Episode #74: Redefining Stress and Success: Stress Management for PCOS

Perhaps you’ve heard that stress and PCOS are a really bad match and only further the havoc going on in your hormones but saying don’t stress or we should stress less or make sure we manage that stress aren’t really helpful. In today’s episode, we’re going to dive into how stress impacts PCOS first of all and then, more importantly, what does it mean to manage our stress? and how can we practically do that in the midst of the stress that is our day to day life? So let’s get started.

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 today we’re going to be diving into how to manage stress to improve our PCOS hormones. I think first of all, it’s really important to understand how does stress actually impact PCOS and what do I mean by stress? What counts as stress in our life? First of all, stress creates a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol, in turn, increases our insulin, and it turns off and turns on various hormone pathways in our body. So cortisol is a very, very, very strong chemical that has a wonderful place at certain times in our physiology but when we are in constant fight or flight mode, which is what cortisol tends to stimulate in ourselves, it’s this turning us on, preparing us for managing a difficult situation, perhaps a life-threatening situation, which is a really important thing to be able to do at times but it’s also really important to be able to turn off or turn down that chemical response in our body and allow ourselves to rest and recover. So cortisol, stress, it’s not good or bad. It’s really more of a balance between how much of it do we have in our life, think of it like this. If we are constantly, as nice as it sounds, relaxing in a beach chair on the beach, on vacation, rested, getting plenty of vitamin D, enjoying lots of time with friends and family, as relaxed and wonderful as we feel, at some point in time, we get tired of that. We want to get back into the swing of a daily routine and depending on how long it’s been since we’ve had a vacation, the harder it is to imagine wanting to get back into the swing of things but at some point in time, if we give ourselves enough time to rest and recharge, we ultimately do want to get back into the swing of things again.

So again, like everything else on the podcast, it comes down to balance. Cortisol can affect our insulin effect. Cortisol can basically raise our insulin. Through that and through other means, our cortisol can raise our metabolic hormones or create chaos in our metabolic hormones, as well as throw off our androgens. So it can raise the FSH to LH ratio, creating problems with ovulation. It can tank our progesterone, leading to problems with our luteal phase and conceiving. So both ovulation and our luteal phase are really important to make sure our follicular phases too, but cortisol specifically affects the ovulation and luteal phase, which is going to create difficulties with fertility and cortisol also, through the insulin pathway, tells our bodies to not burn fat as energy. So we create a metabolic problem that compounds on itself with weight management and we create a lot of emotional health disturbances. So when we are constantly on edge, it’s like if we are constantly taking in too much caffeine and we’re not allowing ourselves to get good rest and good rejuvenation, having constant cortisol in our system does the same thing.

Now, like I mentioned though, cortisol is not all bad and we’re going to talk about this throughout this episode. There are times where having a burst of cortisol can actually be a really healthy response to a situation. Those are how cortisol and stress related to cortisol can affect our PCOS health. Now, what do I mean by stress? What constitutes as stress? Now, interestingly enough, but right in the middle of this episode, and I edited out because you didn’t want to hear this loud noise, but I got a weather alert on my phone, and it’s like this siren that goes off and even though my phone is on silent, it goes through anyway because it’s a warning system and they’re testing it in our area or whatever. Anyways, this loud alarm all of a sudden goes off in my office. It took me a few minutes. I had to pause the recording and calm back down and it’s funny how I wasn’t even stressed by it. It says it’s a warning, it’s a test, it’s not anything going on. It’s just they’re testing the system, so nothing to worry about. It says it right on there as soon as I look at it. So immediately, I know everything is fine, but it took a while for thatlike, What is going on? Fight or flight response in my body to calm down. The rush of blood to my brain, the shakiness of my hands, the pounding of my heart. These responses bring us to full alert. If we are in danger, we want this response to happen. That’s one version of stress, anything that creates a fight or flight feeling. Anything that startles us, scares us, it could be a near accident on the road, it could be a loud noise, it could be a hostile situation where you felt maybe a little bit threatened. All of those situations happen outside of our control.

