Physiological and psychological stress, especially when experienced in combination, create a resistance to normal hormone levels, causing the release of far too many of some hormones, far too little of others, so that the body doesn't know what to do with them and therefore has an unnatural response.
It does not happen overnight, it happens as a gradual process over years, normally as a result of a conflagration of various factors which coincide to produce significant effects. Not everyone will experience the syndrome to the same extent, given that the triggers take a long time to build up. Furthermore, the effects are cumulative so that mild symptoms become progressively worse, and pass from being mildly annoying to quite debilitating.
If you were normal weight in your late teens and early twenties, and yet went to extreme lengths to measure up to society’s obsession with “size zero” and then incorporated some pretty high level psychological stress, it's likely that you've given yourself this disease. I have. I had to work through the realisation that my current health problems are something which I created - albeit mistakenly, but by my own ill-fated design. Not an easy conclusion to acknowledge, but the truth, nonetheless (maybe a topic for a future post?).
In my case, extreme dieting, not eating for days at a time (anorexia) and running a high stress corporate career did it for me. For others it could be stress caused by a life-changing event (the death of a loved-one for example).
Causes can be summarised as follows:
- Psychological stress
- Physiological stress
Psychological Stress
There are two types of stress: acute stress, which is largely beneficial, and chronic stress, which is man-made and highly detrimental.
Acute stress is identified, in simple terms as that “fight or flight” mechanism which all animals rely upon to stay alive – it’s beneficial in the modern world in that is the mechanism which causes you to jump reflexively out of the way of an oncoming bus, causes a spike in performance when you’re striving to reach your personal best for 100 meters, makes you run from a dangerous situation. Crucially, it is short-lived, and goes away once the dangerous situation is far enough away, the bus has passed, the 100 meters has been conquered. It leaves the body almost as quickly as it arrives, it is an effective “turbo boost”, bringing with it feel-good hormones, endorphins which make us feel lucky to be alive, giggle with relief, jump up and down with elation. It’s a stress with an equally good pay-off (the endorphins) all of which are good for the body and the soul.
Chronic stress a whole different matter and is identified as that stress which is constant – eating away at the back of your mind and continuing for days/weeks/months years. It’s the pressure of constant deadlines, worries about the ability to pay the mortgage at the end of the month, a huge percentage of first world populations consider themselves “one paycheck from disaster” and it’s this stress which does all the damage. Chronic stress is already identified as a bad thing; I expect that the effects of chronic stress will, in future, be considered the same kind of bad habit as smoking, alcoholism, sugar. It is largely a man-made evil.
The effects of stress are widespread and have a detrimental effect on the body – we’re already starting to understand in some small way the effects of stress, especially that long-term, unrelenting stress which we all know and experience, itself a symptom of modern life and about as far removed from the short term ”cave man” acute stress which we, like our ancient ancestors, were designed for.
The medical profession already recognises that the effects which this type of stress has upon body systems, such as the role played in contributing to a whole range of identified conditions such as coronary heart disease, stroke, depression. It’s not a great leap to imagine its effect on a female body which is already under-nourished, under-slept and over-exercised.
The medical profession already recognises that the effects which this type of stress has upon body systems, such as the role played in contributing to a whole range of identified conditions such as coronary heart disease, stroke, depression. It’s not a great leap to imagine its effect on a female body which is already under-nourished, under-slept and over-exercised.
The big problem with Chronic stress is that it causes the release of hormones into the body (adrenalin, cortisol, testosterone, the male growth hormone etc) which are fine in normal short bursts, but experienced at a high level over a very long time are grossly damaging.
Many women experience this, many women with this syndrome can point to the kind of lifestyle which promoted this kind of hormone overload. Not everyone with such a lifestyle will experience the syndrome – some bodies are more sensitive than others. Some bodies would be fine with just this kind of stress if properly nourished and maintained but in combination, it can trigger this syndrome.
