The Zen Hormone - Progesterone

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. The zen hormone, also known as progesterone, is the hormone of the day, the hormone du jour. And we are talking to Sherri Griggs, owner and hormone replacement extraordinaire with Balanced Body Health and Wellness here in Omaha, Nebraska. And we have this really great— I just love the analogy that you've come up with because even though I don't know cars that well, I know that you can turn the key and something happens and then you're able to roll down the road with this big old machine. That's my Knowledge of cars, but relating hormones to that vehicle and understanding as you grow older, sometimes you got to keep those in check and keep them balanced.

So, John, yes, the car analogy. Um, look at it like you— I mean, you know a car well enough to know that you've got a motor and you've got a transmission and you have wheels, tires, right? So if that motor isn't running, car's not going anywhere. So that's your cortisol. Cortisol is the engine. Cortisol is the really the main thing that's got to be level, running properly, just like the motor. And then we have thyroid as your transmission. Want to make sure you're in the right gear, not too fast, not too slow, but everything is running the way it should.

Mm-hmm.

And then you have your 4 wheels or 4 tires, and that's going to be your estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, and DHEA. And we know if, say, you have a flat tire, car can still go, but it doesn't go very well.

Right. You really only need 3 tires to roll down the road, but you can't go very far on 3 tires.

Correct. You know, and if you really want to get into it, if you just keep going down the road with that flat tire, then you're going to ruin the wheel. And I mean, just things just don't run right.

Hmm. That— okay. See, I know enough about cars that that makes sense to me. So, yes, that's a perfect example. Now, you said something because we're digging in, like I said, to progesterone. Mm-hmm. And I— this is the one that I like the most based off of your description because it's not necessarily, you know, a problem child. It's all about zen. Zen and synergy, right? Isn't that what you said?

Mm-hmm. Progesterone is our relaxation hormone. So I kind of made the comment when we were visiting earlier that that's like your zen hormone, like, ah, that's progesterone.

I like progesterone for that alone.

Right, right. And so, you know, it is— men and women both need progesterone. Women tend to Suffer more symptoms if they don't have enough of it. So just to say, and of course, every time we talk about these, we know that everyone is different, not everyone has the same symptoms. We also know that, you know, not everybody needs to be or can be treated the same way. So everyone is unique, just like, you know, I guess if you use the car analogy, like, well, all the cars are the same. Not really. I mean, think about it. Some cars have the motor in the front, some have them in the back. Some of them are manual, some of them are automatic transmissions. So, you know, all people are different as well.

This is true. It's true. And I like, I tell you what, I like how you articulate this. It just sticks with me every time that everybody's kind of their own build, engine in the front, engine in the back. But what is right for you doesn't necessarily match with— it's not within the range of numbers, it's where do you feel right for yourself in a healthy range.

Right. So I've been in the medical field since I was 10 in 1986. And, you know, we, in those days, everything was about, are you within the range? When we did your lab work, are you within the range? If you're within the range, you're fine, right?

Mm-hmm.

Well, I don't know what's wrong with you. You don't feel good, you're within the range, you're fine. And sadly, we still have some people that practice medicine this way today.

Mm-hmm.

And it tends to be, um, the people that I see will be, my numbers are great, my lab work is great, but I don't feel great.

Okay.

And the keyword that you said is range. So you can have a, a low range and a high range, and you might feel good at the lower end of that range, but I need to be at the higher end of that range to feel good. And so that's where we look at how people feel. How are you feeling? Do you feel good? Are your symptoms gone? And specifically the symptoms That are caused by that low hormone. So on average, women start to lose their progesterone at the age of 35. That's an average.

Oh.

And frequently one of the symptoms as they age that they'll start to get is heavy bleeding that they never had before. Before we knew more about our hormones, the answer to that would be some sort of medical procedure, a lot of times surgery to remove the uterus. But now we know it's because the progesterone is starting to leave, and progesterone is what— the progesterone-estrogen balance is what keeps the uterine lining from Becoming so thick. So a woman then becomes estrogen dominant. Estrogen builds the lining. Progesterone keeps it from getting to be too much. Okay?

Okay.

Um, very basic terminology I'm using. I'm not going to use a bunch of medical terminology, so I want to make sure that, that everyone understands. And so as they start to lose that progesterone, then they start to run into some of those symptoms. And that will be one of the first symptoms because that balance is off.

