The Real Reason You’re On Edge in Menopause And How to Help: Cortisol, Estrogen Decline & Nervous System Support - Episode 298

Menopause can feel like your body changed the rulebook without warning. One day you’re handling pressure just fine; the next, a slammed door spikes your heart rate and your mind won’t quit. I pull back the curtain on why stress tolerance can collapse at midlife and how to rebuild it with smarter hormone care, steadier blood sugar, and nervous system-aware tools that actually fit real life.

I grow tired of experts telling us to control our stress.  Or limit our stress.  This is nonsensical to me because we can only mitigate the effects stress has on our bodies and we can't make it disappear.  Ignoring it, numbing it, also doesn't work at menopause. 

I have MANY different tools to help mitigate the effects of stress. NuCalm is a tool I've been using for many years now.  I was one of their early supporters and affiliates, and I remain a big believer.  Use this link for a free trial!!  And if you love it, use SANDYK for a discount.

https://nucalm.com/free-trial?ref=sandy54

Email me your questions, topics, or comments to be featured on my show - whether anonymous or not - your choice.  sandy@sandyknutrition.ca.

Follow me on all of my socials - @sandyknutrition everywhere.

Who am I? I don’t define myself by my past, but it’s a big part of my story. In 2010, my five-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer, and just a year later, I was too, but with thyroid cancer at 41. Fast forward to now, at 55, I’m navigating menopause and constantly learning what it truly means to thrive - body, mind, spirit and soul - to this next chapter of my life.

Along the way, I went back to college, became a Registered Holistic Nutritionist, earned numerous certifications, and started this podcast just before the pandemic. I come to you not only as a practitioner and a podcaster, but as a woman who’s lived it, someone driven by passion over profit, and a genuine desire to help others heal, grow, and live with more vitality, purpose, and joy.

Beyond the basics, I spotlight underused supports. Adaptogens can help some, but they won’t fix trauma or misaligned hormones. I also lean into the deeper layer: how menopause can surface old beliefs and hypervigilance, and  about BEAM Therapy. See Brenda Farrugia for more on this at https://www.sobrilliant.ca/.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Purpose
• 1:34 Disclaimers And Audience Scope
• 3:46 Perimenopause Vs Menopause Basics
• 5:38 Adrenals, Cortisol, And Stress Load
• 8:04 Subscribe, Platforms, And Mission
• 10:00 Personal Story: Anxiety Roots
• 13:28 Midlife Pressures And Nervous System
• 16:10 Perimenopause Metabolic Shifts
• 19:05 Bioindividuality Over Influencer Advice
• 21:06 The Grand Finale Of Perimenopause
• 23:24 Fixing Hormone Ratios With Labs
• 26:10 Beyond Adaptogens: What Didn’t Work
• 28:08 Glandulars And Nose-To-Tail Wisdom
• 30:14 Inositol As A Menopause Ally

