Tag: OCD and Hormones

Carrie: Welcome everyone. Glad that you are tuning in to the podcast with us today. I’m very excited about today’s episode. We’re talking about hormones, specifically with women. Now, if you’re a guy who’s listening, maybe you wanna understand your wife better or another female in your life, we’re happy that you’re here as well.

But we’re talking about balancing hormones naturally to help with OCD and anxiety.

Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast,

where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode.

This is an episode that I’ve wanted to do for a couple different reasons. One is that so many women have told me, “Hey, when I’m around the time of my period or right before, I’ve just noticed my obsessions are way worse and I’m really struggling a lot more with OCD.”

It could be maybe during ovulation when there’s some shifts and changes, too. I’m also in the very early stages of perimenopause, trying to navigate and figure that whole thing out, and I’m noticing even within myself, I consider myself a reasonably regulated person, but I definitely can feel some of these hormonal shifts and how they’re affecting me mentally, emotionally, and physically.

I just think it’s an important thing for us to talk about. A lot of more people are becoming more aware and more astute and looking for resources online to navigate hormones in our life. So today, I am inviting Salicia Gerber here to talk with us. And tell us a little bit about yourself and the type of work that you do and the people you work with.

Celisha: Well, I am a friend, mother, daughter, sister, wife. I also going through different things, and I see around me loved ones. As a naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist, I help people understand what their bodies are trying to tell them through symptoms. While I work with a variety of health concerns, many of my patients are overwhelmed women struggling with anxiety, hormone imbalances, exhaustion, chronic stress.

The way I approach it is with functional wellness, nervous system regulation, and lifestyle medicine mainly. I believe the body was designed to heal, and when we give it the right environment, support, we remove those obstacles to heal, it does. One of the things I’m most passionate about is helping women realize that they’re not broken.

Their body’s not working against them. It is trying to compensate. So symptoms are often the communication from our body that something needs support, so it’s understanding that and helping them work with them, see what their body needs.

Carrie: Yeah. And I find for myself, too, like I always think of like pain as communication So if something’s hurting, it’s like, okay, what is my body telling me that this area of my body needs that is in pain?

I’ve been through just kind of like a variety of different things that way, so I like that. It’s like you can look at it as communicate with yourself however you want to about your body and your symptoms and say like, “Oh, no, I’m falling apart,” or, “Everything’s broken,” but instead saying, “What is my body actually trying to communicate that I need right now?”

What do you find is the correlation between hormone imbalances and anxiety and OCD just that you’ve seen in your patients that you work with?

Celisha: One of the biggest misconception is that hormones only affect reproduction, and it doesn’t. Hormones are deeply connected to the nervous system and the brain.

The nervous system is constantly wanting to find out, am I safe? So if it perceives safety, we’re able to think clearly, we’re able to rest well, sleep, digest, connect with others, things work well. But when the brain perceives threat, it activates the stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Many of the reproductive years, estrogen and progesterone, uh, will buffer that nervous system function against stress, so you don’t feel it as much perhaps.

But I often compare that to shock absorbers in a car. The bumps are still there. You’re still going through the stress, but the ride is a bit smoother with those hormones. And then as women enter the perimenopause, those change in hormones, even on a cyclic basis like you were saying at ovulation and just before the period, there’s significant changes naturally.

But when perimenopause starts, progesterone declines first, and estrogen, while it’s also declining, becomes erratic, so it’s going up and down, up and down in a downward motion. Women suddenly notice more anxiety, more intrusive thoughts, OCD tendencies, sleep disturbances, emotionally overwhelm. And that’s typically because progesterone is an important part of the brain’s calming pathway, specifically GABA signaling if you’ve heard of GABA.

As progesterone declines or becomes erratic, women lose that natural buffering system that help them stay calm and resilient. And at the same time, this fluctuating estrogen that happens affects blood sugar regulation, the sleep quality, serotonin production, and stress resilience. So if you’ve had a history of trauma, anxiety, or OCD, these hormonal shifts, they amplify those symptoms that were already present beneath the surface.

Carrie: And I just wanna say in relationship to that with people, another thing that I hear is, “Well, yeah, I’ve kinda sorta had this OCD for a while, but it’s been manageable. Like, it’s been okay.” And then what will happen is a couple of different things. Either one, there’ll be some type of trauma or major life shift that happens to them.

They lose a loved one, and that kinda rocks their whole world, or they go through a traumatic experience. They become a caregiver. Like, then all of a sudden, there’s extra abusive stress which always makes our mental health symptoms worse. They’re wondering, like, “What in the world happened?” I just feel almost like you’ve gotten knocked off your horse.

Like, you were riding through life, everything was okay. Yeah, okay, I had a little OCD, and then bam. So I could definitely see how that could happen to women in perimenopause because there are also just so many different life changes that happen during that time, depending on ages and stages of children and parents.

