Cortisol Control: Stress Less, Live More with BHRT

Welcome to the Balanced Body Podcast, where Sherri Griggs, owner of Balanced Body Health and Wellness in Omaha, talks to us about health, wellness, and balancing hormones. We're talking to Sherri Griggs, hormone specialist extraordinaire. Welcome to your podcast, the Balanced Body Podcast. How are you today?

I'm great, John, and thank you very much. How are you?

I'm doing great because we're going to be talking about stress in a weird way because we're jumping into our personal mechanics, right? No, that's not the right— that's not the right thing. Our car, which is our body, right?

The mechanics of hormones.

It's our mechanics of hormones.

So, so let me just be real quick about that, John, because there might be somebody that did not hear last week's podcast and they will be completely lost.

Yes.

So very quickly, think of hormones like a car. Cortisol is the engine. Engine has to run properly. Transmission is your thyroid. Transmission's got to be working, got to go at the right speed in the right gear. And then you've got those 4 wheels: estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA, right?

Yeah.

So somebody out there might be giving you new wheels, but if your engine's not working right or your transmission's not working right, Car is not going to run like it should.

And so we are going to talk about the engine.

We are.

How not to redline it, right?

Correct. Absolutely. That's a good way to put it.

So if, like, like you said, if you missed, you know, the previous, uh, podcast where we talk through all the different, um, hormones and what they do for the engine, we do— I think I thought we did a very decent job of talking through all the different parts of the You know, our own personal car, which is our hormones, making sure that they're level. But now it's time to get our hands dirty by talking about each one separately. And so because it's the engine, cortisol is just running rampant when you're older, and we got to make sure that it's running level and, and, you know, purring like a kitten.

Right. But there are times when we need a burst of energy and we do need to go quickly. Might— we might want to redline, but the problem is Doing that for a long period of time.

True. Yes.

Right.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So you can gun that motor and get a quick, quick move, but if you do it for too long, what happens? You blow the engine. Motor burns out. Oh man.

And that just doesn't— I mean, coming from a non-mechanic point of view, I feel like that's no good.

It is no good because then you're not going anywhere, right? You might have new wheels, but you're not going anywhere if your motor's not running properly. Or at all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you gotta get your cortisol in line. So from a non-mechanic, non-hormone specialist point of view, let's just dive in real quick on like, how can you tell that your engine's not running efficiently?

Right.

Cortisol levels are out of whack.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna kind of back you up just a little bit.

Okay.

Where does cortisol come from? Right. What is cortisol?

Oh, yeah, I guess that's important to know.

Yeah, it's our stress hormone. It's the hormone that when we're under stress, think of like our fight or flight hormone. We need that. Those are those times when we need that redline. Something needs to happen, it needs to happen quickly. So when people hear stress, they think stress is a bad thing. But there is something called eustress. Not you are stressed, but you stressed. E U stress is a good thing, right? Gives you inspiration, motivation, right? Enhances your performance. Like I said, sometimes got to have that red line. You you you know goal setting success. So there is good stress, good cortisol. Now, when it becomes bad is when it's High over a long period of time. When stress is high, high stress, chronic stress over a long period of time, that means your cortisol is elevated for that whole period of time. That's bad stress.

That seems like bad stress.

It is. And it's, you know, we have our stages. Think about, here's our stages of stress and, and what happens with our cortisol. So we get alarmed. Something happens, we— it activates our amygdala and says, uh-oh, which I could go on a side note about amygdala training. That's what SWAT team does. But it activates our amygdala so that we have to respond. And internally, it's that fight or flight or freeze. Okay.

Okay.

Impact, heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, right? We need blood to those muscles so that we can run if we're going to run. We have fear, we have anxiety. If anybody thinks about if they've been in a stressful situation, think about it. You might have been sweating. You might have felt like your head was pounding, shaky, right? That's that dump of cortisol into our system in that first alarm stage.

Okay.

Okay. Now, when that happens, And we get through that situation, then our cortisol goes back to normal. But what happens if we don't get through the stress, don't get past it, then that cortisol stays elevated.

Hmm.

And that's when it becomes bad stress. Okay. The stressors persist, the cortisol stays elevated. That is when they talk about our HPA axis. That is our hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis.

Okay.

