Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue my year in review series, and today I want to talk to you about understanding the role of hormones, because hormones impact almost every aspect of our well being, from our energy to our mood and our metabolism, and you are aware of key hormones such as cortisol and insulin and estrogen, and it's really important that we keep all of these in balance. We need all of them. We just don't need anything that is either too much or too little. The body always wants to be in balance. Cortisol, for instance, we need that as we wake up in the morning to start our day and have the energy to get through our morning. We don't want it to be high. In the evening, when we're trying to get to sleep, it's inverse. Hormone is melatonin, and in the evening, we want melatonin to be high. And so managing this balance is really important. With estrogen, we want that to be in balance with progesterone. And if estrogen is too high, then relatively speaking, our progesterone becomes too low, and we become estrogen dominant, which starts to negatively impact our thyroid hormones. It starts to negatively impact our insulin levels, and as a result, it can have downline effects on our health, and what is often the trigger behind all of these imbalances in our hormones, it can very often be stress. Our stress levels will impact, obviously, our cortisol and the body's ability to produce melatonin. If cortisol is too high, we're not going to be producing melatonin. Our stress levels do cause an imbalance in our estrogen and progesterone. Our stress causes negative sleep, or poor sleep. Poor sleep can also increase our stress or how we respond to stress. When we sleep well, we're more stress resilient, and when we're sleeping badly, we're less so, and all of this is impacting our overall health. So what we want to be doing really the first step in supporting our hormones, there's a couple actually, first off, our liver, if it's sluggish and overwhelmed, it's unable to detox excess estrogen, and then we end up in that estrogen dominant state, impacting our thyroid, impacting our insulin, insulin markers, etc. So we want to make sure our liver is functioning properly, and we can do that by doing a proper liver detox, which I have a self guided program that you can do in order to give your liver a kickstart. It's like picking up a overflowing trash can and dumping it out. It's the same thing with getting your liver functioning properly and addressing your adrenals addressing the stress. How can you implement more stress reducing activities in your day. How can you slow down? Take some time in nature. Go outside for a walk. Take some time to simply breathe. Make sure you're getting enough sleep. Avoid sugar spikes that will also impact your insulin. There's so many things that we can do and be empowered in our health to support our hormone levels.

So

this year, I did some episodes on energy levels that were starting with episodes 355, 358, and many more. I did some episodes talking about the liver. Which episode 418 you can go back and look at. And then I also did a whole bunch of episodes on stress, starting at episode 445

so you've got lots to work with if you want

to go back and learn more on these topics. Episode 391 was the start on my series of sleep so hopefully that gives you lots of information to work with to help keep your hormones in balance, and so that you have the energy you want in order to thrive, and your body is in balance, and that is the place from which you can truly thrive.