Cortisol: Turn Your ‘Bad Boy’ Hormone Into Goldilocks

Sara Gottfried, M.D., is a practicing integrative physician and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Hormone Cure (Scribner, 2013). Dr. Sara teaches women and men how to balance their hormones naturally, regardless of age

Cortisol: Turn Your ‘Bad Boy’ Hormone Into Goldilocks

Dr. Sara

You know the bad boy you dated in high school or college? You knew he was bad news, you even knew it would end badly, but you dated him anyway.

That’s cortisol.

Cortisol is a stress hormone designed to give us the bursts of energy needed to escape a dangerous situation, like running away from a tiger. Unfortunately, modern life often convinces our brains that everything is a stressful situation — and it’s nearly impossible to escape an overflowing inbox. Instead of resolving the issue, we stay on high alert all the time, with elevated blood pressure and glucose levels. Over time, this becomes a serious health issue, despite how conventional medicine neglects the importance of this bad-boy hormone — and that’s not just my opinion, but the evidence continues to mount.

Want a quick recap of the cost of wayward cortisol? Short version: It makes you fat, frazzled, and a total frumpster, which was my story 10 years ago as a busy mom working in McMedicine.

Meet the Three “F”s

Feel fat, frazzled, frumpy? All are warning signs of chronic stress and elevated cortisol. They are messages to love up your cortisol and transform it from bad boy to Goldilocks, which means you’ve got cortisol in your sweet spot of not too high and not too low.

And how might you do that? You might be wondering, “Uh, Dr. Sara, how can we channel Goldilocks with our stress-drenched modern lives?”

Hit the “pause” button.

Your mind plays a major role in managing cortisol levels, so choose not to see everything as a stressor (as much as you may want to!). It may not feel like you have the time, but spend 15 minutes doing deep breathing, meditation, yoga, or even going for a short walk. The brief respite will clear your mind and remind you that you can handle this.

Do yourself a favor: Choose not to date cortisol.

Big Idea #2

You Maca Me Crazy: A Big Idea for Amplifying Your Best Mood 

Inconsistent energy? Is your mood in need of a boost? I hear this every day in my integrative medicine practice and online programs for women.

“Dr. Sara, my energy is lousy. It’s all over the map. Some days it’s good, some days I feel depleted, like I’m running on fumes. Maybe I’m depressed but it’s not bad enough to want the latest anti-depressant. Help me with energy, and then maybe we can take on my lack of sex drive next!” — Patricia, age 40
This is one of the most common complaints I hear from women who come into my practice. And guess what? Their problem is usually one of the three hormonal Charlie’s Angels: estrogen, cortisol, thyroid.

Meet Your Charlie’s Angels

Most likely, you have either estrogen dominance or low estrogen, but it’s also possible your bad boy hormone, cortisol, is off. (Read my first “Big Idea” right here.) We know that 20 percent of people with poor mood and depression have a problem with the third angel, thyroid.[1],[2] (For men, I call them your Three Amigos: testosterone, cortisol, and thyroid.)

My main point: if you’re cranky, tired but wired or just plain tired, think biology first before you start blaming yourself and signing up for therapy. Most likely, your hormonal Charlie’s Angels need a few small tweaks, such as the one I have for you today. (Of course, you want to get this problem checked out with your local clinician if it’s been going on for more than two weeks or it’s severe.)

Low estrogen causes your mood and libido to tank. This is not just a problem of women in the later years of menopause, but younger women may experience a drop in estrogen as early as 28, especially if they go on the pill. Low estrogen makes your vagina as dry as the kitchen floor, your joints less flexible, your mental state less focused and alive. So in the interest of general juiciness — make a smoothie!

You’re Prescribing… a Maca Smoothie?

Yes, a maca smoothie. Maca (Lepidium meyenii) has consistently been shown to help with insomnia, depression, memory, concentration, energy, hot flashes, and vaginal dryness. Additionally, maca has been shown to improve libido and to lower anxiety and depression, all of which are symptoms of low estrogen. Maca extract is available at your local health food store, in either a capsule and liquid tincture. The common dose is 2,000 mg/day. Maca has a malty taste that I prefer to mask with one to two tablespoons of raw cocoa powder in my smoothies for breakfast.

What are you waiting for? Get that smoothie whirring and those juices flowing.

Hormones: The Hidden Culprits of Weight Gain

There’s a serious epidemic in our culture: obesity. But there’s an equally serious epidemic that hardly anyone knows about.It’s affecting a huge percentage of our population and it directly affects how women are able to manage weight and energy levels.

I’m talking about hormones.

When hormones such as thyroid, cortisol, and estrogen are out of whack, energy levels plummet and metabolism crawls at a snail’s pace. Other side effects of hormones misbehaving may be decreased sex drive, mood swings, and accelerated aging.

Your hormones work together in your body, which means that if you have one hormone out of balance, the other ones probably aren’t in perfect harmony, either.

I propose that the next time you want to lose weight, instead of following your doctor’s instructions to “exercise more and eat less” (because this doesn’t always work when your hormones are off!), evaluate your hormones first. Once you’ve identified which ones are high or low, you can use targeted strategies to return your body to equilibrium.

Once your hormones are running smoothly again, you’ll be shocked at how young and vital you look, not to mention how sexy, smart, and juicy you feel!

