How Your Personality Changes With Your Cycle (And What To Do About It)

Since your hormones change several times every cycle, and those fluctuations affect your thinking patterns as well as energy levels and mood (feeling positive and extroverted, or not), it makes sense that our personality traits can get swept up in the mood swings of the moment. And if you’re suffering from nutrient deficiencies, then your mood swings might be even more dominating and extreme, spilling over into your personality tendencies.

Have you ever taken a personality test but weren’t sure if it was really accurate, or maybe you got different results the second time? There might be a good reason for that (we'll get into it!) If you haven’t ever taken a personality quiz, check out the free test here! The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) offers multi-level psychological insight into how your brain most likely works within four domains of behavior: focusing inwards to oneself or outwards to others (introverted versus extroverted); attending to sensory information or interpreting more intuitively; deciding by logic or by situation (rational thinking versus emotional feeling); judging or being open to interpretation. 

Of course, it’s not set in stone for every person because we’re all different and unique, but it offers good guidelines. You can also learn more about your own communication styles as well as those in your social settings, and your profile will have good insight into your strengths and weaknesses. Given that there are roughly 16 different types of personalities and the test might seem to never be the perfect questionnaire for everyone, you might be torn on some questions. However, just try to answer as honestly as possible about how you think and act the majority of the time. 

Your Hormonal Personalities

Now, even though you might be technically introverted or extroverted, emotional or more rational, these traits likely will differ somewhat depending on what cycle phase you’re in. This is due to the rise and decline of hormones such as progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone. Cortisol and oxytocin will also affect your moods. I like to think of a woman’s emotional world as a square instead of a circle, where each side is a phase of her cycle, and the transition from side to side and phase to phase needs the guidance of her own self-awareness as well as nutritional support. 

Although the following projections are generalized, the intersection between the emotional and physiological influences of your hormones and your personality traits offers much food for thought because they do affect each other!