Transcript

Sandy Kruse: 0:01

Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For years now, I've been bringing to you conversations about wellness from incredible guests from all over the world. Discover a fresh take on healthy living for midlife and beyond. One that embraces balance and reason without letting only science dictate every aspect of our wellness. Join me and my guests as we explore ways that we can age gracefully with in-depth conversations about the thyroid, about hormones, and other alternative wellness options for you and your family. True Wellness nurtures a healthy body, mind, spirit, and soul. And we cover all of these essential aspects to help you live a balanced, joyful life. Be sure to follow my show, rate it, review it, and share it. Always remember, my friends, balanced living works. Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. Today I've got another solo episode. I'm going to talk to you all about stress at menopause. Now remember, I am not your practitioner. I am not a doctor. I'm providing you with insight based on my knowledge. I don't know you, I don't know your situation, I don't know if you're on hormones or not on hormones. This is not medical advice. And another thing, because I'm talking about the nervous system, it's really important that I have this little caveat at the start. And I want to note that if you have a chronic or diagnosed issue with depression or anxiety, and or you are medicated for it, please see your own practitioner. This article is likely not for you. Anything natural that I discuss could potentially be harmful if you're on these medications, and it is contraindicated in a lot of natural supplements. So I do not provide medical advice. And this shorter podcast that I'm gonna talk about today, it is very nuanced. It's also specifically for perimenopausal and menopausal women, mostly just who have nuanced anxiety issues brought on by hormonal changes, which is something that most of us will undergo. And I just want to explain physiologically why this is happening. So let me just tell you first of all, my name is Sandy Cruz. I am a registered holistic nutritionist, I have certifications in peptides, aging, I also have certifications in endocrinology and hormones and functional lab testing and also functional nutrition. So I do know a little about a lot of different things. And I'm also a 55-year-old woman who is going through menopause without a thyroid gland. So I am a big believer that we can't look at our menopausal issues from, you know, these big doctors who speak about it and not, they're not able to relate to it. So that's why I really want to talk about the nervous system. So what happens in perimenopause is first of all, a lot of times people use these terms interchangeably, they are not the same. Perimenopause means things are starting to slow down, you're not as fertile as you once were. You, you know, it's harder to get pregnant. If you're trying to get pregnant, you may have some um lowering hormones, some symptoms. It is not the same as being in full menopause when you no longer have a period. Now, they mark this special time as one year of no periods. I actually am 55. I'll be 56 very, very soon. Oh my God. And uh in March of 2025, it was exactly one year since I've had a period. So, in the medical viewpoint, that is full menopause. So I will say that there are differences once you cross that threshold in that you're maybe not going as much up and down. I had about three years of latter stages of perimenopause, but there are other things that I noticed that really were more prevalent, and one is the nervous system, which is what I want to talk to you about. So physiologically, your ovaries are producing those sex hormones when you are younger, you're not in menopause, even when you're in perimenopause, you're still producing those hormones, maybe not as much. But what happens when you're in full menopause, those ovaries shut down. They're not making those hormones anymore. But, you know, we don't turn into men just because we enter menopause, we still produce those hormones, we just don't produce as many. And what happens is our adrenal glands start to make those hormones, or they they they I think they always do in small amounts, but they basically that's it, that's their job now. So most people know that the adrenal glands make, I think, three main hormones aldosterone as well as cortisol. Everybody knows about cortisol. Cortisol is not evil, it's not bad, but cortisol is that stress hormone. It's like a steroid hormone, and really it helps you to act in situations that are, you know, stressful. So a lot of people have heard that analogy about the lion running away and being really stressed out. So the body, when it's in that state, can't really do anything else. So if you're in a constant stressed-out state, your digestion may be off, your sleep may be off. It's really, really hard to function normally with prolonged high stress periods in our lives. So just to add a little more complex of a scenario, our adrenal glands now must take over to make those sex hormones. We still want to have estrogen. So if you're not on hormone replacement therapy, you still have estrogen, you still have progesterone, but now your adrenal glands have to take on the extra load. And a lot of women don't understand around menopause. Why am I so stressed out? Why can't I handle stress like I used to? This is a main reason, my beauties. It's because your adrenal glands are perhaps a little overloaded because they got a big job to do once we reach menopause. So today I am going to read you another Substack article. I'm gonna ask you first to subscribe to my podcast wherever you're listening, wherever you're watching, you might be watching it on YouTube, on Rumble. Be sure that you're following and subscribing. Subscribe