195 ADHD, Progesterone Intolerance & The Missing Research with Adele Wimsit

👀 This isn’t your average convo about "that time of the month." This is about the hormonal chaos no one’s talking about and how it’s silently wrecking the lives of neurodivergent women.

💥 What You’ll Walk Away With:

• ADHD & hormones? Oh yeah,  they're very much connected. Especially in midlife.
• The Perfect Storm Study: Adele Wimsit exposes the black hole of research around women, ADHD, and perimenopause.
• Why progesterone is your nervous system’s BFF and what happens when it ghosts you.
• Estrogen dominance is real, and it’s not cute. Mood swings, fatigue, and brain fog? You’re not “just aging.”
• The wild card: methylation and how your body processes hormones matters more than you think.
• Trauma, ADHD, hormones = 🔥? We connect the dots.
• Why generic advice doesn’t work for women and what to do instead.
• GABA, calmness, and why your brain might be starving for balance.
• You’re not broken. You’re not crazy. But you might be overdue for a hormone reality check.

🧬 This episode is a permission slip: To ask better questions, demand better care, and stop settling for “normal” when your body’s begging for help.

💡 Final Word: If you’ve ever felt dismissed, misdiagnosed, or misunderstood, especially as a neurodivergent woman, this episode is a wake-up call wrapped in science, empathy, and fierce advocacy.

👉 Listen now. Share with every woman you know. And remember: you’re allowed to ask for more.

📲 Connect with Adele Wimsit:

Website: https://harmoniseyou.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harmoniseyou/

Sally's Links:

[Free Guide] Healing The Trauma Underlying Your Menopause Symptom Severity: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/healingtraumatheguide

[On Demand Masterclass] How To Heal The Trauma Underlying Your Menopause Symptom Severity [£17]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/healingtrauma

[On Demand Workshop] Redefine Your Values at Menopause and Live Life in Alignment With Them [£27]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/redefine 

[Online Practitioners Diploma - Self Paced] Menopause Wellbeing Practitioner [£127]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/meno

[One to One] Transformational 30 Day Rewire (Includes RTT) [£497]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/redefine 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sallygarozzomindmentor

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallygarozzo/

Send me a voice clip via WhatsApp: https://wa.me/message/FTARBMO7CRLEL

Transcript

So my guest today is Adele Wimsit. Adele is a women's health practitioner supporting women from menarche to menopause. Adele offers online and in-person hormone clinics where she bridges the science and the woo to support women to harmonize their hormones. With the additional option of functional medicine testing, Adele provides tailored lifestyle interventions to address

hormone imbalances as well as creating a space to explore HRT options. She also has a very special interest in ADHD and how our hormones play a role. So welcome Adele, how are you?

Adele (00:52.039)
Hi Sally, thank you for having me.

Sally (00:54.158)
It's a pleasure. So I'm really excited to chat to you today because ADHD is actually a subject that fascinates me, especially as it relates to hormone changes and also our early life experiences and complex trauma. And I know that this is an area you have a ton of experience with. So I would love to start by asking you the question, what inspired you to start your perfect storm study?

And what exactly did you uncover from that? And tell us a little bit more about it too.

Adele (01:26.622)
Yeah, so basically, I mean, I think we just we we attract our own frequency, don't we? So as a woman in perimenopause myself and as a neurodivergent woman, I one of my rages, my righteous rages has been about the lack of research for women generally. But it's really stark in the neurodiverse where the impact hormones have on our traits and our experience. So

There has never been a piece of research undertaken specifically on perimen and pausal women, but because I was seeing so many women in my clinic in this, having this experience, I wanted to know more about it. So I took it upon myself. I'm not somebody who moans about things and doesn't do anything about them. I've ranted on about this big gap and decided to do something about it myself. So in partnership with Mira, who are an at-home testing company, they kindly supported me with the testing element and I...

took a cohort of women through this to identify their experience. And it was really interesting, because one of the things I find ADHD brains do or don't do is we know two things, but it doesn't always bridge them. So what I found, my hypothesis actually turned out not to be something that I found. I thought I'd these very distinct changes in the phases. But of course, because we're perimenopausal, we're not really having phases through the cycle because we're not ovulating all the time. So we have this very consistent pattern through the month.

And what I found was amazing. And I actually believe that particularly in those early stages of perimenopause, it's progesterone that we start seeing a bit of an issue with. And then we start seeing things around histamine and methylation. So these are all things I could talk to you all week about, but these were the main findings was as that progesterone declines in the first phase of perimenopause, given what we know about progesterone in terms of mood stabilization and nervous system regulation,

Ishtron's then dominating. We don't usually need Ishtron that time. Ishtron is just fine with her production usually. Ishtron feeds histamine. Histamine has a massive impact on traits and mood. And sometimes we see an element of methylation. So these are things that started to come through the study that my geeky self got very excited about. And it's available for free download if anyone wants it from my website.

Sally (03:36.182)
Okay.

Okay, that's so interesting. Yeah, histamine really does play a role, doesn't it, in irritability and insomnia and anxiety. Yeah.

Adele (03:47.68)
It's huge. It's huge. And you know, it's a neurotransmitter. Yes, it plays a big role in terms of immune modulation, but it's a huge, it's a big impact for ADHD. And we, well, all women, actually, I think during pro menopause, lots of women experience something, I'm getting hay fever, why is that happening? And it's this unchecked estrogen histamine relationship, which I believe is due to the lack of progesterone.

So yeah, it's a big issue and it's something that we know in the ADHD community there's more of a link with, but we don't understand enough about why that is yet.

Sally (04:20.238)
So what did you find in your study then? Was there a certain link that you found that, so ADHD symptoms were worse because of the lack of progesterone, not the falling estrogen?

