How stress effects your hormones

What comes first – stress or infertility? While stress might not be the cause of infertility it can certainly contribute to the problem. 

Here’s what happens in your body during stress:

• Your stress hormones, cortisol and adrenal rise and inhibit the release of the body’s main hormone, GnRH . GnRH is responsible for the release of sex hormones, so your sex hormones production is surpassed during stress.

• Prolactin goes up and inhibits ovulation.

• Progesterone utilization gets inhibited by cortisol and it leads to insufficient progesterone levels in your body. 

• Ovulation is being suppressed

As a result it can lead to:

• Hormonal imbalances

• Insulin resistance 

• Thyroid malfunction

• Amenorrhea

• PCOS

• Poor ovulation & egg quality

• Poor sperm quality

• Low libido 

And of course many other health complications.

In fact, this is totally normal response to stress and your body is just trying to defend itself.  When you’re in stress your body literally sends a signal to your brain - this is not a good time to make a baby, we need to survive now. And even if pregnancy is not your goal - spending too much time in this ‘fight or flight’ mode is simply unhealthy. 

Factors that cause stress

Many people think about the stress as external factors such as finances, pressure at home, work, IUI and IUV treatments, kids, studies.. These are all emotional factors. In this case the problem is not the stressor itself, but how your body reacts to it. 

Yes, these are valuable reasons for stress, but most of the times we don’t have control on many of them..

 But here’re also many other factors that can be a huge stressor for your body.

Here’re just few of them:

• Certain foods and drinks

• Excessive exercise 

• Environmental factors - pesticides herbicides, certain cosmetics and make up products, cleaners, air fresheners and more

• Medication 

• Excess supplementation

• Lack of sleep or poor sleep quality

• Circadian rhythm disruption

• Poor oxygen supplies

The interesting thing is - your body doesn’t distinguish between types of stress. Whether it physical or emotional - it reacts in exactly same way on everything that serves as a stressor. 

And while it’s hard to control emotional stressors - all the physical once are so much easier to eliminate! That’s why I put a great focus so much on stress management.  I believe it’s one of the biggest factors to many health issues including infertility.

What can you do today to lower your stress levels?

I strongly encourage you to overview your habits, make a list of all the potential stressor you might have and divide it to 2 categories: those you can’t change because they’re out of your control, a.k.a external and emotional stressors, and those that you can start influencing. Now, it might seem very overwhelming at the beginning, but with very small steps you will be able to tackle those down and eliminate all the obstacles that simply don’t serve your body well.