25 Jan Stress Thyroid Relationship
If you’ve been diagnosed with a thyroid condition + you’re looking for what you need to focus on, stress and adrenals are a HUGE part. Stress reduction is going to be key in encouraging better thyroid balance.
How Stress Affects Thyroid
Thyroid production starts when your brain (specifically your hypothalamus and pituitary) communicates to your thyroid using TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) and tells your thyroid to produce thyroid hormone. Our stress hormone, cortisol, is produced by the adrenals. Just like the thyroid, the adrenals also have the same brain communication from the hypothalamus and pituitary.
When your body creates more cortisol, it suppresses the TSH, which then blocks thyroid hormone production. With low levels of thyroid hormone, hypothyroidism can occur.
When stress is higher, it influence various enzymes within thyroid production and shifts your free thyroid hormone (T3) to reverse T3. Reverse T3 is an inactive form of thyroid hormone, but can compete on the cell with the free thyroid hormone further reducing the amount of free thyroid hormone to communicate with the cell.
If someone has Hashimoto’s (autoimmune condition that causes the immune system to attack to the thyroid), stress can also activate your immune system and trigger more autoimmune activity.
Lab Testing For Adrenals
In addition to your full thyroid panel, testing your adrenals can be really helpful in determining the status of adrenal function. Are your adrenals too high? Too low where it’s hypothalamus pituitary adrenal dysfunction? Is the pattern off, where your cortisol is high in the evening, but low in the morning?
There can be a variety of scenerios that can happen, so it’s important to have a practitioner that understands how to interpret adrenal testing. Blood tests don’t show enough markers. Saliva tests are the 2nd best test because it does show the pattern of cortisol throughout of the day, but saliva only shows free cortisol, which is only 1-3% made by adrenals.
DUTCH hormone testing shows not only free cortisol and patterns, but can show the total output of your adrenals. All of this information is really really valuable (as seen below!)
Ready To Work On Your Stress Thyroid Relationship?
Our team is ready to help you take your stress thyroid relatinoship to the next level – lowering your stress to better your thyroid function. Your next steps is to book a call with our team to sort out a game plan, lab testing, etc. This is a 15 minute call with our team – book it here!