Other ways that this can occur is through more of emotional stress, so something that is of discord. So maybe someone at work isn’t happy with us, maybe we messed something up, maybe we’ve hurt a friend’s feelings and we’re feeling stressed about a more emotional and interpersonal situation. Then there is another form of stress that I think is really important to mention, and that is just a constant, busy, rushing, always on the go, almost like an addiction to the doing that we can have and maybe we don’t like it, but we do it. Maybe we don’t know how to end it. Maybe we don’t know how to create pauses. So it’s not necessarily an addiction because we love it, but maybe it’s because we don’t know how to recognize how full our calendar is getting before it gets too full, how much we’re agreeing to do. Maybe we don’t know how to think outside the box of what’s ours, what’s not ours, and how to pace ourselves because sometimes we feel like we’re in a job where just this much is what’s expected of me and so it’s a matter of a black and white matter of either I leave my job or I perform at this level.

And sometimes we have to think outside the box. Sometimes we need to talk to a manager or supervisor. Sometimes if we’re our own boss, running our own business, or a business owner of some sort, or a higher enough executive that our workload is a little bit more under our control, deciding what things we can either delegate and putting in systems and processes to delegate those in a way that we feel good about, or maybe taking some of those things off the to-do list and punting them down the road, even though they may be excellent ideas, they’re not worth losing our health over because we are taking on more than we can handle at any given moment. Those are different ways that stress can creep in. Basically, we can think of stress under a more danger situation. We can think of it as more of an interpersonal and emotional type of stress and then we can also think of it just as having too much on our plate. Now, what are some forms of healthy stress? Sometimes this is where exercise gets a bit confusing in the health and wellness space. I have heard more than one “health expert” recommending against hard, intense exercise if you’re dealing with hormone disorders, or if you have been under any stress, or for any condition that stress may be negative for.

Stress in the generic sense of, Oh, I’m so stressed out, really isn’t good for anybody but that does not mean that exercise that raises cortisol is bad for you. Okay, so maybe doing something like rock climbing or an adrenaline-based sport when you are maxed out stressed in every other area of your life may or may not be a good choice. Now, I say may or may not because probably for most it’s a knot but there are people that almost need that adrenaline to release the cortisol, and then they’re actually able to chill out better after they release it and so there are different personalities, and in every situation, we have to look at what is our personality and what is actually working for me. So for some people, my husband is one of these, he has a very high-paced, stressful job and when he’s in his downtime, he likes to rock climb. He likes to get out and do very strenuous all-day things like summit a mountain, run a long distance and it actually acts as a calming mechanism to get out there and burn off that cortisol and I think the reason why this works, again, this isn’t a study that I’ve read, but theoretically, in my own mind, the way I think of this, is that we are running on so much steam that in order to hit our weekend and shut it off, sometimes for some of us, we almost need to burn off the excess.

Now, for some of us, we are so drained that doing something that requires more adrenaline is even more draining. It depends, I almost think of it like if you’re humming at this really high tune, maybe we need to use up the rest of it so we can come down a little bit. Maybe for some of us, we are struggling to ramp up because we are so burnt out, we can’t even ramp up to that level that life is expecting of us. The last thing we want to do is try to burn off more steam because we can’t even get to that level at baseline. When we look at these different personality types, when we look at these different situations in which stress is a component, there’s going to be a different answer for both of those people. When we think of “positive stress”, such as with exercise or high intensity, maybe high adrenaline sports and activities, leisure time activities, we want to think about what is actually going on with us. Now, this is where I always come back to this. This is everything about health and wellness is so personal. We can’t take one person to recommendation and take it as a rule. We have to look at, well, why are they saying that and does that apply to me? and this is no different in the realm of stress.

So when we think about exercise and stress management, because exercise is so beneficial for stress, and we’re going to come back to this, we don’t want to discount that there are positive forms of stress. Key here, though, is that we have to find the balance of all of them. We don’t want to remove all cortisol from our lives, because honestly, cortisol is a really good thing. We’re talking about it from a negative standpoint here in this podcast episode about stress but on a daily basis, we want our cortisol to rise as we wake up and then naturally lower as the second half of the day unfolds in preparation for winding down for a good night’s sleep. Then we want to have a good night’s sleep, get well rested, and then we want our bodies to naturally start ramping up that cortisol a little before we normally wake up so that we can wake up feeling alert and alive and then again, continue up throughout the morning, but then later on in the day, come back down again and that natural rhythm is what helps us create and maintain a circadian rhythm throughout the day.

