Survival mode can have a profound effect on your thyroid health through the adrenal-thyroid connection. What triggers survival mode? Chronic stress.
The impact of stress on our overall well-being cannot be overstated. We have tremendous stress all around us with the pandemic measures, economy, politics, our children’s schools, and public safety, just to name a few. Then you have personal stress in your home life as well. Add to this the environmental stressors that we face daily such as toxin exposure, and the stress can cause physical symptoms.
Stress has many effects on us. It also has a tremendous impact on our metabolism, weight, mood, and hormones by impacting our thyroid. Stress may be chronic, but you can take steps to address the damage and reverse it if it’s affecting you.
The HPA Axis: your body’s alarm system
Stress sends your brain into high alert, which activates the areas of your brain designed to protect you from threats and dangers. We may not face the same dangers as our distant ancestors, but the brain can still function as if we are facing a saber tooth tiger or wooly mammoth. Our brain mobilizes the systems that give us the energy to evade, escape, or overcome an immediate danger. In some extreme instances, it can give us superhuman strength, such as you hear about in rescue stores where someone lifts a car off of another person. It makes your heart race, makes you want to flee a threat, or make you suspicious of a stranger.
This key warning system is called the amygdala. If it perceives danger, it sends a message to the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA Axis). The hypothalamus sends a chemical alert of a threat to the pituitary gland, which then relays the message to the adrenal glands to produce adrenaline and cortisol. This creates the fight, flight, or freeze reaction, and it prepares your system to deal with possible injury, infection, inflammation, shock, or hemorrhage.
It’s a very effective system that keeps us safe. It’s our survival mode. Unfortunately, it sometimes recognizes modern-day stress as a physical threat and keeps us in a state of chronic stress activation. Any of the following can put our system into survival mode
- A stressful home situation or relationship
- Financial stress
- A periodically or chronically stressful work environment/boss/co-workers
- Illness in yourself or a family member
- Getting stuck in traffic on your way to a meeting or to pick your kids up at school
- Running late and getting stressed out about it
- Having to get your taxes in and your bills paid
- Episodes of low blood sugar because you’ve skipped meals altogether
- Poor sleep making you feel irritable, crave sugar and feel at the end of your rope
- Being overwhelmed by things to do, and feeling like you’re never going to get them done
These stressors activate the HPA axis, which can be even more vulnerable if you have had past trauma. When that happens, your perception of each incident as a threatening trigger is elevated.
When chronically activated, the HPA axis puts us in a state of ongoing survival mode, and this can have a huge impact on numerous aspects of our health, leading to:
- Poor immunity, getting sick a lot
- Chronic exhaustion, overwhelm, poor emotional, mental, or physical resilience
- Irritability, anxiety, feeling tired and wired, depression, hopelessness
- Overweight, especially around the middle, and difficult or near impossible weight loss
- Difficulty falling asleep, poor sleep, or waking up tired even after a full night of sleep
- Sugar, caffeine, and other food cravings
- Episodes of low blood sugar
- Insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure, high cholesterol
- Poor mental function, concentration, or memory problems
- Hormonal problems from irregular periods to fibroids to infertility to PCOS to hypothyroid
The adrenal-thyroid connection
The thyroid performs many essential functions related to growth, hormonal control, metabolism, and utilizing energy. When you experience chronic stress, the adrenal system tells your body to conserve rather than burn excess energy. This happens for several reasons. It diverts energy away from positive activities like digestion and sex drive toward survival activities. Famine is the most illustrative emergency event that our HPA Axis responds to by shifting energy-expending activities to energy-saving activities like slowing metabolism and weight gain. The cortisol that is released dampens thyroid function to enable these responses.
However, a poorly performing thyroid makes you feel exhausted, sluggish, and depressed. It can have a significant impact on your overall well-being and long-term health.
Untreated Hashimoto’s and hypothyroidism can cause:
Decreased cognitive function – the thyroid is responsible for helping us maintain brain health, and even slight thyroid dysfunction can impair memory and concentration. Studies of women in their 60s have shown that even marginally slow thyroid function can cause dementia-like symptoms and that treatment can dramatically improve cognitive function and have a brain-protective effect.
- Increased risk of cardiac arrhythmias and congestive heart failure due to the regulatory control of the thyroid on heart rate and rhythm.
- Fatigue and exhaustion
- Weight gain, and an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease
- High cholesterol due to the role of the thyroid in fat metabolism
- Depression – as many as 15% of women on antidepressants have an undetected thyroid problem as the cause of their depression – but their thyroid problem hasn’t been diagnosed so they are being misdiagnosed and mistreated. That’s one reason that antidepressants don’t help a subset of women.
- Anxiety also often accompanies thyroid problems.
Impaired thyroid function can also have a devastating impact on fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood. Women with hypothyroidism:
- May have with fertility problems
- Have an increased risk of miscarriage and preterm birth
- Have a much higher risk of developing prenatal and postpartum depression, making what would otherwise be a beautiful time in their lives potentially traumatic.
