Build Lower-Body Strength and Find Your Balance With These 6 Yoga Poses

Let these poses give you roots to help you find your wings.For as long as I can remember, the days before my period have felt like an emotional rollercoaster. I had what I called “PMS on steroids,” but turns out, I actually have PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

PMDD is a mental health condition that affects about 10 percent of all menstruating people, per the Cleveland Clinic. It’s a severe form of PMS characterized by shifts in mood, anxiety, energy, and pain levels in the 10 to 14 days leading up to your period. Doctors aren’t exactly sure why it happens, but it likely has to do with the steep drop in the hormone progesterone in the days before menstruation, affecting your “feel-good” neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates sleep, mood, and pain, per the National Institutes of Health.

The typical treatments for PMDD include therapy, antidepressants, and lifestyle changes like reducing stress, getting better sleep, and eating a balanced diet with healthy protein and fats, all of which I’ve implemented. While these methods do work to keep my PMDD in check, I still sometimes need something more to take the edge off each month (especially if I’m under lots of stress).

This is where natural healing modalities come into play. Enter: SOAAK, a sound healing app that just launched its new frequency composition called “PMS Support,” to help people manage the symptoms of PMS and PMDD. I’d never tried a natural method for my PMDD, but when given the chance to try the app free for 30 days, I jumped at the chance.

Here’s my review of the SOAAK app’s “PMS Support” frequency, the app itself, and whether sound healing worked to relieve my most annoying (and sometimes debilitating) PMDD symptoms.

First, what is SOAAK?

SOAAK technologies is a health tech company in affiliation RenuYou—an in-person natural clinic in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The company started about nine years ago when co-founder Henry Penix and company president Laura Widney combined their knowledge of technology and naturopathic healing. When the duo’s in-person clients began asking how to reap the benefits of sound healing therapy in the comfort of their homes, the pair began working with scientists, doctors, and app engineers to create the SOAAK app.

While the concept of a sound healing app is fairly new, sound healing therapy itself has existed for generations as a staple of Traditional Eastern medicine. You’ll often find tuning forks, Tibetan singing bowls, or gongs used in sound bath treatments, to help people relax and reduce a multitude of physical and mental health symptoms, according to December 2020 review in Integrative Medicine (Encinitas). Even spa-like music during a massage, or the sounds of nature, can be considered sound therapy.

The SOAAK app has 30 different sound frequency compositions to choose from based on your needs. The most popular include:

• “Sleep well” (for insomnia)
• “Anti-anxiety”
• “Mood boost”
• “Focus” (for better concentration during the day)
• “Headache and migraine support”
• And now, “PMS support”

Each 20-minute frequency composition can be downloaded and played at any time, much like a meditation. Each composition has a variety of tones set at different Hertz (Hz)—a measurement of sound. The most commonly used frequency in spiritual healing is 432 Hz, which has also been associated with lowered heart rate and blood pressure, per an August 2019 review in Explore: The Journal of Science & Healing. But there are zero to (basically) a trillion different Hz frequencies that can be combined and customized to meet your need, according to Widney.

You can listen to frequency compositions in their original form, or layered under sounds of nature or music. Other app features include:

• A series of 21-day programs on various mental health and motivational topics from scientists, physicians, life coaches, and more. One example is “Healing Your Inner Child” with psychotherapist Amy Van Slambrook.
• A health biometrics section—where you can connect your wearable device (like an Apple Watch) to keep track of things like heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep cycle, and more.
• A virtual health concierge—a chat where you ca