C’mon, get happy:
How to reset your hormones
By your late thirties or early forties, you could be undergoing a profound hormonal shift that affects your body and, more particularly, your brain, and that can feel bewildering, frustrating and liberating all at the same time. Even if you don’t have symptoms such as hot flushes, perimenopause is a critical window for health and an inflection point when small health problems can, if not addressed, amplify into larger and more permanent ones.
The good thing about this window is that it’s also a time when small changes can pay big dividends for your future health. And one of the first steps is to address the way these hormonal changes impact your nervous system. For example, you may be noticing changes in how you handle stress, how deeply you sleep and even how you digest food. The solution is to support the health and resilience of your nervous system with smart strategies and essential nutrients. Doing so will not only help you feel better now, but could reduce your long-term risk of conditions such as depression and dementia.
Hit the stress reset button
Meet your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part that promotes relaxation, sleep, digestion and healing. One of the best ways to activate it: stimulate the vagus nerve, which is a cranial nerve that communicates directly from the brain to the body. Increasing vagus nerve activity dials down the fight-or-flight response and acts as a built-in ‘stress-reset button’. Simple ways to stimulate the vagus nerve and calm the parasympathetic nervous system include walking in
nature (green exercise), finishing a shower with a blast of cold water, spending time with people or animals, and long exhales such as with yoga. Traditional hatha yoga poses that combine long exhales with hands raised above your head have been found to stimulate the vagus nerve, promote relaxation and improve mood in midlife women.
Curb cortisol
If you’re so bone-tired that you’re wondering about adrenal fatigue, then you’re thinking about your HPA axis, which is the communication between your brain and adrenal or stress glands. When your HPA axis is functioning well, you produce higher amounts of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline only when you need them, and then turn them off again.
However, when your HPA axis is overstimulated, you make chronically higher levels of cortisol and adrenaline, which contributes to depression, insomnia, fatigue, reduced muscle mass, low libido, impaired immune function and insulin resistance.
Activating the vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system is one way to stabilise and regulate the HPA axis. Another strategy is to allocate more time for rest, something that’s tough to do in our nonstop world.
If there was ever a time to take a break from a hectic schedule, it’s now during your forties, because the hormonal shifts of perimenopause can have a temporarily destabilising effect on the HPA axis and put you at risk of higher levels of stress and cortisol than at other times in your life. Your body needs you to slow down, and if you can’t find a way to do that, your body will find one for you.
From a dietary perspective, the best way to lower cortisol and help your HPA axis is to maintain stable blood sugar. That means avoiding dessert-type foods and eating protein with every meal, especially breakfast. Several nutritional supplements can stabilise the HPA axis, including B vitamins and magnesium.
Consider your circadian rhythm
The hormonal changes in your forties can disrupt circadian rhythm, which is important because every cell in your body has a ‘clock’ and is on a twenty-four-hour schedule. That’s why an out-of-sync circadian rhythm affects not only your sleep, but also mood, digestion, bones, HPA axis and even metabolism or your ability to maintain a healthy body weight.
Fortunately, there are several ways to synchronise circadian rhythm and it all starts with supporting a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is like the lead metronome or master clock, keeping all the other clocks in sync. It does so by coordinating the release of various neuronal and hormonal signals, including cortisol from the HPA axis and melatonin from the pineal gland.
In the simplest terms, cortisol is your daytime or daylight hormone, and melatonin is your darkness hormone. Melatonin promotes sleep and has many other jobs, such as maintaining healthy digestion, immune function and metabolism.
Here’s what can help: blue wavelength light, which is strongest in the morning, tells your brain it’s daytime. So, start your day with a morning walk. And at night, try dimming your screen or putting it away an hour or two before bed.
Eating protein by 10am also helps: it sends beneficial signals to the ‘clock genes’ that regulate insulin and metabolism, which in turn can help regulate circadian rhythm, improve sleep and even promote weight loss.
“If you can’t find a way to slow down, your body will find one for you.”
– Lara Briden