#275 Testing Stress Hormones Community Q/A Replay

This week on The Less Stress Life Podcast, I am sharing audio from our Live Community Call in December. On this call we covered topics related to testing stress hormones. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
+ What to know about stress hormones
+ Testing these hormones
+ What to do about high/low cortisol and also touched on other nuanced questions like PCOS/adrenal connection, thyroid connection, post hysterectomy weight gain, and more. 

My January Community Q&A will be on Jan 23 at 1 PM MT/3 PM ET, and it will be much shorter teaching/more time for questions on Seasonal Illness Prevention & Support. 

You can register here.

If you want me to look 1:1 at your case, I opened up two calls for Thursday, which will be the cut-off for starting work together in January. OR, you can book a call anytime in January to consider working together in February.
 

Learn more here. 

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Transcript

 Stress is the inflammation that robs us of life, energy, and happiness. Our typical solutions for gut health and hormone balance have let a lot of us down we're overmedicated and underserved at the less stress life. We are a community of health savvy women exploring solutions outside of our traditional Western medicine toolbox and training to raise the bar and change our.

Each week, our hope is that you leave our sessions inspired to learn, grow, and share these stories to raise the bar in your life and home.

My style or preference is to have real conversations and dialogue with real people. And so this is the second month of trying something new, which is a community call or a q and a or a a live way for you and I to get together on Zoom every month on a different topic. So, Last month was a little open-ended.

It was a little more discombobulated, I think, about gut health. This one was a little more organized, but a little less interaction. This one is all about testing stress hormones, so I go over testing of stress hormones. I don't know how you'll feel without seeing the slides, but I wanted to share it with you anyway, because the format is that I go over a handful of slides to give context, and then I jump into questions that people have submitted.

Around this topic in January, coming right up, I'm gonna do one on immune health. That one will be a lot shorter teaching. It's just a topic I see repeatedly and repeatedly in my client calls with our one-on-one clients. And so I wanted to share a little tidbit about that with you. So if you wanna register for this, you can go to krista bigler.com/links or slash community.

Either one. Links gives you like all of the links. So I think that's the best place. And right now in January only is one of the four. Five times of this year that I'm taking clients. So if you are interested in getting a mineral, uh, H T M A or a mineral test done, like I talk about in this episode, or if you wanna get your GI Health assessed or you wanna resolve some symptoms or you'd like to optimize your health, or you're interested in kind of this like sustainable.

Approach, pro metabolic approach. Like there's an intersection of several different things. It's integrative process, pro metabolic, htm, a gi, et cetera. Then I welcome you to book a call with me this month. You can do that@kristabigler.com or krista bigler.com/links. So I hope this is interesting to you, and if you wanna join the January community call where we're talking about immune health, make sure you jump over to that same link and.

All right, so this is really Stress Chemistry one oh one disclaimer. This call is for informational purposes only and should not be substituted for medical advice. I'm a practitioner, but I'm not your practitioner at this time. So those are, I just have to put that in there. Okay, so here's what you can expect.

This is a loaded topic and it's an area that we need, believe me, I'm gonna go straight to that third bullet point. I mean, it was a needed topic before I used to do like a whole month long program on like adrenal resilience and. You like since 2020. It's essential, like people are so burned out from the last two years.

So anyway, I prefer dialogue with real people. So these calls are really just like a monthly experiment. I mean, community and service. It's really interesting what happens, uh, when you have these kinds of calls. But anyway, side notes, like if you need one-on-one help, I'm accepting clients now and to start in January and January to start in February.

Otherwise, I have a podcast called Less Stress Life. So now you know that this is what I'm gonna cover right now. What are stress hormones? How you. Test for stress hormones and then comparing like common functional testing for it. And then the main question everyone wanted to know this week online was what do you do if you have high and low cortisol?

So I'll cover that as well. So I have a bunch of pre-submitted questions. I have about like, uh, 13 slides, so I'll jump right in here. Okay. So real quick, 1 0 1. Is cortisol what you need to know. And I'll go over like where this comes from. Actually, let me start here. So what happens is you have stress. Your hypothalamus talks to your pituitary, which talks to your adrenals.

