How to Game Your Hormones
(Photo Courtesy of Erik Isakson / Getty Images)
No part of our physiology exerts a bigger influence on how we think, feel, look, and behave than our hormones do. These chemical life assistants, secreted by glands distributed through the body — including the pituitary, the adrenals, the pancreas, and the testes — keep us in physiological balance. The energy to roll out of bed in the morning, the ability to repair and create new muscle after a teardown workout, and the wherewithal to rise to the occasion during sex are all orchestrated by hormones, nature’s way of twisting the dials so we respond in the optimal fashion.
As we age, though, most hormones become erratic or go downhill, and in myriad ways, so do we. Thankfully, recent research has given us a more sophisticated understanding of how we can naturally pump the brakes on hormonal decline and, essentially, game the system. Consider this your guide.
Related: 6 Habits That Are Aging You
The Stress Hormone
(Photo Courtesy of Erik Isakson / Getty Images)
Every morning at about 5, adrenal glands release the day’s first shot of cortisol. This boosts metabolic power supply by signaling the liver to produce muscle-fueling glucose in preparation for the day ahead. The adrenals send out a second surge when we get out of bed. From there, cortisol levels stay high for most of us throughout the morning, then fall beginning in early afternoon, until we’re back in bed. This pattern repeats daily.
Whenever a challenge arises — meeting a deadline, swinging a heavy kettlebell — the hypothalamus, in the brain, signals the adrenals to make more cortisol. This is good; we want all the energy we can get. But because we associate cortisol with stress, and we often assume all stress is bad, we think cortisol must be trouble, too. Not so, says UCSF professor of medicine Rick Hecht. A massive amount of emerging research illustrates the different health effects of "challenge stress" — mobilizing our physical and mental resources to deal with a short-term demand — versus “chronic stress,” when feeling overwhelmed becomes the new, miserable normal. Challenge stress keeps you sharp. Chronic stress, with its locked-in high levels of cortisol and the fight-or-flight adrenal hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine, breaks you down.
Related: The 10 Healthiest Ways to Relieve Stress
Hack Your Levels
Schedule energy-demanding tasks — work projects, exercise — in the morning, ensuring plenty of glucose to fuel the brain and muscles. (It’s not one size fits all. If you’re an evening person, Hecht says to flip that recommendation.) To help ensure that daily stressors don’t snowball to chronic stress, Hecht, along with Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal, advises that you change how you view stressful situations. (See “Learn to Thrive on Stress,” page 44.) McGonigal highlights a 2011 study that followed nearly 30,000 people for eight years. Those who said they thought stress wasn’t a harmful thing were, despite living high-stress lives, less likely to have died from any cause than those who led low-stress lives. One guess as to why: Periodically getting into high gear hones our physiological and psychological resilience.
Related: 8 Reasons to Fight Stress With Sex
The Muscle-Fueling Hormone
(Photo Courtesy of Erik Isakson / Getty Images)
Insulin is what keeps cells fed; it works with cortisol as a tag team. After cortisol helps glucose enter the bloodstream, the pancreas releases insulin to escort the glucose to cells for energy. It’s a great system if your lifestyle and your hormones are in sync.
But eat a diet of refined carbs and the system turns on you. Bagels, sandwiches, and pastas all break down quickly in the gut. The resulting flood of sugar into the bloodstream forces the pancreas to pump out large amounts of insulin to clear it. Over time, the body can become less sensitive to this rush of insulin, leading to insulin resistance and, if left unchecked, type 2 diabetes. Even less severe insulin resistance is linked to heart disease and cognitive decline.
Excess cortisol — the kind generated by overwhelming, chronic stress — wreaks even more insulin havoc. The cortisol tricks the body into thinking it needs to arm itself for physical action, so it dumps extra glucose into the bloodstream. But because there’s no physical release — you’re overstressed, not about to run a 10K — the muscles don’t burn the sugar, and the insulin stores that sugar as fat.
Related: Can Statins Cause Diabetes?
Hack Your Levels
Address supply and demand. Hecht says that aggressively cutting back on refined carbs — which may even include whole grains if your blood sugar is high — and upping fiber-rich vegetables and legumes will limit the sugar supply. And exercise. “Muscle is the largest consumer of sugar in the body,” says Dr. Tim Church, director of preventative medicine research at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. “When muscle is healthy, you lower your risk of diabetes and other metabolic conditions.”
