Latest / Cortisol Coach / High Cortisol Symptoms in Women Over 40 | The Story Behind the Cortisol Coach- Christine Marie

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High Cortisol Symptoms in Women Over 40 | The Story Behind the Cortisol Coach- Christine Marie · Cortisol Coach

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Welcome to the Cortisol Coach Podcast. If you're exhausted, gaining weight,
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losing your hair, your anxiety is through the roof, or the depression and emotional
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overwhelm have completely consumed your life, or maybe you're not showing up
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as the wife and mom you want to be.
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You've spent years never feeling
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good enough, taking care of everyone else while you quietly fell apart.
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And your body has been keeping score of every single bit of it.
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The chronic stress, hormonal shifts, perimenopause, menopause,
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whatever season you're in, cortisol is making all of it worse.
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And until you heal the root, nothing changes. But this show here is about to change that.
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I'm your host, Christine Marie, Holy Spirit-led Biblical Mindset Coach,
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and I have helped thousands of women heal their hormones and cortisol levels.
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Every week, I bring you leading experts, doctors, and coaches who will help
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you heal your body, mind, emotions, and your spirit so that you can step into
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every kingdom purpose that God has planned for your life.
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So go grab your cup of coffee and let's jump in.
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Out of everything you could be doing right now, the laundry,
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emails, scrolling social media, you chose this, and I don't think that's an accident.
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I'm Christy Marie, and this is the first episode of the Cortisol Coach podcast.
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But before I tell you what this show is about, I need to tell you something first.
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I need to tell you about the woman that I used to be, because she is the reason
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this podcast exists, and she might be the reason you pressed play today. She was 35 years old.
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She had two adoptive daughters, her two boys, an incredible husband,
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and a faith that she was desperately trying to hold on to.
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But honestly, she was completely falling apart, and not in any way that was
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obvious to the outside world, because
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from the outside, She looked like somebody who had it all together.
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She loved going to church. She had fostered 77 children. Yes, I said 77.
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She had served on the governor's task force for foster care reform.
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She had been the state foster parent president, mentor.
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She ran a nonprofit. She was doing all of the things.
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But inside, inside her body, her body was keeping score of every single thing
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that she had never dealt with.
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The first thing I noticed was the brain fog.
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It was so bad that I genuinely started to wonder if something was wrong with my mind or my brain.
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And my kids used to call me Dory, you know, like that fish who can't remember anything.
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And then we'd all laugh. But honestly, it made me feel pretty sad because I
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knew, I knew that I couldn't remember things and I knew something was wrong.
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Every day I overslept my alarm. My kids were late to school and then I would
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drive them there gripping the steering wheel, panicked, stressed out,
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feeling so shameful, feeling honestly like I was the worst mom alive.
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Then I'd drop them off and then I'd go home and then I'd go back to bed because
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yes, I was that exhausted.
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I could never sleep enough to overcome how tired I was.
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No amount of rest ever made it better.
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And then there was the weight. I was gaining weight. I barely had an appetite.
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I wasn't hungry during the day.
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But the moment that the stress hit, I was starving. And I was having all of
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the cravings. And I loved sugar cookies and cupcakes.
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And I definitely made two to three stops at
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my local coffee shop for a very high
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sugar mocha make it iced every day
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whatever would make me feel something other than what
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i was feeling and that coffee shop drive-thru was definitely
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a dopamine hit i was diagnosed with fibromyalgia because i had joint pain so
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bad that it was affecting everything in my life i had migraines yes migraines
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every single day i was put on migraine medication and then something that is
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even a little bit uncomfortable to talk about is I had zero libido.
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Like I had no interest at all in having sex with my husband.
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And yes, we are going to go there because I didn't know why.
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And the shame of that, that carried a whole other kind of weight.
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And the anger. I remember feeling like I was going to explode out of my own skin.
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I felt overstimulated, overwhelmed, angry, frustrated.
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Like everything was so loud all the time. And yet, I was constantly reaching
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for caffeine, coffee, or anything that would help me just survive the next two hours.
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And that was my life for years. And I had no idea that all of this was connected.