Again, cortisol, just like stress, isn’t good or bad. We need to have healthy levels of cortisol in order to have good vitality and energy and all of the things. It’s finding that balance that creates a good, healthy, working system for us with our environment, with our current state of health, and with our body’s needs, just like with every other area of PCOS that we talk about here on the podcast. Before we get into how to manage stress, I think that we need to talk about the mindset of stress. That starts with the fact that stress and busyness have become a status symbol in our cultures. It’s almost a coping mechanism. It’s a power symbol, it’s a success symbol, and it’s one of these toxic traits that is a buzzword now on social media. What’s your toxic trait? Well, considering stress as a status symbol or as a coping mechanism is the toxic trait that we’re talking about here in this episode. So what do I mean by a status symbol? I think that’s pretty straightforward. Being busy means that you are productive. It means that you are in demand. It means that you’re important and you can feel good about yourself because you’re so in demand, so important, and so needed that you have all of these things that people want from you.

Now, that’s great that it’s boosting your self-confidence, but can we do that while not deteriorating our health and having so much on our plate that we never let our cortisol dip down in the evening to relax and enjoy and recover and rejuvenate. There’s nothing wrong with being full of power and energy throughout your day. In fact, that’s an amazing thing. However, being able to almost compartmentalize it, have the correct time for it, and then detach from it and unwind is a practice that most people find a lot harder. Another way that we were talking about stress as a status symbol is that it can actually be a coping mechanism for avoiding too much responsibility. We tell ourselves, we tell people around us, Oh, my goodness, I have so much stress at work. I’m so stressed out right now. I have so much going on. I’m busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. It’s almost one of the first things that we have learned to say to people. Oh, how are you? Oh, I’ve been really busy and it’s almost like a way of apologizing for not getting together more, not texting more, not calling, not checking in, potentially not being available for whatever they’re going to ask you to do and it’s like this shield that we can put up around ourselves of, Oh, I’m so busy, don’t give me anything else. And it allows us to have an easy out without having to be comfortable with a no and so it can become a coping mechanism for dealing with trying to maintain some degree of balance of how much we have going on and I’m not going to say that it’s wrong. I think there’s probably healthier ways of doing that. I think the more that we can just be honest with, That’s not something I need to do right now, or I’m choosing to do other things but there are times where we don’t necessarily want to open a discussion with certain people about why we’re not doing a certain thing at our workplace that’s not really part of our job description, that we’re not volunteering for something, that we’re not helping out at our church, that we’re not taking on some community responsibility in our neighborhood, whatever the thing, sometimes just saying, I’m really busy or too busy for that right now, is a fine way to sidestep an obligation that really doesn’t need to be yours right now.

What I want to caution us about, though, is that self-talk of saying, I’m busy and stressed out. It’s one thing to use it as a polite deflection for a job that we don’t want to take on. It’s another thing to always be telling ourselves, Oh, I’m so busy. Oh, I’m so busy. Oh, it’s too much. Oh, I’m so stressed. Because we almost wind ourselves up with that and instead of being able to be present, be in that mode of powerful and productive and then relaxed and rejuvenating, we can get ourselves in a negative cycle. That brings us to the mindset shift of how can we reimagine our stress? How can we talk about our stress in a different way that our body, at a very cellular level, feels more calm, more present, less pressured, and ultimately can lower the negative cortisol spikes.

When we tell ourselves, I’m so busy. Oh, I’m not getting enough sleep, all these things, we’re making all these excuses and telling ourselves that things are big and scary. When we do our best to remove the things we don’t need to be doing and then think and talk to ourselves about the things that we are doing in a positive way and in a way for feeling on top of it, relaxed about it, and in control of it, all of a sudden, it’s no different than following a recipe. So if you think about you wake up, you have a doable morning routine, you have cut out what doesn’t fit. So you’ve set your alarm, you have set your sleep schedule, you know what time you need to go to bed, and you know what time you get up. You have set enough time in the morning to accomplish the handful of tasks. Maybe it’s a workout, maybe it’s packing your lunch, maybe it’s getting a load of laundry started, whatever it is that you need to do in the morning before you start your day, you have put those in place, you get them done, you go through the motions, you have those habits in place so that it’s not overly taxing to think about and go through. It’s set up for you just to automatically roll through it. You got all those things done. You got all of that off your plate, and it caused no stress. It was almost peaceful.

That’s both a mindset shift as well as taking the mindset shift into action of the practical. Then you head off to work. Your focus is on being powerful, amazing, productive, outstanding, whatever it is, however you want to see yourself at work, with the mindset and the expectation of yourself to take on the priorities and either reschedule or let go of the things that are not necessary to keep yourself in appropriately productive and powerful growth that you want from your career, from your job, and not letting it spill over.

