If I'm a woman, how am I going to know if my symptoms are hormonal versus maybe just because of stress or other things going on in my life?

Dr. Betty MurrayHelping Women Navigate Menopause | Speaker, Author, and Advocate for Women's Health Over 40

Is it stress or hormone changes?

23 Mar 2026 · 2 min

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1:45

Dr. Betty Murray explains how hormones work like a symphony, with sex hormones affecting thyroid and adrenal function together. In her 21 years of practice, she's seen perimenopausal women develop thyroid issues and blood-sugar problems at the same time. Her team built a quiz to identify which hormonal imbalances are actually driving your symptoms.

Questions this video answers

Dr. Murray advises trusting your intuition, recognizing that hormones act as a symphony where sex hormones affect thyroid and adrenal function via the hypothalamus‑pituitary axis. She notes that perimenopausal women often experience simultaneous thyroid, blood‑sugar, and stress‑chemistry issues. To differentiate, she recommends using a symptom‑based quiz that evaluates multiple hormonal factors rather than looking for a single cause.

Chapters

If I'm a woman, how am I going to know if my symptoms are hormonal versus maybe just because of stress or other things going on in my life?
Yeah, so, you know, I'd say number one, trust your intuition. You know, women have extraordinary intuition, and it's when we get kind of pushed up against a policy or a group that sort of questions it that we often sort of back off it. So if you think it's probably hormonal, it probably is. Now, the other part of this is our hormones are a symphony, right? So they all work together. So you don't just have the drums alone. You don't just have the wind section alone. They all play together. So when your hormones start to shift as sex hormones, it's going to change how your thyroid functions. It's going to change how your adrenals function because your two controllers in the brain called the hypothalamus and the pituitary are trying to create harmony. And so they'll start adjusting. So often we'll have co-committing sort of hormonal imbalances. And over my 21 years, that's what we saw is women would get into this sort of perimenopause that were sort of fluctuating behind the scenes, but they were also developing thyroid problems. They were developing blood sugar issues. They were developing excess stress chemistry or erratic stress chemistry. And so you have these two hormonal imbalances that are co-occurring. And that's why we created our quiz, because that helps us look at some of the symptoms you're having and help you understand that it may not— because everybody's looking for the single bullet. What's the bullet that caused it? And I'm like, oh no, it's a howitzer. We have a bunch of bullets that are all together, and we need to figure out which big ones are playing, right? And so many times perimenopause might be a dominant thing, or menopause, but there's other hormone problems sitting on top of it.