Dr. Nicole Cain explains "endocrine anxiety": anxiety driven by imbalances in endocrine organs, hormone production, or hormone metabolism—especially sex hormones (estrogen, testosterone, progesterone), thyroid hormone, and cortisol. She emphasizes the gut's role in orchestrating hormones and explains why anxiety can persist even after lab values are normalized (other downstream or upstream causes remain). She identifies heavy metal exposure (cadmium, arsenic, lead) as potential disruptors of sex-hormone pathways and promotes the Holistic Wellness Collective program and its wellness Roadmap as a way to find root causes and create a holistic healing plan.
Chapters
Your results indicate that you might be dealing with endocrine anxiety. Endocrine anxiety is anxiety that came from an imbalance in something of your endocrine system. Whether this is the endocrine organs themselves, or the way that they're producing your hormones, or the way that your body is metabolizing and processing those hormones. When we think of endocrine anxiety, we're looking primarily at sex hormones like estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone. We're looking at thyroid hormone, and we're looking at cortisol. It's important to have balances in all of these hormones, and interestingly, they are orchestrated by your gut. And so if your gut is out of balance, it will cause a domino effect that affects your hormones. So let's say that you've been to the doctor and your doctor ran your thyroid test and your thyroid is out of balance. But when they treated your thyroid, you still continued to experience symptoms of anxiety or autonomic arousal. You might be scratching your head, wondering, why would my thyroid be contributing to anxiety? But when I correct my thyroid, I still feel anxious. And that's what endocrine anxiety is all about is I want you to think of it kind of like you're balancing on one foot and somebody puts a brick in your hand, and you have to kind of shift your weight a little bit in order to accommodate holding that brick. But then let's say you put a brick in the other hand, there's another adjustment or another variation. And as we go, your body is continually trying to make adjustments or to adapt to whatever has happened to you, didn't happen to you, or is going on in your life right now. And so even if you're using medications or even supplements and other natural remedies to, to put your endocrine system back in balance is realize that there are other domino effects that go deeper that may be maintaining that anxiety for you, because whatever the root cause is hasn't been addressed. In the Holistic Wellness Collective, I teach you how to get to the bottom of why you feel anxious. We actually look at the things that may be causing your endocrine system to go out of balance. For example, if you have heavy metal toxicity or if you've been exposed to cadmium or arsenic or lead, the studies show that even at low doses that these metals can interfere with your sex hormone pathways. So even if your estrogen is totally normal on your testing, if those pathways have heavy metals getting into them, you're going to have endocrine anxiety, estrogen related anxiety, even, even though your estrogen is normal, so this can be kind of confusing. But don't worry, I've totally got you. If you want to get to the root cause of why you feel the way you feel, if you want to be empowered with information that you can bring back to your doctor, especially related to endocrine anxiety, this is definitely the place for you. The Holistic Wellness Collective has a wellness Roadmap that walks you step by step through all of the phases of getting to the root cause, interpreting that into your current scenario, and then creating a holistic heal healing plan for your future. So if this sounds interesting for you, check out the link in the bottom and I look forward to seeing you on the other.
