Dr. Aaron Hartman explains how chronic stress and nervous system dysregulation can cause thyroid resistance, where your body produces high reverse T3 and low free thyroid hormones despite normal TSH. His daughter Anna, told she'd never walk or talk, thrived after the family rejected surgery and used sleep, breathwork, and nature exposure to rebalance her nervous system.
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Patients who've known me for years thought they knew my story. They had no idea. My daughter was never supposed to walk, talk, or crawl. And not only is she thriving at 19, I found the exact blueprint that made it possible. In Uncurable, I share that blueprint plus thousands of dollars in free tools and resources because I got into this work to help people just like you, not just the people sitting in my office. The link is in the show notes below. Get your copy today.
Chronic stress, little t trauma, big T trauma can over time suppress your HPA axis. One of the things that happens is you'll get thyroid resistance. Your body wants to go into a state of basically hibernation. So if you do a complete thyroid panel, you actually see your reverse T3 being high, either the 4th quartile or above. And then you'll see your free T3 and your free T4 be the bottom core, 1st quartile or below. Holistic hormonal health. The next level of hormonal treatment. Next level of hormonal health. Many of us are familiar with hormone replacement therapy. It's now been approved to do since November 2025 by the FDA, which many of us have been doing for years before. We knew how good, helpful it was for our patients. But there's a next level of that, which is hormone optimization, which we've talked about many times in other podcasts. In the last several episodes on Friday Podcast, we've talked about the idea of a holistic hormonal hierarchy. How does everything interact with your hormones? We gave out the different factors, and this is the third episode and last in this series I want to talk about. But I want to mention a few things in regards to that, which are trauma, nervous system security, emotions, how all these impact our hormones, particularly our sex hormones, chronic stress, low T trauma, big T trauma, can over time suppress your HPA axis. One of the things that happens is you'll get thyroid resistance. Your body wants to go into a state of basically hibernation. So if you do a complete thyroid panel, you actually see your reverse T3 being high, either the 4th quartile or above. And then you'll see your free T3 and your free T4 be the bottom 1st quartile or below. But at the same time, your TSH is normal. Maybe it's even the optimal range. It could be even 1. Well, the reality is, is that your, your HPA axis is trying to put you into a, in a hibernation type state because of the stressors. And they can be acute. We do see this with acute traumas and it can be a low-grade stressor dealing with, you know, a sick loved one. You know, our family have had issues with just dealing with kids with special needs and how that's caused a lot of issues. And I see a lot of patients that have that same thing as well. It could be job stress, it could be, you know, residual COVID stress, it could be certain, you know, social media stress. I have patients who literally they're, and there's actually literature on this. On social media exposure and news feed exposure being directly related to elevated cortisol and dysregulating your, this neurohormonal axis. The point is this, these are external factors that can have an impact on your, your brain-body axis. Your mind-body medicine that I kind of used to make fun of and say it's weird, woo-hoo nonsense, right now, psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology is now cutting-edge science in the space of how your mind, your psyche affects your nervous system, your hormonal system, your thyroid system, your gut system, your entire body. And external factors, external stressors, low-grade stress can actually impede this or impact this. So I have a lot of patients I'm working with who, as they go through from, you know, regular female aspect of their life, getting towards that menopause, perimenopause area, the estrogen starts to do its funny stuff. Progesterone's already been down. Testosterone's already been down. All of a sudden they can no longer deal with stress like they used to, and they start having hot flashes, night sweats. They start having a lot of hormonal symptoms, even though this is a normal changing phase of life because the cortisol is so high. And their sympathetic nervous system is so high, their rheostat, their temperature thermometer set in their brain gets dysregulated. And all of a sudden, all the stimuli they're used to are now exaggerated. So a small fluctuation in their body temperature results in a big perceived fluctuation to the extent you can have vasodilation, you can have sweating. Poor sleep is a common thing that happens during this time. Being awakened easily, startled easily, wake up in the middle of the night kind of in a startled kind of state. Waking early, it's, yeah, this is a phenomenon that the daytime intrudes into the night. So you wake up early and then throughout day, you feel tired early. A lot of these can simply be the end result of chronic stressors, whether it's job stress, work stress, family stress, et cetera. Lack of rest, lack of sleep makes all this worse. If you're a shift worker, you're a nurse, physician, works like I used to work for years, works graveyard, whatnot, all of a sudden that's going to impact all this. And the lack of varied mental activities, doing the same thing over and over and over, not varying up what you do mentally with your, with yourself can lead to that as well. And that's where stagnation in personal pursuits, which unfortunately happens with life, Have you been told there's nothing wrong with you, or worse, there's nothing we can do for you?