Those of us that are type A struggle with this, we want to outperform, we want to do, do, do. It can be difficult for us to slow down and smell the roses as we go, so to speak. This is where, even at work, we are diligent about the amount that we’re taking on, having it fit into the workday, keeping our focus at the workplace on what we want from the workplace, and then closing the book on the workplace and going home with the expectation of unwinding from our day. Prepping for the next day so we can do it again. Now, you can see where this is like containers in a mindset and shifting throughout the day to different arenas and segments of our life. The same thing goes with connecting with family, connecting with friends. We have to make those shifts. We have to close whatever we’re currently working on, whatever currently thinking about whatever we currently have going on, shut that down, save it for later, just like we would like a computer file, and then turn our attention to be somewhere else. When we feel like we are running a million miles an hour, oftentimes it’s because we’re trying to multitask across different portions of our life. We’re trying to bring work home with us and accomplish something. Well, we’re also supposed to be making dinner. Well, we’re also supposed to be giving attention to our partner. Well, we’re also supposed to be taking our dog for a walk. Well, we’re also supposed to have somehow magically get a workout in and all of a sudden, without hardly doing any of it, we are mentally exhausted. There’s both the actions and the mindset and the ability to put a pin in it for later. Maybe you write yourself a note, maybe you open up a notepad on your phone, and if you have a thought about it, you know right where to put it, and then you can let it go again but you’re training yourself to be present, calm, collected, and purposeful in your moments so that your body feels not spun out in a million directions, but feels like, I’m doing this, I’m doing it well, and then I’m letting it go and doing something else and then even more importantly, the bedtime, you are consciously and focused on relaxing and getting a good night’s sleep.

Those are all ways that we can prioritize our actions and our self-care and our stress reduction in the middle of a very productive, powerful, and action-packed day. It’s not about having to relax and unwind all the time, but it’s knowing when it’s time to relax and unwind. When it’s time to connect and be with people. When it’s time to be productive and engaged. When it’s time to ramp up in the morning and start our day feeling on top of things. When it’s time to start wrapping it up so that we can feel like we completed our day and now we can unwind and relax. With those basic setup of how we want to address our mindset and our actions around stress, what about when we are actually in the midst of a cortisol surge from stress? Maybe similar to what I just talked about when the alarm went off on my phone. Maybe when we realize something really stressful with a relationship, maybe a health problem of a loved one. Maybe it’s the betrayal of a loved one where a friend was gossiping about us or shared something that we didn’t want shared, and now we’re having to deal with some social things that we find stressful. Maybe we just got in a car accident. How do we take those moments where our body goes into this fight-or-flight response? We can feel the physiological, actual effects happening in real time in our body or maybe at the end of the day, you’re going into this just anxiety attack of instead of being able to close your eyes and unwind, your mind starts going because there’s finally space for it to start going and all of the anxieties start attacking you. What can we do in those moments? Okay, so a couple of things with that.

First of all, getting regular exercise can really help with this and that’s one of those reasons why sometimes a cortisol spike due to exercise can actually have this effect of calming our bodies down, not just during or right after exercise, but in the 24 hours of time that we included an exercise program. That’s one of the huge benefits of exercise. It helps burn through some of that cortisol. It helps to blunt the ability of our anxiety to take over and heighten to the panic attack stage of anxiety that it sometimes can. So exercise can be a huge tool. All kinds of exercise: strength training, cardio, if you want something really calming to help wind down in the evening, stretching or yoga, or even more of a meditative, deep breathing type of exercise where you’re just focusing on different breathing patterns and there’s many different breathing patterns. You can Google and watch how people do them but I’m not going to sit and breathe into my microphone here for you on the podcast, because that would probably just be weird but there’s many breathing routines that you can go through to help clear your mind, calm it down when stress and anxiety strike.