Huh. And you start losing it at 35? Yep.

And I mean, it's a gradual reduction. It's not generally, oh no, it's gone.

But that would be awful.

One day you're fine, next day you're bat crazy because you don't have your relaxation hormone. Now we know what's happening to people. COVID stole everybody's progesterone.

I believe that. I, I truly, truly believe that.

So, so yes, our relaxation hormone, which then the next symptom is trouble sleeping. So, um, and, and you're, you're laying in bed and you're just like, oh, I gotta do this, gotta do this. Your brain is just— they call it monkey brain. And frequently, I don't know what it is about 3 o'clock in the morning, but somebody will say, I wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and I can't go back to sleep. That's progesterone. That's the lack of progesterone.

The lack of zen.

The lack of zen. And women tend to notice that. That tends to be the first one they notice. Testosterone can be low. They don't notice it so much. But that's generally because the progesterone at that point is— again, you lose your relaxation hormone. Women would come in all the time into the primary care. I, I've never had anxiety in my life. My gosh, I'm anxious. I don't know what's going on. I'm anxious. I, I just don't want to do anything. I'm kind of depressed and I'm not sleeping. The doctor says, ah, here's an antidepressant. But that's not the problem.

Yeah.

You didn't just all of a sudden develop You know, anxiety and depression when you got into your late 30s, early 40s, that's because you've lost your progesterone.

Wow. I bet you a lot of lights are going off now, just having known, having heard that. That makes sense, it seems.

Right. And again, everybody's different. Somebody could truly have developed a disease process, But in general, it's probably the progesterone. Now progesterone, that's a tricky one because progesterone, there's really no good way to check that. We check hormones in many different ways. And I know we talked about that in one of our earlier podcasts on how do we test. Well, we can test saliva, blood draw, a serum, a finger stick. which checks more of the interstitial fluids. It does check capillary blood, and it's never really a good measurement. Progesterone is just one that doesn't matter who you talk to, no matter what hormone specialist it is, that will say, you know, progesterone is a hard one to measure.

Hmm.

But because the symptoms are so pronounced, And so specific, you can measure it by how it handles your symptoms for you.

Interesting.

Right?

So keeping an eye on how you're feeling in your own— when you're in the process of balancing, right? That's when you kind of measure it.

And the one that people will notice the most is sleep.

Hmm.

That's the easiest one to judge. So I will tell my ladies, I'll start them at a particular dose depending on how old they are, whether they, you know, whether they're just low or they're past, past menopause and they have pretty much zero. And I'll say, here's your first dose, do this for a few nights, you should be sleeping better. But if you think you could sleep even better, then you can up that dose. So I give them the ability to change their dose. And I'll say, up that dose. You notice you're sleeping better and you wake up feeling good. Maybe you can sleep better. Up it again.

Oh.

Now you've upped it. You're sleeping good, but you wake up and you feel groggy. You're groggy. You have trouble waking up. And you try it, I say try it for 3 nights in a row just to make sure. And you're groggy, then you have too much. Now you know you have too much, go back to that prior dose and know that that is your dose.

Interesting. And I mean, I know that people, when you kind of lose sleep, that's, you feel that and it's almost an immediate thing. So that seems like a pretty decent bar to measure.

It really is. And you know, if you're laying in bed, not able to fall asleep, you know, if you're waking up in the middle of the night, not able to go back to sleep. So the progesterone, and then, and so progesterone, you know, if you think about it, I feel like that's probably the hormone that we really know the least about, because we don't have a good way to measure it. But then we also have Different ways of dosing it. You will have some practitioners that say, well, you know, you have to dose it in a cycle. A postmenopausal woman should not take it every single day because her body didn't give her a dose every single day. There were days that her body was off of that progesterone.

Hmm.

So we try to mimic that, they'll say. And their thought process is, well, we want the receptors to continue to be active. So, we want to give them the break. So, we will say, take it 6 nights a week and be off the 7th. 6 nights a week, be off the 7th. Or take it days 25 through 30 and be off— or take it days 5 through 30 and be off days 1 through 5. But then the issue might be, well, then you do not sleep on those days.

Hmm.

