Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Debunking Pop Wellness Trends: Nervous System Regulation, Elevated Cortisol And Bogus Supplements
106 Plays1 year ago
It has to be said though. It’s getting out of hand! Moms who are in thralls of postpartum and the chaos of overwhelm are scrolling searching for real advice… social media has been such a valuable way for more experts to reach more people, but there are a lot of others misusing it and looking to sell *garbage*
In this episode of the Bloom After Baby podcast, Jen delves into the misconceptions surrounding nervous system regulation and its correlation with stress and anxiety. She addresses the misleading information prevalent in the wellness industry and emphasizes the importance of understanding the root causes of stress rather than relying on quick fixes. Join Jen as she navigates through the complexities of nervous system dysregulation and offers insights on holistic approaches to managing stress and anxiety.
A few of my favorite resources for learning about reducing anxiety, learning how to recognize signs of stress and anxiety in your body and environment, and tools for building resilience:
1. The Anatomy of Anxiety by @ellenvoramd
2. Real Self-Care by @poojalakshmin
3. Nurtured Revolution by @nurture_neuroscience_parenting (and her interview on @bloomafterbaby pod Ep 20)
4. Rattled by @drnikkipensak (coming on the pod very soon!!!)
Sponsors:
Needed | Get 20% off your first purchase. Just use the code Bloomafterbaby at checkout
Follow along with Bloom After Baby for all things maternal mental health: Instagram @bloomafterbaby [https://www.instagram.com/bloomafterbaby/?hl=en] and website bloomafterbaby.com [https://www.bloomafterbaby.com/]
** Don't forget to leave a rating and review if you enjoy this Podcast! Thank you so much! 🥰 **
This podcast does not contain medical advice and is for entertainment purposes only.
------------------------------------------------
nervous system regulation; stress and anxiety; misconceptions; elevated cortisol; holistic approaches; root causes of stress; postpartum; overwhelm; how to regulate your nervous system; how to lower your cortisol
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Nervous System Regulation
00:00:06
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
00:00:24
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.
Misleading Wellness Information
00:00:41
Speaker
And the reason I want to talk about this today is because a lot of the information you're seeing around these topics is
00:00:51
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
00:01:15
Speaker
anxiety and stress and are really some unhelpful gimmicks and in some situations potentially harmful. Okay, so let's just get into
Understanding the Nervous System
00:01:24
Speaker
it. We're talking about nervous system, dysregulation as a cause of anxiety and symptoms related to anxiety.
00:01:34
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.
00:01:49
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
00:02:19
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
00:02:44
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.
Critique of Influencer Claims
00:03:14
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.
00:03:40
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.
00:04:13
Speaker
And it goes on to give, to talk about a supplement, a drink that this person uses and wants to offer you as
Normalcy of Stress Responses
00:04:23
Speaker
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
00:04:41
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
00:04:58
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
00:05:17
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.
Cortisol's Role in Stress
00:05:38
Speaker
So let's talk about cortisol. What's the deal with cortisol here? So elevated cortisol levels.
00:05:43
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.
00:06:02
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
00:06:27
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
00:06:43
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.
00:06:59
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
00:07:25
Speaker
it's not getting to the root cause.
Cortisol and Psychological Stress
00:07:27
Speaker
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
00:07:53
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
00:08:17
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.
00:08:37
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.
00:08:59
Speaker
So is not necessarily a great marker for capturing or diagnosing mood conditions or really even a proxy for psychological stress.
Misconceptions of 'Dysregulation'
00:09:08
Speaker
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
00:09:29
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
00:09:59
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,
00:10:29
Speaker
Where there can be.
00:10:31
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.
00:10:59
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.
Advice Against Quick Fixes
00:11:20
Speaker
So really the goal of this discussion and hopefully the take-home message here is that we need to ensure that we are
00:11:28
Speaker
not falling into these kind of quick fix solutions for anxiety, burnout, or mood conditions that you might be experiencing. If you see
00:11:39
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
00:12:09
Speaker
factors are contributing.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:12:11
Speaker
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
00:12:33
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.
00:13:06
Speaker
you