Your adrenals are these little bean shaped glands that sit on top of your kidneys. And these adrenals produce different stress hormones, including cortisol, including D H E A, including aldosterone, which is not shown in this image or graphic. So now that you know that little, like now you have a. In your brain, then it makes a little more sense to see these terms here.

So largely we're gonna be talking about cortisol today. That is really essential. What you really wanna know is that your body's gonna stop making all other hormones to make cortisol . Like if you have stress, your body's like. I don't really care if you have progesterone and you wanna be happy and feel good and have not terrible menstrual cycle periods or menstrual cycle symptoms, it does not care.

It's going to make cortisol preferentially. And also as a side note, when your cortisol is pumping, think about that whole evolutionary running from the tiger situation. Blood flow diverts from the central area of your body to the arms and the legs, so you could run from a tiger. And so it down regulates digestive function and all kinds of other functions that are core to this area.

So cortisol a fun topic that affects blood sugar and everything else. So we're gonna talk primarily about cortisol, but I'll just give a little bit of lip service to a couple other hormones that the adrenals produce. Aldosterone helps you regulate your blood pressure, and D H E A is one that helps regulate your blood sugar and your lipids.

And so why do you really care about those? I would say that stress hormones, my best example for this is it's kind of like speeding. If you have a lot of stress for a while or you're working nights, or if you're a normal human being and you're waking up. And running, like getting ready for work and getting maybe kids out the school, out the door to school or whatever.

Then you run to work and then you do all your meetings. Then you come home and it's like, go, go, go. I would just call that speeding, right? And so you can speed for a while and then you can run out of gas. And once you run outta gas, that is long-term stress to the adrenals. And what happens is cells die.

And when cells die, they cannot produce these hormones. So you'll see low corti. Low D H E A. All of those things are really low. By the way, it's gonna down regulate testosterone so you have no sex drive and things like that. Okay? Remember, cortisol is the most important. You must have it. So it's gonna down regulate every other hormone.

So sometimes, and I will just say like from a conventional standpoint, sometimes you can get your D H E A drawn as a blood lab. And if that's low, such a pretty good sign or symptom, it's a pretty good sign or symptom that you've got some adrenal stuff going on, just because if it's low, then your adrenals probably cannot produce D H E A in a common thing that I'll see is that people get kind of hangry.

They can't really wait more than a few hours between eating things like that. So think about your questions. Feel free to like throw 'em in the chat if there's stuff that pops up as I'm talking. Happy to kind of like balance your questions in the chat with the pre-submit. I mean, you're the priority if you're here, so we'll get there in a second.

So, okay. Lemme keep going. So I talked about adrenals, where they are, the H P A access. I think that's important for you to just be aware that all these terms get used interchangeably, hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal access, these are, this is the communication system and I already talked about speeding and then running out of gas.

What you should know is that stress hormones or cortisol affects pretty much every other system in the body.  and I'm really gonna try to just cover like cortisol for the most part today cuz it's a lot. Okay, so I do have, you know, this little assessment, this is just an Instagram post we did and it's very popular.

People will say, oh, I have both of these. I'm gonna talk about that. But here's another assessment form if you want. Take a screenshot of this. Real quick, and this will allow you to assess on your own. And then I'll get to that question, which is, what if I have a lot out of each? Usually I'm in a default, quick answer.

Usually I'm gonna default to low cortisol and you'll see why. Cuz there's like really three pillars you still support. Like what's the end message? Love on your adrenals. That's what it's about. So what I want you to know about testing at any point. Is that test or not perfect tools. So don't expect them of you.

Perfect tools. Looking at an assessment or your symptoms is really flip and helpful. So that's why I'm saying take a screenshot of this. So people are always so angry about that they can't get help for this. And I'll get to, I have a little note about that on the next slide, but if your symptoms point to this, it doesn't hurt to love on your.

So, all right, we'll talk about lab testing. So first I'm gonna talk about like, what I know about conventional lab testing. I'm not a conventional provider anymore. Even when I was working in conventional care, this was never checked and the people I was working with were like very sick and, and this was really this, none of this was ever checked.

