Our modern world has many conveniences, but it also has mountains of stress. We all deal with stress differently. And, stress has a tremendous impact on our hormones. If you suspect that stress is impacting your hormones, or if you’re feeling anxious, tired, irritable, bloated, or tense, you might want to assess the stress in your life.
Let’s take a look at how you can take a proactive approach, establish proper hormonal balance in your life, and have increased energy, better focus, cheerful moods, efficient digestion and elimination, and fewer headaches. You can pursue a happier, healthier, and more resilient life.
Hormones are messengers. They send messages. They “talk” to different parts of your body. Hormones are typically made from proteins, cholesterol, and fats. Your hypothalamus, which is your brain’s control center, receives different signals about imbalances in your body, typically caused by diet, lifestyle, and psychological habits.
Examples of signals that alert your brain are low or high blood sugar, a negative memory, an infection, pain, inflammation, feelings of being pressured, irritability, or sadness among others. Your brain receives signals that you’re stressed in some way: emotionally or physically. In response to these signals, your brain releases hormones that instruct different glands in your body to secrete more hormones that will help to deal with the immediate stressor and bring those imbalances back to homeostasis. When you’re physically or emotionally stressed, a lot of hormonal activity occurs to help you deal with the stressor.
The hormones most closely associated with stress are cortisol and adrenaline. Cortisol is often referred to as the stress hormone, and adrenaline is the fight-or-flight hormone.
Adrenaline
Adrenaline is both a hormone and a neurotransmitter, which means it sends messages via both our endocrine and nervous systems during the fight-or-flight response via the sympathetic nervous system. Adrenaline is responsible for the immediate reactions you feel when confronted with a stressful situation. Adrenaline increases your heart rate and blood pressure, dilates your pupils, quickens your breathing, tenses your muscles, and gives you a surge of energy. The point of adrenaline is to heighten your alertness and responsiveness to effectively deal with the fight-or-flight situation. It can also make you hyper-reactive, anxious, and tense.
Cortisol
There’s a lot to know about cortisol and stress. After being confronted with a stressor, the brain signals the adrenal glands to produce cortisol, and within minutes cortisol begins to act within the body. To understand what cortisol does, it’s helpful to understand what cortisol is. Cortisol is a glucocorticosteroid. Cortisol increases the mobilization of energy sources in response to stress to help us adapt to the stressful circumstance, regardless of what is causing the stress. Cortisol mobilizes energy to fuel the brain and body to respond to stress.
Cortisol is a corticosteroid which means it is involved in the inflammatory response to pain and other stressors. Cortisol is possibly the most powerful anti-inflammatory substance known to man, hence the creation of synthetic corticosteroid medications modeled after the cortisol molecule and used to reduce inflammation.
Small amounts of cortisol are good when faced with a stressor. And brief amounts of adrenaline are good when in a fight-or-flight situation. These stress hormones are potentially life-saving, giving us the energy, mental focus, and anti-inflammatory protection to deal with threats to our life and well-being. These stressful situations are temporary. The stress response was designed to be temporary. Hormones are produced, the body is made temporarily more able to deal with the stress, and then everything goes back to normal. Blood pressure goes back to normal. Heart rate back to normal. Breathing back to normal. Muscle tension back to normal. Mental focus back to normal. Beautiful, precious homeostasis returns.
But for many people, things do not go back to normal. The stress response continues. This may be due to chronic stress in your life that creates inflammation, a poor diet, exposure to toxins, or poor digestion. Remember that stress also comes from perceptions that may activate a stress response. Your perception of your life means a lot. Stress destroys. Negativity deteriorates the brain and body. And it works through cortisol, which is good when needed, but bad when unchecked.
Cortisol will break down whatever it needs to break down to help you survive. This could be your gut lining, muscles, or endocrine system that produces estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. If your body has to compromise your digestive, reproductive (fertility), and immune functions to keep you alive because your brain is sending signals that you’re stressed, it will. It does. Your survival is it purpose.
How do you keep cortisol levels in check? How do you ensure that the brain-to-body messaging system (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal axis) doesn’t dysfunction?
You can start by asking your doctor to test for cortisol and neurotransmitter health. You want to ensure that the HPA axis functions well. This is also important to your serotonin and dopamine levels, which are responsible for well-being and concentration. Serotonin and dopamine will be compromised if your HPA axis is off and if your cortisol levels are high. You’ll likely produce less serotonin in your brain and your gut, so you may feel unhappy or depressed, anxious, harbor negative thoughts, suffer migraines, have PMS, or experience digestive issues. And your dopamine production will decrease, leaving you to feel unmotivated, moody, forgetful, have a hard time experiencing pleasure and struggle with good quality sleep. And with cortisol dysregulation, you may feel sluggish in the morning, hit a wall in the afternoon, feel wired but tired at night, and feel anxious and irritable in general.
This isn’t how your body is designed to function. This is not the “new normal.” It may be common for many people to feel stressed, depressed, and anxious, but it’s not normal. You can feel better. With the right diagnostic tests, your doctor can help pinpoint the problems with your hormones. Then you can work together to look at your whole life, your diet, your exercise, and your thoughts, and develop a plan to get you back on track. If this sounds like you, take the first step on the path to overall wellness.