Physiological Stress
Physiological stress breaks down to three elements:
- - Lack of food (extreme dieting)
- - Over-exertion (what Mark Sissons refers to as chronic cardio)
- - Lack of sleep
The pressure on young women to be thin, wear the smallest size in the shop, and maintain that slim physique is crippling, and well documented. Many studies have identified this as a phenomenon and the results are, of themselves, bad in their effect on self-esteem, body image, and in their effect as a distraction from achievement in more rewarding pursuits (such as career, academic achievement, ability to participate fully in a (excuse the pun) well-rounded life. I don’t need to explore the subject further, the amount of reading material/media attention, even political attention far outstrips my brief description here.
What’s less well-documented is the effect that extreme dieting has on the body. In most people, a few weeks diet helps shed a few pounds, clothes fit better, overall health improves, but that is not what I’m addressing here.
It is becoming far too common for women to exist on very low calorie diets, or sometimes no food at all. In my case I used to eat around once every 3 days and would aim to eat no more than 500 calories per day when I did eat – this sounds extreme but it’s frighteningly common, and there’s a culture of “less is more” – the peer pressure to eat less and less in comparison to those around us.
There are a myriad of hormones around eating and digestion – leptin and grehlin: the hormones which tell you you’re hungry and then tell you you’re full, insulin, thyroxine, and probably others which we don’t understand yet (leptin and grehlin were only discovered in the 1990’s, for example). The effect on these hormones of either severely restricting food, ignoring the hunger hormone altogether and therefore pushing hormone levels right down, and then occasionally eating sends the hormones into overdrive – insulin particularly gets screwed up and is a major contributor to the problems I describe as part of this syndrome. Over months and years this severe restriction then leads to a hyper-response when the production of insulin is triggered. Furthermore some professionals are also starting to acknowledge that there is a “high” that comes from an overdose of leptin (I know from personal experience: it happens!).
As with the other responses I’ve discussed, this kind of response once in a while is probably not harmful, but protracted over a period of weeks, months, years, it becomes a major problem and the body loses all sense of the correct levels, not just for insulin, but also for oestrogen, testosterone, progesterone etc etc.
Over Exercise (Chronic Cardio)
So, you have a chronically stressed person, who is also not eating, whose hormones are already out of kilter because of both, and then you throw in significant amounts of heavy exercise which the body is ill-equipped to deal with on any level.
Exercise triggers hormone release, (normally good) endorphins, adrenaline and cortisol which are beneficial to a healthy person but simply add to the problem rather than helping to clear some of that stress – I wish I’d known when I was pushing myself to and beyond the brink in exercise terms that I would have been far better off with a walk in the countryside or a very gentle bike ride. In fact, my problem with exercise persisted long after the eating issues – because I was getting fatter I exercised harder and harder – again, extremely counterproductive.
Lack of Sleep
Lack of sleep is probably the last piece of the puzzle and seals the deal. Sleep is essential to everyone’s wellbeing – burning the candle at both ends not only makes everything worse, it also robs the body of it’s opportunity to do any kind of repair work and release the adult growth hormone which is there to counteract the effects of everything we’ve done during the day – for that to happen, around 8 hours restful (i.e. not tossing and turning) sleep is required. In my case, at the time when I contracted the syndrome, I was performing an international sales role, taking planes every week, entertaining for work, socialising as no-one has ever socialised before. Sleep was for wimps.
To recap, lack of sleep = no balancing growth hormone, exacerbating the result of all the other damage.
As the syndrome took hold, I also developed insomnia, lying awake for 2-3 hours a night – believe it or not I never really thought much about it, but I should possibly have seen this as one of the biggest indicators that I was really heading for a problem. Whilst I probably recognised that something wasn’t right, no doctor would entertain my concerns, so I just got on with it.
In short, chronic stress, extreme dieting, chronic cardio and lack of sleep combined to produce the perfect storm I’ve mentioned elsewhere:
Stress: Adrenaline, cortisol, testosterone = constantly elevated
Diet: digestive hormones, thyroxine, insulin either severely restricted or hyper-elevated
Exercise: adrenaline, cortisol, endorphins elevated
Lack of Sleep: body unable to produce the balancing hormones to counteract
=
Endocrine Meltdown
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