Okay, so standard or conventional testing or diagnostic criteria for stress hormones. So this is what I know. There could be things I don't know cuz I'm again not a primary care provider in that capacity. Like you don't come see me like a doctor in the same exact capacity. I do a lot more different stuff.

So I'll get to the testing I use in a minute. So Addison's disease or Cushing syndrome are our basic adrenal conditions. But look how not prevalent they are. Or by diagnosis. Addison's disease is like one in a hundred thousand. At least half of my clients have adrenal dysfunction, at least half of them, right?

Cuz anytime you have prolonged stress, it's impossible to like not have a system perform very optimally. And for you to have symptoms, you could possibly request a single blood. So you can test for cortisol in the blood. I think that would be useless because cortisol has a rhythm. I'm gonna go over that in a moment.

Cortisol is a rhythm. It should peak 30, 60 minutes after you get up and then kind of go down over the day. So what would be much more accurate is trying to get a four point cortisol test, a salivary or urine test. It's not commonly done, but it's available. You can try to order this on your own request to test or direct labs.

I didn't get that on the slide, but request to test or direct labs would have that and they might have something else that I'm not aware of. Every provider's got their own toolbox, but I'm. I'm not under the impression that they've, that they've got a lot. So their technical term is h p a access, dysfunctioning.

And technically adrenal fatigue is not really a commonly accepted, uh, term. It's not a diagnosis, but burnout does have a diagnosis code. Most people are really burned out and they have adrenal dysfunction including, and what I would say again, when people are like angrily writing, Comments on my Instagram post about this.

I'm just saying, you know, your health providers are probably burned out. So if they don't know what to do, it's probably cuz they haven't figured out how to help themselves yet. And that's kind of, we're all like that, right? We're all trying to figure out how to help ourselves best. Okay, here's some testing, not use in practice.

So I said that cortisol has a rhythm or a pattern, so, , what should happen is you should want to, like your body has this like essentially natural caffeine state, right? Where it's like it get you wake up and within 30 minutes you should have a peak. That should be your peak throughout the day, and it should come down and it should go down in the afternoon, and then it should get lowest at night.

This person right here, They're a little delayed. They don't really peak until like 60 minutes later. So it really takes them a while to get up and get going. Maybe this person had coffee, maybe they didn't. Usually you don't. When you're trying to do this test, if you do, you just have to know that. So that way you're seen by that spike.

This person's feeling really tired in the afternoon, like it could be even worse. And then this person might just feel a touch wired and tired and when it's time to go to bed, right? So this is this person's pattern. It's just a little funky. And when you go over that with someone, they're like, yeah, I totally.

This person feels like just poop all the time. Right? They wake up and they don't have any natural rush of energy or cortisol, natural cortisol, and it gets worse and worse and worse. Like they never have any energy at all. Okay, so that's kind of the pattern. What are some other things that I'm looking at on here?

So if, if I kind of went over this earlier, but if the adrenals are, we'll just call it burned out, right? Like he ran outta gas. The cells, what's actually happening is the cells are damaged so they're not producing hormones. What you see there usually is you're gonna see this low cortisol and you might see low metabolized cortisol.

Now I'm looking, this is an excerpt of a dried urine test for comprehensive hormones. You can pull out and get just the adrenal section. So I have some pros and cons. Like everything has pros and cons. I don't actually use this off the bat. Very much at all. I actually use, I can tell when I see someone for the first time, like if their adrenals aren't working very well, and I'll get to the three points you can do to help yourself.

So I don't think I need a test to prove what I can see on symptoms, but I do have, the next one is a test I do use initially, and why don't I use this one off the out the gate expense. Convenience. It's so like really to be honest, like my end goal is not to be more overwhelming and to have to do this at a certain time is kind of a pain.

But the more important piece is usually this test is bundled with like sex hormones. And I usually don't do them separate. It's just not a very good use of money. It's much more bang for your buck if you can do it. The sex hormones, if you're running a sex hormones, then I have to wait around someone's menstrual cycle.

