Episode #117: ​​The Stress Response Root Cause

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast, where in today’s episode, we are going to dive into our first PCOS root cause of our mini-series on what is going on in the root causes and how are they connected to the symptoms of PCOS. We’ll get into all of this. But symptoms of PCOS are really just the tip of the iceberg of what’s happening deeper in our metabolic and endocrine health. Without further ado, let’s dive into today’s root cause of the stress response.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair podcast where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek, and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast where we are diving into the stress response. And before we fully get into cortisol and all things in the hormonal realm of the stress response root cause, I I want to just back up a second and review a little bit of what we talked about last week. We’re currently starting a mini-series here diving into the hormones and their root causes and what’s causing that dysfunction, and then how is that connected to the external symptoms that we experience with PCOS. This way you can understand a little more of how all of the root causes are interconnected and how they’re different. If you missed last week’s episode or it’s been a little while since you’ve listened to it, I recommend you jump back and start there because all of these episodes are very, very connected and build off of each other. Also, I want to remind you that my terminology of how I explain what’s going on in the hormonal metabolic endocrine chemical sphere of our bodies is my unique way of explaining it.

When I say something like a stress response, we get what that means. That’s not a medical term, your doctor is not going to be like, oh, you have stress response PCOS they’re going to say, you have PCOS, you’re experiencing these symptoms. Would you like to try birth control? or metformin has been helpful with PCOS. They’re going to continue talking about PCOS like that. We’re going beyond that to start to explain what is going on in our lifestyle that is affecting what’s going on inside of our body, and then how that’s coming back around to worsen or repair our PCOS hormones. That’s not something that you’re going to hear your doctor talk about. The terminology I’m using is completely my own way of talking about it. It may mimic other people that you hear talking about it, but these are just my best ways of trying to explain it to women on a more practical, less research, technical, medical jargon type of way. All of what we’re talking about is based in pathophysiology, so it’s all based in science. It’s all based in research. The things that I tell you are a combination of well-researched things, although nothing in PCOS is that well-researched, unfortunately, as well as what I have seen in my own experience, as well as my own experience working with hundreds of women and speaking with hundreds of women and other experts in the field of fertility and women’s health and health and fitness, and putting all of that together to try to help explain to you what is going on in our root causes. What I’m really trying to say there is, don’t get hung up on the terminology that I’m using. Use it to help you better understand it but if you go and Google it, you’re going to go down a whole different route because it’s unique to me.

Last week, we talked about the root causes. As a quick recap, these include the base of the pyramid. Basically, think of the pyramid again. If you haven’t listened, again, go back and listen because we talked about the pyramid, at the base of the pyramid, we have cortisol, that’s your stress hormone. That’s the one we’re going to be talking about primarily today. As you move up the pyramid, then we move into insulin. Then as we move up further, we move into inflammation. Then as we move up further, we have a disarray of hormone dysregulation, as well as maybe some nutritional deficiencies. This may have been brought about by other diseases. It’s more superficial. This is where we’re getting into maybe a little bit more superficial lifestyle things. If we have the basis fixed, like we’ve fixed our cortisol or more or less brought our cortisol into balance, our insulin into balance, and our inflammation is subdued, then if we’re still seeing some symptoms, we’re dealing with some of the aftermath chaos, basically, if you will.

Those are the more superficial things, and then that leads straight into those hormones are affecting and leading to our symptoms but essentially, going up that pyramid, each thing from the bottom affects the next thing up and so forth. Cortisol can very much, as you’ll see today, affect insulin. Insulin does not affect cortisol as much. If we have high insulin, it doesn’t necessarily signal the release of cortisol, whereas if we have high cortisol, it will signal the release of insulin. Again, go back and listen so you can review about last week. But for right now, what we’re going to get into is the stress response root cause. Where I want to start with this is what do I mean by stress response?

We all experience and perceive stress differently in our life. Some people find being late very stressful. Some people, my husband, I’ve watched him, it’s like he’s completely and totally unfazed by the fact that he’s late, although he’s driving fast and he’s still rushing and he’s still more on edge but if you checked in with how is he feeling, he is not anxious, stressed about being late. He is, however, going through the motions of, I need to get there quickly. But he sees it almost as more exciting, whereas I see it more as, I really need to get my act together. I’m such a mess. I feel more stressed, more visibly stressed. I use this example because how we perceive stress, how we think about stress, how we take a stressful situation or a high velocity situation or a highly charged situation, and how we deal with it, how we think about it, how we feel about it, what physical reactions, do we start getting sweaty, do we start having our heart rate? And then also what emotional reaction do we have? Do we start beating ourselves up about it? Do we start feeling fear or anxiety, those things? How we react to a situation is so unique person to person and so it’s important as we begin this conversation about their stress response to point out that how our body is perceiving these reactions is actually quite similar. So someone who is like my husband, who is almost thriving on this, I feel more alive. This is exciting. I have to get there quickly and almost heightened awareness versus someone who is almost falling into a puddle of despair over, I’m late now I don’t know what to do, and I’m losing my mind. There’s different responses to the same situation. Both of these are creating a fight or flight response in our body. They are creating an adrenaline release. They’re creating a cortisol release. Essentially, at the primal level, no matter how we’re handling the situation on the surface, no matter if we look like we are completely cool as a cucumber, whether we are flying off the handle, whether we are energized, whether we are drained, however we are showing up in this stressful situation, at a primal level, our body is seeing it as a threat.

