Anxiety is what happens when a person experiences nervousness or feels uneasy about something. Worry is when you allow the anxiety to become the focus of your thoughts.
Anxiety can be frightening and cause you to be unable to handle day to day activities. It can come on gradually or happen all of a sudden. If you’re not someone who normally struggles with anxiety, the cause of what you’re going through could be due to a hormonal imbalance.
When all your hormones are within their correct levels, you won’t notice anything – but when they’re out of whack, you can experience both anxiety and worry as well as other emotional or psychological symptoms.
However, if you find that you have more than your usual amount of either and you feel like you just can’t cope, that’s a sign that your hormones need to be checked and you need to get on a treatment plan to restore yourself to your normal way of life.
Certain hormones work to keep the chemical processes of the brain functioning in order to keep your mind and emotions on an even keel. These hormones work to help with the production and distribution of serotonin.
When your hormones are off balance, you don’t get the serotonin you need and a chain reaction begins. When you don’t have the right amount of serotonin, this raises your anxiety level.
It can reach the point where you find that you can’t remain calm even if you’re normally a calm person. You seem to fly off the handle quickly and you get anxious and worry over things that wouldn’t normally trouble you.
One of the hormones that can lead to anxiety and worry is your cortisol. Cortisol is your stress hormone and it serves an important job in your body. It’s responsible for keeping your senses and reflexes, especially during fight or flight situations, at peak level.
Because of cortisol, you can respond to both small and large stressors. When you’re stressed, your body signals a cortisol release. The stress is handled and your cortisol is supposed to return to normal.
In people who have a hormonal imbalance, the cortisol doesn’t follow what it’s supposed to do. So the level doesn’t always rise or lower. So what happens is you can get a cortisol flood, which makes you more anxious than you normally would be.
But low cortisol can also trigger anxiety. This is why it’s important that this hormone level stay in normal range. Estrogen can also cause anxiety and worry if it’s off balance. This happens because when it’s imbalanced, it throws off other hormones like your testosterone. Your thyroid hormones can get out of whack and not only cause anxiety, but if left unchecked for too long, can lead to panic attacks too.
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