# Hormone Hierarchy ##### Menstrual Cycle Awareness for Perimenopause --- ![[Pasted image 20261024191502.png]] ![[Pasted image 20261024191507.png]] --- ## TL;DR - Your hormones are intricately connected. Everything is connected. - Changes in cortisol and insulin can affect what happens with oestrogen and progesterone. - Oestrogen and progesterone are the hormones we’re going to look at in more detail here. --- ## Transcript So hormone hierarchy. So your hormones are intricately connected in a delicate system. OK, so like a symphony, they work best when in harmony with one another. Any imbalance, especially of cortisol or insulin, can disrupt the entire system. If we zoom in a little closer, this hormone hierarchy is adapted from a book called Fix Your Period by Nicole Jardim. It’s a brilliant book. I highly recommend it. And she says, again, your hormones are intricately linked. And this is something I’ve been saying for years. Everything is connected. Absolutely everything. OK. And that includes hormones. The foundational tier-one hormones, those at the bottom, directly impact all the others. OK. And again, this could be a course in itself. If there are changes to these, especially cortisol and insulin, they’re going to affect your oestrogen and progesterone. And obviously, oestrogen and progesterone, they’re the main hormones when we work with your menstrual cycle. So if we’re stressed, if our blood sugar is off, things are going to change to your hormones. OK, so you can see where I’m going with this. The stability of tier-three hormones, including the sex hormones, depends on the balance in the tiers below. So again, everything is connected. We could go through all of these in a big, long course, but today we’re going to look at the top two—oestrogen and progesterone—in a little more detail.