Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Bloom After Baby podcast. This is Jen. I'm recording a solo episode today on kind of a hot topic right now. This is kind of a unique episode. This is one of the hills that I am going to die on at the moment. If you spend much time on
Speaker: social media, looking at wellness accounts. You might be coming across this term nervous system regulation or your nervous system is dysregulated, high cortisol, and some of the symptoms of stress and anxiety associated with high cortisol. And the reason I want to talk about this today is because a lot of the information you're seeing around these topics is
Speaker: kind of inaccurate and really missing the mark as far as management. I think that some of the wellness and health experts or influencers talking about these topics might just be sort of misinformed. Unfortunately, I think there's also a lot of opportunistic and even kind of predatory behavior trying to sell products that really aren't useful for conditions related to
Speaker: anxiety and stress and are really some unhelpful gimmicks and in some situations potentially harmful. Okay, so let's just get into it. We're talking about nervous system, dysregulation as a cause of anxiety and symptoms related to anxiety.
Speaker: and this term nervous system regulation as being kind of a goal that we're striving for. Let's take a step back and look at what we're even talking about when we say nervous system regulation.
Speaker: All right, so a quick overview of the nervous system itself. So our nervous system controls every system in our body. Communication between our central nervous system, our brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves through chemical communication, including hormones, stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline. And in the context of this nervous system regulation, we're talking about a part of our nervous system called the autonomic nervous system. So this is a component of the peripheral nervous system that regulates involuntary
Speaker: physiologic processes like heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and the autonomics nervous system is subdivided into the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. So these two systems work in tandem to maintain those physiologic processes. So in times of danger and stress, the sympathetic nervous system is what helps protect us and sends the messages to the rest of the body to
Speaker: increased processes of alertness, the fight or flight type responses. And alternatively, the parasympathetic nervous system is what helps to deactivate these processes when danger or that threat has passed. So that's kind of just a quick overview of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system with the sympathetic fight or flight type responses, stress response, and then the parasympathetic, which you can think of as the calming, slowing things down inside of the autonomic nervous system.
Speaker: Okay, so now let's talk about how these terms are being used in kind of POP Wellness, POP Health. When we're hearing things about nervous system regulation and lowering your cortisol, I will actually just pull up an example from a popular influencer wellness account that I think is a good example of kind of where this terminology is misleading and sometimes kind of BS. Okay.
Speaker: This example of a real, so it says something along the lines of, this is a sign your nervous system is overwhelmed in stress. You might be feeling bloated, anxious, easily irritated, have irregular bowel movements, can't sit still, have weight loss or weight gain, have weight loss resistance, puffy face, fatigue, hormonal imbalances. And then it goes on to say, these are signs that you have elevated cortisol and your nervous system is dysregulated. Here are some tools for regulating your nervous system.
Speaker: And it goes on to give, to talk about a supplement, a drink that this person uses and wants to offer you as well. So the first point I want to make here is that those processes that I just described are normal physiologic processes. So fight or fight stress response is a normal physiologic process. And having some amount of anxiety and stress response is normal and can even be
Speaker: an adaptive process. So it's definitely not accurate to look at the stress response as always a negative thing even in our day -to -day. The second point I want to make is this idea of dysregulation. So it's a term that's not really used often
Speaker: in the medical field and it's being thrown around a lot kind of casually and especially on social media and in pop wellness, pop health right now. But there's not a really accurate medical term for it in the sense that it is a measurable thing. And so you'll see accounts talk about
Speaker: cortisol being elevated, and these are signs and symptoms of cortisol being elevated, which indicates that you are in a dysregulated state. And so when you're hearing terms or phrases like that, it kind of indicates that dysregulated and elevated cortisol are a definitive, maybe even diagnostic picture, and that's not really the case. So let's talk about cortisol. What's the deal with cortisol here? So elevated cortisol levels.
Speaker: aren't inherently negative when they're an appropriate response to stress. So when the body senses a threat or a stress, the brain, the hypothalamus, releases a chemical to the pituitary gland and that sends a message to the adrenal glands above the kidneys.
Speaker: to secrete cortisol into the bloodstream and cortisol has a lot of helpful functions in terms of the stress response. It can help facilitate a heightened awareness, attention, memory, is part of the stress response in increasing heart rate, also blood pressure with shunting blood to muscles away from digestion, increasing blood sugar for
Speaker: energy, decreasing sensitivity to pain. So in the context of a stress response can be helpful. Persistent elevations in cortisol or states of chronic stress can have some of those negative symptoms that we just mentioned in that
Speaker: example, so GI issues, digestion issues, changes in mood, low mood, problems with sleep, metabolic side effects. But again, those symptoms may indicate persistence in elevated cortisol, but the cortisol itself is secondary.