Adele (04:35.306)
So we need to be really careful that there are lots of people, ADHD and hormones seems to be the thing lots of influence want to talk about at the moment. And I'm finding it quite jarring because it's misinformation and quite confusing and conflicting information that is going out. So people are picking up, sensitizes dopamine and serotonin. This is what we need for ADHD. Estrogen is a hormone that needs to be really, really well-managed. She can get really, she can be quite harmful.

when she's not kept in check, I see estrogen like a fire and progesterones like water. And so we're going down this path where lots of influencers are saying, you know, we need to make sure estrogen's okay. And so women starting to add in estrogen, actually it's causing a lot of problems, which we could talk about further down. But specifically in relation to what I was seeing was this pattern of estrogen dominance in women. And I was really focusing on women 35 to 45 in that age bracket. So the earlier phases of perimenopause.

rather than later. So the first phase is progesterone is low, is usually fine, whereas in the second phase, estrogen then starts to decline. That's the pattern that we see. Whereas, so when that progesterone drops off, we become estrogen dominant, which is a very confusing term because it indicates that we're producing too much estrogen and we need to lower it. That's not the case. You might even have low levels of estrogen.

But I talk about Ishtarun as the party girl of the hormone world. She makes you feel sexy and confident and energized when she's behaving herself. Whereas progesterone is like the mama who comes back from the house party and goes, calm down, it's time to go to sleep. So when that progesterone is not there, Ishtarun is just partying by herself. And we know too much party makes us feel like crap. So not having that progesterone there, suddenly Ishtarun's dominating, she's left unchecked.

if we have particularly sensitive nervous systems or we're more prone to hormone sensitivities, which I see in the neurodivergent community, that is dominating can be really quite harmful to things like anxiety and mood dysregulation. And if women are then encouraged to start putting estrogen HRT into that, you're going to exacerbate those things that are already there. So actually the reduction in progesterone, you've not got that to calm me down. You know, all these strategies that we used to have to help

Adele (06:54.108)
manage our traits, suddenly they don't work anymore. You know, we're starting to get worried about things we never worried about. We've got this inner scratchiness, this irritation. We're not sleeping so well. You know, everything feels like we're pushing a rock up a mountain. This is progesterone deficiency. And because of that, we become estrogen dominant because she's not there to keep her in check. And those were the patterns that I was seeing in all of the women through their data.

Sally (07:19.498)
Okay, so did you pick women who were diagnosed with ADHD formally? Yeah.

Adele (07:24.064)
Yeah, yes, they're women from my community who had to have a formal diagnosis, not that I care about that in my clinic, but for the purposes of the study they had to be. Not medicated and not have any other conditions, diagnosed conditions. Yeah, so those are the women we were looking at.

Sally (07:42.936)
Wow, that is so fascinating. you know, I'm post menopause now. And even post menopausally, I'm noticing that I am estrogen dominant because I have recently, I mean, I do get restless legs in the evening. And the other day I went to bed with an entire restless body. And it was that inner creepy crawly feeling, which as you said, that inner scratchiness. I've had, I've never had it before prickly heat.

Adele (08:03.988)
Yeah.

Sally (08:12.558)
over my arms and legs and so I decided now I wouldn't advise this obviously but I decided to just take the progesterone. I've done this off my own back it's not something that I guess a doctor a GP would recommend but maybe somebody like you know.

Adele (08:32.2)
Not on the NHS. Not on the NHS, you won't get it. We're about 20 years behind where we need to be in HRT prescribing. We're ramped just growing. It's that grossly misunderstood and women are being failed because of it.

Sally (08:37.282)
Yeah, right.

Sally (08:44.63)
Right, yeah, I can see how you're really passionate about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And honestly, for me, taking the progesterone, I've been taking it on its own, no oestrogen, for a couple of weeks, and the itchy skin's gone down, and I feel a lot better.

Adele (08:46.816)
I'm so strongly about progesterone.

Adele (09:02.568)
Honestly, this is something, as you can tell, I could massively get on my bandwagon around. Progesterone is a miracle molecule. I have lots of resources on my website around this. We work with the international lead researchers. We have decades of research of showing how effective progesterone is for anxiety, depression, insomnia. Carol Peterson is an incredible lead on this. She actually trained with a woman called Dr. Katerina Dalton, who treated PMDD with high-dose progesterone.

and it's a very misunderstood molecule, but we know how incredibly effective it is for all of these things. But the problem is you can't patent a progesterone molecule because it's natural, right? So we turn it into a synthetic progestin and get told it's progesterone, which is factually incorrect. Progestins, like in the marina contraceptives, they come with side effects and risks. Body identical progesterone does not. It's protective, it protects your bones, protects your breast, stabilizes the mood, regulates the nervous system.

incredible molecule and we are denying it to women repeatedly and I truly believe that within the majority of cases of hysterectomies could be completely unnecessary if we properly dosed on progesterone.

Sally (10:13.984)
Wow. So sore breasts, is that in your opinion a sign of estrogen dominance rather than progesterone sensitivity? Yeah.

Adele (10:21.076)
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. When we tend to get this, where women tend to think it's progesterone sensitivity is either this misconception that in the luteal phase, progesterone is coming in and dominating and therefore we're getting the symptom. Actually, what I see clinically when I'm looking at the data is it's estrogen dominance. There's not enough progesterone to keep the estrogen in check. Equally where this can happen for women is when they start on a low dose of progesterone and in my view,

NHS levels are very low. So the maximum you're likely to get is 200 and that's a very low dose. We tend to start women on 300 in our clinic. So 200 goes in. One of the things it does, progesterone does, is sensitize estrogen receptors. So you think of your breasts are covered in estrogen receptors and when we put a small amount in, it fires up that estrogen to work better and it can hurt our boobs. But of course we think, oh, it's the progesterone.

