Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life

An excerpt from the book by Dr. Claudia Welch

When we go through stressful times, we survive them by living on “credit,” borrowing from our reserves of good health. When the stressful time passes, we regroup and rebuild. Trouble arises when stress is prolonged and our reserves become too depleted. We no longer have the resources to combat the effects of the excess stress hormones in our systems. An overabundance of stress hormones outweighs the nourishing effects of our sex hormones and leads to the breakdown of bones, skin, muscles, and brain tissue. This is when we start feeling seriously off-kilter and require serious repair. While there is always hope that we can regain our health, it will be an uphill climb. It is far easier to maintain our health than regain it.

Eastern medicine teaches us that humans are an aspect of nature and are governed by her laws. Our minds are individual mirrors of the cosmic consciousness and our bodies are microcosms that reflect the state of the world around us. What happens to the one is reflected in the other. For example, look at what happens in the macrocosm of the economic world. When we experience financial crisis, often borne of spending money we don’t have year after year, it becomes a sticky prospect to fully regain economic health.

In the microcosm of the world that is a woman’s body, it is not uncommon for her to outspend her energetic and nutritional resources. Between holding down a job, maintaining relationships, and caring for her family, a woman often blows through the energy she “earns” from sleep, good food, and good company. Her daily needs repeatedly outpace her daily intake of energy. The result? She has to dip into her reserves, which depletes her core nourishment. This is no more sustainable than spending money we don’t have. Just as there comes a time when we can no longer ignore financial debt, there comes a time when energy deficit becomes unsustainable. When that happens, it is not only economies that need bailouts. Our bodies and minds do, too.

How does hormonal imbalance come into this picture? When a woman is stressed, her body releases stress hormones. These hormones make her hyper-vigilant and they key up her nervous system until it is hypersensitive. In this state, she begins to experience even benign events as critical situations. This, in turn, stimulates the release of even more stress hormones. A vicious cycle begins. There is no easy resolution to the stress, because it is caused by not only external factors but ongoing internal factors, such as the woman’s desire to meet all of her family’s needs, her boss’s needs, her friends’ needs, and her own expectations.

The long-term oversaturation of a woman’s cells by stress hormones throws her hormonal balance out of whack and triggers a host of maladies. True, some stressors are beyond our control: the death of loved ones, natural disasters, or the loss of a job, for example. But others stressors are ours to relieve, such as the stress created by our worldviews and values, our choices about what we deem essential or desirable in our lives, and the efforts we make to achieve those things. Credit problems are initiated in part by the belief that we need more than we can afford. To acquire or achieve those things, we put ourselves under stress so routinely that it becomes habitual. And as with all habits, we stop noticing we are doing it. We become so chronically stressed, we may not even realize it’s not our natural state.

Maybe we know intellectually that our lives are stressful and need changing. Maybe we know this physically, as our bodies send us distress signals like headaches, irritable bowels, sleeplessness, hot flashes, feelings of tightness in our throats or chests, or overwrought emotions. Maybe we hear these pleas from our bodies, but we don’t know how to stop running, pushing, overreaching ourselves. We are afraid that if we stop, something terrible will happen. We’ll lose our jobs. Our lovers will leave us. Our families will collapse. Our personal worlds will come crashing down around our ears. So we keep going, going, going. And our hormonal balance becomes the victim.