The effect of stress on your hormones!
Today I'm going to teach you all about the effects of stress on our hormones. Womanly ones :)
This helps you understand just how much stress has to be moderated well, which is a real challenge with modern lifestyles, and why coaching skills are so crucial, beyond the functional medicine know-how!
This is the root to healing from PCOS, PMS, Hormonal migraines, mood swings, breast cysts, fibroids.
How our hormones can get whacked with stress.
#1 Stress comes in many forms. Even if you're not mentally or emotionally stressed, inflammation, sound pollution, allergies, the toxin load of our food and air counts as bodily stress. While stress is good, our bodies are chucking out too high levels of cortisol. Being late for work is being interpreted by the body as going in for a confrontational hunt or kill.
#2 So cortisol levels are consistently high, all the time, in the 2020 human being. Cortisol is made from the progesterone metabolite 17-OH progesterone. If you're pushing out lots of cortisol on the daily, you can therefore expect your progesterone to fall.
#3 Progesterone is vital for the immune system, to keep you calm and chill, for optimal fertility, heart and bone health, and a normal period and less PMS.
#4 When your progesterone is low in relation to estrogen, you get all of the consequences of low progesterone (less chill, more PMS, poor immunity, poor heart health, poor bones) AND all the consequences of unopposed estrogen dominance.
#5 Estrogen dominance symptoms include depression, hair loss, bad PMS, belatedness and water retention, swollen and painful breasts, cyclical migraines and headaches and generally feeling "hormonal". Increased risk of endometrial and breast cancers.
#6 Cortisol rises lead to sugar and insulin rises in the body. This leads to insulin resistance, which in turn leads to a high testosterone and a propensity for PCOS (Polycystic ovarian syndrome)
#7 High levels of cortisol and adrenal activity is resource intensive. Your body will tend to downregulate the thyroid function in order to wisely conserve energy. This means you will appear to have a low thyroid function. (an unusually low TSH, via the pituitary pathway) This brings along weight gain, lethargy, fatigue, hair loss to name a few.
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If you're looking to work with me as your coach, your first step is to book a 45-minute initial consult with me.