And what is the solution there is usually more progesterone faster. And then because we get in and compensate for that estrogen. Yeah.

Sally (11:26.178)
mean, this is stuff that you just don't hear anyone talk about.

Adele (11:28.83)
No, that's why I get very loud about it Sally and I could go on all day. Women are being given such a disservice and it is that righteous rage that fuels my work because every day in clinic I see woman after woman who has been failed, given misinformation and my passion is rectifying that because women deserve to feel good. Whether you're neurodiverse or not, I work with all women and we get women feeling better, you know?

Sally (11:31.912)
Imagine.

Sally (11:57.422)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so what about if someone comes to you and you're going, right, you need more progesterone, like I can give you 200, 300 milligrams of progesterone, and they freak out because they've been told they're progesterone sensitive.

Adele (12:11.936)
Yeah, so this is something we work a lot with so I work with a specialist GP in my clinic whose knowledge around progesterone is just incredible. He's a wonderful man So we work very closely together around this and lots of women who come to me I like I mean I've had clients country in their consultation say don't effing talk to me about progesterone I hate it and I the every woman I work with is the captain of their ship. I am here to create a safe container

to give that woman information to make really informed consensual decisions about her body from a really strongly informed place. And so that's what I let women do. I said, okay, I completely hear that. And then as trust gains and we start to work on other elements, cause it's not all about HRT. It's very much about getting this foundation in around blood sugar regulation, adrenal function, gut health, liver, all of it. Once we get that trust and they start feeling better, that information is there. And then I'm yet to have a woman who

has not gone down a route successfully who thought they were progesterone sensitive or intolerant. And we're looking at big doses sometimes, doses that would spin an NHS GP's head off because they don't understand the progesterone. But women can tolerate mega doses of progesterone. When we're pregnant, we are swimming in progesterone. The fetus is swimming in progesterone for months. Lots of actually ADHD women think they feel incredible. Their traits go when they're pregnant. That's the progesterone.

And even on mega doses, and I'm talking like two and a half thousand, so most women get 200, we're talking two and a half thousand for treating things like bipolar, schizophrenia, that we're even in those levels that doesn't come close to the levels a woman has when she's pregnant. Okay, so we're looking at really, really high levels that the body can tolerate.

Sally (13:59.704)
Wow, I am blown away. So why do people think they are progesterone sensitive then if they're having these symptoms linked to progesterone?

Adele (14:06.868)
Yeah, because they've been given, in most cases, because they've been given low doses. Okay, so it's something called this estrogen kickback. We don't know enough about it, because as we know, pharmaceutical companies fund most of the research, and they don't want to fund research into progesterone, because they'll lose a gazillion pounds on synthetic hormones and SSRIs for women, right? So we don't have that information. But what we think our hypothesis is this estrogen kickback.

It's sensitizing whatever is on your estuarine receptors, which could be Xenoestrogens, so chemicals that are attached on there. It could be your liver has a genetic preference or lifestyle is causing it to metabolize your estrogens in a certain way, which creates estrogen gremlins. They attach onto your receptors. That progesterone comes in in a low dose, flares it up, and you're gonna feel horrific.

You know, so we wanna really be saying, and the answer in that situation is usually a higher dose. You know, different modes of transport. Some women who take it orally, on the NHS we're very limited, it's oral or vaginal. When we take it orally, in the upper GI tract, it gets broken down very quickly into a metabolite called allopregnenolone. And for some women that's just too much, you know? So actually what we might look at is a cream.

which goes in in its whole form, it's in every cell of your body within 20 seconds and you get the effect of the progesterone before it then gets broken down. So mode of delivery and dose are paramount for women who think they're progesterone intolerant.

Sally (15:36.052)
I see. for someone who thinks they are progesterone intolerant, a cream might be better because it's not being broken down into that allopregnanolone, which somebody might be quite sensitive to, especially if they've had childhood trauma and their GABA receptors are not quite, yeah.

Adele (15:44.296)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adele (15:50.025)
So, let me.

Exactly, exactly, the GABA. So for me, I know that with childhood trauma, very sensitive nervous system, mean ADHD people are on, right? We walk in a room, we know who likes us, doesn't like us, what the energy is. We know, we can't help that. That's our nervous system, but it's on all the time. And when we have to remember that perimenopause is an adrenal issue, okay, the symptoms there are adrenal. They're not ovarian. Our ovaries are doing what they're meant to do. The issue is with a generation of women that have

crash land into perimenopause without our adrenal support to pick up the slack of yeast and progesterone. So therefore we're just left. The adrenals are barely staying on top of their stress hormone production, let alone picking this up. So we're left swimming in this sea of symptoms going, what am meant to do with this? And when we start replenishing and optimizing these pathways, then we can get some kind of regulation with it. But progesterone for me is fundamental and.

We is very normal in America. It's very normal in other countries, some of the other countries to do progesterone only. We are obsessed with putting estrogen in women's bodies and it's really harmful. I'm not saying we shouldn't have it, but actually it's a one that needs to be very carefully monitored. This method of like, I'll just up your estrogen. It's harmful, you know, for lots of reasons. Progesterone, we don't see that.

working with a prescriber who truly understands progesterone dosing, and lots will tell you they're experts, they're not, they're really not experts, they're just charging a phenomenal amount of money for things they really don't understand. And this progesterone, getting that in is like the foundation. Women are like, feel like me again, I'm sleeping. I mean, you give a woman a good night's sleep, she can conquer the world, right? Yeah, yeah, but look, know, straight away your body has gone,

Sally (17:37.329)
yeah, hallelujah! Yeah!

Adele (17:42.794)
You know, it's like, thank you.

