PCOS & Student Life

For most of us, PCOS is a lifelong chronic condition and symptoms can persist even after menopause. But even if we have PCOS for the duration of our lives, it’s important to understand that this condition does not necessarily impact us in the same ways throughout the years.

Just as life is not static, PCOS symptoms and triggers can morph over time. More importantly, our goals transform every time, and this has a large impact on how you may go about managing your symptoms.

You are reading this because you have indicated that you are in a student phase of your life. Whether that means you’re 18+ and finishing up high school, taking classes at a community college or 4-year university, or embarking on a different path of skill development to achieve your future goals, this article is good for you if you are still in school and starting to think about transitioning to full-blown adulthood (eep!).

We’ll be focusing on questions like:

• How can I be most productive with my studies while having PCOS?
• How can I balance the lifestyle modification that comes along with managing a chronic condition with building friendships and maintaining a social life?
• What are tips for opening up to friends and family about having PCOS?

PCOS and productivity

Students are focused on learning. We want our brains to be in tip-top shape to effectively absorb the information our teachers and professors are sharing with us, and we need clarity of thought for writing papers and studying for tests.

But what if our PCOS is having an impact on this? There are several common symptoms of PCOS that may take a toll on your productivity levels, for example:

• Brain fog
• Fatigue
• Anxiety and depression
• Insomnia

If you can’t think clearly or are too anxious or tired to find the motivation to actively participate in your education, it’s natural to feel frustrated. This is one of the main goals of this phase of life: to learn!

Have you ever felt like any of the above symptoms were impeding your education experience? If so, know you’re not alone: it can be helpful to even just recognize that your PCOS may be catalyzing these psychological issues. This awareness can be a helpful tool in and of itself.  

While reducing PCOS symptoms requires patience, in time you can manage the psychological symptoms that may be taking a hit on the quality of your listening skills and performance in school. If productivity is an issue for you, make sure to discuss this with your care team. There are a variety of lifestyle modifications your coach can help you with to tackle symptoms that are impeding your productivity. While Pollie does not currently prescribe pharmaceuticals, your care team can also help point you in the right direction if you are experiencing severe psychological symptoms that you think would benefit from medication.

Managing your PCOS vs. participating in the social scene

Learning is certainly one main factor of being a student. For many of us, an element of equal importance - if not higher importance than education itself! - is the social growth you embark on during this phase of life.

If building relationships is a core goal of yours as a student, you may start to feel conflicted between giving your all to managing your PCOS and wanting to fully participate in your social life. For example:

• You know getting 8 hours of sleep per night is important for everyone, but especially people with PCOS. Regulating our circadian rhythm can help with re-balancing hormones, and wonky sleep schedules lend themselves to more hormonal disruption. But your group of friends likes staying up until 3am on the weekends, and you feel like you miss out on half the fun when you stick to your 10pm bedtime.
• Dairy aggravates your PCOS acne, and you recently learned that you are insulin-resistant and should stay away from starchy carbohydrates. This makes you a high maintenance participant at group dinners, and you find yourself saying “no” to group dining activities that involve pizza, pasta, and the like.
• Excessive alcohol consumption can aggravate PCOS symptoms, but your broader friend group is pretty much always drinking beer at parties. You feel like you really miss out by not drinking, and while you still have fun sober, there is a part of you that wants to be on the same “level” as your friends.  

Symptom management is of course important, but so is quality of life. Taking control of your PCOS in a sustainable way means finding treatment strategies that truly work for you now. While in a perfect world, our friends would magically change their behaviors and interests to suit our lifestyle needs, this is not realistic.

In this sense, reframing how you are thinking about your PCOS as a student is important. For example:

• Perhaps you do not like the idea of medicating your symptoms away forever, but right now, being on hormonal birth control and Metformin keeps your symptoms at bay and allows you to experience your desired social life with no compromises. Your goal may be to find a medication plan that works for you today, with the plan to try a more holistic route once you have graduated.
• If committing to lifestyle changes is vital for you, remember that you do not necessarily need to be as stringent with your diet, exercise, and other behavior change techniques forever. Maybe you can take a 3 to 6 month period of focusing more intensively on getting your symptoms under control, and then you can start re-incorporating social drinking and periodic late nights while monitoring your own unique threshold for symptom flares.

There is no denying it: it is difficult to manage PCOS with lifestyle modifications and simultaneously lean into a stereotypical social life as a student. But, it is possible with patience and experimentation.

*An important reminder: Just because you have PCOS does not mean you are protected from pregnancy. Even if you ovulate irregularly or infrequently, pregnancy is still possible and when it comes to sex it is best to use protection if you are not trying to conceive.

Opening up to friends and family about PCOS

As you age, we guarantee you that you will hear of friends, family members, and colleagues who also have PCOS. With a condition that impacts 10% of the female population, this is an inevitability!

But if you already have a PCOS diagnosis and are still in school, there is a chance you are the only person you know that has this condition. That can feel incredibly isolating and uncomfortable.

While it is up to everyone to share what they are comfortable with, many do find comfort and relief in talking about their diagnosis and bothersome symptoms with their friends and family. Try opening up to just a single person and see how you feel; our guess is it will be as though a massive weight was lifted from your shoulders.

If you are not yet ready to open up to “real life” people about your PCOS, we recommend you share your experience with your Pollie support group. Opening up to people that you already know are struggling with the same condition can be a great first step to finding community support.

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