Those 3 work together. So, then you might have some, you know, physically we are trying to cope with the stressor, mentally we are trying to cope with the stressor. And, you know, the body wants to go back to normal, back to homeostasis. Right? But what if we don't let it? We're not sleeping well. Our immune system goes down. Right? Mental fatigue, maybe highly emotional. If you've known somebody under stress and they snap, right? They're like angry all right away, or you just know they're stressed out. That cortisol, that cortisol affects all organs, all the organs in our body.

Hmm.

So our nervous system and our brain, right? So hypothalamus and the pituitary, they're up in our brain. We talk respiratory, you know, we're gonna be breathing. We need oxygen. We need to be able to run. Um, the adrenals, right? They're dumping the cortisol out. Our muscles need to be ready to go. Heart and blood vessels, heart's pumping more. Blood vessels are, are expanding. We stop digesting. Because we need the blood in our muscles, not in our stomach. That sounds awful, right? But that's what happens to your body when you're under stress for a long period of time and that cortisol stays up.

Okay.

Dementia. High cortisol, chronic stress cortisol can cause dementia.

We hate that one.

Huh?

We hate that one. We do, right?

So another good reason not to be stressed out all the time. So if you think about it, stress, cortisol, brain damage, and that's when the brain says, adrenals, you've got to stop this. You're hurting me. No more cortisol. So that's what we used to call adrenal fatigue. Many people are aware of that word. It's been around a long time. There have been some really good books out there written about it. But what we found is the truth is it's really HP. PA access dysfunction. The adrenals aren't tired. The brain is— the brain is tired of being, being drowned in cortisol and tells the adrenals to stop working, stop giving cortisol out.

Oh my gosh. None of that sounds good.

It's not. When you get to that point, you are on the verge. You are on the verge, literally, Of pure exhaustion. Just you, you can't function, you can't get out of bed, you're tired because you have zero cortisol.

Gosh.

None.

So it's important to have— just, you gotta, you gotta manage it.

You do, right?

Yeah.

So how do you know if you need to manage your cortisol?

I would assume one of those things are happening to you.

Like stress.

Is it like random stress or just like stress through the day? I guess it depends on you, right? Like how you react to stress through the day. Because I know people that almost like high-functioning stressful people, they're just stressed all the time, but that's just like their normal. Even when they were younger, they were like that. And then other people don't stress about a lot of things.

Yeah. And they may not last very long that way. I mean, they, you know, eventually they'll end up with, especially because it drops the immune system, eventually they start and they end up getting sick. You know, they, they don't feel good. You know, they're tired. They're just, you know, they're the people that if they're running on stress all the time, you know what, What are they able to do? Are they spending the whole weekend recovering or are they stressing all weekend and spending, you know, days or they, they go to work all day and then they go home and they can't do anything more because they're just exhausted.

Yeah.

There's nothing left. Right. So think about it. There's just no energy left for the body. You've burned it all out.

And I, I can see that. I can see that with some people. Through just history of knowing a lot of people, which we all do. I mean, we all know somebody, like somebody popped into our head as soon as we started talking about stress.

Right. And you know, it's, the thing is, when you said, is it random stress? Is it okay? It's the random stuff that it happens, you deal with it, you let it go. That's not so bad because you, it happens, the cortisol goes up. You react, and then you go back to where you need to be. You go back to homeostasis. Okay? But if you don't, if it's you've got somebody that's stressed at home, they're stressed at work, they're they've just got a lot of things going on. Life is we try to fill every waking moment with something to do. You know, I the the COVID right? As my friend likes to call it in New Jersey. The COVID you know, that caused people stress. People are still stressed. It's a different kind of stress. And it's not good for us.

No.

You'll know it. Some of the symptoms, you don't sleep. We call it wired and tired. You are wound up, but you're exhausted. You're wired and you're tired. But you can't sleep, right?

That's, that's the one that just, I mean, I feel like if I knew that I wasn't sleeping, that'd be the one that would make me feel like, oh, I gotta figure this out.

Yeah.

But I know a lot of people that just don't sleep too, so.

Right.

Sleep crazy.

And especially if it's, if they're the wired, right? They're, they're, mm-hmm, they're going, they're going, they're worrying, they're thinking about things. They just can't shut their mind off. They just can't go to sleep. They're just, but they're exhausted.

Okay.

They are burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. And their body's never getting a chance. They are quickly headed to APA access dysfunction. They're on their way. That's, that's going to be, you know, where they're probably experiencing some, well, besides the extreme fatigue, then gastric symptoms, symptoms of stomach, you know, Reflux, ulcers, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, things like that. Because remember, when your cortisol's up, the blood is leaving the stomach area, food is not digesting, and it's staying in the muscles and in the organs where we need it— the heart, right? Should we need to run. Okay.

