Wired at 3 AM: Cortisol, Progesterone, Anxiety, and Midlife Sleep

From the video captions, as spoken.

Cortisol is your stress hormone. It's supposed to be the highest in the morning when you wake up and lowest at night so that you can sleep. And for many Midlife Women, the rhythm flips. Wired and tired at night because cortisol spikes when it should be dropping. So that's your insomnia right out of the opening list of symptoms. If you're lying there 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning, can't go back exhausted but completely awake, this is cortisol. Now if you're having some cortisol issues, not only will you have trouble sleeping at night but morning is going to feel brutal.

You're going to feel like you are dragging because cortisol is flat when it's supposed to be rising, right? That's your fatigue. The specific flavor of, I slept 8 hours, but I woke up feeling like I didn't sleep at all.

Now you see, cortisol does this thing. It signals to your body to release glucose in your bloodstream. Now it does this regardless of what you've eaten, okay? That's major. So a chronically stressed Woman, and I didn't know that I lived chronically stressed friends, I did, now I see it. A chronically stressed Woman can eat a genuinely clean diet and still run high blood sugar because it's generated from the inside. This is where you get weight gain that doesn't budge. Even if you calorie restrict, even with more exercise.

This is weight gain that you can't explain and then Women are told their diet is a problem and you cut more calories which is in itself a stressor which raises cortisol further. You know chronic stress this is this is something that I think is so invisible in our culture. Just like sugar addiction is invisible we don't talk about it. We don't talk about how So, most Women, 20s, 30s, 40s, are living in chronic stress, right? If you had asked me earlier in my life, was I in chronic stress, I would have said no. I normalized it so completely that I couldn't even tell.

The Women most affected by this are frequently the ones who would tell you with total sincerity that they handle stress okay. But their body keeps a record either way. Now, conventional endocrinology names 2 conditions in this territory. Adrenal insufficiency, which is specific and serious, and Addison's disease, which is rarer. Both are real and diagnosable. But the phrase adrenal fatigue is a phrase that functional medicine has embraced, and it sits outside of what endocrinologists consider about the adrenals. So there's unfortunately not a diagnostic code for this cortisol flip-flopping.

So if you go to an endocrinologist, they're going to say they're not being dismissive of you, but you're not going to get very far with your endocrinologist as far as really diving into what's going on with your cortisol rhythms. So cortisol, remember it shows up as a pattern. There's a test, it's called a 4-point cortisol test, and it will show you what your rhythm is over 24 hours, right? So I lived inside a pattern for years where my cortisol, it had flipped, it was low in the morning, then it was high and then it just collapsed. It just went to flat line because I didn't know what was going on. And so I wasn't able to treat it until I could. So, let's go through now what's happening hormonally for Women in Midlife.

Okay. Again, that 17 year window of hormonal rebalancing. Progesterone. Okay. Think of this as your hormone of steadiness. This is the hormone of deep sleep. It's your Nervous System's ability to settle. Now progesterone is the very first hormone to decline.

Sometimes for Women in their 30s, okay? More than a decade plus before Menopause. Now a Woman with low progesterone is going to feel anxiousness, restless, wired at night, wide awake at 3 a.m.

So this is oftentimes what is behind that anxiety that comes out of nowhere for Women. And the anxiety that has like no story attached, nothing you can pin on and say, well, that's why I'm feeling just anxiousness and irritable. Okay. Of course she's anxious. The calming hormone is running out. Now this is what's also behind insomnia, because progesterone supports deep sleep directly. When it fails, sleep gets thin and broken and so you wake the same hour every night. It's also what's behind moodiness. Progesterone falls before estrogen does, which means you can spend years with an unopposed estrogen pattern and the irritability, the tearfulness, and the short fuse that come along with it, okay? So here's what happens to her.

She becomes one of the Women handed an anti-anxiety prescription without anyone having checked her progesterone.