Episode 290: Imbalanced Cortisol: 2 Questions to Ask Yourself
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If you’ve ever seen imbalanced cortisol on a hormone test and thought “how do I fix this?”, then this episode is for you.
There are MANY reasons for imbalanced cortisol, and Erin lays out many of them in this episode. But after 12 years of practice, there is something that she consistently sees as the NUMBER ONE reason for burnout, stress and cortisol issues. As a functional medicine practitioner, these are the 2 questions she asks anytime cortisol shows up as high or low on a hormone lab.
This is exactly what you need to uncover and correct burnout, stress, “adrenal fatigue” and cortisol issues – and prevent them from coming back again.
In this episode:
3 different ways to test cortisol [3:55]
Cortisol testing: should you even bother? [5:47]
Reasons for high & low cortisol [14:11]
How cortisol dysregulation opens up the doorway to other issues [19:41]
Overfunctioning & boundaries: a clash between 2 essential needs [21:33]
Are your relationships causing cortisol imbalance? [36:50]
Resources mentioned:
Your Hormone Revival™ (Only available within The Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™
1:1 Functional Medicine Nutrition
Energetics of Expansion Business Course
The Boundaries Course (Available for free within The Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
Kion Aminos (Get 20% off monthly orders and 10% off one time orders)
Ned Natural Remedies (get 15% off your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Learn more about Hormones and Mindset
Related episodes:
82: Cortisol, DHEA + Adrenal Testing, Part 1
83: Cortisol, DHEA + Adrenal Testing, Part 2
72: Exercising with Adrenal Fatigue & Cortisol Dysregulation
112: All Your Cortisol Questions Answered, Part 1
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast, where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet culture, and the healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do, and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect.
Erin Holt [00:00:39]:
So I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school in mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review and share because you never know whose life you might change. And of course, keep coming back for more. Hello out there, my friends. You ready to talk about cortisol today? Let's do it. If you've ever had any type of hormone testing done and your cortisol has come back kind of wonky, and you've thought, how the heck do I fix this? This episode is for you.
Erin Holt [00:01:30]:
As a functional medicine practitioner, these are the two questions that I ask whenever I see imbalanced cortisol on a hormone lab. So this could be high cortisol. This could be low cortisol. The two questions are, are you ready for it? Where am I over functioning? And why am I over functioning? There are lots of different reasons for imbalanced cortisol. We'll talk about them today. But after twelve years of practice, over functioning is the number one reason that I see for burnout, for stress, and for imbalanced cortisol. And we need to understand why you're doing that, why you're over functioning, before we can attempt to change the behavior.
Erin Holt [00:02:20]:
And this is what I think about when I think about taking a real root cause approach to things. Now, quickly, I want to remind you that the day after Thanksgiving, we are running our Funk'tional Friday sales, where all of our courses are going on sale, including our courses for business and entrepreneurship, like the Energetics of Expansion, which is the game changing course where you learn the strategies to grow your audience by thousands and attract your most aligned clients without all the self doubt. It is probably my favorite course that I've ever built, but I think I say that about all the courses. So just know that those are coming in hot in a couple of weeks. So be sure you're on our email list, so you will get the invite. Okay, so let's get into it. Cortisol. I want to talk about testing for a little bit now.
Erin Holt [00:03:10]:
I have done a lot of episodes on cortisol. We'll link them up in the show notes in case you want to do a deep dive. So I don't want to spend too, too much time on the cortisol basics, like what is. It's a glucocorticoid, it's a stress hormone, and there are a few different ways to test it. So, in case you're new here, I do want to kind of unpack a couple of the different options that you have. Now, remember, there is a big difference between conventional testing and functional testing, and one is not good or bad or better or worse. The way that I view them is there are two different sets of tools that are looking for different things. And I explain all of this in episode 212, A Functional Medicine Approach to Labs.