I have a weird situation in my life just in the sense that I have a young child in my 40s, whereas a lot of people have teenagers in their 40s that they’re trying to launch out into the world. So I have that stress. Parents, a lot of people’s parents are getting older. I’m weird ’cause my parents have already passed away, but that whole sandwich generation.

Is that something that you see a lot showing up in your patients as well? Just the time period of perimenopause can be unusually stressful as well.

Celisha: Most definitely. Life is not consistent typically. So this time you’re usually straddling caring for parents and caring for children. Maybe work is not stable, so you’re thinking about financial stressors.

Yeah, life always has its challenges, and the change in hormones does impact it. One of the things that is important to understand too is that hormones, they don’t work in isolation. They interact with what we do on a lifestyle basis, how we sleep, our nutrition, how we’re moving, just overall nervous system health.

While we can’t stop aging, there are things that we can do to improve the resilience. So as that buffering declines, there are other systems that actually become even more important than estrogen and progesterone, and we can talk about that if you’re interested.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really helpful for people to know.

Kind of getting into some lifestyle things that you’re talking about, like getting sunlight. Is that what you’re meaning? Like, those types of things are more important. Movement.

Celisha: Yes. There is a system that works to producing oxytocin, which is a hormone and neurotransmitter. It’s often called the love hormone, and oxytocin’s associated with that trust, connection, gratitude, feelings of safety.

When we are imbalanced and having that question, “Am I safe?” Progesterone, it’s gonna go down over time. It’s not gonna go up. It goes down over time. What we can do is we can take advantage of this hormone, oxytocin, and cultivate that. That actually calms and counteracts the cortisol. Many of things that you can do that increase oxytocin, helping that nervous system to feel safe, is healthy relationships, community, gratitude, service, prayer.

Carrie: That’s really good. I think we underestimate the power, like, of our social relationships and, and interconnectedness. And so it’s like if you feel yourself withdrawing from relationships or you’re not as close to your spouse, or you’re not as close to friendships, like, it might be a good, like you said, warning signal to try to start reconnecting there.

Or if you’ve gotten out of church, and you really need that community and need that support, like, it’s a good time to think about leaning in and what does that look like. Maybe I do need to get more involved in service or in a small group or something like that. And I think some of these, like, proactive approaches that you’re talking about help us feel less victimized by our hormones, because I think a lot of women, and I’ve probably felt that way at different point too, like, “Oh my, I just have this surge of anxiety happening right now, and it feels completely outside of my control.”

What are some other things that people can do to not feel like, “Hey, I’m just totally out of control over maybe mood swings that are happening with them”?

Celisha: Yeah. I teach what’s called the eight laws of health. They correlate with the days of creation in Genesis. If we look at the days of creation, we can gather insight into how we were designed to function, and if we cooperate with that design, we can better live out our purpose to love and be loved.

1 John 4:16 says, “God is love, and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Like the law of gravity, there are just basic needs the system has to function properly. And for the body to adapt gracefully to hormonal transitions, these eight laws are fantastic So they’re basically sunlight, rest, which was day one, air and water, nutrition, exercise, temperance, and trust in God, connection, relationships, all those.

Just incorporating those is going to help regulate the stress hormones, inflammation, metabolism, nervous system function. The goal isn’t to fight your hormones, it’s to build a body and nervous system that can adapt to change. That’s the biggest. Simple things, but going back to how were we created.

Carrie: Yeah, and as far as the stress happening, I know a lot of women struggle with maybe weight gain or struggle with not being able to lose weight at different points.

Can you tell us a little bit about that connection to hormones?

Celisha: That weight gain usually is just because of that change in hormones that’s happening, so as estrogen drops, we actually get more blood sugar instability, and when blood sugar drops, we create a response of stress. Cortisol increases, adrenaline increases, and what does that do?

It tells us that we are hungry and we want carbs, and the insulin sensitivity gets worse. If we can focus on eating protein, fiber, healthy fat at every meal, but especially at that first meal of the day, whenever that is, and then once we start eating, making sure we’re eating at predictable times, ’cause the nervous system is observing that, and it can start producing those stomach contents to protect the stomach, to start digestion.

The liver, the pancreas, all those w- can start their process, and if it can predict it, our nervous system is gonna be much more stable. So I encourage women to prioritize definitely a variety of colorful vegetables which are rich in vitamins and minerals, especially magnesium, vitamin B6, having protein at every meal, but especially plant-based proteins.

Why? Because they’re alkaline. They promote an alkaline pH. And then healthy fats, because we need those fats to make our hormones. That’s the base. All of our hormones come from cholesterol.

Carrie: So don’t be afraid of fat. It just has to be healthy fat.