Another, I think, really important thing when it comes to anxiety is if you’re finding that it is debilitating, you definitely want to see a specialist. I am by no means a specialist when it comes to anxiety. I have dealt with my own bouts of anxiety from various things in my life, and so I’m a little bit aware of some tools that have worked for me but if you are really struggling with bouts of anxiety, I want you to definitely go and seek some professional assistance with that but some things that you can do at home, also include recognizing that anxiety is a form of worry or a form of concern over past events. So something maybe had happened in the past and you’re worrying about it happening again, or something that has not happened and you’re worrying about it happening and it’s this extreme worry that creates almost this inability to focus on anything else, and it can be all-cumbersome, and it can really raise our cortisol levels, and mess with our health and mess with our emotional health, our mental health, and our physical health. I think one of the things that has always helped me is, and I learned this technique in college when I would do a fair amount of rock climbing on the weekend and it’s this weird phenomenon when you’re rock climbing, and probably many people have not rock climbs. Let me just explain. When you’re out there hanging on this head of a cliff, even though you are tied into a rock or into a rope, I’m sure most of you can imagine that if you look down at your feet or you’re trying to make a hard move and you feel like you might pop off the rock, so to speak, even though you are attached to a rope and you technically know in your mind that you should be fine, it is very, very, very uncomfortable, and it creates a stress response. Your legs and feet will actually start to shake. Your arms and hands start to shake, your muscles start to tire and fatigue, which stresses you out even more because you need those muscles as you’re hanging onto the side of a cliff. Plus, there is nothing more stress-inducing when you’re climbing than your feet starting to shake, because now these two things that you are trying to balance on are shaky. I had to learn, as part of rock climbing, that I had the mental power, the mindset power to calm myself down and it was like this slightly irrational, but really irrational because I was tied in. I had a harness and a rope and I was safe. Irrational fear of heights all of a sudden while climbing on the side of a cliff and I would have to mentally talk myself down. Sometimes I would even sit back on the rope and feel that I was being held, that I was safe, that I was secure, sometimes I wouldn’t come off the rock because I was afraid that I would slip off to where it’d be hard to get back to that position. Not afraid in a scared sense, but I didn’t want that to happen but I would lean into that rope and recenter myself and take a deep breath.

So instead of leaning into the anxiety, I would lean out and take a deep breath, recenter myself, and amazingly, my feet would stop shaking and that practice has been something that I have extrapolated into when I start feeling nervous, when I start feeling anxious about something, when I start feeling overwhelmed, is tapping into, What am I afraid of? What am I worrying about? and realizing that while sure, anything is possible, it could happen. I’m worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet and so that means I have one, the ability to set things up to go differently and two, it may not happen. Wasting my energy right now is not assisting myself and by taking those deep breaths, by recentering my thoughts, I can feel my cortisol go down, I can feel the stress response go down, I can feel myself be ready to have a good night’s sleep. Now, in a very small way, when my phone alarm went off, that’s exactly what I did. I felt my heart racing, I felt and I’m like, Oh, my goodness. Why is this alarm going off? and you start this confusion, and you have to take stock of the situation.

Realize that that just made my adrenaline go up. Take a few deep breaths. I realized that, you know what? That was scary, but it’s actually a really good thing. I know my alarm system on my phone now works. That means I’m actually even more safe than I realized because if there was some weather warning in my area, I would get the alert. When we reframe our thoughts from that, we can actually very quickly calm ourselves down instead of staying agitated for minutes, hours, or even the full day or week, depending on the situation that we’re dealing with. This is something that, again, is so, so, so personal.

As we wrap up today, I think it’s really important that we realize there is not a one size fits all when it comes to dealing with our stress. I think that it’s really empowering to remind ourselves that so much of the things that cause stress in our life are, if we choose to see them this way, very reframeable, very in our own minds that we are working up and we have the ability to also calm them down and then external stressors are things that we can still look at how do we want to approach them. Are they all things that we need to be doing? Or can we space them out? Can we let some of them go? Can we ask for assistance? Can we ask for an extension? Noticing and learning from where we’re currently at to take less on, to keep our commitments manageable, and to use the tools that we do have of a good night’s sleep, good exercise, good mindset, and reframing the way that we talk about our stressful situations, and the ways that we take time to breathe and ground ourselves throughout the day so that we don’t feel as at the mercies of our stresses, and also using the day to have different focuses so that we can not feel pulled in a million different directions, but more engaged, more present, more intentional and then that in itself can help our body to succeed without feeling so stressed because some of the things, even though we feel like we’re handling it, can make our bodies feel almost dizzy because they’re getting pulled in so many different directions.

So there you have it. I would love to hear what you find stressful in your day. This is just the beginning of the conversation of stress in PCOS, each individual person has such unique stressors, and I think maybe a great exercise for you to do is think about where are you perceiving or experiencing the most stress in your life? and what are one or two ways, from the way that we talked about it today in this episode, that you can either reframe them in your mind or through actions, readjust or re evaluate how you’re committing to certain things to assist in easing that stress impact on your health. And if you feel like sharing them, I would love to hear from you in my direct messages on Instagram, you can find me @Nourishedtohealthy. And until next time, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS Fertility Meal Guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.