Too many people in our modern, hectic world remain stuck in survival mode. But this condition can impact the health of your thyroid. This occurs through an adrenal-thyroid connection. What triggers survival mode? Chronic stress.
Stress comes from life events and environmental toxin exposures, which our world has an excessive abundance of. Let’s take a deeper look at how stress impacts your thyroid gland, which influences metabolism, weight, mood, and hormones. You have a variety of natural support options to minimize or eliminate that influence for greater overall well-being.
The HPA Axis: your internal alert system
Stress or any threat to your well-being causes your brain to jump into high alert, which activates an area of your brain designed to protect you from danger. It rapidly mobilizes the energy you need to escape, evade, or overpower the immediate danger. Essentially, your flight, fight, or freeze mechanism goes into high gear.
Your internal alarm system is activated by two areas of your brain: the amygdala and the hypothalamus. If danger is perceived, a message goes to your Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis (HPA Axis). The HPA Axis works to trigger a release of adrenaline and cortisol, which puts you into the fight, flight, or freeze mode and prepares your body to deal with possible injury, inflammation, infection, hemorrhage, and shock.
It’s a necessary reaction when danger truly confronts us. However, modern life has created so much stress, that our bodies remain in chronic stress activation much of the time. These life events can include:
- A stressful home situation or relationship
- Financial stress
- Illness in yourself or a family member
- 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
- A periodically or chronically stressful work environment/boss/co-workers
- Episodes of low blood sugar because you’ve been too busy to eat much more than a cup of coffee and a muffin, or you’ve skipped meals all together
- 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
Depending on how you cope with these stressors, your HPA axis may be activated far too much. The stress response can be even greater if you experienced severe trauma at some point in your life such as a relationship trauma as a child or adult, vulnerability due to severe financial stress, any other stressful past trauma, or perceived potential disaster because then your perception of each incident as a possible threatening trigger is even higher.
When chronically activated, the HPA axis puts you in a chronic survival mode, and this can have a negative impact on your 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 link
Your thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland at the front of your neck. It performs hundreds of essential functions related to growth, metabolism, hormonal control, and utilizing and conserving energy depending on what your body needs moment to moment.
When you experience continual stress, your adrenal system tells your body to conserve, rather than expend too much energy. It does this for two reasons: immediately, it’s diverting energy away from essential activities like digestion and sex drive, toward handling the danger your brain perceives. Famine is an emergency that the HPA Axis recognizes, thus it shifts us from energy expending activities like metabolism, reproduction, and sex drive to energy-saving functions like slower metabolism and weight gain. Cortisol significantly curbs the thyroid function in order to protect you.
However, a slow thyroid can cause serious long-term health problems.
Untreated Hashimoto’s disease and hypothyroidism can cause:
- Fatigue and exhaustion
- Weight gain, and with it increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease
- Increased risk of cardiac arrhythmias and congestive heart failure due to the regulatory control of the thyroid on heart rate and rhythm.
- 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.
- 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.
Impaired thyroid function can also have a devastating impact on fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood, and is often an undetected source of anguish, loss, and struggle. Women with hypothyroidism:
- May cause 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.
Additional health problems associated with a dysfunctional thyroid
The thyroid impacts bone health and strength. Women with Hashimoto’s are also at risk of developing additional autoimmune conditions – autoimmune disease is a whole-body process, and frequently more than one system is attacked. Hair loss can occur with Hashimoto’s as well.
The impact of hypothyroidism on an individual is often dramatic and sometimes devastating, with poor concentration and fatigue impacting career, financial success, and personal relationships.
Because the most common symptoms of hypothyroidism – weight gain, depression, anxiety, brain fog, sleep problems, and fatigue – overlap with symptoms of stress, doctors sometimes miss the correct issue. This is unfortunate because detection and treatment are straightforward.
How stress impacts your thyroid
Stress can have direct and indirect effects on your thyroid function. Here are some of the major ways this happens:
Reduced thyroid function
When you experience stress, immune system chemicals called inflammatory cytokines (which have names like IL-1 beta, IL-6, and TNF-alpha) 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 thyroid hormone sensitivity
Chronic inflammation also makes the thyroid hormone receptors on your cells less sensitive to the active form of thyroid hormone, such that thyroid hormone can’t do its job. This is called thyroid hormone resistance.