Sally (17:44.962)
Yeah. Okay, okay. What makes an expert in progesterone? You said that they think that they market themselves as experts in progesterone, but they're not. In your opinion, what makes an expert in progesterone?

Adele (17:58.396)
I would be asking them, what dosing do you do and what vehicles of delivery do you have available to me? They would be the two questions that I would look at. And I would expect them to be familiar with the work of people like Carol Peterson, Dr. Phyllis Bronson, Dr. Katerina Dalton, even Dr. Ray Peay. I would be expecting them to have knowledge and awareness of their work. And if they didn't, I wouldn't work with

Sally (18:22.894)
Okay, okay and can you get these progesterone creams off the shelf or did they have to go through, do you have to go through a doctor like yourself?

Adele (18:27.155)
Yeah.

Yeah, so you can get over the counter the creams, but they vary significantly in their dosage. So Onas is brilliant. It's at a 20 % and 200, but it goes out of stock like it's in and it's out because it's so, everyone knows how precious this cream is. So you can get lots of them over the counter, but they're very low dose, some of them. So you might find, for example, that to get one oral Uttragestin tablet, which is the most common one through the NHS,

you might need 25 pumps of that cream. Well, that just becomes completely unaffordable for people. So you can, but the Onus cream is 200. So that's the equivalent of two of those each gestan. So it is very much, it depends which one you get.

Sally (19:17.122)
Yeah, okay, okay, great. Thank you. I mean, this is all like such amazing information and I can see why you have this righteous indignation. I think it's really powerful actually to get this out there. Why do so many women get diagnosed? Let's go back to ADHD. Why do so many women get, say again?

Adele (19:23.593)
Good.

Adele (19:38.528)
progesterone detour. We just did a progesterone detour. That tends to happen with me.

Sally (19:43.982)
Well it's all linked isn't it, let's face it. So why do think that so many women get diagnosed with ADHD in later life?

Adele (19:54.772)
because of everything we've been speaking about, Sally, I feel very strongly that as that progesterone drops off, and we're talking from 35 years onwards, okay, you you're probably not gonna really start noticing it till your late 30s, early 40s, but the strategies that we used to have just don't work anymore, and hormonally what is happening there is progesterone is going, but it doesn't happen overnight. I talk about hormonal deficiencies being a bit like a slow erosion of your soul.

because you don't wake up one morning and they've gone, right? If you were in your 43 year old body, but you were 22, you could put yourself back, you'd probably think you were dying. If you woke up one morning like, oh my God, what is this? Am I going crazy? What's happening? But we just adapt. We're like rivers. We meet a hard thing and we adapt around it. We find a way to push through. We find a way to power through. We're always looking for solutions of which magic supplement is gonna save us or which diet or whichever it is.

And so we hit this phase that progesterone is not there to stabilize the mind and the mood and the traits and the nervous system. So everything builds up, builds up, builds up and the trait, the lid on the traits just comes off.

Sally (21:04.384)
Okay, what are the traits? What are ADHD traits?

Adele (21:08.842)
So there's a saying that if you've met one person with ADHD, you've met one person with ADHD. It's very different. And I think, you know, in the last couple of years, I've seen this real shift in understanding that this typical naughty little boy bouncing off the walls in the classroom, that's not where we are, you know, but there was a massive gender bias in the research around this because everything's based on these boys, really. The assessment, diagnosis, treatment, medication is based on a male physiology and women just kind of get...

treated as small men, so quite often the medications don't work in the same way because of the hormonal fluctuations, but it's not been researched properly. So we're a bit like guinea pigs when it comes to that. But in terms of our traits, it's to do with something called executive function. And lots of people go, well, you know, we're all ADHD, we've all got a bit of that. And that is the most dismissing, invalidating thing you can ever say to someone with ADHD. It's so harmful to say that, because that person will never trust you to talk about their challenges again, if they say that.

But yes, we can relate to things, but the example I give is that we have a collection of traits which might be inability to do the things we need to do, to get the motivation to do it. And it's not because we can't focus, it's because we're bored, that thing bores us, okay? Because when we're interested in something, we are in, like me and Progesterone.

You know, hyper-focus, I know everything, I need everything. No stone is left unturned around it. So it's not that we can't focus, it's that we choose not to focus on all the things that don't interest us. But that could be really hard as a woman when you've got to do the washing, you've got to do the cooking, you've got to do all these really boring things, right? We can't do it. But people go, well, I feel like that. Yeah, but you can do it. You know, you don't have a pile of laundry that just taunts you.

And it can look like, so we get messages that we're lazy, we can be sat on the sofa and inside you're like, gotta do the washing, gotta do the washing, gotta do the washing, gotta do the washing. And it's taunting you, but it looks like you're just sat on the sofa. It's when it starts to have this impact on your life, forgetting things. I have to set alarms to remember to pick my own children up. That's not normal to have to do that. I have to go through a whole process when I leave the house to make sure that I've done everything I need to do and I've not left everything. It's a lot to be us.

Adele (23:25.172)
So it's when these things start to have an impact on your quality of life and how you show up with things. If I didn't have a PA in my business doing all the stuff I don't want to do, like the admin, I couldn't run a clinic like I do. Because I just want to help women, but I can't deal with all the admin processing. I'm not interested. So therefore it just goes out of my brain. So it will look different to different women, but it's when these issues with the executive function.

go offline and it's thought to be a link with neurotransmitters like the dopamine and the serotonin.

Sally (23:57.738)
Okay, it's thought to be, but you think it's more linked to progesterone?

Adele (24:02.246)
I think, well, I think there's so little we know about ADHD. know, there is a strong link between the dopamine, you know, is it that we don't have enough? Is it that we methylate it and get rid of it too quickly down detox pathways? The brain's always looking for the next thing to get that hit from. But what are the other things coming into play? You know, I think there's a lot more information coming out now, like around complex PTSD, which almost mirrors ADHD in terms of lived experience and traits.