Erin Holt [00:03:51]:
Okay, so if you need a refresher or you just want to learn about the difference, go there. Now, if you were to get your cortisol tested through a conventional medicine doctor, they would most likely be looking at a blood lab, and they're really screening for more of a significant problem, like adrenal insufficiency, where the adrenal glands just aren't producing cortisol, or they're looking for some other type of endocrine disorder. An example of this would be Addison's disease, and in many cases, Addison's actually is autoimmune. But they would look at that through ACTH testing, which is the hormone that tells the adrenal glands to make cortisol. In this case, cortisol would be extremely low, because, again, the adrenal glands just don't make enough of it. Another situation would be Cushing's disease or Cushing's syndrome, where cortisol is extremely high. So this is kind of what a conventional approach would probably be screening for, whereas with functional testing, we're kind of looking for non medical issues. The point of testing cortisol through a functional lens is not really to determine whether or not you have a rare endocrine disorder, but to determine how stress is impacting your body and your health so that we can catch it and reverse the impact of that chronic stress.
Erin Holt [00:05:13]:
It really gives us information so that we can correct any HPA access, dysregulation, or dysfunction. I think it really provides validation, especially for kind of hard charging, heavy hitting people who just go, go. I remember years ago, a client said to me, she said, I knew I was stressed, but I didn't realize to what extent the results were so validating. And I feel like I knew it all deep down. But having the answers has really changed things for me and has given me the drive to really make some changes. And some medical professionals, physicians, other practitioners, think it's kind of ridiculous to test for cortisol, especially in the way that we do with functional medicine. And I actually fundamentally disagree. Just based on what I've seen, it really can be the thing, the kick in the pants, if you will, to get people to completely change their behavior, change their thoughts, change their approach, do the undercover work that actually creates the profound change in their health.
Erin Holt [00:06:22]:
More long term stress is extraordinarily subjective. So it's hard to define, it's hard to quantify. And as you've heard me say, a lot, many of us, over time, have just become so disconnected from our bodies. One of the things that I encourage everyone to do is to attempt and begin to learn the language of your body, because the body's always sending us feedback, it's always sending us messages. We're just not always so skillful at listening to those messages. But the data doesn't lie, so we can use it as a way to say, hey, you're under significant stress. Based on the data, you've probably been under significant stress for a long time. And this is how it's impacting your physical body, and this is how it's contributing to your symptoms.
Erin Holt [00:07:11]:
So, personally, I am a fan of looking at hormones, including cortisol, when we're doing a workup on somebody just to see, hey, what the heck is going on? And could stress be part of the problem here? Another way to test, and this is something that you would find with a functional provider, is through salivary testing. So this is your saliva spit test. Super easy to collect. It's very convenient. You can do it yourself at home, inexpensive. You are looking at free cortisol. So cortisol levels will change throughout the day, and you are essentially spitting in a tube four different times throughout the day, versus, if you're taking a blood draw, you're only getting that once, right. Or even if you're just doing one cortisol sample, you're only seeing cortisol at that time of day, which is not really reflective of overall cortisol production and doesn't show you that diurnal pattern as it moves throughout the day.
Erin Holt [00:08:08]:
There is one that is pretty good from Doctor's Data. It looks at the four cortisol points. It looks at secretory IgA, which is an immunoglobulin, as we'll talk about in a little bit. They can sometimes go together hand in hand, and then it also looks at DHEA, another stress hormone, and that's going to run you about $150. And that's pretty good. That's a good starting place, and it's very budget friendly. Typically, when we test cortisol in my practice, we're looking at a lot more than just cortisol. So we use DUTCH testing through Precision Analytical.
Erin Holt [00:08:45]:
There's absolutely no affiliation with the company whatsoever. It's just, in my estimation, the most comprehensive way to look at hormones. There's two different ways to do this. You can do. Or actually, I guess there's three. If you just wanted to look at cortisol, they do have just a saliva test. That's about $300.
Erin Holt [00:09:04]:
Kind of expensive, to be honest, in my opinion, for what you get. Then they have the DUTCH complete, which is going to run you about $500. That's looking at urine. So they're testing your hormones through dried urine sample. The unique value of urine for cortisol is that it's showing cortisol metabolites, which is a better marker for overall production. It has the ability to look at your total amount of production in a 24 hours time period. And then there's the DUTCH+, which looks at urine and saliva. So you're kind of getting the best of both worlds, where you get to plot out that free cortisol diurnal pattern.
