Dr. Betty Murray explains how chronic stress keeps your body in constant alert mode, suppressing the hormones that drive ovarian function and worsening both perimenopause and autoimmune symptoms. Stress continuously mobilizes glucose, raises insulin, and prevents the brain's stress controllers from ever switching off.
Over time, chronic activation of our of our stress system mobilizes glucose, immune modulates, and causes vigilance. And so this is a primary driver also of the stress response and how it plays a role in autoimmune conditions, particularly with women. Because we're chronically stressed out, the immune system gets activated, becomes vigilant. We mobilize glucose, so we're constantly driving insulin up. And when you never fully downregulate, the controllers in the brain, the hypothalamus and the pituitary, don't get the correct. Feedback loop to calm back down. And then they add the gonads to that message because they go, crap, I'm freaked out. Nothing's safe anymore. I need to directly suppress the pulsatility or the variability of our gonads' GnRH messenger, which is what stimulates the ovaries to do things. And then it'll stimulate things like follicular stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone. It has a pulsatility, so it goes up and down. This then suppresses that activity and we get A suppression of ovarian function, and ultimately it makes your perimenopause worse.