So it's just really slow. But the biggest con is if you have any abdominal adiposity, meaning if you have any stomach fat. Unfortunately, it can create cortisol and it'll skew my dang metabolized cortisol results. So that was kind of the last straw for me. So this is really good, but does have cons. So fyi.

So I really like this now, but there's definitely cons for this from a consumer perspective. I would say the main cons are from a consumer's perspective. So pros, it's funny because maybe 11 years ago, Maybe 12. I actually found some notes recently and then, then I threw them away.  from a training I went to way back when and I first learned about H T M A testing way back then.

I thought I was like a little hokey and not something I was ever gonna use. And it's funny, you know, like you're as good as your education and you're learning. You're continued learning, I would say. So I was on a girl's trip with other. Professional practitioners a couple of years ago, and we talked all about this and then I kind of reopened my eyes to it and I will tell you the first training I did in H T M A testing wasn't really that good.

I had a lot of nuance. It was really focused on supplements. I mean, it felt like kind of exhausting. So I just wanted to tell you those things, cuz sometimes people see this and like, well, I'm gonna go order this. What I want you to know is that it's not very easy to interpret. But what I will tell you, let me briefly tell you about it, it's really awesome for me because it gives me longer term data of what your minerals are doing.

Here's the basics. When your cortisol goes up, when your aldosterone is getting used up, when your stress is up, you dump out minerals. So that'll come into like, what do you do about this? So you dump out minerals under stress, and when everything is kind of depleted, you're gonna have poor wound healing, poor workout recovery.

You know, just like general exhaustion, you don't have any resources for your body to do processes with, right? So there are different patterns of minerals that you can see, and it'll tell me what, how the adrenals are doing and how the thyroid's doing. So I really like this test to show. Subclinical stuff that doesn't show up on blood tests, but all the symptoms are there if the thyroid is not working optimally and if the adrenals are not working optimally.

This is the adrenal ratio right here. I see it below two all the time at my clients. I see it below one a lot and those are like, ugh, real burned out people. And I know that their symptoms are gonna be kind of funky. They're gonna react to a lot of things kind of coming back online cause they're, they don't have very good resilience in short.

This is what I use in practice going out and ordering this on your own. You could maybe do, but I have like kind of a caveat here at the end. It's like the tests are not useful all the time. Definitely look at your symptoms. So here was some questions that I had. From really, like there was lots of questions from that Instagram post that I showed you earlier, but the main one that pops up all the time is, what does it mean if you have everything from both list?

What if you have all the, all the symptoms from both lists or I have like several from each? Well, if you have several from both. High cortisol, low cortisol, there's only a couple nuance from me. There's only really a couple of nuanced things I do differently. Because again, I like the main mantra is love on your adrenals.

You don't have to like get obsessed with, like if you did, there's some herbs that are a little more stimulating and some that are a little more calming. But the other stuff that can be supportive either way, so you know, you don't stress out too much about messing it up. So on the next slide I've got like my three pillars that I work on with clients, if your adrenals are, are high or low.

So I'll go over that one in a second. And how do you test for this accurately? So this person said she had saliva and blood tests done and they both showed low then high than normal at different times of the month. Well that makes sense cuz your cortisol changes depending on like my cortisol's probably a just a touch high cuz I just drank coffee and I'm talking really fast to try to get through this really quickly.

So I know that my heart rate is up. If I wanna slow it down, I just have to slow down my rate of talking and my rate of breathing. Right? So of course it would change all over the time, right? Like that's the beauty and the fallacy of a blood or cortisol test. It's a very, right now test, this is one of the reasons I like the mineral test because it shows me a longer term pattern because hair tissue grows slowly.

So if you're not seeing the minerals that eagle is in the backyard again, it's like looking like an airplane back there, . So when those minerals are really dropped off and. I know that that's been happening for a long time. I know it's not just like something really erratic. I always ask when I'm doing one of those Dutch tests, that first one that I showed you.

