When it comes to your hormones, stress is all about the adrenal glands. These are a couple of nickel-sized pieces of tissue that can completely make or break your health. The adrenal glands can be affected by diseases, but this is extremely rare and rather straightforward for doctors to diagnose. It is much more common for the adrenal glands to be free of disease but dysfunctional under a large stress load.
The adrenals are different from your other glands in that they make different amounts of hormones as the day goes on. They release a burst of cortisol to wake us up, and they shut it off at night to let us sleep.
Even when a disease or the aging process is the core problem with your hormones, the adrenals still play a role, and here is why: Hormones don’t really do anything until they go inside of your cells. Each cell has a wall around it that lets in just the right amount of hormones at just the right times.
Think of your cell as a castle wall with a drawbridge that only comes down to those who know the password phrase. The password phrase that lets hormones into your cell is “the cortisol rhythm.” The cortisol rhythm is controlled by the adrenal glands. When adrenal hormones are wrecked, it is important to understand what this means. It doesn’t mean they are unable to make hormones; it means their rhythm is disturbed. This is important because you may read that taking cortisol can help if you have low cortisol. At first, this makes sense and seems to fit the strategy for thyroid disease — if you have too little thyroid hormone, take some to replace what is lacking. The problem is that in the case of adrenal stress, low cortisol is not the result of the adrenals being unable to make cortisol. It is the result of all the parts involved in cortisol production being off in their timing. Putting more cortisol into the system just makes the problem worse.
If taking cortisol is not the answer, then what is?
Read the rest of the article at The 3 Things That Wreck Your Hormones (Part 3) | Alan Christianson.
Filed under: adrenal, Rare Diseases | Tagged: adrenal glands, Hormone, stress | Leave a comment »
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