Yeah.

Um, sometimes people will have— they'll be lightheaded. They'll have low blood pressure. Um, you know, and, and really that's just when things have gotten pretty serious. They've been doing this for a while. They start to have, start to really have this. Um, they really have the symptoms.

So now, so now we're talking through the symptoms and it seems like it's Pretty much like anybody I know is stressed, but we're talking about overly stressed, like not letting it, not letting things go, not sleeping. Like you said, like there's, there's other triggers for this to try to get, you know, everything to know that your cortisol is out of whack.

Gotcha.

So you figured it out. Is the solution to just work with your cortisol directly or is it A balance of the other hormones to kind of get that going. Like, where do you go from there? What do you start talking about, and how do you how do you start solving this issue?

Right. Well, depending on your age, if you are of an age where you know maybe your hormones are starting to change, it's great to do it all at once. But here's the thing: we can balance the cortisol and get you in a better place without doing anything with the wheels, right? Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA. It can be done. Now, DHEA is, is really one of the hormones that our adrenals need to work properly. That one doesn't end up dropping as frequently as the other 3. So a lot of people haven't even heard of DHEA because that's not one that tends to Drop as easily or quickly as the other 3 do.

And didn't you say, and sorry to cut you off for this, but didn't you say that DHEA is one of those ones that kind of is tied to all the other hormones? So it is one that does get overlooked, not only because people haven't heard about it, but then doctors aren't necessarily looking at it directly because they think it's easily one of the other hormones if they're, you know, somewhat specialized.

You're right. Women can turn DHEA into testosterone. Okay. Men cannot. DHEA does not have as as an extreme side. I don't want to say side effect. If you are low on DHEA, your symptoms will not be as extreme as they are should you be a male low on testosterone, or should you be a female low on Estrogen or testosterone, DHEA. It's more of a precursor type of hormone, and again, it also helps with the adrenal. So it also helps with the cortisol.

So it's the tricky one.

It is, and and this is where I say it's so important that they all work together, which is why I liked the car analogy. Because yes, if one of those things are not working, well, if the motor is not working, you're not going anywhere no matter what.

Cortisol is important. That's what we're getting out of this one.

Right. And if one of the other 5 aren't working properly, you can still chug along. But it's that cortisol. If your cortisol is not at a proper level, it doesn't do any good. I mean, really, you're wasting money to just replace the other hormones if you're not looking at the cortisol.

Mm-hmm.

Because the cortisol will sit on those receptors if it's high and prevent your body from being able to use those hormones as well as it could.

Gosh. So it truly is the engine that runs it.

It really is. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you do?

Right?

So you, you have cortisol. What can you do? There, there are some things you can do. One way to lower your cortisol is relaxation and relaxation, like mindfulness, meditation, quiet time. Just sitting and being.

Sorry, I don't, I don't mean to cut you off, but like, so if your, if your cortisol is out of whack, trying to force your body into calm can kind of help at some level, just at least get you a little bit more normalized. Is that what you're saying?

Yes. If your cortisol is high, it is elevated. That is one of the main things As opposed to a pill or a medication or something like that. One of the main things is to try to bring the body back to homeostasis, to calm things down, to bring that stress down so that the body can stop making so much cortisol.

I mean, that makes sense to me, but I also know that for people that are highly stressed, it is hard to do something like meditate or just be calm.

It is without a question.

Yeah.

Because they're used to running on that adrenaline rush, right? They're used to having that all the time. And that's why later on, you know, we talked about if you continue to do that, then you end up, you end up in illness, you end up with illness, you end up being sick. So, you know, and so yeah, meditation, taking the time to be quiet. I had a patient that Her cortisol was high, and all she did was add 10 minutes a day. Now, if you're not— if you don't meditate, if you're a religious person and you want to pray, whatever, it's quiet time, right? She's talking to a friend on the phone. She's telling her friend how much she has to do. She has a very stressful, busy job. And her friend said, I can't believe you sound so calm about it.

Hmm.

And she said, what do you mean? She goes, normally I can hear your voice. You are just stressing out. She goes, but now you're telling me everything you need to do and you don't sound like that. So it was already working, right? She was already handling it differently by not causing that huge stress reaction over something that shouldn't be.