This one, if I see it looking kind of funny, I'll say, Hey, was it a really stressful morning? And I had a client one time, she was like traveling for a basketball tournament and doing this test, right? So when I hear things like that, I'm like, maybe I'm just gonna back off from doing that Test. Life is funny.

So, all right, so then what do you do with it? For me, this is what I do with my clients. I have three pillars I work on for adrenals, so minerals, mitochondrial support, and adrenal support. You can really support minerals and mitochondrial support for anyone. The main problem is sometimes people are supporting the wrong minerals.

They're only consuming like salt based electrolytes instead of other ones. So that's a correction. When we get those H T M A results, I can really like dial in the minerals, but I always start my clients on like broad spectrum minerals and electrolytes. And then I dial in once I get those H T M A results, mitochondrial support, mitochondria, essentially like the organs inside the sellers, like at least 2000 per cell, the heart, the liver, et cetera.

Those are richer in mitochondria. There's like boatloads of nutrients that support mitochondria function, but this goes back to when you've been speeding and cells have been damaged over long. When cells are damaged, we've damaged mitochondria because the mitochondria in the cells, right? So if you support mitochondria, that's how you regenerate things, and it's kind of the, it's how cells make energy and turn them on, so you can't really mess that up too much in theory, you know, like everyone could support their mitochondria.

I believe that is like the fountain of youth essentially.  and then adrenal support. That's where the nuance comes in a little bit. Some things are more calming. If someone already has really low cortisol, sometimes giving them something that's really calming doesn't make sense. They might need something a little more stimulating like early in the day cuz they're just so flatlined already.

They're already like just blah, like flat, and so they need something a little more stimulating. Things that are more stimulating would be like Ola.  Ash, like I have really hit or miss with honestly. But some of that calming stuff, it, it's really depends on the person. So I do adrenal glandulars. Honestly, some people are afraid of doing that.

I have no fear of that, but that's where the nuance comes in. If it's higher or low, if you don't have to stress about it too much, you can for sure do these other two pillars. So I'm talking about the nutritional angle majorly, but there's a ton of other stuff you have to consider if your adrenals are burned.

Why did they burn out  in the first place, right? Like what kind of traumas and and stressors and long-term stressors did you have? And I hear it all. So I'll just say like, non-negotiable, sleep, light exposure, changing your workouts, eating enough, and frequently enough. We already talked about how not having enough D H E A.

Leads to unstable blood sugar. You have to have enough cholesterol, the backbone to all hormones. So low cholesterol is not something to be glorified, relentlessly eliminating stressors. That's an ongoing process for all of us, right? It's imperfect and improving how your body processes it. So I'm trying to slow my spa rate of speech down Traumas that can look very different than what you think it can.

I've seen flatline cortisol from i b. In vitro fertilization, et cetera. Mold is a big automatic cause of H P a access dysfunction, any kind of like significant stealth thing, but always start with like the easy low-hanging fruit first. So this is what you do when you're trying to support your adrenals and there's a lot of stuff I could talk about with it.

So I'm getting there. I'd love to see more of your questions in the chat. I'm gonna leave this q and a up. I'm gonna, I'm go to these last couple slides and then I'll come back to this. First of all, Thanks for being here. I hope you found that useful. And then I'll get through these and if you, what would be helpful so people don't talk on top of each other.

I actually love to dialogue with you here, actively live if you want. So there's a little hand raised button somewhere in the menu if you wanna use it. And you can raise your hand and then, I mean, you can try to just send you and say, Hey, I have some questions, but. It's great if we can not all like, have like a crazy, crazy, crazy, uh, audio mess as well.

Let me come back to these q and as. Uh, let me just briefly touch on these last couple points I have. Everyone always wants a test to be like the answer, and I would just like also if you are kind of working on this on your own without a practitioner, Or someone who knows what they're doing. Then I would say like, who cares what the test says?

If you don't know what to do with it, you don't have to like go order something today as like this proof unless you feel like that is what you need, or if you're not ready to take actions from it. And again, this is something you kind of learn through experience, but your symptoms are enough to tell you if you have to nourish your glands or your organs.