So, we tell people, Take it every day. I tell people, here's the thing: they don't know for sure. People who have taken it every single day, they're forever. I've taken it every single day for what has it been? 19 years. My receptors still work fine. My receptors are not burned out. It still works for me. So I, you know, if somebody is still. cycling, then I'll have them do it with their cycle. If they're not, then I tell them, here's what they say to do. Some people believe it this way. Frankly, you can take it every single night. So I like to give my patients the ability to have some control and, and go on how they feel.

That's perfect. Because again, it goes all back to What I think is one of the most important parts about all of this is like, how is it, how is it affecting you? And how do you want it to be effective for you? Because you are not just the number, it is how you feel or what makes you less stressed. And I know plenty of people dealing with anxiety that like one little thing of, well, somebody said that you need 5 days off.

Right.

That stress anxiety is probably just enough to kind of counteract what you're trying to balance correctly.

Well, and it could be, it could cause anxiety knowing that for that 5 days they're not going to sleep, or that 1 day of the week they're not going to sleep and the next day they're going to feel anxious. Right. So, and going back, you know, like you said, we're not treating the number, we're treating the patient. Medicine says we should check these numbers. You know, that's, that's, you You know, standard of care, check the number. So we'll check the number and, you know, as long as you're just not going to see somebody on massive doses of progesterone, because if you are, they're going to be dragging all day, not being able to wake up. It's just, it's just not something that is going to happen. I mean, anything's possible, but not generally, right? Nobody wants to take something so that they wake up in the morning or they can't wake up in the morning, right?

Right, exactly. Well, not anybody that I know.

Right. We want to feel good.

We want to feel good. Yeah.

Right. And we want to feel energized and feel good. And, and, you know, it's— there are even some studies coming out, you know, if we pivot to men and progesterone. Um, I know when I did, uh, the presentation for our group You know, I, I, I'm sure that some of the guys were like, estrogen, that's, that's women. Nope, men need it. Progesterone, men need it, right?

Right.

We all need those 4 hormones in different amounts, right? We, as we talked about testosterone, that's man's top hormone. Estrogen's women's top hormone, you know, but low progesterone in men can have issues. Now, their symptoms can be a little different. Okay. And are you ready? This will be surprising.

I, I am on pins and needles that I'm sitting on right now.

Progesterone low in men— weight gain, loss of libido, inability to get or maintain an erection, an enlarged prostate. Did I say that? Loss of muscle mass, right? Everyone says, oh, I'm having trouble, I'm having erectile dysfunction, it must be testosterone. Not necessarily. Hmm. So even, even low progesterone in men— there was a recent talk I heard, and I wish I could remember exactly what it was, but it was, I believe, In relationship to erectile dysfunction and testosterone and some of the balance that needs to, that needs to be done. Now, when I said with progesterone being our relaxation, if you think about relaxation as far as cardiovascular health, progesterone dilates blood vessels.

Hmm. Relaxation.

So, this is why replacing our hormones when we get older is so important. I will say, and this is something that I want people to hear, and I will say it twice. If we were not supposed to replace our hormones, then why did we ever have them in the first place? And I'll say it again, if hormone replacement is not safe or not warranted, Then why did we ever have them in the beginning?

I have to admit that makes a ton of sense to me because we are flush with hormones when we're younger.

We are. And that's when we feel our best. We have our most energy. We are our healthiest. I get people that will say, yes, but testosterone causes prostate cancer. Then why aren't there a bunch of 20-year-old men running around with prostate cancer? Because there aren't. Oh, estrogen causes breast cancer. Then why aren't there a bunch of 20-year-old women running around with breast cancer? So our hormones, we need them. We weren't meant to live past the age of 45 years old. When we ran out of hormones, we were dead.

Or soon. Or maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe that's when the lions caught up with us or whatever we were hunting.

Yeah, or, you know, that's when we— life was tough and, and we didn't live that long.

That's true.

So it's, um, so that's, you know, it's pretty simple. And that's why I say, I'll say it, you know, if we aren't supposed to have these, then, you know, why can't we? I think that because when I say things about progesterone being kind of a mysterious, right, no, no good way to measure it, um, No, you can't get a handle on it. And I will throw a little controversy out there and say, and it is not safely a pharmaceutical medication. And I say that because progestin, not to be confused with progesterone, progestin is the synthetic version of progesterone that our pharmaceutical companies Manufacture, and that is the one that was given with the estrogen in the Women's Health Initiative study that caused breast cancer. Oh, okay. It was progestin, a pharmaceutical synthetic pharmaceutical drug. What we learn about in medical school are pharmaceuticals. We don't learn about naturals.

