick fix. Well, I could go on and on. It’s not.

So, you you’ve got epigenetics, you’ve got all of this stuff, that’s all in my book. However, because this culture has been driven, quick fix, quick fix, women then turn to, you know, some random stranger on Instagram, right, in the comments section. And then they’ll say, you just need more estrogen love or you just need more testosterone. That was a game changer for me. So what happens is that woman then takes the external stuff

and inputs it into her nervous system. It goes wrong horribly. She doesn’t understand why it’s going wrong. And then she’s back on Instagram and someone else is telling her, no, you need to take your estrogen down and add in progesterone. Now, do you see what I’m saying? So now you’ve got, and it’s not, it’s actually really scary and crazy how women have been, I’m going to say very strongly brainwashed into believing that they can take psychoactive hormones

and put them in their body and their brain and you’re going to have the same reaction as some random stranger that’s on the internet. mean, this is the problem we’ve got. And people come to me and they’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, what do I do to fix it? So I’ve had to change my social media profile and I said, don’t come here for a quick fix because I’m not about quick fixes. I’m about you understanding you.

So you can empower you in order for you to make the right decisions about you. That’s a very different, very different philosophy, right? People don’t like it. It’s almost like, what? What do mean? You want me to understand it? Well, how are you going to make changes or inform decisions if you don’t understand it?

Jannine Krause (59:57.234)
100 % 100 % oh

Paula Rastrick (01:00:00.12)
It’s crazy because it’s not women’s fault and I’m not saying it’s women. believe it’s not the women. I believe the women have been gaslighted and falsely led to believe that you should just do this and you’ll be fine and it’s leading to a mess. And women are then being disempowered. There is nothing empowering about some of these social media doctors. They are not empowering women. What they’re doing is they’re repackaging

a 1960s narrative about estrogen. They’ve repackaged it all to make it more palatable for the year 2025. But underneath that, it’s still the same model. They are feeding off of women who are vulnerable.

Jannine Krause (01:00:52.294)
Yeah, I see it every day. And that’s why we’re here. That is why we are here. We are here to help give a different voice, give a different twist. And for those who are looking to really empower themselves and take control of their health, that’s why we’re here. Paula.

Paula Rastrick (01:01:11.054)
I think the thing is though, if you’re true to yourself, which you are, you can’t show up in any other different way. I can’t show up publicly and pretend that I’m a quick fix person because even if I was making millions, I still wouldn’t be able to do it.

Jannine Krause (01:01:29.522)
No, can’t live that way. That’s how it works. And I hope that we have inspired some folks along the way here to really kind of rethink things and slow down a bit on what we’re seeing on social media and think about your own intricacies here with health. We’ve got to tell folks how to find you over there at thebrainbodymethod.com. We’ve got to tell folks.

Paula Rastrick (01:01:35.512)
Same.

Jannine Krause (01:01:59.058)
social media and also guys pause been talking over and over again about her book hormonal or I can talk hormonally sensitive woman a trauma it’s it’s coming out soon hopefully sooner than later we’re gonna push Paula to get it out there

Paula Rastrick (01:02:14.08)
Yeah, I mean it’s kind of I’ve done two versions of it and this second version has had to be done because the the second version will empower women more to be able to take it to medics. That’s the point I’m trying to make so you are empowered to understand it more. So yeah, it’ll be worth it but it will be this year. It definitely will be this year.

Jannine Krause (01:02:34.864)
We’ll make sure that we put out a big deal on it so that folks can see that as well and now on on social media You’re under your name, correct at Okay, mrs. Paula rostrick, that’s what it is there and guys I’ll get the whole spelling RAS TR ICK I’ll say now Paula’s felt just how you would think and then we’ll have it in the show notes at dr. J Krauss nd.com Gosh Paula so many things I could talk to you for hours

Paula Rastrick (01:02:44.172)
Yeah, Mrs. Paula Raschstreich, yeah.

Jannine Krause (01:03:04.35)
And I definitely look forward to getting that book out and bringing you back on so we can talk through some more things for folks because I think this is just the tip of the iceberg as we explore the nervous system more and folks are really starting to understand that connection of how much the nervous system really does impact them. Thank you so much again for coming on.

Paula Rastrick (01:03:04.523)
and then.

Paula Rastrick (01:03:24.312)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.