Stress is an unavoidable reality of our daily lives. Work, school, pets, kids, schedules, dinner - stress you out just thinking about it? Our lives are hopelessly productivity based and that may be causing permanent damage to our bodies. Conversations are opening up throughout the healthcare world about burnout and adrenal fatigue. While those terms are still sort of vague and not widely accepted, they both point back to one thing: Chronic Stress.

What is Stress?

The human body is an intricate machine that is both self-governing and self-maintaining. Stress is the biological response “fight or flight” in action.

While humans don’t spend much of their time running from lions these days, there are many new predators invoking the same internal response system. Work projects and grades may not sound like they belong on the same spectrum as lions, tigers and bears but the nature of human life has changed. As humans have evolved, the situational stressors have too.

Chronic stress means that your body is unable to come out of stress mode simply based on the nature of your life. This ranges from prolonged exposure to trauma all the way to struggling for a work-life balance. An inability to remove yourself from whatever the chronic stressor may be leads to a slow but steady imbalance of hormones.

The Hormone Axis

When your brain perceives stress or danger a chemical cascade begins which ultimately leads to cortisol rushing through your bloodstream. As it moves through your body, cortisol causes parts of your body to make serious changes to protect you. When this happens, your pupils dilate, your heart races, your body is flooded with glucose while your digestive and reproductive systems are shut off. Cortisol is quite a busy molecule! But what does that mean for the rest of your hormones?

If your body is constantly in fight or flight because of chronic stress, the extra cortisol could lead to serious dysfunction of your hormone producing glands. Many important hormones work on negative feedback, but if cortisol is keeping them turned off there is no feedback at all. This means your glands do not perceive a need to make things like estrogen, insulin, or melatonin. Sustained stress could prolong this depletion of vital hormones in your body and cause serious damage to your hormone levels and your health.

Signs of a Problem

Signs and symptoms may vary greatly between people experiencing chronic stress based on the nature of the stressor and the hormone bearing most of the burden.

Weight gain in the midsection and face
Missed periods
Acne or skin quality changes
Changes to libido
Frequent illness
Decreased energy
Insomnia
Night sweats
Mood swings
Headaches

My interest in this topic follows a year of strange symptoms and bodily changes that brought me to the discovery that my hormones were very out of sync. I began experiencing night sweats and migraines early last year. To be frank, acne is the only symptom on this list I haven’t had a problem with since the first symptom appeared. Somewhere between school and the ominous vibes of 2020, I became trapped in a chronic stress merry-go-round and I was ready to get off!

What Can You Do?

There is an abundance of gurus, teas and playlists that all market themselves as stress reducers. So who has the answers? A great place to start is acknowledging that you have a stress management problem. I am very much so a plan-happy person who loves lists and calendars. Time management is my specialty, but I have a hard time regulating how much of my emotion and energy gets absorbed by all of those plans. After you have acknowledged the problem, identifying what exactly the stressors are will help you better decide how to manage them.

No matter what your stressor may be, there are a few things that are universal to stress management: