Adrenal Fatigue Part 4: The “Cortisol Steal”—or, How Increased Stress Creates Female Hormone Imbalance

This is  Part 4 of  an 8-part series about Adrenal Fatigue  (HPA-Axis Dysregulation), how it relates to your health, how to know if it’s impacting you, and what you can do to fix it! Click here to read Part one, Part two, and Part three. 

Two days ago, I was getting my haircut, and I saw a picture of my hairdresser’s two adorable kids at her station. She told me she’d raised them herself, thankfully with some support from her mother and brother, and that her young daughter was quite a handful these days!

Then she shared with me that she felt like now that she had turned 43, her hormones were “making her crazy” all of a sudden—the other day, she’d snapped at 7 year old daughter about something that would never have been a big deal in the past.  This type of short fuse was always worse right before her period was due, but lately, it seemed like her mood, energy, patience, and brain function shifted almost 2 whole weeks before hand! As she remembered it, her mother had gone through a horrible menopausal phase. In fact, she’d had a really tough relationship with her mother during that time because of it, and she was terrified that her menopause was going to turn her into a crazy person too!

I don’t know first-hand, but the stress of being a single parent, even with some close family nearby, just seems like it requires super-powers to withstand. It was no surprise to me that after years of stress, her reproductive hormones were taking a hit.

So how does stress impact our female reproductive hormones?

Our bodies make most of our adrenal hormones and some of our “reproductive hormones” like estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone from the same precursor horomone – pregnenolone.

Ordinarily, pregnenolone is transformed into a multitude of various hormones, in optimal ratios, every minute of every day. But the minute our body perceives it is under stress, it prioritizes cortisol production, at the expense of the other hormones.

This prioritization is elegantly designed. Progesterone, estrogen and testosterone are all hormones designed for the long-term reproductive survival of the species. Cortisol is about rescuing You, Now.

If your body receives a hormonal message that the external environment is threatening, or you’re in a famine and therefore in a fasted, hypoglycemic state, it’s probably not the best environment to bring a new baby into, right?

So, your body focuses its energy and resources on saving you, and diverts its “attention” away from making hormones that are specific to reproduction and other “non-essential” activities. This allows for the production of a huge amount of cortisol, but inhibits the production of virtually every other hormone.  When the stress resolves, our brain stops sending the signal to increase cortisol production, and hormone levels return to normal…in theory.

Pregnenolone can convert down either of two main pathways:

1. Conversion into progesterone, as a first step on the path to being converted into cortisol, and/or cortisone, our main anti-inflammatory hormone.
2. It can be made into DHEA, which is the precursor to all of our sex-hormones.

When under stress, the body will decrease DHEA production and prioritize the cortisol production. While the majority of our reproductive hormones are produced in the ovaries and testes, roughly 30-40{0ace9f30246476cbe34912402cc70dd667071e9efa13e47cc458477e17894418} is produced in the adrenals. This amount significantly impacts the maintenance of the overall stable hormone levels in circulation.

But there are other ways that stress impacts our monthly hormone cycles as well! The HPA axis is closely related to the HPO (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Ovarian) axis. Just like these glands in the brain have feedback loops and signaling systems that tell the adrenals what to do when, we also have telephone lines between the hypothalamus, pituitary, and ovaries.

High cortisol levels block the HPA axis at each step in the chain. High cortisol stops the secretion of the hormone that our Hypothalamus send to the pituitary (GnRH) that tells it to make LH and FSH. LH and FSH are the hormones that the pituitary makes in order to signal the ovaries to make estrogen and progesterone. When these are suppressed, the ovaries don’t get the message. And, to make matters worse, elevated cortisol levels also interfere directly with ovarian hormone production, which is the bottom line.
This system is meant to protect you, and ultimately, to help your body know when the situation is safe for reproduction. But this brilliant system isn’t built to cope with today’s messy, stress filled world. We used to live in villages where everyone shared the responsibilities of life, food, shelter, and survival.  For most of the humans on the planet, most of the time, everyday life was pretty ho-hum, and big stresses only occurred from time to time.  Now we’ve each become our own village, wearing all of the hats every day, in industrialized countries. Our lifestyle of convenience and high-speed access to everything may not be so convenient after all.

Worsening PMS, stronger menstrual cramps, increasing hot flashes and night sweats, or periods that go AWOL are some of the red flags that Adrenal Fatigue and stress may be causing female hormonal imbalances!

Read on in Part Five, about the types of Stress (it’s not just emotional stress!) that can disrupt adrenal hormones!