So, yeah, that's it. And I just wanted to say this, so I have a couple spots left in December. If you wanna start working together in January, or I'm accepting calls in January to start working in February, and then after that I won't take any until April. So you can find that there's two calls left on Thursday if you need some help or you just wanna, if you just wanna talk us through your case one-on-one, we can do that.

Okay. So these are the questions again, like if you wanna ask questions, feel free to unmute or raise your hand or whatever. This is the ones in the. And I don't know if you're still the person who wrote this, I don't see her still here, but she said, wow. And here I thought it was on my thyroid. I would say like your thyroid and your adrenals were intimately connected as well as your ovaries.

So it can be actually both probably, but if you're really fatigued, it can be thyroid. But usually that's gonna be paired with hair loss. It's not just one or the other. Like they all love on each other. So you can, you can love on all of 'em. Okay, so again, interrupt me if you have a. So Christine asked, how do you accurately test cortisol levels?

And actually I, I honestly think she was the one who  put that Instagram question I already answered. Accurate is always gonna be loose for a lot of tests.  your cortisol changes throughout the day, so just depending on your stress that day, or your coffee consumption or your blood sugar or whatever can affect it.

And this is I guess why I like H T M A cause it's a little longer term, but your symptoms are really useful. So that would be my comment. How do you treat the symptoms of Cushing Disease? Oh, and this is, I actually cut this off and didn't wrap that thing, so I missed that from her. So I can try to go back and look at that before we're done here.

Okay, Jackie said she's 44, lack of energy, and she's tired and she ate some mornings, so this sounds like really low cortisol awakening response. We talked about that right here. This person right here, their cortisol awakening response is not very good, right? They don't have this natural rise at that time and then it cuts off later.

So that would be the thing I would focus on. The antidote for cortisol awakening response is light exposure. Don't roll over and look at your phone. Go look at the sun. First. It sends, it sends light to your super charismatic nucleus behind your eyes and it tells your body to produce hormones for the day.

It is really starts that simply . So that's a cool thing You can.  and again, like there's nuance maybe. Maybe Jackie's everything is just like flatlined and that's not the only thing she needs, right? How do you reduce high levels of cortisol? So that's a good question and that's where some of that nuance is.

I use, I was trying to like remember the ingredients and some of the components I use. There's a lot of options. One, look at your life. Look at what's free First look at, I personally like to draw a line down the middle of a page and say, what do I'm excited about and what is like taking up rent-free space in my brain?

Because you can like supplement to death. If you don't ever plug the bathtub, you're just gonna kind of keep coming back to this year after year. So I would say like, start with like looking at what's going on around you or like where your big stressors are and look at you. If you can change how you're processing stress inside, that will like serve you for the rest of your life.

very well save you lots of money. Can you change how your heart is beating? Can you change your rate of breath? And then from there, Some ingredients. Again, I'm just kind of talking broadly. I, I don't know this person at all and I'm not her practitioner, his or her, but, uh, Magnolia, altheine, possibly Phosphel searing.

It just depends, right? So there's different ingredients. Some people really like Ashwaganda. You know, to be honest, something I really like also that improves resilience and immune system and it's awesome for blood sugar and prebiotic support and gut health is really those beneficial mushrooms like cortis and Chaga and whatnot, and kind of regular use of that stuff like that can be useful for kind of modulating stuff.

So Gloria asked, what kind of steps could I take to reduce cortisol in a high stress world? I kind of went over like I would, I would say like, Change how you're processing it on the inside. Again, you guys are here live, so your questions are technically priority. If you wanna talk through your case or if you wanna ask a question.

Okay, so, so Debbie asked How do I increase low cortisol? And that really boils back to these three pillars, minerals, mitochondrial, and like very aggressively. It's a six month timeline. It could be a year. It depends on if you fix some of the sources of the cortisol and the stress. I will say like, So I talked to someone earlier today and she had been seeing someone and there was a lot of like food restriction and she wasn't eating enough and none of those things would be really supportive to a, yeah, I support like the big four, which would be thyroid, adrenal's, gut, and liver.