Celisha: Exactly, not inflammatory fats, ’cause inflammation does also become worse with the decreasing or erratic estrogens.

It will actually stimulate things to kick off like autoimmune disease or inflammatory processes, so that’ll be happening as well. But let’s talk about some, a couple things we can do to specifically support estrogen and progesterone. Our cycle starts day one as the start of a period, right? Your start of a bleeding.

And that phase is where you really wanna support estrogen balance. It’s the heavy estrogen time of our cycle. So from that day one to ovulation. And a couple things you can add diet-wise is flaxseed and pumpkin seeds. There’s also things in nature that God gave us that are considered phytoestrogens. So what is that?

Acts like an estrogen in a weaker way, attaching to those receptors in our body. And a few of those are red clover, hops, non-genetically modified soy, and alfalfa, stimulating, promoting the healthy estrogens, and then detoxing of those xenoestrogens. Xenoestrogens are toxins that also bind to those estrogen receptors, and then they make you feel like you are in excess of that estrogen stimulation, and therefore, even further imbalance into the progesterone balance.

What you can do to detox would be sour, bitter foods in nature. So that’s like lemon, lime, grapefruit, dandelion, artichokes, bitter endives, lots of leafy greens. And then going to the second half of the cycle, you wanna promote more of the progesterone. So that’s from ovulation to when you’re gonna start your period again.

You can add things like sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, evening primrose oil, borage oil. Some of the herbs that are phyto progesterones that attach to those receptors on the progesterone receptors are vitex and wild yam Usually the body likes more sweeter type, starchier vegetables during that time, so like sweet potatoes, squash, berries, those are good things.

You don’t wanna overly restrict your calories during that half of the cycle ’cause you will blunt progesterone, and you’re already dealing with that decreasing progesterone during perimenopause.

Carrie: Yeah. So instead of just definitely don’t wanna do any, like, starvation-type stuff on your body, but balancing out the protein and the healthy fat is gonna help you be fuller.

And of course, the vegetables, things of that nature, are already lower in calories is a good way to balance things out, you feel like?

Celisha: Yes, most definitely. And then avoiding things that are inflammatory like alcohol and caffeine, processed foods. That’s gonna increase inflammation and pull more of our resources, our anti-inflammatory resources, from what our body would prefer to make progesterone and the calming-type hormones.

Carrie: Yeah. I think people can get in this really bad cycle with caffeine and sleep, or it’s like they’re using a lot of caffeine during the day, and then they can’t sleep at night, and it’s like, “Well, I didn’t sleep, and so I… Now I need caffeine,” and trying to get that rhythm back can be really challenging for people.

There’s a lot of chatter, of course, about supplements on the Internet and social media. Why do you feel like diet and lifestyle is more of a primary solution than supplements?

Celisha: Yeah. Supplements are great when they’re needed, but they should never be expected to do the work of lifestyle The body runs on inputs.

It responds to what we give it or we expose to it. So food becomes hormones, it becomes neurotransmitters. Sleep regulates cortisol, sunlight regulates circadian rhythms. If someone is sleeping five hours a night, skipping meals, relying on caffeine, living under chronic stress, there’s not a supplement powerful enough to consistently overcome those factors.

Carrie: Yeah. And this is something that I see a lot, where once you kind of peel back some of these layers and you find out maybe, like, how much caffeine someone is intaking, or you find out that they’re not eating at regular intervals, like you said, they’re not eating all day and then they’re eating at 2:00, or they’re eating at 5:00 is, like, when they’re having their main meal of the day, I’m like, “Of course you don’t feel good.

Of course your mental health is really struggling,” because kind of I would say on the mental health piece too, if your physical health isn’t at least somewhat regulated, we’re not gonna be able to make massive changes to your mental health through therapy. And I think that’s why it’s so important for people to have just some, like, baseline physical health stuff going on.

I know we have a lot of people out there that I meet in the Christian community specifically that don’t want to be on medication for OCD, and I always say, like, “Okay, well, if you’re not gonna be on OCD medication, like this is my opinion, you’ve got to exercise. That is not optional because that is so healthy and so important for your brain.

You can’t just not do anything. Like that’s not gonna be good.”

Celisha: It’s so hard to separate ’cause we think, “Okay” exercise is only for our muscles, but in reality, it works just like all the other hormone systems together. They all interact with one another, so you need the whole picture. Just like each of our body parts are necessary, each of our pieces in our body are important for balance and for us to have that spiritual, mental, physical health.

Carrie: Yeah. In the modern age, we’re not getting the level of movement that humans used to get in days past. We were more agrarian, and farming, and out in the fields, and milking cows, and I mean, there’s certain movements that are having to happen to make all of those things work. I think about my grandparents and the kind of movement that they got, very different than today’s desk job situations.