Severe hypothyroidism in pregnancy has now been shown to not only increase the risk of developmental problems in the baby but also increase the risk of autism.
In addition, the thyroid affects your bone health and strength. It can cause hormonal imbalances. Women with Hashimoto’s are also at risk of developing additional autoimmune conditions. Hypothyroidism causes fatigue and poor concentration, which impacts career, financial success, and personal relationships.
For women with hypothyroidism, its symptoms of weight gain, depression, anxiety, brain fog, fatigue, and sleep problems are frequently seen as “just stress.” This should happen less often in modern society since this is a condition that is easy to detect and treat.
Many factors can cause hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s disease. Let’s take a look at one issue: stress.
How stress affects your thyroid
Stress can have direct and indirect effects on your thyroid function including:
Reduced thyroid function
When you are under stress, immune system chemicals called inflammatory cytokines are released. These decrease the production of the key thyroid-related hormones TSH, T3, and T4, making the thyroid less sensitive to TSH which stimulates the production of thyroid hormone production.
Reduced active thyroid hormone production
Your thyroid primarily produces an inactive hormone called T4, which is converted to T3. This conversion takes place in the liver. Chronic stress or illness can decrease this conversion. Your body stores the T4 by binding and holding it in a form called reverse T3 (rT3), making it unusable until the stress passes.
Reduced thyroid hormone sensitivity
Chronic inflammation also makes the thyroid hormone receptors on your cells less sensitive to the active form of thyroid hormone, which prevents the thyroid hormone from working. This is called thyroid hormone resistance.
The stress-immunity impact
Chronic stress increases your risk of developing chronic inflammation and autoimmunity. It creates a cycle that can be difficult to break. The more our body perceives stress due to inflammation, the more the stress response system gets triggered. In response, our body produces more cortisol, which in turn causes us to gain more weight, break down muscle for fuel, and store extra fuel as harmful forms of cholesterol.
The stress-gut impact
Chronic stress diverts energy from key functions, and it can limit your thyroid function and ability to heal. Stress also impacts your gut microbiome by harming it and causing leaky gut. When you experience stress, the blood flow is redirected away from the lining of the gut. The chemical environment can lead to an imbalance of the flora in favor of harmful microbes. These changes can cause leaky gut, which increases the susceptibility to harmful triggers from foods, gluten, dairy, and others. You could experience a condition called endotoxemia, which can lead to inflammation that is significant enough to result in autoimmune conditions.
Eliminating food triggers is essential to reducing stress on your body and healing the adrenal-thyroid connection. An elimination diet and 4R regime can help pinpoint food triggers, improve your microbiome, and heal your gut lining.
The stress-estrogen impact
Cortisol reduces our body’s ability to clear estrogen through the liver. Higher estrogen levels increase the production of thyroid-binding globulin (TBG). Bound thyroid hormone is not very active, so thyroid function goes down even if production remains normal. The active free form doesn’t get to your cells where it’s needed.
Healing the adrenal-thyroid connection
You can help break the destructive cycles of the stress-adrenal-thyroid connection. Follow these steps.
- Be mindful of your stress response and survival mode. Recognizing the signs gives you the ability to respond quickly with relaxation techniques instead of a chronic stress response.
- Work on the areas in your life that are causing you stress. You may need to say no to additional responsibilities. Or, you may need to adjust your work/life balance. Investing in self-care will help you increase your resilience to cope with life. Simplify your life. Reach out to friends. Stay connected to counterbalance your stress system.
- Develop a regular routine to help you decompress from stress. Find methods to center yourself. When faced with stress, take a quick break. Breathe naturally at first, then after a few breaths, inhale for 4 counts. Then exhale for 4 counts. Repeat this at least 4 times.
- Keep your blood sugar balanced. Low blood sugar takes a toll on your brain. Eat regularly. Eat a healthy diet with protein, good quality fats, carbs from whole grains, and plenty of vegetables. Don’t skip meals.
- Heal your gut. Our gut health has a tremendous impact on our thyroid function and health. Healing leaky gut and/or microbiome disturbance can be a game-changer in reducing thyroid inflammation, antibodies, and also improving your energy, mood, sleep, weight, and getting rid of sugar cravings. F
- Use adaptogens to support your adrenal stress response and cool down your immune-inflammatory reactions. In addition to their effects on stress adaptation, adaptogens have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects that protect your cells from damage from a variety of chemical exposure. Adaptogens are non-toxic, safe, and gentle, even with long-term use. Some of the most common are Holy Basil, Ashwagandha, Rhodiola, American Ginseng, and Reishi.
Final thoughts
Self-care and being mindful of your stress response will help quiet your inflammatory responses. This will allow your thyroid to more effectively produce thyroid hormones and revert Hashimoto’s antibodies and allow your cells to convert and use those thyroid hormones. By doing so, you will have more energy, experience better sleep, manage your weight better, and handle stress more easily.