Reduced active thyroid hormone production
While your thyroid produces thyroid hormones, it mostly produces an inactive form called T4. This has to be converted to a form called T3, which does the productive work of thyroid functions in your body. This conversion happens primarily in your liver. However, when you’re under stress, or when you are sick, your body’s conversion of T4 to T3 is decreased. Your body accumulates the inactive form by binding and holding in a form called reverse T3, making it unusable by your body until the stress is alleviated.
The stress-immunity link
Chronic stress has a major impact on your immunity increasing your risk of developing chronic inflammation and autoimmunity. It’s also a vicious cycle, because the more our body perceives stress due to inflammation, the more the stress response system gets triggered. Your body releases more cortisol which causes more weight gain, breaks down muscle for energy, and stores extra fuel as harmful forms of cholesterol.
The stress-estrogen link
Cortisol reduces our ability to clear estrogen from our system through our liver. Increased estrogen increases the production of a carrier protein called thyroid-binding globulin (TBG) which binds to thyroid hormone. Bound forms of thyroid hormone are not very active – so your thyroid function decreases even when your thyroid is working properly. The active free form is unable to get to your cells to perform its work.
The stress-gut link
Chronic stress diverts energy from essential functions like digestion. This can impact thyroid function and the ability of the thyroid to heal. Stress affects the gut in two main ways that can directly impact thyroid health. One is by harming the microbiome, and the other is by causing leaky gut.
When you are under stress, blood flow is diverted from the lining of your gut. Stress can alter the chemical environment of your gut microbiome leading to the overgrowth of harmful species at the expense of the beneficial species. Both of these situations can lead to a leaky gut, which makes you vulnerable to food triggers and endotoxemia. This results in inflammation throughout your body which can be enough to ultimately lead to autoimmune conditions.
Cutting out food triggers as part of reducing the stress your body is under is an important part of healing the adrenal-thyroid connection. An elimination diet and 4R program can help you to identify food triggers, heal your gut lining, and improve your gut flora.
Healing the adrenal-thyroid relationship
You can take proactive, natural support steps to help heal a dysfunctional adrenal-thyroid relationship.
Become familiar with your signs of stress response. Once you learn to recognize them, you can learn to respond quickly with a relaxation response, rather than react with a prolonged stress response.
Identify those areas of your life that need attention to alleviate excessive stress and lead you into a life that you love living. This might mean saying no to some things you’ve taken on, rethinking how you approach your work: life ratio, taking more time for self-care so you can have the resilience to cope with what’s on your plate, rethinking your finances and letting go of things you want rather than need. Avoid toxic people and surround yourself with those who love you.
Keep your blood sugar balanced. The blood sugar crash is common – and it takes a major toll on the adrenal stress system. Your brain is dependent on a steady supply of sugar to keep it functioning well. Low blood sugar is a brain emergency. Feed your brain with protein, good quality fats, and carbs from whole grains and veggies. Eat protein at breakfast, don’t skip meals, graze on high-protein snacks if your blood sugar tends to tank, and keep a healthy emergency food stash within reach.
Heal your gut. Our gut health has a tremendous impact on thyroid function and health. Healing leaky gut and/or microbiome imbalance can reduce thyroid inflammation, antibodies, and improve your energy, mood, sleep, weight, and reduce sugar cravings.
Use adaptogens to support your adrenal stress response and cool down your immune-inflammatory reactions. Adaptogens are a category of herbal medicines that have been used in Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicines for centuries. The term adaptogen refers to the unique ability of these herbs to help you adapt to the stress in your life. They do this by “normalizing” or “regulating” the adrenal stress response. Adaptogens help provide a sustained sense of calm and increase energy. 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 exposures.
Final thoughts
Take care of your stress system to help alleviate inflammatory responses and enable your thyroid to more effectively produce thyroid hormones. This can help your cells convert and use thyroid hormones. The results can be more energy, better rest, weight loss, and no more cravings. Your overall well-being will be much better.