Erin Holt [00:09:50]:
You can look at cortisol awakening response, which is just basically asking, are you mounting a big cortisol response when you wake up? Which we absolutely should be doing. It's imperative for immune health also just to feel good, have energy, not feel achy and pain-y when you wake up in the morning. So we get to look at that plus the metabolites. And then again, like I said, with the DUTCH test, we're also looking at other hormones. We're looking at DHEA, we're looking at your sex hormones, we are looking at how your body is metabolizing hormones. There's a lot on that test, not the point of the conversation today. So the DUTCH+, the one that we use, runs you about $650, if you buy it right from the website. You can purchase it for $650 if you're working with us, either through our one on one work or Your Hormone Revival, it's $400
Erin Holt [00:10:44]:
I believe. We always pass along our practitioner costs for our labs directly to our clients. So those are the different ways you can test for cortisol, some of the pros and the cons associated with each of them.
Erin Holt [00:13:51]:
Now remember I said there's different reasons for imbalanced cortisol, high or low. And when I see either of these, I always come back to, okay, where is this person overdoing? Where is this person over giving or over functioning? But there are also other reasons or reasons in conjunction with over functioning that we might see imbalanced cortisol. So I want to tuck into some of the reasons before we get into the over functioning discussion. For high cortisol, we might see this because you're under a lot of stress.
Erin Holt [00:14:43]:
Like obviously, stress hormones are going to go high. When you're under a lot of stress, physical, mental, or even chemical stress, your body's being exposed to something that it really shouldn't be. Acute inflammation and acute pain can drive cortisol up. Same with an acute infection. So let's say you got the flu and you happen to test your cortisol at the time of the flu. It's not crazy that cortisol would be high during that. We can see high cortisol pair with insulin and glucose problems. Those kind of go hand in hand.
Erin Holt [00:15:14]:
If you drink a lot of coffee or caffeine or you use stimulants that can also drive up free cortisol levels. If you're not sleeping well, that's going to impact cortisol for sure. Hypothyroid sometimes can do it as well. And then if you're on certain cortisol medications like Cortef, that can drive cortisol up. And as we talked about a more severe situation would be a Cushing syndrome or a Cushing's disease. Now for low cortisol. If you're seeing low cortisol on a lab, this is when I usually think about a more longer term picture for the most part. So long term stress, psychological burnout, long term inflammation, pain, infection, like let's say you've got a gut infection that's been there for a really long time, or a viral infection that your body's been kind of attempting to fight off for a long time, that can drive down cortisol levels.
Erin Holt [00:16:02]:
Poor sleep can absolutely do it. If you've got mitochondrial issues that could impact cortisol levels, head trauma, like a TBI, anything that really can affect the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland or the hippocampus can do that. Certain medications can absolutely suppress cortisol production. Things like prednisone, steroids, opioids, accutane is a big one that can affect it. So those are all things to consider. But usually with a low cortisol picture, this person is depleted. So you really want to ask how did they get depleted in the first place? If you've got low cortisol, your tank is empty. Why? What has been draining it? What has been siphoning your energy and your resources? This is the real root cause work.
Erin Holt [00:16:53]:
In my eyes, it's not just saying, oh, low cortisol, we're going to give them some adaptogens to raise it back up. We're not trying to play whack a mole, right? We want to move away from the idea that functional medicine is just trying to correct every lab marker imbalance. An example that I'll give that's not cortisol. Let's take B12 for example. So let's say you've done a lab and your B12 is low. The first instinct a provider might have is to give you B12 to raise it back up. And that's not a wrong approach at all. But we also want to ask the question why? Especially if we're taking this root cause functional approach, your practitioner should really be doing some of the head scratching to understand, well, why are they low in B12 in the first place? Are they not eating enough dietary sources of B12? Are they just not eating enough in general? That's a big one that can sometimes be overlooked.