You know, how many practitioners that are assessing and diagnosing are really competent in complex PTSD as well, because they tend to be in either specializing that or neurodiversity. So there's a lot, there's so much we don't know. And I am so passionate about nervous system that actually do, these things do matter, these labels in our society because of how it's structured. But for me, the women's lived experience,

Sally (24:46.349)
Yeah.

Adele (24:59.39)
and getting her regulated and balanced through lifestyle, through things like blood sugar regulation, because we're much more prone to type 2 diabetes, through nervous system practices that work for our kind of brains. It doesn't really matter what else is going on. Let's get that right. And what I see clinically is most of the time when we get progesterone properly dosed, nervous system regulation, these foundational practices around lifestyle, women feel a lot better.

Right? And that's what I see time and again, you know, but you're not going to see that in the research papers.

Sally (25:32.756)
Okay, okay, yeah that makes sense. So is there, in your opinion, is ADHD genetic or is it exacerbated by complex trauma or does complex trauma create that scattering that Dr. Gabor Mate talks about or is it both? Yeah.

Adele (25:50.08)
Who knows? Who knows? You know, I think there's definitely a genetic link because genetics are linked to everything, right? I'm yet to meet an ADHD woman who doesn't have trauma. You know, I think just being an undiagnosed little girl with rejection sensitivity dysphoria running alongside it where we're terrified of getting something wrong. Most people don't like getting something wrong. For us, it is a visceral traumatic experience. I remember being a little girl.

Sally (26:15.64)
Yeah.

Adele (26:17.63)
desperate to just be perfect and get everything right. being told off by a teacher, wasn't even probably told off, was just got nine out of 10 on a spelling test or something. And it was like a bomb of a million pins going off in my body. A visceral pain to getting something wrong. That's trauma, right? So the nervous system is then constantly trying to avoid getting something wrong. So we overwork, we become perfectionists. You know, we receive a lot more messaging about not being under par.

through our childhood experiences by people's nonverbal communication, which we perpetually pick up. We pick up everything. We know the subtext to what someone's really saying. Nothing escapes us. So, you know, there's a lot going on for us. And so to unpick it all, we get lost in it. Women come to see me and they're like, I don't know if it's my trauma. don't know if it's perimenopause. I don't know if it's my neurodiversity. Actually it's fine. It's probably all of those things, but let's just come back to the low hanging through. Increase your...

and start building from there because whatever it is the intention is to get you feeling better.

Sally (27:19.65)
Yeah, and it doesn't really matter how we do that. And it might change over time as well. What that looks like might change over time. I think so much of the neurodiversity and the trauma aspect, you if we're born with certain traits that make us feel different, that being different and trying to integrate into a society that is a certain way, whether that be through school or work or whatever, that in and of itself can be so traumatic that that makes those original symptoms a lot worse.

Adele (27:22.568)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adele (27:44.478)
Yeah.

Absolutely, matters spending your life knowing that you don't fit in, you're not good enough. That is the messaging, you know there's something not right with you and you don't want anyone to see it. So what's expected me in this situation? We mask, not because we're manipulative and we want to pretend with something else, we need to survive. Our nervous system is saying this is what is expected of you in this situation, so sit and smile and nod. It's exhausting.

Sally (27:51.479)
Yeah.

Sally (28:11.084)
Yeah, yeah.

Adele (28:11.424)
Being that, I remember feeling when I was younger, even in meetings in my early 20s, I was working for the police then and sitting there sat in times thinking, I need to get out, I need to get out, I need get out, I need get out, because I was so bored and just sitting there with a smile on my face. It was awful. And that's what children are feeling like sitting in a classroom. You know? So it's, I believe there have always been people with our kind of brains and we played a massive role in the evolution of humanity. Because when we lived in the woods,

Sally (28:29.43)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adele (28:40.384)
There wasn't this sensory overload, but we heard a stick breaking two miles away. We smelt the gone off food. We were out of the box fingers. We were kicked quick to be the hunters and shoot. All of these things. The problem is we're living in an environment that is misaligned to our physiology. And this is where we're seeing the symptoms. So we've become the problem and it's not actually, I believe it's the environment that we're living in. Yeah.

Sally (28:56.579)
Yeah.

Sally (29:02.242)
The environment, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, really, really true. So ADHD itself makes us hypervigilant, but then having to exist in an environment that is wrong makes us even more hypervigilant. So the sympathetic side of the nervous system is so jacked up that we, and we kind of get stuck up there because then that pattern gets wired in over and over again through habits.

And so do you see that a lot of your clients just get stuck with their foot on the accelerator and they find it hard, even feeling perhaps unsafe to relax?

Adele (29:38.208)
100%. I don't think the majority of ADHD women, I can only talk about women because that's all I see in my community, don't know what it feels like to really relax. I think if you put a neurotypical person in our body, they'd probably be thinking they were having a breakdown on a normal day. You know, I think we're so desensitized to the stress that we hold because of all the things we've spoken about. And when we look at this hormonally, the nervous system and the endocrine system communicate with each other all day long.

Sally (29:51.968)
Yeah.

Adele (30:05.864)
Okay, they're inextricably linked. It's why I've trained to be a somatic coach for the female nervous system. Because I can only take women so far when with their hormones, when their nervous system is wired. And again, bringing it back to progesterone and adrenal function, when our nervous system is stressed, this is a very simplistic way, it's much more complex than this. But effectively, we go to progesterone deficient when we're stressed, because that progesterone gets used in cortisol production. Like I say, it's more complex than that. But when we're stressed, we become progesterone deficient.