Mm-hmm.

And these are naturals. These are bioidentical hormones. People will say, but they're not natural because they're manufactured. Manufactured. And everything has to be to some extent. We know some of them come from yams. Okay, we do also know that certain pharmaceutical drugs come from natural products as well.

Mm-hmm.

But bioidentical, meaning that they are made to be identical to our biology, is different than how other drugs are made to work. So progesterone being mysterious, Zen, because Zen can be mysterious, right?

Absolutely.

Makes it very difficult. For people to feel comfortable, for our medical providers to feel comfortable, because it is, as I've said before, a whole nother specialty.

Well, and you, you're going, you're screaming towards this as a, as, as a, as a point of, um, something that we're gonna talk about. But like, I agree, like it's tough when you are a general, you know, the general doctor that you go to every year for your checkup. You can't know everything about everything. And our, our healthcare is built on specialties. And, you know, they're gonna say exactly what you said earlier. Oh, you're feeling depressed and anxious? Anti-anxiety drug. There you go. Bam.

Right.

And for some people, that's what they need. And I, I don't discount that whatsoever because there are anxious people that need You know, certain drugs to kind of, to, to work through. However, if it's, if it's due to lack of hormones, it makes sense. Like you, and you wanna look for something that's like, I feel out of balance.

Right.

I feel this way. I'm having trouble sleeping through the night, or I'm getting anxious, but I haven't necessarily had this my entire life. I'm not an anxious person usually.

Exactly.

It's like a flag. That's like, oh, maybe, maybe hormones are the path forward that you just need to balance.

And the difference of what you just explained, one was treating the symptom. Here's some medicine for anxiety, and the other is treating cause. Right? You're better to treat the root cause. If we just treat the symptom, then There will continue to be further symptoms because you've not taken care of the main issue, which is the root cause.

Mm-hmm.

So you're putting a bandaid on it, right? You're putting a bandaid on blood loss when you just needed to stop the blood loss. So, you know, it's in— and, and again, it's generally gonna be, I've never had this issue before. Oh my gosh, where did this come from? Why, why all of a sudden am I having this? As opposed to, I've always had this all my life.

Okay.

You know, I, I, I'm not going to say that if you're somebody who's been anxious all your life, just because, you know, say you're a female that's always had anxiety and now that you've turned 40, you're like, oh, I'm just gonna get some progesterone and I'll be better.

Yeah.

No, because you weren't low in your 20s, that's not your cause. Right. And, and that gets into something that you had brought up earlier when you asked me about one of the neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are what work within our brain, and our gut makes a lot of those neurotransmitters. But progesterone is a precursor also and can affect neurotransmitters. So, you know, maybe we'll go into neurotransmitters someday, but right now we're not going to because that's not a hormone, um, and that's just a completely different process. Completely different testing.

Well, and to give, to give context to that, you know, when we were talking about it, I noticed when I was researching progesterone that there was mention of GABA and your GABA interaction. And it kind of brought the conversation that we had to prep for this episode down a route that wasn't necessarily what we wanted to talk about, but Case in point, when you're talking to somebody who's not a specialist, that's the information that's out on the internet, talking like it's all of a sudden it's going down that path. And that—

Right.

You're talking to somebody who knows what they're doing, like Sherri does, because she is the hormone replacement extraordinaire here in Omaha. Like, she will tell you very clearly, this is what they're going for, this is what that information means. But if you're thinking your hormones are out of balance, then this is what we need to be focusing on over here. Again, back to the specialty.

And very much so, because now you look at, like you had talked about the GABA. So let's say you have low progesterone, so you have low GABA. Are we going to just replace— are we just going to treat the symptom or the cause? Because as we said, if we treat that symptom, if you see somebody who doesn't know anything about hormones, but they treat that symptom and they replace your GABA for that neurotransmitter, What about the other symptoms we talked about? Low progesterone, right? Enlarged prostate, low libido, erectile dysfunction. Um, what did we say? Some bone loss. You know, um, yeah, some bone loss can— right, the dilation of the blood vessels and cardiovascular. So we replaced that GABA, but we didn't— this is the exact example— we didn't take care of the The main cause, the root cause. And so then we still deal with the side effects of having the low progesterone, the other side effects. So now all of a sudden we're treating the symptoms and replacing your GABA, and we're trying to figure out why you have erectile dysfunction. And now we're giving you a drug for an enlarged prostate. Then we're giving you a drug because you don't have the dilation of your vessels and you have hypertension. And then we're— so now we are giving you 5 drugs. To treat the symptoms that could potentially have been cured by replacing your progesterone. Hmm.