I would say those are kind of my MO in life,  to support all of those. I just obviously did not have time to cover. Thyroid in this conversation, but maybe on a future one. So I think I'm gonna do these community calls every month. Again, they're like kind of an experiment and a community service thing, and I like to talk to people.

So it feels weird that I'm just talking at you, even though you're here right now, . So I prefer to talk with people and so it's just kind of, um, something I'm. I'm exploring and being of service too, so it's just kind of fun. Next month I chose, because my clients are having so much trouble with this at the moment, or I'm having this conversation so much, I'm gonna talk about immune system support, some things to do and some things that you're not doing correctly.

Potentially in January that's mid j, I think it's January 23rd, and in the replay email, you will be able to sign up for that call or it'll be in my Instagram links page. It's just not there yet. We. Picked the date like an hour ago. So how long does it take to reverse chronic gut inflammation? It could mean it depends on if like that's the actual only problem as little as a month.

But to finish the job, three to four to five months, kind of depends on you when you say chronic, right? How severe and all of the details around that. So we can talk about it if you want a little bit more too. If you wanna unmute and ask about it. If you have chronic gut inflammation, it can just add burden to your adrenal.

So that's a thought. I've had mold show up as chronic bed inflammation, which automatically flatlines those adrenals as well. So also I will just say like when I'm doing gut protocols, I start with two to three months, but then there's like kind of maintenance stuff that you do for a couple months afterwards.

Yeah, Crohn's and colitis are actually some of my favorite conditions to work on. I would say in an ideal world, sometimes you can see a pretty big shift in those in like two weeks, honestly. But you would be supporting that for a couple of months and then I would cycle in. When you have Crohn's and colitis, you have specific, you're more predisposed to having things happen, so you have to be a little more supportive.

I have a mantra called more supportive than aggravating, so sometimes like quarterly, even after you're like doing really well, I would support to some extent, so. It's a good question. How to interpret Dutch cortisol results please. So, yeah, I kinda went over that. Oh, and actually, let me answer this one first.

Let me answer Lindsay's question. How do I know if hormones are affecting weight gain? Posty hysterectomy. So there's a decent chance that they would be, and here's why. It kind of depends cuz there's different. Things that they do. They either, sometimes they leave your ovary and don't like, I'm not a surgeon, but they sometimes leave the ovaries, sometimes they don't.

If they would actually take an ovary in that process for any reason, then you would not be able to make sex hormones. So this would be like essentially premature peri or menopause. So if we have low sex hormones, estrogen specifically is associated low. Estrogen specifically is associated with. Gaining abdominal a opacity.

So I dunno if that's the case. But these systems are, I talked to you about the H P A access, hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access. There's also the ovarian adrenal thyroid. So like, you know, it's not just one, you can support 'em all. And I think some people find that overwhelming to me. I'm like, oh, there's just a lot of opportunity.

And a lot of times if you're supporting one area, it's gonna have an overflow to the other area also. So that's a good thing. Always like, like to take the optimistic. Okay, so Kron said how adrenal glands affect blood pressure, P C O S, and stress. All right, so I'm gonna talk about this a little bit. P C O S is stands for polycystic ovarian syndrome.

It's kind of like a misnomer. It's like a poorly named disease, but since it's taken so long to get recognition, they don't wanna change the name of it. There's four types of P C O S. There is insulin resistance, blood sugar related, inflammation based. Post birth control pill and adrenal P C O S. I have a podcast episode about this with Jillian Grieves fairly recently, last three months probably, and it's almost a misdiagnosis almost.

So adrenal P C O s is the real like sad part about that is all the stuff that they recommend for other P C O S would make adrenal PC. So much worse. So there are three diagnostic criteria for P C O S. Irregular cycle elevated testosterone, which would be like hair through the central, like around your belly button, around your breasts, like maybe on your chin, et cetera.

It's a irregular cycle. Elevated testosterone and cysts on your ovaries or the string of pearls, they'd have to look at an ultrasound. So if you do one of those things, it's not enough. So sometimes they'll diagnose this with just irregular periods, but if, if you have adrenal issues that would go along.