So traits flow up, we haven't got the progesterone to support. So the nervous system is fundamental to managing how we show up.

Sally (30:46.166)
Yeah, you can't really talk about menopause, ADHD, neurodiversity, sensory sensitivity without talking about the nervous system because they're all interlinked. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Paula Rastrik, don't you? Yeah, she's brilliant. Yeah. She's taught me so much about all of this. So can you explain a little bit about GABA? What GABA is, what GABA does and how it links in with progesterone? Cause this is quite important.

Adele (30:54.592)
You can't. Yeah.

Yeah, I work closely with her. She's great. Yeah. Yeah, she's amazing.

Adele (31:14.278)
Love, yeah, love bit of GABA. So GABA is a neurotransmitter that is responsible for soothing the nervous system, basically, and progesterone sensitizes it, makes it work better. So when we become progesterone deficient, the efficiency and effectiveness as the GABA is diminished, which means we don't get the relaxing and calming benefit. So this is what we have, this is the role the hormones play with ADHD. They make the neurotransmitters work differently.

so that how well they work. So if the hormones are fluctuating, the effectiveness of the neurotransmitters are going to be affected. So progesterone is with GABA and GABA is the mama who comes home and calms everything down. So of course it makes sense when progesterone goes, the GABA doesn't work effectively. Also, if we have trauma, these GABA receptors can not work so well. So we might, for example, one way of supporting that is you might need a higher dose of progesterone.

we're starting to have questions around the impact synthetic progestins, particularly for those of us in our generation who were stuck on the pill in our LATs and that brain was still forming. What impact has that had on the receptors? So many things unknown.

Sally (32:22.946)
Yeah, yeah. What does trauma actually do to the GABA receptors?

Adele (32:31.752)
The simplistic answer is we think it has an impact on them not working quite so effectively. So it kind of doesn't know how to, the hormone attaches itself to the receptor, which is where it sends the message. But when there's been trauma, we know that that connection isn't quite as perfect as we would like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that can have an effect on how we experience the GABA or not.

Sally (32:49.4)
So like the lock and key system doesn't, yeah. Okay, okay, that makes sense.

Sally (32:57.11)
Yeah, okay. There's so much we don't know, isn't there? We're just kind of taking leaps in logic.

Adele (33:00.312)
Sally, why would you bother researching women? You know, we'll just research the men and just hope it applies to women even though we have a totally different endocrinology and nervous system, but they'll be fine. You know, we'll be fine.

Sally (33:12.312)
We'll be fine. We've always coped. always will, which we do. We cope, but now we're sick of coping. We actually would like to feel quite nice. We'd like to thrive.

Adele (33:19.76)
Do you know what? There is this, I say I take women from striving to thriving, right? There is this movement, this international movement of women who are pissed off with being gaslit, traumatized, not having their needs met. The change is not coming from the top. No one's coming to save us. The fire is coming from us who said, I have had enough and the more like wonderful women like you can share information like this on your platform. And women go, that's me. And you feel that rage.

righteously that sacred rage to just be like no, no more, I want this information and the more women that are sharing this and talking about this and experiencing the benefits of all the things we speak about, the quicker the change will come because no one at the top is making this change for us. It's not coming really through the research, it's not coming through the science, it's not coming through the institutions and the medical practices, it's not coming from there. We have to be the ones to bring this change and

quite often I'm asked, you well, what can we do to bring this in? I think we just have to kind of bypass it. The medical systems, like many systems, are crumbling and changing. They're falling apart. We have to just keep our blinkers on and stay in our lane. Keep carving out a new way. You know, creating spaces where women can properly heal, where their bodies are understood, where their experiences are validated. That's where we bring the change. We don't try and fix a system that's implading on itself. We create this new path.

And we do that in community, in collaboration, through connection. And we just let these toxic, outdated, masculine models just crumble as we create the new way. That's what women need.

Sally (34:56.896)
I just want to throw my arms in the air and go hallelujah.

Adele (35:04.682)
True.

Sally (35:06.262)
Yeah, wow, wow. I would come on a march with you. I would get off my ass and come on a march with you, seriously.

Adele (35:11.5)
No. We're doing it. Honestly, I feel like at the moment, we're there leading this hormone rebellion. You know, no more should women be okay with surviving. No, you know, when we take women in clinic and we pull women out of the trenches, they're like, oh, I'm feeling so much better. I okay now. Like, no, don't want you feeling okay. I want you feeling great. You know, okay is not good enough. Just because we're out of the trenches, you deserve to feel good.

Sally (35:24.738)
Yeah.

Sally (35:39.702)
yes yes double hallelujah on that okay so you've mentioned this word a couple of times but i want to get really really clear on what this word is... Methylation

Adele (35:52.404)
Yeah, methylation is the way in which your body processes hormones, okay? It's a biochemical process in which it turns one thing into another. So usually, for example, with estrogens, it's turning it down into metabolites. And the way your body does this is influenced by genetics, so people might be familiar with the MTHFR gene or the COMT gene.

Okay, but it also does the same with neurotransmitters. It has this whole molecule that goes around the body, does that job, but the body then needs to get rid of it. And it can't get rid of it in its whole form, so it methylates it. It turns it into smaller things to help clear it out.

Sally (36:32.878)
Okay.

So it's another word for breaking down, breaking something down, yeah. Transforming into something else. And that's important because we don't want, we don't want oestrogens and progesterones like recirculating.

Adele (36:38.208)
Basically, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Adele (36:51.518)
We don't want the methylation to be disrupted because it can mean it can hang around too long. Especially if we have a preference for turning it into metabolites that are naughty. And we can test this through Dutch tests. This is the only way at the moment to test that. I'm looking at what, if our body has a preference for turning it into more harmful metabolites, we're gonna see things like oxidative stress, inflammation, mood dysregulation, even some cancers.