So back to the car analogy, we might have picked up a nail in one of them tires. We're just trying to fill that tire with different types of air, but really we just need to pull the nail and plug it, right?

So that it can be put— put that progesterone back in it.

There we go. See?

Yep. It's like we're just getting multiple nails and, you know, we just keep plugging away, pun intended, um, and, and treating that symptom but never treating the cause. And that—

Mm-hmm.

I've simplified it. You know, I don't ever want anybody— and I say this, that, you know, our podcast, we're not diagnosing and treating anything. We don't want you to listen to this and go to your doctor and say, you know, if you just gave me progesterone, I wouldn't have You know, I'd be all that large prostate. I wouldn't have hypertension, and I wouldn't have this, and I wouldn't have this. Just give me some darn progesterone. I put it on a podcast.

I heard it on the Balanced Body Podcast right here.

We only wish life was so simple, but sometimes it is, John. Sometimes I I have a patient that for her we are yet to see if the added progesterone is going to fix a. A bleeding issue. She takes it orally. I've added it topically. But changing her diet, and I'm kind of going down a little bit of it. I know we're finishing up here, so I'm going a little bit down a rabbit hole here, but I just wanted to say sometimes it can be so very simple. We changed her diet. She had had a stroke. She gained 22 pounds. She has now in the last 6 weeks lost 19 of that weight.

Wow. Oh wow!

By taking five of the end, by five of the most inflammatory foods out of her diet, and her doctor is thrilled and at the same time in shock because it was so simple.

Man, if it was only that simple for all the time. Anybody who scheduled a fifteen-minute call with you, Sherry.

Yes. So go to my website. www.balancedbodymedical.com, a free 15-minute discovery call, and we can find out, and I can talk to you to find out, can I help you? Um, is this potentially really a hormonal imbalance? I won't diagnose you over the phone, but you get this free 15-minute phone call. I always say, if I can't help you, I can find somebody who can. You can come to Omaha and see me. And, uh, I mean, I need to see you at least once a year in person. Um, if you're in Omaha already, we decide on that phone call if it's worth that time or not.

Sounds— that's— that part— that part of the process sounds very easy. So—

Very easy and painless.

Painless.

Painless.

I love that. See, for anybody who's got white coat syndrome, The painless part sounds amazing.

Yes. And so then next week we have one hormone left.

Can you believe it? Now, I really loved how we positioned progesterone as like the non-trouble person in the equation.

The zen hormone.

Yeah, right. The zen hormone that doesn't have as much What to do, like estrogen and testosterone. Right. Would you say BHRT is similar? Like, are these the two wheels that just are there chugging along, along for the ride?

So BHRT, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. That's what I do. That's the DHEA. I know all these acronyms, John.

Oh, I ruined it.

Didn't ruin it. Acronyms, acronyms. But it's good because I don't believe that we've ever said that. What is BHRT? Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. And I brought it up today, but we didn't. So acronyms. DHEA. DHEA is the one that people kind of forget about. People forget about DHEA. I saw a provider for 5, 6 years and she never once brought it up.

Really?

But she also didn't treat cortisol. She didn't do full thyroid panels, and she only did 3 out of the 4 wheels.

Sometimes that 4th wheel is the one that gets left behind. It's the less squeaky of the wheels in some respects.

It really is. It's the less squeaky of the wheels, but it's— it has a lot of importance. Because it affects more than just hormones. It affects our adrenal glands.

Oh man, so it's the sneaky wheel.

It's the sneaky wheel. Oh man.

Yep. Well, I can't wait to dive in on DHEA.

That's right.

When we're talking about BHRT.

And don't make me try to say what DHEA is for because I don't think I could.

Well, we'll do that next time.

Yes, we'll try to say that next time.

I'll practice. All right, 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 Street in Rockbrook Plaza.

Thank you.