The Vitality Hormones
(Photo Courtesy of Tara Moore / Getty Images)
During sleep, the body produces anabolic hormones: testosterone (T) via the testes, and human growth hormone (HGH) from the pituitary gland. T boosts sex drive, of course, helps keep moods chipper and protects the immune system, heart, and brain. Both T and HGH maintain and build muscle. While testosterone helps muscles grow bigger, HGH increases the number of muscle fibers and promotes the breakdown of fat. The lower the levels of cortisol and insulin, the better T and HGH work. Unfortunately, in our late thirties, T and HGH begin to decline by about 1 percent a year, and cortisol and insulin spike higher and stay up longer. Feeling chronically stressed makes this worse. Put simply, “excess cortisol castrates,” says Geo Espinosa, naturopathic doctor at NYU Langone Medical Center. Lack of sleep is an especially pernicious component of this high-stress lifestyle. In one study, healthy men had a 15 percent drop in testosterone after a single week of five hours of sleep a night. “That corresponds to 15 years of aging,” says the study’s author, University of Chicago endocrinologist Eve Van Cauter. She explains that 80 percent of the body’s androgens are produced while we sleep; most of that production is during the first, and deepest, slow-wave phase. In our twenties, we average 80 to 100 minutes of slow-wave sleep. By the time we hit 40, however, that number can shrink 50 percent.
Related: What’s Normal Testosterone, Anyway?
Hack Your Levels
The best remedy, Van Cauter says, is exercise, “regular and intense,” which may cut the deep-sleep drop in half. High-intensity intervals and strength training, in particular, will also directly stimulate HGH production. (Break down the body, and it has to make HGH to build it back up.) Combine exercise with a good diet, and you have the best weapon against the other major testosterone offender — belly fat. Fat cells pump out an enzyme called aromatase, which increases estrogen, and that, in turn, decreases testosterone. Cut back fat and you increase T. Case in point: A recent study in which men who lost 15 percent of their body weight saw a 15 percent rise in T.
Also, limit drugs, both recreational and some prescription. Excessive drinking and regular marijuana use depress T, says New York City physician Joseph Raffaele. And the hair-loss drugs finasteride and dutasteride, he adds, can reduce libido and drive depression by blocking production of the most potent form of testosterone, DHT. Last, research shows that statins can also lower testosterone by about 4 percent.
What is clear: Positively influencing hormone levels begins with daily decisions about stress, diet, and exercise. Manage those, and your hormones will better manage you.
Related: 9 Things You Didn’t Know About Alcohol and Your Body
Bad Night’s Sleep
This hypothetical but all-too-familiar day of hormonal hell begins with a bad night’s sleep.
You wake after a restless five hours. Your cortisol levels are high, and your mood is low. Because of poor sleep, your human growth hormone and testosterone production is down. You find solace in a carb-heavy, comfort-food breakfast, which sends blood sugar, and then insulin levels, soaring. This sets the stage for a sugar crash that makes you sleepy, hungry, or both.
Feeling off, you skip the trip to the gym — that means the sugar that insulin delivered to your muscle cells doesn’t get burned for energy. Instead, it’s stored as fat in your gut. Over time, this can raise estrogen levels and lower T. Without your usual exercise, the stress at the office feels more overwhelming (which means cortisol levels spike and contribute to even more sugar dumped into your blood- stream, as well as fat storage). You drown these discontents with a few or more drinks after work, which can further depress testosterone.
Before bed, you indulge in a sugar-rich snack that keeps insulin pumping when your anabolic hormones — testosterone and HGH — should be kicking in. This leads to another bad night’s sleep. The good news: Tweak any one of these behaviors, and you flip the hormone circle in a positive direction. The easiest place to start is with a good night’s rest.
Learn to Thrive on Stress
(Photo Courtesy of Erik Isakson / Getty Images)
We know that when we feel overwhelmed, cortisol levels spike. The best way to circumvent that? Embrace, even welcome, stress.
“Hormones almost always respond to mindset,” says Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal: “Change your mindset and you may alter a cascade of physiological changes.” Rick Hecht, research director of UCSF's Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, says that while there’s no magic formula, some basic techniques can help.
First, he advises, “Break down the things you have to do into discrete tasks, and feel good when you complete each small, attainable goal.” When you’re in the middle of a high-pressure situation at work, take 10 seconds to remind yourself that this is a challenge, and one that can bring out the best in you. “It’s not being Pollyannaish,” Hecht says. “In some situations, tell yourself, ‘This is tough, but I’m getting something out of it.’”
Hecht is about to publish a study suggesting that meditation and yoga can also play a role in skillfully handling stress. These activities aren’t escapism, he says, but a way to train your mind to acknowledge stressors rather than obsess over them. “You become better at noticing what’s going on around you; that helps you avoid automatic emotional responses,” he says.
By Joseph Hooper
More from Men’s Journal:
8 Health Benefits to Practicing Yoga