Sally (36:57.688)
Okay.

Adele (37:18.58)
So this again is one of my issues with the current HRT model for most women is that if you're putting estrogen into a woman's body who has issue with methylation, you're increasing her risk because we see that it's gonna turn those estrogens into the estrogens on steroids basically, and that can cause more harm than good.

Sally (37:36.94)
Yeah, yeah, I have, I've done the Dutch test a couple of times and I've got the, is there something with 16? It's like the middle. What's it called?

Adele (37:45.76)
So you get the 2-OH, the 4-OH, and the 16-OH pathway. And if you've got a preference for 4-OH and 16-OH, you wanna do some work on that. We wanna switch those pathways up.

Sally (37:51.489)
Yes.

Sally (37:56.468)
Yeah, yeah, that's what I've been doing. Actually, I've been I've been taking some dim, which is really good. Cut out blood sugar, cut out cut out sugar and all those kind of nasties and toxic chemicals and things like that. Yeah.

Adele (38:08.34)
Yeah, I would say someone's going to work on that work with a practitioner around it. DIM is one of those ones you don't want to be on very long, you know, and some women can feel worse on it. So, you know, that is that's and again, this is when people hear this term, estrogen dominance, or just get some DIM and clear the eschina out and that can make it worse. You know, so it's working really with you as a unique individual to get these things in. But the good news is once like you're doing Sally, once we know we can deal with it.

Sally (38:18.508)
Yeah.

Sally (38:29.484)
Yeah.

Sally (38:34.422)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I noticed that I had to come off DIM after about a month, actually, and I think it might have been causing some of the itchy skin after a while. Yes, I'm glad you said that. With in terms of histamine intolerance and histamine issues, what if someone says, well, can't I just take an antihistamine? Wouldn't that get rid of it?

Adele (38:42.196)
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Adele (38:56.414)
You can, if that's a path you wanna go down. I will always try and look for a lifestyle functional medicine kind of approach to it or functional, yeah, just a lifestyle approach. The thing is because histamines are really good at drying up all your cells. So that includes cells like your cervical mucus. We don't want to be drying up anything down there. For women, it can have an impact on some hormones like testosterone. It can have an impact on gut. It's not ideal.

to be used in a histamine, but it can be helpful to kind of go, is this playing a role? Do I feel different when I take one? I am much more about getting to the root cause of what this is about. And histamine issues are usually linked to the gut. So it's the fact that we don't have an enzyme usually working optimally called the DAO enzyme. And so the histamine builds up and that's what causes a problem. So I wanna see what's going on in your gut. You can use lovely things like.

you can supplement with the DO enzyme, nettle tea, diet, don't even think about doing a histamine intolerant diet, it's the most depressing, stressful thing in the world, but be like conscious of it, but blood sugar regulation, adrenal function, circadian rhythm, all of these things, you know, it's systemic, it's not about that. yes, anti-histamines are a thing, but just be aware of the balance with them.

Sally (39:59.502)
Hahaha

Sally (40:16.578)
they don't necessarily get to the root cause. So does histamine dry you out?

Adele (40:18.496)
No.

Yeah, it's very good at drying out cells. It stops the stop, you know, but the cells, it's like our digestive tract almost starts in our nose. The cells that lie in the nose are very similar to the cells in the gut in terms of mucus production, right? So if we're stopping the mucus here in the nasal passage, we're doing that in the gut. We're doing that in the cervical mucus. Everywhere that's mucus producing gets dried up. We don't want that.

Sally (40:49.172)
Okay, that's so interesting and I have a personal question. I don't sweat very easily. I think this could be genetic because my dad doesn't sweat very easily either but I am slightly concerned that I'm not getting like the detoxification benefits of sweating. Is there a histamine component to that as well? Because what I find is when I'm in the sauna everyone starts sweating in like five minutes. My husband, my stepdaughter, they just start sweating after five minutes. My hands just swell up.

Everything just swells up.

Adele (41:20.192)
Come on, that's the fun time. I'm just gonna sort of sweat up like an elephant man. Yeah, okay. So, I'm trying to think of what the link might be there. I mean, we know histamine is a signaling molecule. So it's released by the mast cells. I'm trying to think of why there would be a link with not sweating. It could be nervous system dysregulation and just a sluggish detoxification. I mean, if you've got that prone...

Sally (41:25.742)
you

Sally (41:34.83)
Mm-hmm.

Adele (41:49.344)
already in the liver around estrogen elimination and methylation, then it might just be an overall impact on your entire detoxification elimination system. So I would be really, you know, as you're so knowledgeable about looking at that nervous system regulation, gentle detoxing, like things like castor oil packs, dry skin brushing, rebounding, making sure you're getting that mineral replenishment with electrolytes and adrenal cocktails.

Sally (42:01.013)
Yeah.

Adele (42:19.646)
Those are the kind of things that I would look at.

Sally (42:21.55)
Interesting, do you ever prescribe the bitter herbs for liver?

Adele (42:26.88)
So I don't prescribe supplements, but I would say to women, I really think you should have a look at these, X, Y, Z, and I think digestive bitters are great, yeah.

Sally (42:35.084)
Yeah, yeah, okay. So when people come to work with you, we'd love to know what kind of results that you're getting actually, but what's the profile of someone who is coming to work with you? What do you do with them exactly? Like what's the container and how do they feel afterwards? So beginning, middle and end.

