Do you experience constant stress, anxiety, exhaustion, or overwhelm?
Have you ever been through something traumatic? It could be childhood trauma, a divorce, some breakup of any kind, financial hardship – maybe you're an entrepreneur and you work all hours of the day.
Or perhaps you’re a parent, especially with more than one child.
If you identify with any of these things, there's a really good chance that you're living off of stress hormones: cortisol and adrenaline.
And that is preventing you from living in a state of balance.
Essentially, living off of stress hormones is creating something called metabolic chaos. In this state, your adrenal glands, which are the gas tank of the human body, can no longer function well. We have taken too much energy from them. It's like stealing from the energy bank. You have to pay it back with exhaustion and anxiety, and if you've ever been tired but wired, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Your thyroid is the furnace and the thermostat of the human body. And you need adequate thyroid hormone inside of your cells to make and maintain your energy. So, if you are completely exhausted, if your hair is falling out, and you are constipated, there is a really good chance your thyroid is not able to provide you the energy that you need because you're locked into a whirlpool-like pattern of living off of stress hormones.
Living off of stress hormones also depletes really key neurotransmitters in the brain. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that are the foundation of our hormonal balance.
You've probably heard of serotonin, which is our feel-good inhibitory neurotransmitter. It makes us feel calm and at peace and able to sleep, and it also helps to fix hot flashes.
Then there’s dopamine, which is a wonderful excitatory neurotransmitter. When dopamine is in balance, we feel excited and motivated, and we also feel relaxed and happy at the same time. These are wonderful ways to feel, but we can't feel like that when this system is depressed.
And the brain experiences collateral damage from living off of stress hormones, as does your entire Central Nervous System. There's damage that happens to something called your myelin sheath, which is the electrical insulator of your nerve cells that keeps them protected.
And when you have been through something traumatic, which 80% of us have – life can be a lot sometimes – it's like taking sandpaper to electrical tape. That's what's happening to your myelin sheath, and we need to coat it and calm it and soothe it with a honey-like substance to actually repair it.
We can pull out of this cycle of living off of stress hormones, by working on all four systems at the same time.
And blood sugar can be regulated once again because insulin and cortisol have an inverse relationship. Insulin is the hormone that regulates your blood sugar. But when you are living off of stress hormones, you get hangry. If you ever become angry when you get hungry, this is the sign.
Or maybe you get spacey, can't think anymore, or get anxious when you're hungry? These are signs you're locked into this pattern, and that all four systems need to be addressed and need to be healed. This way, you will stop living in your Sympathetic Nervous System – your fight-or-flight nervous system – where your body constantly feels like it's in danger, and this shifts you into living in your Parasympathetic Nervous System (a.k.a your rest-digest-and-heal nervous system).
This is where all the healing in the human body happens. And when you do the work to live in that nervous system, you will be rewired.
