Anxiety Caused By Hormonal Imbalance

Hormones help maintain your health, diet, appetite, weight, mood, and lots more.  The trouble can come when your hormones become imbalanced.  Men and women can both have hormonal imbalances.  Though women have more things that can cause an imbalance.  Such as pregnancy, thyroid dysfunction, or even premenstrual syndrome. 

If you have had the feeling that you are overwhelmed with anxiety it may not just be anxiety there may be a deeper cause, a physical cause from imbalanced hormones.  Anxiety can mean lots of different things for different people, excessive worrying, nervousness, or tension. 

PMS & Anxiousness

These hormone levels raising and dropping during PMS can cause your neurotransmitters in your brain to actively overfire.  Especially when it is over firing serotonin and dopamine, these are hormones that are associated with mood regulation.  So this change in your hormones can cause you to feel overly anxious, cause depression, or have major mood swings.  Hormones in the body not only during PMS are always changing, adjusting, and flexing.  Diagnosing your levels though is a quick and easy blood test to see if you have a hormonal imbalance.  

Your body doesn’t know why you feel stressed.  As far as your body is concerned when reacting to stressors, it is fight or flight mode.  You might as well be being attacked by a tiger instead of being overwhelmed with work. 

Symptoms of a hormonal imbalance can cause changes in the way you think, feel, and act. 

Causes

Imbalances can occur from diet, life stressors, environment, age or lifestyle. 

The main hormones that become imbalanced are estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, insulin which balances your sugars, cortisol which helps you manage stress or anxiety, and DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone) which fights stress and depression.  

Balancing Those Hormones

Once you are diagnosed with an imbalance then what?  Thankfully there are a lot of ways to balance back out your hormones.  This can be by taking supplements, or birth control pills if that is the way you want to fix the imbalance. 

There are some things you can do at home though to help as well.  Eat healthy carbs.  Yes a diet of carbohydrates, have you ever heard of such a thing?  This can include packing in the quinoa, brown rice, oatmeal, squash, and sweet potato.  Make sure your diet is also getting adequate calcium, milk, and yogurt.  Other things you can add to your diet to help balance hormones are green tea, omega 3 fatty acids, and lots of eggs. 

Things to limit would be alcohol, caffeine, fatty foods, salt, and sugar.  As well try to avoid overeating, and under eating.  Both can be detrimental to keeping your body healthy and balanced. 

Along with a healthy diet, regular aerobic exercise can be very helpful in keeping your hormones balanced.  Regular exercise is good for the body regardless of an imbalance.  Exercise though helps balance the cortisol levels in the body which is the stress hormone that can get very overwhelmed.  The best exercises to try to help balance hormones are yoga, pilates, walking, or strength training.  Yoga can help with relaxation and breathing techniques along with moving your body and stretching out.  

Another thing you can try to incorporate into your life to help balance your hormones is to try some different relaxation techniques.  This could be taking a weekly yoga class if you enjoy that.  Other things are listening to relaxing music or meditating.  You could even try massage therapy.  It is important when finding relaxation time you make sure it is something you enjoy and makes you feel extremely peaceful.  This could even be adding a bubble bath to your nighttime routine. 

Speaking of nighttime routine, getting enough sleep is crucial to making sure your hormones are working how they should.  Make sure you have a regular sleep schedule that is allowing you to have a good sleep cycle.  Have a nighttime routine.  Our bodies take time to wind down at the end of the day.  Some helpful things to try for a good night’s sleep is to try turning off all screens at least an hour before bed, sometimes two hours if at all possible.  Read a book, take a bubble bath, or practice some meditation or journaling at this time to wind down before bed.  

Takeaway

A little hormonal imbalance can cause havoc to how we think, feel, and act.  Causing us to be overly anxious when we don’t necessarily need to be.  A quick blood test can help determine if this is what is causing your anxiety and stress.  Some healthy lifestyle changes though can help alleviate that stress and get you back to a balanced healthy life.  

READ MORE:  Why Do Some People Get Anxiety?