At a primal level, when our body sees something as a threat, we go into a fight or flight response. This helps us to be more cognitively clear. This helps us to either hide or to survive. Maybe it’s shutting down hunger so that we can survive if we’re under attack, so we’re not going low blood sugar all of a sudden. It literally affects all of these systems in our body in response to a stimulus and how we respond to that stimulus is actually less relevant than how our primal self is responding to that stimulus.

When our primal response is to release cortisol or to have that fight-and-flight response, that’s where we start to see problems. Now, we want that response there. That’s a really important vital response. It’s a safety mechanism. It’s also what gives us energy throughout the day. Just simply waking up in the morning, we get this nice, lovely surge of cortisol, or we should. Then it tapers off to allow us to slow down and relax at the end of our day. This is normal. It’s a good thing. Also, if there’s an emergency, we want to have that adrenaline reserve where we can have that fight flight response. Where we get ourselves into trouble is when we live in that, and it becomes a chronic state of being. Maybe one minute it’s because we’re running late. Maybe it’s another minute because of an interpersonal relationship. Maybe another minute It’s because we’re overthinking something, or maybe it’s because we’re building up anxiety over going into our second year of infertility, and it’s going to happen for me, or maybe it’s from some grief and sadness over disappointments or some tragedy in your life. But whatever it is that is causing this constant amount, and we live in a very fast-paced society, it’s very easy to become comfortable with this high stress living.

When we don’t care for our high stress living, our primal self goes into a constant state, maybe not the highest state of fight and Maybe you can rev it up a little bit from time to time, but it’s living in a heightened state more times than not. When we’re living in that, that’s when we start to develop this stress response, constantly high cortisol, and at some point, we may even drain our cortisol and go into almost a cortisol crash, or we’ve used it all up and our body is no longer responding. It’s like we’ve responded so much, we’ve called wolf almost so much, or we’ve exhausted our cortisol system to where it’s not giving enough, and then we really feel the fatigue. Then it’s important to note that not only those big stressors, the emotional stressors, the busyness and deadline stressors, the running late, or the overwhelming stressors, interpersonal, family, life, all those stressors. Besides those, there are a different category of things that our body at a primal level perceives as stress.

Those include calorie deficits. If you are someone who has a history of crash dieting or extreme dieting, where you really cut those calories more than about 1-200 calories per day in deficit, and you did that for periods of time to drop weight quickly and then regained that weight when you stopped living in a calorie deficit or yo-yo dieting, sometimes it’s called. If you have a history of doing that, your body has been living in states of extreme stress because to our body, it doesn’t understand that I’m choosing not to feed you. What it understands at a primal level is we must be in a time of famine and starvation and we may die. From that standpoint, our body goes into a very fearful response and goes into conservation mode and shuts down the metabolism and does all of these things that it doesn’t come back out of the diet and then trust that everything’s fine and that’s not going to happen again. Especially when we do it repeatedly. We train our body be fearful of starvation. Our body doesn’t look at it the same way as we do where it’s like, Oh, there’s plenty over here on this leg, and there’s plenty right here on my tummy. We don’t need to worry about starving. It looks at it like, I’m not getting fed today, therefore, we don’t know when our next meal is coming from, and it goes into a severe stress response.

Another stress response that we don’t always perceive as stress, in fact, it actually has a stress release, and that exercise. This is an area where I actually disagree with most people, most experts, when it comes to this topic on PCOS and for a lot of reasons. But there is research that points to when you’re exercising, you get a rise in cortisol. The longer and more intense and more endurance, so long distance or long time frame, intense workouts, the more that bump in cortisol. Now, I would argue that for the most part and for most people, this bump in cortisol is fairly negligible and the benefits far away the downsides because that small bump in cortisol is accompanied by many, many, many other hormones that are extremely valuable. So all of the endorphins, all the serotonin, all of the feel-good hormones that come from exercise, all of the calming hormones that come from exercise are really good. This is where, though, for someone who’s dealing with stress response, PCOS, there are some significant exercise considerations but I also think that this one area where you could work against yourself a little bit with the stress response, I think that one, if you’re doing all the other things right, this would work against you mildly. Then two, it’s a very easy one to put into check, and all of the benefits are so important that I wouldn’t say stop it altogether. I wouldn’t say just go to yoga and low-intensity workouts. I think that the intense workouts, they create an entirely different benefit, and they shouldn’t be overlooked entirely.

