Yin–Yang Hormone Model

If I’m experiencing anxiety, then I’m going to start to address this early so we can stop things from snowballing and avoid getting to a state where symptoms are so progressed that they become much harder to treat. So let’s talk about hormones through the lens of Eastern medicine. I’m going to use the terms from Chinese medicine, which are yin and yang. If you’ve ever seen the yin–yang symbol, it’s a circle with two equal parts. They are two halves that make a whole. In the hormonally female body, we look at hormones from the Eastern medicine perspective in terms of how they interact with each other, rather than seeing them as isolated individual hormones. We look at the whole picture — how they work together. In the hormonally female body, we have our stress hormones, which we refer to as yang. Yang energy is more like a masculine, outward-moving energy. It's fiery; it gets us active and moving. Think about waking up, moving through the day, doing what we need to do — that is related to our stress hormones like cortisol, which wakes us up and gets us going. When we’re dealing with threat, the sympathetic fight-or-flight response kicks in, adrenaline floods the system, and cortisol comes in with it. Cortisol will stick around longer. Over time, because of its fiery active nature, too much stress hormone becomes depleting to our system and inflames the body. We also have our yin sex hormones — progesterone and estrogen. These are considered in Eastern medicine to be more of a feminine energetic. Yin is building and nourishing. These are the feminizing aspects of the hormonally female body — that is what these hormones do. And too much yang energy over time will diminish them. Ultimately, yin and yang keep each other in check. Ideally, in our system, we exert our energy when needed, taking action in the way we need to. And once we’re done, we rest and recover. We move from yang activity into yin recovery. Our modern world is very yang. It's focused on productivity, busyness, and tying our value to output. When we’re constantly in doing mode — or if we have nervous system dysregulation from trauma or unfinished processing — our body stays in that stress state. We end up releasing a lot of stress hormone, especially cortisol. Cortisol is the most depleting hormone. Over time, it takes less and less cortisol to trigger a stress response. The more cortisol circulating in your system, the lower your threshold becomes for releasing even more. It's inflaming, depleting, and creates a chronic cascade of stress hormones. If your body perceives a threat — even something small — your first instinct becomes “I have to survive this moment right now.” You’re not thinking about eating a meal or reproduction. The body shifts into survival, not growth. The body will always choose survival over reproduction. It will pull from the production of sex hormones, particularly progesterone, which shares the same pathway as stress hormones. It will produce more and more stress hormones at the expense of sex hormones. This is how hormone imbalance begins for many women — sex hormones become depleted. Another thing that can happen is estrogen imbalance. Progesterone helps keep estrogen in check. Estrogen is the most building and nourishing hormone — it’s the juiciest. When progesterone gets depleted, estrogen can also become disrupted. Progesterone helps make estrogen, so low progesterone can lead to low estrogen, or low progesterone can lead to estrogen dominance. This is when we begin to see symptoms like cysts, growths, or other signs of high estrogen imbalance.