For most of us stress is a way of life. In fact, many of us are so used to stress we are not even aware of its negative impact. Knowing your stress hormone levels can give you an indication of how well you are managing the stresses of your life. Keeping tabs on your cortisol and DHEA levels can give you and your doctor important information about how your life is affecting you and possibly how long you might live.

To help you cope with life’s stresses, your body has certain built-in hormonal mechanisms in place. Stress hormones help send energy where it’s needed in the body during an emergency. The all important ‘do it now’ processes that the body summons during times of stress include increasing energy and strength and improving brain function. During an emergency you need to hear better, smell more sensitively, and gather and process information more quickly.

Stress hormones have a powerful influence on the brain, playing a very important role in modulating both emotional and cognitive function. They help insure that you have all the mental faculties you need to cope with the ups and downs of life. This is the good news about stress hormones. The not-so-good news is that when it comes to stress hormones more is definitely not better. As necessary as these hormones are, excess amounts have long been recognized to cause disease. Excessive stress hormone levels can trigger many stress related conditions, including high blood pressure, blood sugar problems, fat accumulation, compromised immune function, exhaustion, bone loss, heart disease and, we now know, memory loss. Everyday stress can bring on minor memory failures and temporarily alter the ease and speed with which the brain retrieves and processes information. Relentless, extreme, or long-term exposure to stress hormones can actually damage and shrink the brain.

Using new imaging techniques, researchers have found that some Post Traumatic Stress Disorder patients have about 25% atrophy in the hippocampus region of the brain. The hippocampus is the part of the brain used for processing and storing information. It is crucial for proper cognitive function, memory and emotional well-being. Losing twenty-five percent of this region of the brain is similar in impact to losing one of the four chambers of the heart.

A simple way to look at stress is that it is anything that challenges the homeostatic balance of the body. This homeostatic balance includes ideal body temperature, proper pH of the bloodstream, optimum blood sugar and pressure levels, even a proper ratio of bone building to bone remodeling. Stress can be anything that upsets this balance.

Your stress response helps you “fight the tiger” during stressful situations. By increasing blood sugar levels, heart rate, and even improving cognition, your stress response helps you get up and get going. It is regulated in part by two hormones, cortisol and DHEA.  Under normal conditions cortisol and DHEA work together as a kind of stress management partnership. However, when you are under continual stress, and your adrenal glands are forced to continually pump out these stress hormones, these glands can become exhausted and the natural restorative balance between DHEA and cortisol can be interrupted. With DHEA in short supply, the damaging effects of excess cortisol can go unchecked.

DHEA has been shown to improve brain function and cognition, ensuring a better response to new information and an increased capacity to remember what you have learned. Brain tissue has five to six times as much DHEA as other tissue in the body. People with Alzheimer’s disease have DHEA levels that are half that of healthy people of the same age.

With its abundance of cortisol receptors, the hippocampus is the part of the brain most sensitive to this hormone. Cortisol actually improves memory when it circulates briefly through the brain. However, the reverse is true when cortisol levels stay elevated for long periods of time. Patients with chronically high levels of cortisol show accelerated degeneration of the hippocampus, the brain region crucial for proper cognitive function and emotional well-being. This is similar to what happens with severe diseases of the brain, like dementia and Alzheimer’s. As these diseases progress, the all-important hippocampus will atrophy.

Recent studies have also shown an important link between obesity and elevated levels of cortisol. It seems that an increased level of cortisol, likely the result of stress, directly stimulates food consumption in humans. Additionally, pharmaceutical research has found a link between weight gain and elevated levels of cortisol production. An enzyme with the fancy name, 11beta Hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type I (11HSD1), activates the transformation of inactive cortisone into active cortisol in various tissues, especially abdominal adipose tissue. In a sort of “catch-twenty- two,” excess abdominal tissue, which contains high levels of this enzyme, causes a rise in cortisol which in turn increases the craving for more food, especially the class of foods called “comfort foods.”

Another study showed that women who suffer depression and chronic stress also had high cortisol levels and significant atrophy in the hippocampus. Newborns who suffer great stress just after birth also show mental impairment, including memory deficits. Over the long run, it appears that their brains actually age faster than those of newborns who do not experience severe stress.

The release of stress hormones into your system is meant to help your body respond to thirty seconds, or maybe even thirty minutes of stress. Your stress response is not designed to manage the long term, unrelenting stressors that many people experience today. Turning the stress response on indefinitely wreaks havoc with the body and the brain.