Also, This is a small sector of PCOS women. It is oftentimes an adjoining root cause, which we’ll talk about as we go, but it’s not high percentage of stress response being the primary and only root cause of PCOS for most women. To tell women that exercise may be harmful for PCOS or that intense or certain types of exercise may be harmful for PCOS is such a disservice because when we deal with things like insulin or inflammation, exercise comes into such a huge play. It actually does with stress response, too, when we see how to repair those root cause hormones. When it comes to exercise, it’s important to be aware that this can be perceived as a stressor on the body, but it also it’s more of a, we need to understand it. We need to understand what we’re doing. It becomes very individual. How are you feeling after your workout? Are you increasing gradually? Are you going out and just being a weekend warrior? There’s different ways that we can address our PCOS exercise that allows for really, really, really beneficial workouts without the detrimental results.

Those are some things that can cause stress. Now, what is going on, and this is the important part I want you to understand in the point of this particular episode is what is going on When we raise our cortisol, what is happening in the body and how is this affecting PCOS? Cortisol and stress affects us in two ways. One, when we’re experiencing stress, and again, we’re talking about stress at that primal level. However you think about stress and however you feel stress in your life, we’re going deeper than that to how is your body perceiving at a very primal, primitive level.

Then another that we can have androgen excess is that the stress hormone. So one, the stress tells our adrenals to release extra androgens. It can also tell our body to release more cortisol. So now we have excess androgens and excess cortisol going through our bloodstream. That extra cortisol on a chronic level is going to tell our body to release more insulin. The reason it releases more insulin is it wants to get that blood sugar, any blood sugar it can, into our cells because we need that heightened fight and flight response. It raises our insulin.

That excess insulin tells our ovaries to release more androgens. Now we have even more androgens into our system and flowing around through our blood. That’s telling our LH. It raises our LH, which messes with our FSH, which messes with our ovulation, which messes with our progesterone, which messes with our periods, which messes with our fertility, which also, again, mess with the other PCOS symptoms of acne, of hair loss, of hair growth on the face, hair loss on the head. Then having insulin present in the system. Now, again, insulin is a good hormone that has its time and place but when it’s just circulating around aimlessly, you know what it tells our body to do? It says, store fat, don’t burn it. If you’re trying to lose a little bit of weight and you have excess insulin constantly circulating your system, you’re fighting yourself. On one hand, you’re in a calorie deficit saying, lose weight. Your calorie deficit, if it’s too aggressive, is increasing your cortisol because your body’s stressed. Then that increase of cortisol is raising your insulin, the insulin saying, don’t lose weight. This is a very vicious cycle. To calm all of this down, it’s really important to understand how that stress response is going, what could our body be perceiving as stress, and to dive into that type of root cause.

Again, as we wrap up today, I want to remind you that these root causes, everyone has every single one of them that has PCOS. Actually, probably in humans in general, but in PCOS, we are more sensitive to these. We tend to have them show up at a younger age, and our body is actually just more sensitive to both the root causes and the environmental stimuli that triggers these root causes. We’re just a little bit more sensitive to all of it, so we see it show up bigger, stronger but we all have all of these. We all have the tendency towards inflammation if we don’t care for our health. We all have the stress response. If we’re not being mindful of it, we all have the insulin effect, whether or not it’s as strong or as early on in life as other people. Even though ours in PCOS tends to show up earlier, everyone at some point, if they eat certain ways and have certain lifestyle factors, will eventually head towards a prediabetic or diabetic health situation as well, but when we’re seeing what is going on in, say, our root cause, what we’re looking for is what is that primary root cause? What is the one that’s the leading one for us? And so a lot of times we’ll see stress response as a close secondary response to both inflammation and the insulin effect and so you may find that you have these combo ones. Combo ones are completely normal. Essentially, we would just look at what is your primary root cause, focus on the low-hanging fruit of that one. We’ll also incorporating what would be also beneficial for that secondary root cause. These are oftentimes very linked. You see the insulin connection very easily there. There’s a lot of things that overlap and we can start to address in tandem, making our efforts more focused and effective.

I hope that overview of what is even going on in these root causes, because I know I talk about them all the time, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions about, Well, what’s going on? Why is this happening the way it’s happening? I think I have multiple root causes. Well, yes, you might. You may have one that’s prominent. You may have ones that are all fairly lowly. They’re there, but they’re all there. We see different combinations of all of that. It’s just learning how to read what’s going on in our body so that we can care for it, nurture it, and ultimately repair that root cause imbalance and pair our PCOS.

With that, if you have any follow-up questions on this, feel free to find me over at Instagram. My handle is @Nourishedtohealthy. I love hearing from everybody over there. My DMs have been very full. If you have a question and I somehow miss it, feel free to message me again because sometimes they hide in my hidden messages. I’ve been finding those more easily lately because I know to look for them now but if I’ve missed any of your messages, I apologize. Instagram has a way of sometimes hiding them. I don’t know why. With that, until next time. Bye for now.