The Stress Cascade & Symptoms

So in the last module, you got the foundations of the nervous system and hormones, and I'm gonna tie it together in this module and talk to you about chronic stress and how it impacts the female body, and what are some of the root causes of stress for modern women. So, the impact of chronic stress on the hormonally female body is that it leads to chronic stress hormones flooding our bodies. When we have chronically high cortisol, cortisol is really the hormone that sticks around much longer. Adrenaline comes in, but then it ebbs, and cortisol will stick around longer. And when we have chronic cortisol flooding our system, what will happen over time is that it lowers the threshold in which our body perceives input as a threat. So, it leads to a state of hypervigilance in our system. The more and more we're in the state of hypervigilance, the more a stress hormone is being released, so it's this kind of vicious cycle that happens. Over time, what will happen is that progesterone is sacrificed, because progesterone is made in the same pathway as stress hormones. So, if you think about this from a very logical way, our body is saying, "I need to survive this immediate threat." It will always choose survival over reproduction. So what our body's receiving is the message that there's chronic threat. It will use our finite resources to produce more stress hormone to ensure that we survive that immediate threat. So again, our body will always choose survival over reproduction, and it will pull the production of progesterone, in particular, to create more stress hormones, and that can contribute to hormone imbalance. So if you think about depleted progesterone, what's the role of progesterone? Progesterone is helping to keep estrogen in check, or it's helping to produce more estrogen. So it can lead to estrogen dominance or a depletion of both of those hormones. Cortisol inflames and depletes the body when it's chronically flooding our system, so long-term release of cortisol can be inflaming, but also depleting, because cortisol is the most yang depleting hormone in our system. So, the way that this imbalance will cascade through our system is in the following order. It will first hit our adrenals, so that's where we can start feeling, like, adrenal fatigue would be a common symptom of this imbalance affecting our adrenals. Then it will move to the insulin-producing portion of the pancreas. That's where we may start noticing that belly fat that doesn't go away, or that weight gain that doesn't go away no matter how hard we exercise. Then, it will affect our thyroid. So, what happens a lot of the time is that women can actually be running on overdrives, or thyroid is over-producing, and then over time it just kind of conks out and then it moves into more of a hypo production, underproduction of thyroid hormones. And then our ovaries will be affected, and the last half of that cascade. So some of the early warning symptoms… In Ayurveda, early warning signs are really important, because we see that if we can address early on, we can prevent it from developing to something obviously more serious over time. Some of those early warning symptoms are confused or foggy thinking, little aches and pains, stress, irritability, or depression, poorer short-term memory than usual, heavier or lighter periods than usual, fatigue or lethargy, hot flashes, insomnia, mild headaches, minor digestive complaints like gas, bloating, heartburn, constipation or loose stool, or lack of appetite. Now, people are gonna have these symptoms. It's not like we should never have any symptoms, but it's really a matter of how often, how chronically are we having these symptoms? More progressed symptoms can look like hyper- or hypothyroidism, adrenal or chronic fatigue, weight gain, especially around the middle, PMS symptoms, low libido, fertility issues, menopause symptoms. I'm gonna talk a little more about menopause in a second. Autoimmune disorders, anxiety or depression, fibroids, cysts and endometriosis, breast lumps, breast and inflammation, chronic insomnia, vaginal and/or systemic dryness, osteoporosis, heart disease, cognitive disorders, and insulin resistance. So a lot of these imbalances are things that we've just really normalized in our culture, and I just wanna reiterate that this does not have to be our default. So what happens when we move into menopause? I really wanna emphasize that menopause is not a disease, it's not a woman's health issue, as if it's something that's not supposed to happen to our body. This is a natural transition where our body moves out of the reproductive years, so our sex hormones are naturally reducing. But if we go into menopause, and when that natural reduction happens in our system, and we're already depleted in sex hormones because we've been running on chronic stress, we're gonna feel those symptoms a lot more intensely. It's called the Great Revealer. It really magnifies the state of imbalance in our body. It's going to make us aware of the ways in which we've been using our energy that's no longer in alignment for us. Menopause, from the perspective of Eastern medicine, is actually a rite of passage into our next evolutionary phase and empowerment. It is a phase of using our wisdom from a place of leadership, and it's not a sickness, it's not a disease. So when we move into menopause, what may be revealed to you is how depleted you are, how you've been running on stress energy rather than source energy, your nervous system dysregulation, and experiences, emotions that you still need to digest and process. And I really think it's important to also teach this to women even if they're not in those perimenopausal years. Teach this to women so that they can prepare themselves to really protect their sex hormones and learn how to run more from source energy rather than stress energy, which is exactly what we're talking about in this course. So make sure you go to the hub and check out the resources there, and in the next lesson I'll talk to you about the root causes of stress for modern women.