Erin Holt [00:17:44]:
Are they unable to break down their food and access the B12 in it? Do they have low stomach acid? Is their body in an acute period of stress, so they're really using up their B vitamins more than normal right now. Again, these are the big questions that we should be thinking. This is the way that we look under the hood. And I'm laughing because I want to speak into this a little bit. I was going through our FNA applications, that's the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, our practitioner training, and somebody indicated that it's just so overwhelming to learn and understand how to interpret these functional labs. And I was chuckling to myself, because if you're not overwhelmed by all of this, you're probably not doing it right. I'm joking a little bit. But we can't take something as complex as our health in the human body and try to oversimplify it.
Erin Holt [00:18:38]:
So these labs should be like a doorway in a pathway into the real root stuff. We're not trying to oversimplify complex issues through these functional lab testing by saying like, oh, you're low in B12, we just got to give you some B12 to bring it back up. Or oh, you're low in cortisol. Let's just give you some adaptogenic herbs to bring that cortisol back up. And I will continue to advocate for this because I feel by me advocating for this, I'm advocating for people who are struggling with their health to get the good, proper care that they need. It's so important if you want to leverage these functional labs, if you're a practitioner or you want to leverage these functional labs in your practice, it's so important to have the appropriate training and the ability to ask questions as you're learning the lab. That's why I believe mentorship is so important. That's why, that's what we do in the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy.
Erin Holt [00:19:35]:
If that's something you're interested in, be sure to apply. We'll link to it in the show notes. So anyway, back to cortisol. The real reason that you should care about cortisol dysregulation is because it can open up the doorway to other issues. By now, we all know and understand that stress is not good for our overall health. But when we see low cortisol, for example, I mentioned this earlier, this can oftentimes pair with low secretory IgA. Secretory IgA is at a really important immunoglobulin. It's part of our immune system.
Erin Holt [00:20:08]:
And so with low cortisol, we can oftentimes, dare I say, almost always see a suppressed immune system or suppressed immune function. And when our immune function is suppressed, that really opens up the doorway to lots of different things. Respiratory infections, the flu, COVID, gut dysbiosis, or in my case, all of the above within a span of like four months. Yeah. So that was the impetus for this episode. My cortisol labs. I ran a DUTCH test on myself and I was like, oh, okay, yeah, this tracks. My cortisol levels were really low and it's not the first time that I had seen this pattern.
Erin Holt [00:20:51]:
So if you've ever wondered what a functional medicine practitioner does when they see low cortisol levels on their own hormone lab, this is it, babe. This episode is it. When I saw this on my lab, I didn't say, let me run to Fullscript to buy up all the supplements. I had to say, let's unpack how I got here again. And so the two questions I asked myself were, drumroll please. Where am I over functioning and why am I over functioning? So the same medicine that I preached to you, I am taking a spoonful of it myself. So let's define over functioning. So we're all on the same page here.
Erin Holt [00:21:37]:
I kind of think of this Liz Gilbert quote. I think this was from a Huffington Post article. She said, nearly all the women I know are stressing themselves sick over the pathological fear that they simply aren't doing enough with their lives. So that's kind of over functioning in a nutshell, never doing enough, which is crazy, absolutely flat out bananas because the women I know do a lot and they do it well. Over functioning is doing more than necessary, more than is appropriate. It is doing more than your fair share. It's over giving, it's overdoing, and quite frankly, it's doing more than is healthy. It's holding space beyond your capacity.
Erin Holt [00:22:18]:
It's being overly responsible for people in your life, family, friends, coworkers, sometimes, oftentimes it looks like doing things you weren't even asked to do. Have you ever felt resentful that you were doing something and somebody was like, I actually never asked you to do that. That's over functioning. Doing things that other people should really be doing for themselves and deriving a sense of value and purpose for being all the things to all the people. Over functioning is tied pretty closely to codependency and Terri Cole's definition. When I learned this, because before I would always say, well, I'm not codependent. I'm independent. I do everything myself.