Speaker: But cortisol elevated in that context would be secondary to the stressors that are leading to a chronic state of sympathetic nervous system activation. And so chasing cortisol or a supplement that's going to reduce cortisol without actually getting to the source of what is causing your sympathetic nervous system to be activated to be detecting a threat or danger
Speaker: it's not getting to the root cause. So let's talk about chronic stress and high cortisol. While there is a link between chronic states of stress and high cortisol, it's not necessarily a useful marker for psychological stress. So another problem we'll see is that people read or hear these comments, these posts, and it prompts them to want to go out and have their cortisol levels measured feeling like
Speaker: They have an imbalance, again, kind of focusing on figuring out how to bring the cortisol levels down, maybe overlooking what's actually leading to the state of persistent stress and strain and burnout. And so they'll go out and have their cortisol levels checked. Couple of problems with that. One, cortisol levels don't necessarily correlate well with psychological stress. The study looked at over 2 ,000
Speaker: postpartum women and they conducted validated screening and diagnostic tools for anxiety and depression. So the Edinburgh test and the PHQ -9, I think they use a couple others as well, but then also looked at cortisol levels in morning saliva.
Speaker: in these women and they found that elevated cortisol levels in some of these women did not correlate significantly with scoring on these screening tests. So in other words, some of the women that actually fit criteria for anxiety or depression based on these validated questionnaires did not have elevated cortisol levels.
Speaker: So is not necessarily a great marker for capturing or diagnosing mood conditions or really even a proxy for psychological stress. Okay. And then again, kind of getting back to the term of regulating your nervous system or your nervous system being dysregulated. Again, it's not a term that's used a lot in medicine. I mean, there's metabolic or undergoing disorders, adrenal tumors, Cushing syndrome. You may have heard of high productions of cortisol, but usually what these accounts are referring to
Speaker: is, again, this idea of just being in a chronic state of stress and anxiety and your sympathetic nervous system is an overdrive. I'll pull up another post with an example where an influencer talks about noticing symptoms of irritability, rage, persistent anger, trouble with sleep, and they talk about realizing they were living in fight or flight, nervous system dysregulation. They're regulating their nervous system by limiting coffee
Speaker: exercise they define as daily walks outdoors, a supplement, and none of those things in and of themselves are problematic. But again, it's just kind of missing the picture that the nervous system being dysregulated isn't the root cause. And so you're kind of overlooking all of these psychological, environmental, relational causes. You know, one caveat there certainly is that people with trauma, complex trauma,
Speaker: Where there can be.
Speaker: maybe more of a physiologic or biologic root cause. But again, this focus on the nervous system kind of in a vacuum is overlooking some of the most important sources for a lot of people. And I think especially for postpartum moms, this can be really problematic where there are really unique environmental factors contributing to a state of chronic stress and strain and overwhelm and burnout.
Speaker: and that when we reduce it down to this dysregulated nervous system and high cortisol, we're really doing a disservice to those people that need support and identifying some of those most important environmental or psychological factors that are contributing to their strain, stress, and overwhelm. So really the goal of this discussion and hopefully the take -home message here is that we need to ensure that we are
Speaker: not falling into these kind of quick fix solutions for anxiety, burnout, or mood conditions that you might be experiencing. If you see
Speaker: an influencer or read an article that's promoting a specific supplement or a quick fix regimen that's going to regulate your nervous system, normalize your cortisol, be skeptical. Our bodies are always communicating with us and so if you're experiencing a state of persistent stress, strain, overwhelm, and the sympathetic nervous system, we need to recognize what psychological and environmental
Speaker: factors are contributing. So I'll end with a quote from Bessel van der Kolk, who's the author of The Body Heaps of Score, and he says, neuroscience research shows us that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves. So I hope that information's helpful. I'll have more of these
Speaker: short kind of hot topic episodes in the future. If you enjoyed this episode and you found it helpful, please go ahead and hit subscribe and leave a review and any feedback. Also, you can find me over on AppLoom after baby on Instagram and I always love hearing from you guys and what topics you want to hear more of. Thanks so much for tuning in. Bye.
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