Biohacking 101: Nerd Out About Your Health

Biohacking is an empowered (and delightfully nerdy) approach to health care through self-study and daily tweaking. Made famous by Tim Ferris (The 4-Hour Workweek), biohacking involves collecting detailed — and sometimes immense — amounts of data about yourself. Biohacking can be applied to nearly any aspect of your health, and track everything from calories consumed, to miles ran, to milligrams of supplements taken.

Become a biohacker yourself using medical, nutritional, electronic strategies. Measure yourself, because it has been proven in many fields that what we measure improves.

Start with something you’d like to change — like your mood — and start keeping detailed records of anything related to it. Sleep, diet, exercise, relationship, medication… You get the picture. Once you’ve got a handle on that, start making small tweaks that you think will correct the problem. Record your progress, your successes and your failures. Do research. Make charts.

This is also known as do-it-yourself biology, outside the confines of traditional environments like universities and industry. It’s incredibly empowering, and along the way, you’ll hopefully discover what an amazing machine the human body is.

Sleeping Ills

In the past 20 years as a medical practitioner, I have learned one very important thing about sleep: It shouldn’t come in pill form.

There were 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills given in 2010, and most of them were for women. Yet the shocking truth is “sleepers” barely work. Sleeping pills allow you to fall asleep faster but at a high cost: They can be addictive and may cause memory loss, daytime sleepiness, and brain fog — and sleep quality isn’t even much better!

What’s scarier is that three studies show that even the occasional use of sleeping pills is associated with higher mortality and cancer, even among infrequent users (less than 20 pill per year).

Our country’s epidemic of hormonal imbalance is a major factor; high cortisol and low estrogen are both players in how easily you nod off. High levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, make it darn near impossible to turn your mind off and relax. Low estrogen causes night sweats and low temperature. The worst of both worlds, right?

Balancing your hormones through diet, exercise, and natural supplements is the first step to better shuteye. Figuring out how to respond to stress properly, and get those hormones humming along makes snooze time extraordinary. For those who need a little extra help at night, Valerien is a botanical that’s proven to help you sleep. It showed its effectiveness in several randomized trials.[3],[4] One showed that valerian improves sleep in 30 percent of insomniacs, and doesn’t affect alertness, concentration or reaction time the next day.[5]

Get Charlie’s Angels on Your Side

What’s the difference between a frumpy, frazzled, fatigued woman desperately clutching a coffee and a slim, smiling woman who’s happily sipping a green tea?

The second woman has Charlie’s Angels on her side.

I’m not talking about Sabrina, Jill and Kelly — I’m talking about the Charlie’s Angels of hormones: cortisol, thyroid and estrogen.

Bear with me on this: Just as Sabrina always rescues the “angel in danger,” cortisol, coursing through your bloodstream, alerts your nervous system in stressful situations, whether that’s a car accident or a toddler heading toward a wall socket.

Jill is thyroid, lithe, athletic, and adventurous. Thyroid keeps you energetic, slender, and happy; without enough thyroid, you feel fatigued, gain weight, go through life in a low mood — and libido? Fahgettabout it.

Kelly can be powerful and in control one minute, a seductress the next. This is like estrogen, which keeps you flush with serotonin, the feel-good neurotransmitter. Estrogen keeps the other angels, cortisol and thyroid, in balance.

To bust the bad guys — depression, slow metabolism, lack of energy — you need your hormonal angels working in sync. And the great part is that hormonal balance is attainable through simple lifestyle tweaks and natural supplements. Feathered hair is optional.

Your Body, the SmartPhone: Capturing Your Innate Intelligence

I want you to try something: think about your body as a cell phone. Okay, a smartphone.
You can choose the case.

Next, I want you to try treating your body like a cell phone for a day.

Step 1: Symptoms = Text messages

You respond to text messages quickly, right? And as simply as possible. Do the same thing to your body. If you have excess weight, trouble sleeping, or low sex drive, try some simple lifestyle tweaks before throwing a prescription at them. Meditate, lower stress, and lose belly fat. Try a darker, cooler bedroom before you reach for the sleeping pills. And give maca smoothies a try before resigning yourself to a lackluster sex life.

Step 2: Recharge Your Batteries

Just like a phone, you need to recharge, refresh and rejuvenate yourself each night. Getting a full night’s worth of quality sleep is the human equivalent of a 100 percent battery charge and a new phone case, because quality sleep just after 10 p.m. allows for those magic hours of cell repair. 

Want to learn more? Check out our free hormone quiz right herehttp://thehormonecurebook.com/quiz/

 

References:

[1] Gold MS, Pottash AL, Extein I. “Hypothyroidism and depression. Evidence from complete thyroid function evaluation.” Journal of the American Medical Association 245 (19) (1981): 1919-22.

[2] Hickie I, Bennett B, Mitchell P, Wilhelm K, Orlay W. “Clinical and subclinical hypothyroidism in patients with chronic and treatment-resistant depression.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 30 (2) (1996): 246-52.

[3] Robert Rister, Siegrid Klein, Chance Riggins, The Complete German Commission E Monographs: Therapeutic Guide to Herbal Medicines (American Botanical Council, 1958).

[4] Kuhlmann J, Berger W, Podzuweit H, Schmidt U. “The influence of valerian treatment on ‘reaction time, alertness and concentration’ in volunteers.” Pharmacopsychiatry 32 (1999): 235-41.

[5] Taavoni S, Ekbatani N, Kashaniyan M, Haghani H. “Effect of valerian on sleep quality in postmenopausal women: a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial.” Menopause 18 (9) (2011): 951-5.