Erin Holt [00:23:01]:
But when I really understood what codependency was, I was like, oh dear, it's me. Terri Cole says that codependency is being overly invested in the feeling states, the decisions, the outcomes, the circumstances, of the people in our life to the detriment of our internal peace. It is being overly responsible. It's not really understanding what's their responsibility and what's my responsibility. There's like this overreach. And the funny thing about it is that over functioning is really the only addiction that we're rewarded for. We are praised for it. We're loved, we're needed, we're awarded for it.
Erin Holt [00:23:42]:
So we don't really tend to see it as a problem. And actually, it can become ingrained as part of our identity. It's who we think we are, it's how we view ourselves, it's how others view us. And once it gets tangled up in your sense of self, it becomes really hard to step away from. So again, the first thing that we have to recognize is, where are you doing this? So, after I just read you that list of what over functioning is, can you think about where you might be doing this in your life? For me, I had spent the past two years, I would say, really pulling back from over functioning tendencies in relationships, specifically with my family and with friends. But I realized that I hadn't done that with work. So right now, as I record this, I'm currently in the midst of a several month long identity shift, rebirth. Which is funny because I'm recording this on a Scorpio new moon, and I believe Scorpio is all about death and rebirth.
Erin Holt [00:24:49]:
So, just funny timing. But by the way, this is why I started micro dosing. Because I was using all of my tools and I still couldn't shift this pattern. I needed a little bit of a helping hand. But my sense of self and the value that I offer has been predicated on me working as hard as I can and overdoing. And so that creates an environment where I feel like I am never doing enough. So you can see how that would be very conducive to burnout to low cortisol levels, right? That just kind of makes sense. I will tell you, it was this line that really got me.
Erin Holt [00:25:33]:
It really helped me see my own behavior and my own patterns. I was talking to my husband and I was having a little bit of a breakdown, perhaps I would call it maybe. I was out on the back deck this summer, and I was so overworked, I was so overwhelmed. And I just recognized, like, I have to change something. So I told him, I'm like, I'm just going to do the bare minimum for the next few months. I'm just going to really scale things back and just do the bare minimum. And then I proceeded to list off what I was going to do. And I was so proud of myself.
Erin Holt [00:26:14]:
I was like, I've really cracked the code. I've really figured this out. I'm just going to coast. I'm just going to coast. That's what I said. I'm just going to coast. And he looked at me and he said, Erin, what you just described is a full time job. So your perception of bare minimum is someone else's full time job.
Erin Holt [00:26:35]:
So that was really confronting to me, because in that moment, I recognized how true it was. And I also realized, okay, this is what I need to change if I really want to fundamentally kind of alter this stress pattern, this cortisol pattern, if you will. This is what needs to change. So the awareness of where the over functioning is taking place is key. And you might not know the answer right away. It might take, or you might, I don't know, but it might also take time for you to observe your own patterns, and that's fine. And it might require some conversations with people who you know and who you trust and who have your best interest at heart and can really reflect back to you your own patterning. That might be a therapist, that might be a spouse, that might be a best friend, it might be a parent, it might be a sibling.
Erin Holt [00:27:29]:
But I can say that that was very, very helpful and eye opening for me.
Erin Holt [00:30:22]:
So the first step is the awareness, where am I over functioning? And then the next step is to ask why? And you can't skip this step, I'm sorry to say, because the why is the true root. It is what is driving the behavior. We have to understand what our drivers are, how our behaviors are meeting a need. We're not just doing these things for the sake of doing them. More often than not, we're doing them because we think we have to. So why do we think we have to? Why are we doing this? And for a lot of us over functioners, it comes down to fear. Fear of being unloved or unlovable. Fear of abandonment.
Erin Holt [00:31:04]:
Fear of being left behind. The idea is, if I make myself indispensable, then no one will leave me. If I can be the absolute best at everything I do, this will protect me from getting hurt, because over functioning has a lot of overlap with perfectionist tendencies, too. So I just want to be the best at everything I do. That one, really. I relate to that a lot. If I can do it all myself, I won't be a burden. So rather than seeing and believing that our self worth is innate, we put conditions on our self worth.