to any of my um any of my channels: Instagram, Facebook, um, threads, TikTok. It's Sandy Knutrition everywhere. So easy to find, right? And then my podcast is available anywhere you listen to podcasts, or you can just watch it on YouTube. I try and post everything as I as I have time to, because I do most of the things myself. So my podcast in February will hit six years, over 1.4 million downloads. And it's my little creation just to really, really help those who need more help from a um, I'm not giving you advice that this is much you want what you must do. I'm giving you the breadcrumbs so that you can figure out what's the right formula for you, because there's a lot of advice going around in the health and wellness space on Instagram, Facebook, and everywhere. So I'm not giving you any health advice. So I'm also going to say that if you are a business that aligns with my purpose, aligns with my passion, I would love to hear from you because I am looking at partnering with sponsors. I am looking at monetizing for once after six years of doing this. So send me an email, sandy at sandyknutrition.ca. Also, if you would like to be featured on my show, if you have questions, if you have concerns, if you have comments, if you have a topic that you want to talk about, if you have a QA that you want to discuss, send me an email. Okay, now I'm gonna get to my actual article. Also, follow me on Substack because that's where I'm also an English literature graduate. So I write a lot. And this is where I write a lot of explorative articles, not to tell you about your health, but to actually help you think about it in a different way, so that you can kind of understand. I give you the foundation, I give you some clues, and then you go, okay, that resonates with me. Because I think that health is something that we must all understand. Internal resonance. Does this resonate with me? Does this resonate with my story? Because I don't know your story. Okay, so let's go. The article that I wrote, by the way, it's sandycruz.substock.com. If you want to follow me there, short explorative articles. And this is called How I Save My Nervous System at Menopause. I have never found myself to be a typical anxious person. I always thought that anxiety meant panic attacks. Historically, the only time I had experienced this was when I was over-medicated with thyroid medication. After I had my thyroid removed, this was back in 2011, my TSH was suppressed to undetectable levels, which gave me traditional panic attacks now and again. It wasn't fun. So here are the leading root causes of anxiety, a genetic predisposition, a brain chemistry imbalance. So neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, GABA are imbalanced, chronic stress or trauma, medical conditions such as hyperthyroidism, which is what I just mentioned, substance use or withdrawal, hormonal shifts, especially in women during perimenopause or even menopause or postpartum. Postpartum is another big time that us ladies can go through real hormonal shifts. So we've all felt anxious. I do not label, and I think that the overlabeling that our society loves to do can sometimes do more harm than good. Feeling anxious is normal, and it is a human built-in survival mechanism. It helps us get shit done. When anxiety is dysfunctional, I'm talking about chronic, lingering for weeks or months, excessive or disproportionate to the situation, triggered by vague or imagined threats, interrupting your life, relationships, or health. Has it gone too far? Now I'm going to mention a few things where you know you might want to consider this. You avoid people, places, or responsibilities because of fear. You wake up with dread even when nothing specific is wrong. Your body is constantly tense, wired, or exhausted. You have panic attacks or overwhelming surges of fear out of nowhere. You obsessively overthink what if scenarios. It disrupts sleep, digestion, hormones, or concentration, and you need to control everything to feel safe. Once menopause hits, women can feel all of this intensely, even for the first time in their lives. Our nervous system might react to a massive shift in our internal chemistry. Add to this real life problems, which can also be very intense. And listen, there are many of us out there as a 55-year-old woman. I have elderly parents, I have adult children who are still at home. There's a lot in most people's lives. So this might be the perfect storm for many women. I happen to be one of them, which is why I'm sharing this with you. Boatloads of Oshwagon and Rhodiola didn't cut it for me. Neither did the small amount of estrogen that I was taking. Perimenopause and menopause are not the same, although you'll often hear the terms used interchangeably. I'll break down my experience, and this doesn't mean it'll be yours, but no one talks about this definitive difference that I personally experienced. At age 52 in 2022, I started to experience issues with blood sugar regulation, began to gain midsection belly fat, and found that my HBA1C jumped to 6.1. Pre-diabetic? What? This was the first year I went down to only four periods. I tweaked how I was eating, and funny enough, I was listening to the big biohacking guru before this, and I was intermittent fasting every day doing the 16.8 fast, but still had this issue. So I'm gonna pause there for a second. Um, this was also the time that I became a certified metabolic balance coach. It's a great program. I don't coach in that anymore, but I highly recommend it. If you want information on that, get in touch with me. But HBA1C is different than blood glucose or fasting insulin. So HBA1C, the best way I can I can describe it, just in a simplified form, is how much glucose is stuck to your blood cells over a three-month period. It's a really important measurement because it kind