Wow. I mean, it, it, that, this, this makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I think looking at it from my perspective at my children, right? Of course I know everything and my kids know nothing. But one of the things, even though I don't, even though the thing that I don't know is cortisol and stress and how it reacts, one of the things I constantly am working with my children is work on your attitude, stop being so stressed, find a way to calm yourself before you react. Like all the things that parents tell their kids, right? Mm-hmm. But who knew I was helping with them trying to figure out their future cortisol problems, teaching them coping strategies?

But John, that's exactly what you're doing.

Yeah.

And a lot of people don't tell their kids that.

Okay. Right.

So it's wonderful that you're doing that because you're setting them up to be healthy. Right.

To continue to be healthy because it lowers Sorry, just like you were, just like you're trying to help people who have elevated cortisol or their, their cortisol is outta whack, finding their strategy to balance things. Right.

And, and some people can have a low cortisol and a high cortisol all at the same time because we check it. It's called your diurnal cortisol, where we check it 4 different times during the day.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And we want it to be highest in the morning when we wake up. So we have the majority of our energy.

Yeah.

And then we want it to start coming down around noon. We don't want it to bottom out, just start to come down. And in the evening a little more. And then at bedtime to be the lowest.

Right.

Because that's when you should be sleeping. Some people have it the opposite. They are low in the morning and they are high at night.

Do you think that that's an out-of-whack thing, or is that their personal preference thing?

That's an out-of-whack thing. Who wants to wake up exhausted in the morning and then be wired at night, not be able to go to sleep?

Oh yeah, I guess that's true, right? Yeah.

So that's— yeah, you know, that, um, you've got to get it down. At night, and I've got people that are practicing good sleep hygiene, meaning right no no lights, no computers, no television. You know, read a real book. Don't have TV in the bedroom. Don't be like I said the electronics, right? So, but there are ways we can balance that using. There are herbs that can be used, and that's where you'd want to work with somebody like myself.

Yeah.

Here at Balanced Body Health and Wellness. So we could test your cortisol for you and figure out what you need to do so that you are in homeostasis and balanced.

I love that. Real quick, what kind of herbs do you work with?

Well, people have heard of a lot of 'em. Ashwagandha is one that people hear a lot. And ashwagandha, people hear about a lot. Ashwagandha is one that can do both, right? Some of these are balancing and they can balance, meaning they know when you're high, they know when you're low, and they just kind of help you.

Hmm.

Now, I am not a trained herbalist, um, but I am able to work with good companies that make products that combine the ones that are needed, right?

Yeah.

I know that if I have somebody that is elevated, I give them this product and it has ashwagandha in it. I'm trying to think. Panax ginseng is not one for being high, I think, or that's one for being low. There's— oh, there's one on the tip of my tongue I can't think of. But, you know, the product—

Maca.

Yeah. Maca root is good for calming. Panax ginseng and ashwagandha help support the adrenals. And if you need energy, if you're burned out, right? So maybe we're giving you something in the morning that helps give you energy, and we're giving you something calming at night to try to help balance your curve or your slide. It should be a slide. You should be up in the morning and slide down to sleep at night.

No crashing. No. So no, like, no, like, just crashing to sleep. Well, That's wonderful. And look, if you're feeling like your cortisol is a little crazy, a little stressed all the time, and you try doing the meditation and other things that might be good for self-balancing and it's not working, obviously Sherri knows what she's talking about when it comes to checking cortisol and all your other hormones. So you wanna work with—

Right.

You wanna work with somebody who knows it, who's local here. And Sherri's, Sherri's your gal. She is the one that is gonna make it happen.

We know they all work together. So I think we should talk about our transmission, our thyroid next week. Let's talk about our thyroid next week.

I, I love that just because I think it's one of those ones that, like you said, and you've said this before, but when you have a problem with your thyroid, all of a sudden that's when you are really gearing up and trying to figure out what's wrong with it and how to fix it. Until you hit that point though, the thyroid is like this made-up thing that nobody understands, right?

Right. Yeah, exactly.

So we will talk, we'll dive into your transmission, the thyroid, next week.

Sounds great. Thank you, John.

Thank you, Sherri. This has been the Balanced Body Medical Podcast with Sherri Griggs, owner of Balanced Body Health and Wellness. If you're looking to find Sherri, go ahead and look for the website balancedbodymedical.com. If you're looking for the business and you want to find Sherri at her office, you can find her at 10815 Elm Street in Rockbrook Plaza.

Thank you.