Erin Holt [00:31:46]:
A lot of these conditions have to do with performing for others. If I can just do this for them, then I have value, then I can offer value, then I can offer value, and then therefore feel worthy. So over functioning can really just be a way that we feel worthy of existing. And what we really see here is a clash between two essential needs, the core need of attachment and the core need of authenticity. Attachment is essentially the drive for closeness, proximity to others. It's being part of the group, being accepted into the tribe, whereas authenticity is being true to oneself. It's the capacity to shape our own life based on a deep knowledge of self. Like, I know what I need and I trust myself, and I'm going to build a life and make decisions based on that.
Erin Holt [00:32:48]:
It's recognizing our gut feelings or our intuition, our instinct as it arises, and then it's honoring that, making decisions based off that. It's using our emotions as a directive, as, like an internal compass. Oh, this emotion is coming up. Here's this information. Now I'm going to make decisions based on this information. And if we have to make a choice between attachment, being part of the group, and authenticity, living our life for us in a way that we're being true to ourselves, more often than not, we're going to choose the attachment over the authenticity. We are a lot of times raised and even praised to do this. We are primed for self abandonment.
Erin Holt [00:33:39]:
We learn at a very early age to go dark on ourselves, to divorce ourselves from our body's needs, from our emotional, that internal emotional compass, from our intuition, from our gut instinct, we learn to put our needs last in order to keep the peace. We learn to be a good little girl. We learn to not ask for too much, not be too much, not be too loud, not be too needy, not be too sensitive, not have too many needs, not rock the boat. We learn that this is actually how we're supposed to exist in the world. We go dark on our own emotional needs, so we have no way to effectively or appropriately process those emotions. And, you know, I reference the work of Gabor Maté. Often he refers to unmetabolized emotion. Like, if we don't have a way to process it, they remain unmetabolized.
Erin Holt [00:34:43]:
And it's that habitual, repressed emotion, that unmetabolized emotion that actually chronically activates the HPA access. It leads to chronic stress. So we can absolutely see this show up on a DUTCH test or a hormone test as imbalanced cortisol. Like, for sure, unquestionably so. And if this is hitting you, if you're like, ooh, this is me, just know that I talk a lot about this in the Boundaries course. I unpack all of this. Why boundary setting is so hard. I'm not just like, here's how to set a boundary.
Erin Holt [00:35:23]:
I'm like, no, let's back up a few clicks. Let's talk about why boundary setting is hard for us. Because it's hard for us. And that is included in the Funk'tional Friday sale just FYI. I've said it before, I will say it again. Boundaries is healthcare. And so we can see over functioning and lack of boundaries go hand in hand, because boundaries requires a sense of self worth.
Erin Holt [00:35:51]:
That's something that we don't really talk about much. You have to have some semblance of self worth in order to set a boundary. I love the way one of my teachers, Erin Telford, says this. She says boundaries are essentially an assertion of, I am the precious thing in my life that's worth protecting. I'm it me. I am worth protecting. And an embodied boundary is an assertion that I will not diminish myself. I'm done going dark on myself.
Erin Holt [00:36:25]:
I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not turning away from myself anymore. I'm not turning away from my needs. I'm not dimming the internal guidance that's trying to come through. I'm not devaluing myself, I'm not compromising myself. Me having boundaries is basically stating I have value here. I see my own value. The other tricky part about that is boundaries also require you to choose authenticity over attachment.
Erin Holt [00:36:57]:
It doesn't mean you can only have one or the other. But sometimes you do have to make a choice in order to stay as part of the collective, you might have to go dark on the authentic parts of you. And so that's why there's so much fear around setting boundaries. You're afraid you're going to lose people, you're afraid you're going to be ousted from the group. That is scary. That goes against a core need that we have. And the thing is, on top of all of that, we have 100% normalized it. So it just feels like, well, that's what everybody else is doing.