Not having a cycle or a menstrual cycle or a period hypothalamic amenorrhea. So I would say that these could be really related to each other regardless. Even if you had like insulin resistant P C O S, you'd still wanna love on your adrenals because they make D H A, which helps you control your blood sugar.

So I just think like this doesn't ever go outta style at any age or any time of life. Like it's never wrong to love your. So that's kind of my thought process, which would maybe, uh, maybe answer in Nazarene's question, how often should minerals be to this reminds me of like getting your beer topped off

I dunno if she meant to say it like this, but how often should mineral? I don't know what the question is really there, but. I think you support minerals all the time. But anyway. Okay. Alicia said, I wanna know how stress can cause hair, I'm guessing hair falling out and how to manage, I mean, how to manage stress.

That's such a good question. I'm definitely don't have the capacity to try to answer that today. , uh, I don't know know this person, but we did, I did talk about some strategies. I use some other ones in one-on-one practice, and it's a little bit of a self journey also, but so many modalities and things you can do, I guess.

So how does stress cause hair falling out? Multiple. One of the primary ways would be with stress, your thyroid would not function properly. And one of the main side effects of uh, poorly functioning thyroid would be hair loss. Sometimes you can have like toxic burden in things causing the blood-brain barrier and causing some brain inflammation, and you can have some hair loss.

I would say that would be less common. Sometimes if I start working on mold with clients, they'll have a little bit of short term hair loss. It's really, really annoying. Not like an automatic or a super common, but it can happen a little. I would say thyroid is the main one. There was also post covid stuff.

I really think a lot of covid stuff can relate to really poor mitochondria health. I think Covid like really destroys mitochondria, and so I think that I can, you could always support mitochondria, but there's a lot of details there. I mean, it just kind of depends on the nuances. It definitely other things that cause hair loss, but I would just say thyroid is a big one.

All right. I'm gonna like slowly wrap this. So I covered hormones, affecting posts, hysterectomy, adrenals, and p o s. We did talk about Dutch cortisol results. I think we covered enough of that actually. Low cortisol, you just are really supportive. I would say the big thing is like making sure you're aware of what's happening in your life.

Cuz if you're not getting sleep, you may need like seven to 10 hours of sleep when your adrenals are burned out, which is not as much as some people think that they. Right. So sometimes you have to like kind of surrender to needing more cuz the people who are subject to adrenal fatigue are the ones that are trying to achieve a lot and work out at 4:45 AM every day, make sure they get everything done right.

So definitely kind of like, and are considered really healthy in all of those things with people I have for clients. Anyway, so Jen said I'm struggling with a temporary stressful situation. Okay, so this, I actually do have some things I do for this. In the past, I've always kind of felt like anytime I'm traveling with the whole family or it's the holidays or something, it's like temporarily stressful.

And so what I do is I add a little extra mineral support or a little extra adrenal support. So I've got some different things I like to use that work for adrenals or high or lower aren't over stimulating, just like a really nourishing blend. I like. And so I'll take that or I'll use that and you can kind of play with that.

And that's where I think just for like more generic recommendations, I think that doing some of those adaptogenic mushrooms or adding that stuff can be really nice. But I would say if you're under more stress, add more support would be my comment. All right. I feel like that's good. Do you guys have anything else?

Otherwise, I am gonna wrap this up. I feel like I covered a whole boatload of stuff in 39 minutes. I feel pretty dang good about it. I don't wanna be respectful of your lunch hour or whatever time you took out of your lovely day. So I've just finished up going through all of these questions and all of this.

Stuff about testing. So I will send out the replay unless you guys have any questions or you wanna ask about your case. I've got, you know, the pillars of what I would do with adrenal stuff. I'm hearing from you that you'd like a call on thyroid. Next month's call community q and a will be January 23rd, and I will do illness prevention and illness support for this season.

So if no one has. They don't wanna have a conversation. I'm gonna wrap this up and if you guys wanna register for next month for illness, then that would be awesome. Sharing and reviewing this podcast is the best way to help us succeed with our mission. To help integrate the best of East and West and empower you to raise the bar on your health story, just go to review this podcast.com/less stressed life.

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