of says, okay, this is this blood sugar issue is going on for a long time. It's just not one snapshot because you ate that bagel, right? So this is the one reason I became an advocate for listening to your own body. And I realized that we must learn to turn inward instead of giving all our power away to these wellness influencers. No one that you don't know, who doesn't know you, should have such a strong influence on your personal health. I've learned this myself. Listen, nothing against Peter Atia, he's incredible. But when I hear him talking about menopause, I'm like, great, I'm glad you're using all the literature and I'm glad you're using your test cases of patients that you've worked with. But the facts are this when you hear from a person such as myself who's going through it, who's living it, I think it's just going to add more credibility, more value, other than having the MD behind my name. So I just wanted to pause there because there's a lot of us who will look and take only advice. And advice is big. You gotta be careful about advice. No one should give you advice unless they know you. Period. End of story. They can have all the credentials in the world unless they know you. You need to take it to a practitioner that knows you. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, I experienced the usual hot flashes and sleep disturbances. I became a certified metabolic balance coach in late 2022 to address my issues with blood sugar and help a few clients along the way. So the year between 2024 and 2025 was when more intense nervous system challenges hit. I will call this the grand finale of perimenopause. I also had some significant life changes that I was not equipped to handle. These challenges were enough to put me into a hypervigilant state, as though I were a wild animal on guard from being eaten 24 hours a day. I'm grateful that I can write about it now and today. My estrogen was too low. Despite being on it, it was not optimized. My progesterone was too high, my ratios were off. I was taking the nervous system support supplements, I was writing in my journal every day, I was walking in nature every day, but I was a fucking mess. A literal pile of an anxious and alternating depressed mess. On top of all the life stressors, every old trauma and past negative beliefs resurfaced during this exact time. And I actually recorded a podcast about, I think I called it the great uprooting, what no one tells you about menopause. I wrote about the deeper, more esoteric spiritual meaning behind the transition of menopause. It's in my sub stack, and I actually have the podcast recorded as well. This was truly the scariest time in my life. More frightening than when my daughter was diagnosed with cancer. More terrifying than when I was diagnosed with cancer. And people are like, what? What are you crazy? Maybe it's because it kind of took me by surprise the way that I had zero ability to cope with anything that came my way. I was forced to make changes to save my mental health and stability. So believe me, health is wealth. Nothing is more important than that. So I'm not placing the importance of that. I'm just saying that my reaction was really, really different. I had no coping skills whatsoever. I recommend going back to your own hormone practitioner, number one, to get the estrogen to progesterone ratios right if you are on hormone replacement therapy. So in my article, I give you the guidelines. You can go back to it and Substack. Ensure that your practitioner is experienced in hormone replacement therapy. My practitioner was trying to get me there, but sometimes it's not a simple fix. And this imbalance can cause many issues, including the anxiety, the irritability, the depression, and more. And better now, I get blood work every three months, and I suggest you do the same until you're more stable. Although remember, we aren't robots and our hormones will fluctuate our entire lives. The other thing with me is that I don't have a thyroid gland. So when estrogen goes up too high, that can affect my thyroid function because it increases sex hormone binding globulin. So, like there's so many factors. We are not, we don't, our endocrine system does not work in silos. So make sure that you're working with somebody who looks at the whole big picture. I felt no help whatsoever from Ashwagandha and Rhodiola during this time. Adaptogens don't address unprocessed grief, betrayal or loss, or vagus nerves shutdown, or emotional dysregulation from trauma. No one tells you this. Everyone, including myself as a practitioner, would say, take ashwagandha if you're stressed and wired, take rhodiola if you're stressed and tired, take both if you're both. It was like a common line. At menopause, this might not work if your issues are more intense, including if your issues include off ratios of estrogen and progesterone. I'm not even getting into testosterone in here in this uh discussion, but testosterone relates to mood as well. Another support that might help you, and remember, I have no affiliation with any of this that I'm talking about, and this depends on your individual needs. There's a supplement called Serenogen from Metagenics, and this one includes some different Chinese herbs that might provide more support than the go-to ashwagonda rhodiola recommendations. Now, another thing that you can speak with your practitioner about is actual glandulars. I was having a conversation with my mom. So my parents grew up as farmers, and this is an old Croatia old school farming. And I listened to a lot of what they tell me because I see how this can help us if we can somehow emulate this now in modern day living. So they always ate nose to tail. They didn't eat a ton of animal protein every single day. They did eat it. And when they ate it, they ate nose to tail. They would eat