Erin Holt [00:37:35]:
We have normalized being in environments and staying in environments. So I'm talking communities, I'm talking families, romantic relationships, marriages, friendships, workplaces, even client practitioner relationships where we consciously or unconsciously dull down our full selves. We dim them down, we dull ourselves down. We edit ourselves to make ourselves seem more palatable. We edit out the parts that might cause us to be judged or make others feel badly about themselves. That's a big one for me. I brought this up, I loosely brought this up on a show before, but feeling like I need to apologize for my ambition because it might make others feel badly about themselves, that was a big one for me. So I would always kind of like edit it down, scale it back.
Erin Holt [00:38:26]:
I would kind of assess the group I was in. I'm like, can I talk about my big dreams here or no? Is that not acceptable here? I mean, as you're listening, can you relate to that, that need, or the tendency to scale ourselves back? Edit ourselves back? We're more concerned with caretaking the emotions of other people than we are with getting our own needs met. And that is over functioning. And there can be such a fear with discontinuing this behavior because we don't want to lose people. But I've given this a lot of thought and where I've sort of netted out, if I have to edit myself in any way to keep you comfortable, then you are no longer a safe space for me. You are no longer a nurturing or enriching place for me. Like, I can't go to you to fill myself up because I can't even be my most full expression of myself in front of you. So we become a resource for that person, but we're not able to resource from that person.
Erin Holt [00:39:44]:
So if we are constantly resourcing other people in our relationships, in our environments, but we're not able to resource from these relationships or these environments, you can see how that would create a real recipe for burnout. And I will tell you that sometimes discontinuing over functioning requires you to renegotiate contracts within your relationships. If you have always served as a resource for others to siphon from, and all of a sudden you decide that you are no longer doing that. People might be disgruntled, but it doesn't always have to be a loss of the relationship. It can be a renegotiation. And I feel like the relationships that are worth putting effort and time into are the ones that can grow as we grow. They can change, they can evolve. It allows for renegotiation.
Erin Holt [00:40:48]:
And I have done that this pretty successfully. Well, in a lot of situations I have gotten to certain points where I was like, I am no longer diminishing myself to make others more comfortable. So you can either calibrate up or calibrate out. And some people calibrate it up, and some people calibrate it out. And I don't say this lightly, there is so much grief that comes with the end of a relationship. But I am more willing to stretch my capacity to hold the grief for a relationship ending than I am willing to go dark on myself, dim myself down, and edit myself for somebody else's comfort. That's sort of where I've netted out. And I'm just spending more time speaking into this because I know that this is a driver for so many people.
Erin Holt [00:41:47]:
Whether or not you consider yourself a people pleaser, keeping the peace and performing for others is where a lot of people receive a sense of value and self worth. So this is why we really have to understand the whys behind what we're doing. So then we have more of an opportunity to shift our behavior if we so desire. So for me right now, understanding the whys and the drivers behind my tendencies to overwork, to overdo, to over function, really help me interrupt the pattern when it's happening. And to be honest with you, so much of that has to do with old core wounds and family based stuff. So I won't get into it here, but just understand, understanding the whys, it's a big deal. You can't just follow a protocol checklist for this stuff. If you really want to correct burnout and cortisol dysregulation and hormonal dysfunction.
Erin Holt [00:42:48]:
Now, if you go to a functional provider and you've got low cortisol, they might tell you to take some mitochondrial support, get on some glandulars, take ashwagandha and cordyceps, maybe discontinue high intensity interval training for a little bit and do some more walking and yoga, maybe rest based training. And by the way, I am doing all of those things. They are perfectly acceptable and therapeutic strategies, and they can be really quite effective. But without understanding the why, without understanding the drivers, those things will probably serve as bandaids and the patterns will eventually repeat themselves again. I've heard people say some people are just prone to adrenal issues. And I would actually say some people are prone to validating their self worth through overdoing. And yes, that will probably set you up with some adrenal issues. So if we want to create positive, profound, and sustainable change, this is the work that we've got to do.
Erin Holt [00:43:52]:
So I hope that helps some folks out there, and this can be sort of an initiation on your path into further healing. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