Adele (42:54.11)
Yeah, so I only work with women on packages because I want to work with women who want to feel better. My first session is very informative. It's saying putting you at the center, you'll complete a consultation beforehand. It comes through to me. I spend a lot of time analyzing that before we meet. So we maximize our session together. And I say, this is through a whole main lens what I think is going on for you. So we look at that as the foundation and then we get going. There might be testing that comes out of that. I always try and do things.

through the NHS where possible, but I wanna look at what your thyroid's doing, what's happening with your adrenals, what your blood sugar, so you might look at continuous glucose monitors. We look very specifically at what is happening, and I tailor this to each woman, but I don't believe every woman needs testing. A good practitioner should pick up on what's going on from your symptoms in a lot of cases. So I would only go down a testing rate if I think it's necessary, or if a woman wants that data. And then we create a plan.

where we work for either three months, six months of really saying, right, this is what we're going to do. So we'll be looking at diet, we'll be looking at blood sugar regulation, nervous system regulation, adrenal function, circadian rhythm, HRT, if that's something a woman wants. So liver methylation, gut elimination. I want to know what your body is doing to optimize your hormones. We'll look at tracking, we'll look at, you know, perhaps testing the hormones in relation to tracking. I bring in menstrual cycle awareness. It just depends.

what is right for that woman and we create a plan. say, I've got a hormone buffet and we cherry pick the ones that are right for you. And so a woman might be presenting with really heavy bleeds or she might, someone might say, I just want an MOT. I feel all right. I just want to check everything is going on for me and we just optimize it. So the lifestyle that they've had in their 20s and 30s probably isn't going to be aligned to their 40s and 50s. So what needs switching up? What type of movement do you need? What type of nourishment do you need?

Sally (44:24.299)
Okay.

Adele (44:46.612)
So we change those. So it's anything from severe PMDD, considering hysterectomies, heavy bleeds, awful time to, I just want to have a check-in really to see if things are all right and anything in between. So I just work with all women really. Yeah. Yeah.

Sally (44:59.649)
Wow.

Yeah, that's a wide scope, but really necessary, I think, because we don't, we don't, can't get what we need oftentimes from GPs. I can't tell you the amount of times I've been to my GP and just come away thinking, well, that was just a waste of time because I'm none the wiser.

Adele (45:15.38)
I said it, but it is. Your menstrual cycle is your fifth vital sign, right? Every doctor should be asking your first question, what was your last period like? But they don't because one, they're not taught to do it, they don't consider it, and two, they wouldn't know what to do with the information even if you told them. You you can tell me about your last cycle and I'm gonna know, that's what I think is going on for you. I should be, you know, a good practitioner in women's health should be able to very quickly, through you explaining your cycles, get a really good idea of your hormonal profile.

Sally (45:31.299)
Yeah.

Adele (45:45.086)
and that's not happening. You know, we're not being perpetually failed.

Sally (45:48.782)
Yeah, it's so disheartening, really is. And then in terms of those people that you work with, do you ever see any sort of blocks and barriers to some of the changes that you're asking people to make?

Adele (46:03.892)
I think by the time women come to me, they're usually just like, just tell me what to do. I'm so done. I'm overwhelmed with information. I know bits and pieces of this and that and my job is to bring it all together cohesively and put it in a structured way where we go, this is what we're to do first. So I just take all that stress away. You can give it to me. I don't get a lot of resistance. think one of the problems, the challenge, the biggest one is when we talk about progesterone. If someone has had a traumatic time with progesterone and I very much let the woman lead the way with that.

And consistency, particularly for my neurodiverse, consistency is not our friend. And if it's not directly in our line of vision, it doesn't exist. So we've all got the supplement cupboard, which just goes, everything goes in there to just die to its expiry date before we throw it away. It's these kinds of things. So for my neurodiverse, where I'm like, let's just put on the table and bring to the light the challenges we've got here. If you can't take a supplement consistently, don't waste your money on it. It's just ADHD tax.

Sally (46:38.584)
Yeah.

Adele (47:00.864)
So it's, you know, ADHD women have a lot more complexities around food. You know, it's a lot more challenging, we've got a lot more barriers. Food can be really boring. There's too many steps involved in it. We forget to eat because we're hyper-focusing. And then when we eat, we're ready to eat, we want to eat a small child. You know, we're like that ravenous. So there's a lot more complexity to consider for my women, but we talk about them and don't pretend they're not there. And then we don't fail trying to take advice that works for a neurotypical person.

Sally (47:22.254)
Mm.

Adele (47:27.84)
There's no point saying to an ADHD person, right, you need to go and rustle up spirulina smoothies and kale crisps. You're gonna do that for a week before you burn out and just sit and eat cheesy pizza rocking in the kitchen. There's no point. You're like, let's make it, be realistic about how we work and what we need.

Sally (47:38.754)
Yeah.

Sally (47:43.126)
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love how you can be really tailored as well when you're working on a one-to-one with someone. I think that's so very important.

Adele (47:50.144)
Yeah. It's bespoke. There's no like, not, this is the protocol and I can take you through it step by step. No. What do you need? What works for you?

Sally (47:57.676)
Yeah, I love that. Great. Well, look, I think we have covered so much in actually a short space of time. I'm so grateful for you, Adele. think everything that you've said about progesterone and ADHD and the nervous system and childhood trauma as well and GABA, we've covered so much. I think this is going to be a really pivotal episode for a lot of people and I hope they reach out to you and get the help that they need.

Adele (48:20.938)
Good.

Sally (48:24.942)
Where are you most active on social media and do you have any sort of freebies or anything like that?

Adele (48:29.648)
Yeah, so Instagram is where I've hung out, but I don't like Instagram at the moment because it's trying to silence me around progesterone. So I'm having bit of an epiphy against it and setting up over on Substack and I will be on YouTube. But there's loads of resources on my website harmonizu.co.uk. There's tons of stuff on there.

Sally (48:45.578)
Okay, amazing. Thank you so much Adele, it's been brilliant. Take care.

Adele (48:48.692)
Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Sally.