We were told our daughter Anna would never walk, talk, crawl, or even see. We were also told to start surgeries when she was just 18 months old, and we said no to all of it. Today at 19, she's thriving. And here's what really shakes me to the core. Her story isn't rare. I've seen this happen in hundreds to thousands of patients in my clinic. In Curable, I show you exactly how you can do the same type of thing because you deserve the same fighting chance as my daughter had.
The link is below.
Get your copy today.
All this can play into this, this idea of emotional factors and your brain-body axis affecting your hormones. This is one of the more difficult areas I have to deal with with patients because one, people aren't as aware of the mind-body connection, aren't as aware of the science behind this. And literally you can get a PhD in this. It's called psychoneuroendocrinology. You can actually get a doctorate level degree in this and There's tons of research in it. And because they're not aware of it, they don't, they realize they can start looking at things like, you know, tracking your sleep. I track my own with an Oura Ring. Look at your day-night sleep cycles. Look at your, your gut. There's an interesting association with when you eat, when you go to bed, for example, is a stressor to your body. If you eat right before you go to bed, you'll see your heart rate variability is low for the first 3 to 4 hours. For me, it takes about 4 hours before it starts going back up. You'll notice your heart rate being high. Mine will be like as much as sometimes 70, 75 when I'm sleeping the first part of the night, just because I had a big meal before I went to bed. Doing the wrong things at the wrong time on your body can have negative impacts. You know, you're supposed to eat certain times, you're supposed to sleep certain times, you're supposed to be physically active certain times. Switching those things around can have a negative impact on your physiology. So realizing that these stressors and re-regulating your body, having normal daily patterns of living, of stress reduction, breathwork, prayer, meditation, physical activity, being outside. There's actually a field of medicine in Japan called forestry medicine. Where they'll actually measure people's cortisol levels. They go out in the forest and have these little beautiful paths. They'll measure your oral cortisol levels as you're walking and they'll see them come down just in a 45-minute walk in nature. So just nature exposure can have a massive impact on your, your body's resilience or ability to deal with stress. So maybe for you, it's not that you need to change a lot of stuff, it's just you need to be in nature more. You go for a walk during lunch, you start your day with a walk, you end your day with a walk outside or time in nature. One thing my wife recently has fallen back in love again with is painting. She really loves just being distracted painting. I've found— I've also found interesting how many young people are getting back into crocheting. I've actually seen multiple young people doing that. You talk with them and it's just like they tend to be more anxious predisposition and they find like crocheting just kind of helps get them in the zone, helps relax them. So the idea is that if you're having hormonal issues, you've done all these things, you've done the this typical replacement, you've done the optimization, you're still not optimal. Looking at hormones, your hormones holistically from a holistic viewpoint and dealing with all these factors that I've mentioned in the last 3 podcasts can be super huge. And last, which is actually one of the most important, that's stress, the neurological aspect, including the emotional aspect, and how figuring out your own body's resiliency plan can have a massive impact on your hormones. Hopefully this information has been helpful. If you have any thoughts you'd like to share with us, please put them below. I'd like to hear from you if this has been helpful. If there's any other things you'd like to know about on these Friday episodes, the purpose of these is for education, encouragement, empowerment. So if you let us know what you'd like to learn about, we can put them into our, our series and talk about them as time permits. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.
My daughter was never supposed to walk, talk, or crawl. And today at 19, she's thriving. And guess what? We ignored every single thing the specialists told us to do.
Hi, I'm Dr.
Aaron Hartman, MD, and I wrote Incurable: From Hopeless Diagnosis to Defying All Odds so you don't have to navigate this alone. In it, we share the secrets that she and thousands of my patients have used. Grab the book or Audible wherever books are sold, or you can find it in the link below.
