Your hormones do far more for you than you may realize. When your hormones are not level, it can affect how you feel emotionally. It can also affect your thinking process – including your ability to maintain short term memory.
Hormones are responsible for the health of your reproductive system, your digestive system and a lot more. But unfortunately, when problems occur with the hormones, far too many people are treated for the symptom as if it’s something completely unrelated.
As a result of this, the hormonal imbalance continues and the only thing that’s happened is one symptom gets masked. Hormone imbalances don’t just stop with one symptom.
You’ll continue to experience other health issues since your hormones are responsible for so many tasks. Some people think of a hormonal imbalance as a problem that older people have, but you can develop an imbalance at any age.
Most people go undiagnosed for years and instead they seek treatment for varying symptoms and end up on different medications. It’s common for a hormone imbalance to get diagnosed as something different.
For example, certain hormones, when not level, can cause constipation and yet turn around and cause diarrhea right after that. As a result, too many people get diagnosed with IBS and put on medication to treat it when the problem is actually a hormone imbalance.
Some women experience bowel changes during menopause and get treated for intestinal disturbances that aren’t related. You might not know that if your progesterone levels get out of whack, it’s one of the big causes of problems with your digestion.
It can make you prone to constipation and can be an ongoing struggle because the underlying cause isn’t being treated with the medicine given. Some people get treated for stress and given anti-anxiety medications, when the cause is actually the amount of cortisol that keeps flooding their body from a hormonal imbalance.
Or they experience mood swings where they’re up one minute and down the next. They have trouble sleeping and feel wired. These people can sometimes be mistakenly diagnosed as bipolar or with an anxiety disorder, when it’s the hormones that are affecting both the mood and the mental clarity.
For women who have irregular periods that could be fixed with their hormones being brought back into balance, they’re instead given a birth control pill. Headaches are common in people who have hormonal imbalances and yet headache medication is prescribed rather than fixing the root of the problem.
Frequent headaches are a well known sign of unbalanced hormones. You might not know that hormones can even affect your eyes. If you struggle with dry eyes, you need to get your testosterone levels tested.
High levels of testosterone limits tear production. The good news is that if you get on hormone replacement therapy, it can help you stabilize your body and you’ll be able to get off of other medications you might be taking.