Being able to even recognize that God created our bodies to move, I really do believe that, and figuring out how we can add little movement breaks in throughout the day is helpful, on your lunch break, using the stairs, those types of things. So I’m sure there are women listening maybe who say, “I feel like my hormones are involved in what I’m experiencing mentally and emotionally,” and I think sometimes whenever people feel like there’s some type of mental health diagnosis on their record and that it’s always excused as mental health, and maybe some of the physical health hasn’t been dug into, but if there’s women listening who feel like, hey, their doctors dismiss them, or they’ve said, “Yeah, all your labs are normal, everything’s fine, you’re in normal range,” but they still feel off, they’re like, “Something’s not right here,” what can they do?

Celisha: So this is very common. I hear, “All my labs are normal,” but a normal lab result does not necessarily mean it’s optimal.

Carrie: That’s good.

Celisha: Labs are good for ruling out disease, but it doesn’t explain why people feel exhausted, anxious, overwhelmed. I look at labs from a functional point of view, and that can give me a clue as to what systems are stressed, but I also encourage women to listen to their symptoms.

They are not crazy. What they are feeling is important. Many women, especially during this change in hormones, they’re functioning at a constant state of low-grade stress activation. So even though their labs are normal, they’re dealing with poor sleep, and so that’s upsetting their nervous system, that elevated stress, that blood sugar instability, perhaps some unresolved trauma and inflammation just by way of that declining hormones.

All of those affect the nervous system, and what we learn is that the nervous system has two settings, so an alerting pathway, which keeps us awake, motivated, able to start and finish tasks, and then calming pathways, which helps us feel safe. So when we are consistently cultivating sleep, sunlight, healthy relationships, movement, gratitude, prayer, rest, we’re gonna strengthen the body’s ability to return to that state of safety.

And that’s what’s most important. Healing often begins when we stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” And we actually start asking, “What is the body trying to tell me?” We wanna look at how we can best cooperate with the vessel that the Lord gave us to steward. 1 Thessalonians 4:4 says that, “Every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor.”

And then in 9, 4:9, “For ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.” And we know that we were created to love and be loved.

Carrie: That’s really good. I like that. I think that this is a valuable conversation for so many reasons. I hope that people kind of picked up on, like, a little nugget here and there.

What I’ll say from the mental health side too is I think that people underestimate what chronic stress does to your body, and they may hear you use a word like trauma, and they may be like, “Yeah, I haven’t really been through anything traumatic.” But when you look at what they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis, like we talked about before, caring for a child with special needs, caring for a loved one with a disability, caring for multiple children over the course of your lifespan and trying to maybe dealing with some stressful situations that your teenagers have encountered where you didn’t know if they were being safe or not in various situations.

That can add up and cause a, an effect on your body that can put you in a state of hypervigilance, of the fight, flight, or freeze. Or maybe you had something that you thought was buried that happened a long time ago, and it didn’t get awoken until maybe your kid got to a certain age where you experienced the trauma.

That can also happen. So if you had a traumatic experience at 16, for example, you were trucking along, everything was okay, you felt like it was buried and done with. Your daughter turns 16, all of a sudden you’re re-triggered all over again. You’re afraid bad things are gonna happen to her, whatever that situation is.

Um, just for people to kind of be aware, ’cause I think sometimes people don’t even recognize or they’re not in awareness of how much stress they’re under or that their body has experienced. Are those some things that you’ve encountered, people that just have chronic stress that’s not even on their radar that they have chronic stress?

Celisha: Stress is quite common, and that also impacts the hormones. So you’ll see that with higher stress, you’re gonna have a weaker ovulation. Compound that on top of perimenopause, and then it will affect your lifestyle, it’ll affect your sleep, it will affect how your adrenals are producing the cortisol and those, that adrenaline.

Carrie: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your wisdom today. I know that people are gonna learn new things and just appreciate what you’ve been able to share.

A couple follow-up thoughts on this episode. I feel like the older I get, the slightly more crunchier I get. So I find these types of topics really fascinating to me.

I have been reading The Menopause Reset by Dr. Mindy Pelz. There’s so many things in that book, and so I’m really just trying to focus on a couple small key changes that I’m making in my life to handle my 40s in a slightly healthier way. They definitely have been hitting me kind of hard the last six months.

So if you’re there in this stage of life, I definitely feel you. We’re gonna make it. For our next couple episodes, we’re switching topics over into some spiritual discernment. Next week we’re gonna be talking about, is God asking me to give this up? Where I’m gonna be sharing with you something that I gave up recently, what I learned from that experience, and then I’m applying that over to what OCD usually asks of people in regards to giving things up.

And then we have a special guest coming to talk about discerning God’s call in a new season and just her personal testimony. I think you guys are gonna get a lot out of these episodes.

Celisha: Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the

Carrie: Well Counseling.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.