Across the board, one of the main healing opportunities I find in the majority of my clients is that their HPA Axis has become dysfunctional, and as a result, their cortisol becomes dysregulated.
If you're not familiar with the term HPA Axis, it stands for Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenal Axis. These are glands that work together to produce cortisol as a response to both internal and external stressors, whether real or perceived.
Basically, whenever our body experiences a stressor (i.e. we have a deadline, we're stuck in traffic, a bear's chasing us… you name it), our parasympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight nervous system) is activated and our HPA Axis produces cortisol to give us energy to either fight the threat or flee the scene. This is actually a healthy reaction. We want our HPA Axis to produce cortisol when we're faced with stress! However, the problem these days is that we are faced with so many stressors — from personal stress, to work stress, to environmental stress (like pollution and pesticides in our foods). Our body is constantly dealing with stress, which can get us stuck in a state of chronic stress that overworks our glands and causes dysfunction.
In this post, I’m going to tell you about the four phases of HPA Axis Dysregulation, what this means for your sleep and your overall health, and then give you some tips to keep that HPA Axis and your adrenal glands nice and healthy.
How Your HPA Axis Becomes Dysregulated and Impacts Your Sleep
My mentor, Reed Davis, is the Founder of the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Certification Course where I have my certification from, and he has identified the 4 stages of HPA Axis Dysregulation. To illustrate it, he has created this chart that plots the cortisol levels your body will produce during each stage:
The shape resembles a bell curve. The beginning of the curve is the stage of homeostasis — where we should be. Homeostasis is where our body is producing enough cortisol to keep us awake, but we're not under a lot of stress. This may look like: things are going well in our lives, we may have a good healthy relationship, our work may be going well, our family’s healthy, and we generally have very little stress in our life.
Of course, as we know, homeostasis can’t last forever. There's always something that can cause an elevated state of stress, such as losing a job, a pandemic, divorce, or death of a loved one. When we're dealing with a big stressor, we move into the acute stage — the beginning of the bell curve. This is where our body starts to produce elevated amounts of cortisol — which, again, we want it to do! But what we also want to happen is for our body to go back to homeostasis once the stress is behind us. The problem is: a lot of us stay in this elevated acute state for too long and it is extremely taxing on the body.
Cortisol is catabolic. It breaks our body down. When our body's producing cortisol, our body dedicates all of its resources to producing it because our body thinks we’re in a life-or-death situation. As a result, our reproductive system shuts down, our digestion is inhibited, and our immune system is weakened. All of those resources are going to cortisol. For a lot of people when they’re in this elevated acute state, they feel really good! Cortisol is really energizing and it's also an anti-inflammatory hormone, so you can stay in this elevated state for quite some time and feel pretty good. However, it all depends on your genetics, your vital reserve, and how many resources your body has to contribute to the production of cortisol for how long this stage is sustainable. It can’t last forever.
As our vital reserve becomes depleted, we enter what's called the “compensatory phase”. Instead of going back to homeostasis like we want to be in, we dip over to the other side of the bell curve. The interesting thing is that, if you took a lab test, your cortisol levels would look sufficient and healthy. However, because you’re now in a compensatory phase, your body should actually be producing more cortisol because you still have stress in your system. Instead, you're producing “normal” levels of cortisol because your HPA Axis has become dysregulated and, in turn, your body has become depleted.
It takes a lot of resources to produce cortisol. For example, pregnenolone (the “mother hormone”), which is used to produce steroid hormones such as cortisol, progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone, is dedicated all to producing cortisol during this time of extreme stress. Because of this, the body’s sex hormones become imbalanced. This period — the compensatory stage — is when people start to see symptoms of adrenal fatigue. They start to feel a little bit "off" — they’re fatigued, they start to experience sleep issues and digestive issues, and they can't figure it out because they're not "sick", but they just don't feel “right”. A lot of my clients are in this stage when they reach out to me. If this stage continues and the stress isn't addressed, then the adrenals become completely dysfunctional and depleted and the body enters the exhaustive stage.