the organ meats, and we were talking about that. And, you know, my mom still will cook with, you know, chicken giblets, for example. And they're what I'm gonna say about organ meats, eating them on occasion provides you extreme nutrient density in a small amount. So what that means is you can eat organ meats maybe once a month, and your protein stores will still stay relevant, let's just say, and your nutrient stores, I should say. It's more about your nutrient stores. So remember, you have nutrients, some are water soluble, some are fat soluble, so some are stored, some kind of go in and out of the body very quickly. So you can look at an adrenal glandular for support. Typically, I mean, there's a few out there. There's one that designs for health makes and includes, I think, B6, B12, as well as the actual bovine adrenals, desiccated. I think it's desiccated or dried, whatever. Look into that. And it makes a lot of common sense if you have issues with your adrenal glands that you know, adrenal support might be useful for you, but speak with your practitioner. So the last one that I hadn't heard much about for menopausal women, and I've been on it for a while now, is specifically myo and dechyroinositol. The most studied ratio for effectiveness is 40 to 1, which mimics the natural ratios in healthy tissues. So make sure you look for this if this is something you want to try. I found a brand that's reasonable, reasonably priced in these ratios, made by a company called Wholesome Story. I have zero affiliations or discounts from these brands. Remember, I am passionate over profit here. I'm trying to help you look and explore possible options for your stress support. This one has been a game changer for me. This formulation has been pegged as a supplement that helps with PCOS, which is why most menopausal women don't know about it. You know, they get pigeonholed and boxed into this, you know, PCOS category. And so women at menopause don't even really think about it. These inocitals are vastly underutilized in menopause care, despite offering real benefits to women beyond reproductive age. We produce these same sugar alcohols in these ratios primarily from glucose in our kidneys. Still, production often decreases at menopause, and demand may exceed supply in certain situations, like PCOS, type 2 diabetes, depression, or anxiety, poor diet, and gut dysfunction. So think about it. We experience these symptoms in menopause due to hormones dropping. So why wouldn't practitioners use this or recommend it? Here's why it makes sense at menopause, unless it's contraindicated for you, as noted at the start of my podcast. Remember, talk to your practitioner. Many women, many menopausal women report fewer cravings, more stable weight, and less brain fog with inositol use. In menopause, when estrogen-related serotonin support is gone, inositol offers an alternative route to regulate mood. Many women sleep better and feel less on edge when using myoinositol in the evening. While it won't replace estrogen or progesterone, it can modulate the downstream effects of hormone loss, like blood sugar dysregulation, mood instability, and metabolic slowdown. This is a potent natural neuroendocrine modulator. So this one addition to my own stack, it saved me and my nervous system, and it's become more like it was before perimenopause and menopause. I'm finding myself again. I'm no longer jumping at every single sound. That's another sign, by the way. You know, if a door closes loudly or if somebody comes in a room and you're like, right? That is a real sign that your nervous system may be a little bit off. Um, I don't ruminate to the point of driving everyone in my family crazy because my brain never stopped. So here's the last important fact. Simultaneously, I've been working with Brenda Ferrugia. I did record a podcast about negative beliefs, limiting beliefs, beam therapy. I've done numerous sessions of beam therapy. I don't have any affiliation or payment or anything from Brenda to recommend her. It's only the graciousness of having her on my podcast three times now and experiencing the healing that she facilitates. Beam therapy can help with healing trauma, releasing negative self-talk, dissolving limiting beliefs, reducing anxiety and fear, breaking the program of having to place please others, strengthening self-love, respect, and boundaries. Beam therapy gently unravels deeply embedded subconscious energetic patterns layer by layer, transmuting, dissolving, and releasing the beliefs, behaviors, and traumas that can contribute to disease. Not cause it, contribute to. Podcast description. So that's pretty much it, my beauties. I hope that you found this to be helpful. And I come from a very different perspective to really call attention to this because the nervous system, I believe, is so fragile during this time. And when we do nothing and we experience really stressful situations, which everybody has, and we have we don't have the troops ready to act, it can be a big contributing factor to our overall health and our longevity. So I really wanted to make sure that I kind of got everything in from an unbiased perspective, but just from somebody who's living it, who studied it, and who researches it. So I hope that's helpful. If it is, please interact somehow with this, share this podcast with another friend, or make sure that you're following, review my podcast on Apple or Spotify. You can do that through those two methods and add in a few kind words, and that just helps people to find me more. So I thank you, and we will see you next week. Bye for now. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit. And always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bringing these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new exciting conversations to help you live your best life.