No discussion of mental health would be complete without looking at the relationship between hormones and their impact on mood disorders. Any woman who has had a typical American lifestyle has experienced the impact of hormones on her mood. So most of us are aware of this hormone mood connection, but just how far down this rabbit hole can we go? Let’s delve deeper into this story.
Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up. That starts us with testosterone. Both men and women produce testosterone and both can experience mood issues with low T (low testosterone). Low T is a major cause of depression, fatigue, and mood swings. The brain contains specific receptors for testosterone that affect how well our brain works. Curiously, low T is common in men with bipolar disorder, yet bipolar women show higher than normal testosterone levels. We need good levels of testosterone to have a sense of well-being.
Moving up a few inches to the ovaries, let’s consider progesterone. This is the hormone that causes PMS. In addition to the very familiar bloating, swelling, and weight gain, high progesterone levels (which peak a few days after ovulation) can trigger anxiety, depression, fatigue, headache, digestive issues, and general ‘life is not worth living’ feelings. Strangely the symptoms of low progesterone are very similar to those of too much progesterone. Progesterone directly increases the neurotransmitters dopamine and GABA. Increasing dopamine release and GABA release when they are low helps you feel both pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation, and calm easiness. Additionally, low progesterone levels will decrease serotonin levels creating poor sleep and feelings of depression. Like most hormones, there is a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where just the right amount works. Too much or too little creates symptoms.
The companion hormone from the ovaries is estrogen. Low estrogen is commonly associated with unpredictable mood swings leaving you feeling like your emotions are out of control. Anxiety is a typical result of low estrogen as is depression. Estrogen stimulates serotonin production which gives you a relaxed feel-good state. It is also involved in language skills, attention, memory, and feeling regulation. Like progesterone, too high levels of estrogen produce similar symptoms to low estrogen. When it comes to hormones, everybody affects everybody else, so it is meant to be one big happy family…but commonly it becomes one big dysfunctional family.
As we move up the body, the next source of hormones is in the gut, both those produced by the gut itself and those produced by gut bacteria. 90% of the neurotransmitters we make are made in the gut, not the brain. We are all aware that gut hormones affect our hunger and therefore motivation, but they also affect many other moods…pretty much the same bunch of emotions as all the other hormones. So if you have an unhappy gut, you will likely feel unhappy and try to find some outside circumstance to blame it on. We rarely think that our mood might be controlled by some crappy group of gut bacteria.
Next on our list is an area most people don’t realize is a hormone-producing organ, the kidneys. The kidneys produce three main hormones that control blood pressure, blood cell formation, and the active form of vitamin D which does a lot of things. All three of these have been found to influence such things as bipolar disorder, anxiety, and major depression. Let’s face it, we have hormones all over the place and any one or more of them can mess up our moods.
Let’s move on to a gland most of us have heard of. Sitting right on top of the kidneys are the adrenal glands. They produce the stress hormone cortisol and the fight or flight juice adrenaline. Most mood-altering activities like meditation and exercise focus on bringing the adrenal glands back into line. They can be associated with the same laundry list of mood disorders as all the other hormones, but the relationship is a little more complex. Adrenal hormones are about increasing the focus of attention and energy availability. These guys are all about preparing you for dealing with stresses like threats to your survival. The problem here is that these days the threats are not so immediately resolvable. Chronic stress is the name of the game today, and chronic increases in cortisol and adrenaline really mess us up on so many levels, including mood.
Not much is known about the hormones produced in the lungs and the thymus gland yet, so let’s move up to one of the real biggies, the thyroid gland. Thyroid disorders are really popular, meaning I see a lot of patients with thyroid disorders. The thyroid gland produces the hormone that controls the rate of energy production for every cell in the body. Obviously, if that rate is too low or too high emotional regulation gets all tangled up. Low thyroid can make you feel absolutely like crap while high thyroid makes you feel like jumping out of your skin. Virtually the whole range of psychiatric disorders can be triggered by a dysfunction of the thyroid. This is simply because the thyroid hormone directly affects the rate of formation of the neurotransmitters in the brain. Weirdly the symptoms can be the opposite of what you might expect. For instance, low thyroid might produce depression as you might expect, but it can also cause anxiety or even OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). A doctor might try treating these disorders with typical psych drugs, which will seem to help temporarily, but then will fail because the underlying thyroid hormone disorder has not been addressed.
A second lesser-known thyroid hormone is called calcitonin, which helps control calcium levels in the body. It opposes the action of the parathyroid hormone which we will describe next. This double hormone control means that these calcium levels are really important to keep in a very narrow balanced zone. Calcitonin has a powerful effect on bipolar disorders.
Heading north one more inch we hit the parathyroid gland, which produces hormones that control (raise) your blood calcium levels. Your calcium levels control every nerve in your body. Nerve transmission is actually the movement of calcium into and out of the nerves. So low calcium depresses nerve transmission causing – you guessed it – depression. Too high a calcium level makes you irritable, unable to sleep, and screws up your memory.
Now we are getting towards the top of our journey – deep in the skull at the underside of the brain – the pituitary gland. This gland is called the master gland because it regulates almost all the other glands in the body. It produces at least 11 different hormones. Most of these control many of the hormones we have already written about, but some special ones just for the brain are like oxytocin, which affects how connected we feel towards others, endorphins and enkephalins which regulate mood and pain, and growth hormone which regulates growth and repair all over the body. Anything messing up at this level can and does scramble our moods and brain function. The control and balance of the whole system pivot on pituitary activity.
Our last stop on the glandular train ride is the pineal gland, in the dead center of the brain. Interestingly, this gland is made of the same tissue type as the retina of our eyes and is sensitive to light transmitted along the optic pathways. This gland controls the ebb and flow of our whole system through our circadian rhythm. This rhythm is tied to the light levels and colors at different times of the day. In a healthy environment, we are exposed to high levels of blue light early in the day turning to yellow in the mid-day, and finally the red colors late in the day. This is our internal clock that tells us when all sorts of different things are supposed to happen in our body in order to stay healthy. Many of you have heard of SAD –Seasonal affective disorder – where people get depressed due to lack of sunlight. This is the pineal in action or lack of proper action.
So the big message of this newsletter is that so much of how we think and feel moment to moment is entirely about how healthy our hormone system is. We try to blame it on work, finances, family, and just about everything else outside ourselves, but the truth is those outside things probably wouldn’t bother us much at all if our insides were strong and functioning well.
How to address specific hormone problems is a vastly complex subject. But common to all such issues is inflammation and the most basic cause of inflammation in humans is poisons in our food, air, and water. Industrial poisons like herbicides and pesticides are obvious, as are various air pollutants. More challenging is the poor food choices like vegetable oils and sugars which are the biggest causes of inflammation in our lives right now. They simply have to be avoided just like the pesticides and herbicides. There are lots of other things that trigger inflammation, but they pale by comparison to the impact of sugar and seed oils. So if you are not feeling on top of the world, this is where I would start. Kick those evildoers in your life and move on.
For more information on self-assessing your health, download my extensive health questionnaire. You can score it yourself and the last page tells you the steps we take to remedy the issues. Here
Take care,
David