If you took a cortisol test in the exhaustive stage, your levels would be sub-optimal. You feel wired but tired because you no longer have a lot of cortisol in your system; instead, your body is producing adrenaline to keep you alert. This makes the body feel really jittery and, again “off”. In this stage, sleep issues become prevalent, as adrenaline is very stimulating — and if you have a lot of it in your system, it's going to be hard for you to fall asleep and stay asleep. A compounding effect starts to emerge: your sex hormones are imbalanced, you may be experiencing some digestive dysfunction due to the body spending so much time producing cortisol that digestion has been inhibited, and now the body isn't absorbing all the nutrients and minerals needed from food — and on top of it all, mineral deficiencies and imbalances can cause sleep issues!
Another thing that happens in this exhaustive stage is that illness occurs more frequently because the immune system is shot, since the body is trying hard to produce cortisol and shutting down the immune system in order to do so. This makes the body susceptible to viruses as well as gut dysbiosis, since our immune system is constantly fighting pathogens in our stomachs. If our gut is unable to function properly, then the bad bacteria in our gut begins to outnumber the good bacteria — and as I talked about before in past blogs, this can cause sleep issues as well.
As it goes without saying, avoiding the compensatory and exhaustive phases is paramount so that you don't have sleep issues (and then you don't have to come and see me!) But if you're already having sleep issues, then you may already be in one of those stages.
But don't worry! I'm going to give you some tips to help you take care of your adrenals:
#1: Manage Your Stress
Stress is unavoidable. Our lives these days are filled with stress, but we can do things to counteract it, such as engaging in something relaxing for at least 15 minutes a day — and don't wait until bedtime! I want you to do it during the day — go for walk, meditate, do some deep breathing, talk to a friend or a loved one, or just lay down. Also, whenever you feel activated (you start to feel your respiration pick up, your heart rate picks up, your stomach starts to grumble, etc.), I want you to take three deep breaths. Make sure that when you're inhaling, you're doing it through your nose and inhaling really nice and deeply, and that your exhale is through your mouth and it's longer than your inhale. This will send a signal to your central nervous system that you're safe and it's going to put you back into a parasympathetic state, helping you to feel nice and relaxed and your body's going to stop producing excessive cortisol.
#2: Eat an Anti-Inflammatory Diet
Stay away from gluten, dairy, alcohol, and refined sugar. All these things promote inflammation, and whenever our bodies are inflamed, our bodies produce cortisol to bring down the inflammation.
#3: Get Morning Sunlight Exposure
I know I talk about this all the time, but get that morning sunlight! Go outside without sunglasses within the first 30 minutes of waking up for just 2-10minutes. The light hitting your eyes is going to trigger cortisol production — and that's OK, we want our body to produce cortisol first thing in the morning! — that way, it starts to rebound through the rest of the day so that it’s plummeted by evening.
What About Supplements?
You're probably wondering why I haven't talked about supplements. Yes, you can take supplements to support your adrenals. However, you have to be really careful doing so! I had one client who came to me taking a supplement to reduce cortisol and she was actually in the exhaustive stage, so the supplement was making things worse! This is why I recommend before taking any supplements that you do some functional lab testing.
Consider Functional Lab Testing
This way, you can really analyze the state of your adrenals so that you're taking the appropriate supplements. If this is something you're interested in pursuing, I can help. As i mentioned before, I'm a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and I can order the Dutch test, which helps me to analyze the levels of cortisol that your HPA Axis is producing, as well as the pattern of it because that's important, too. That way, we can make sure we get you on the appropriate protocol.
If you want to learn more, schedule a free discovery call with me here and let’s chat.
For more tips, you can read more articles on improving your sleep in my sleep blog.
My mission is to help you get the rest you deserve to be your best.
Sweet Dreams
Kelly Murray is a certified sleep coach and an award-winning pediatric sleep consultant based in Chicago offering sleep coaching services nationwide.