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Because between the ages of 35 and 43, I saw more doctors than I can count.
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I saw my regular doctors, specialists, OBGYNs, naturopaths.
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I even saw Chinese medicine doctors. I was given a list of diagnoses,
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and they just seemed to keep growing.
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Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, adrenal fatigue, anxiety disorder, panic attacks.
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And if I would have kept going to doctors, they probably would have kept growing.
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I was put on medication for anxiety, medication for panic attacks,
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medication for migraines, medication for fibromyalgia, and every single symptom had a prescription.
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But nobody, not one single person in eight years ever said to me,
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let's test your hormones.
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Let's look at what's happening with your cortisol levels. Not one.
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I started growing fibroids in my mid-30s.
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And some of them were so large, I could literally feel them through my stomach.
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My body was telling me something was majorly wrong hormonally,
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and yet no one addressed this.
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At 37, I went to the ER with severe left abdominal pain.
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They did an ultrasound and found something growing in my left ovary.
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They sent me home, scheduled a follow-up for 30 days later.
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30 days later, I went in, and whatever was growing had doubled in size.
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I remember seeing the doctor's face, and she said, we need to schedule you for surgery right away.
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I didn't imagine right away meant within a week, but it did,
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and they removed one ovary, and when she called me to tell me what they had
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found was actually precancerous cells.
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I remember sitting with that, precancerous cells, in my body.
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She told me I didn't have anything to worry about because they were all encapsulated,
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but they had been growing. while I had been going doctor to doctor to doctor,
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telling them something was wrong.
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And then in 2021, I finally consented to having the hysterectomy that they had
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been telling me for years and years and years that I needed.
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What they didn't know until they did the hysterectomy was that I also had severe endometriosis.
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There were more fibroids than they had previously counted.
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And yet, I thought once I had this hysterectomy, all of my health struggles would go away.
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I thought this was the beginning of a new future, but it wasn't.
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And I want to pause here for just a second to tell you something that I believe
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with every single thing inside of me.
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The medical system is not evil.
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The doctors I saw were not bad people. But there's a massive gap in what women
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are being told about their bodies, and especially women in their 30s and 40s.
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Especially women who are high-functioning and quietly disintegrating on the
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inside, women just like I was.
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And that gap could have cost me everything. I remember one appointment I will never forget.
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Where I sat across from the doctor. I was telling her all of my symptoms.
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I kind of wondered if I was a hypochondriac myself, but I'd been seeing her
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for years. I trusted her.
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She was the one who had put me on anxiety medication originally.
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She had put me on the panic attack medication, the migraine medication.
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And here I come in again with more symptoms, more questions,
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more, please help me because something is wrong.
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And she looked at me and she said, I think I should send you to a psychiatrist.
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I cannot tell you how terrible I felt that day walking out of her office because
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I felt like what she was actually telling me was, I think the problem might actually be you.
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Because honestly, I did feel like I had too many symptoms. I felt so overwhelmed.
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I drove home that day and cried. And honestly, I felt like I was never going to find an answer.
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Because after years and years of fighting to be heard, the one person that I
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trusted the most wanted to send me to a psychiatrist.
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I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I was the only person out there experiencing anything like this.
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But now when I look back, I can very easily put the pieces together. I was the oldest child.
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I carried a lot of trauma from my childhood that I chalked up as just normal. I never addressed it.
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And when you carry unhealed wounds and you don't heal them, you think that by
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doing more, by being more, by serving more, and maybe that's where the 77 foster
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kids, maybe that's where that began.
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Yes, it was an act of love, but it was also me as a woman trying to find significance
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within myself in a world that was never going to heal wounds that I needed to heal unhealed.
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On my own. Being on the governor's task force, being the state foster parent
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president, all of it was amazing and incredible and meaningful.
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And all of it, honestly, fueled a body that was already running on chronic stress,
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cortisol, and a nervous system that had never once been allowed to calm down,
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find peace, and get off high alert.
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I, looking back now, know I was living in fight or flight.
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Not occasionally, but honestly, constantly. And I was managing it.
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Well, honestly, let's be real.
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I was trying to manage it with wine at night. And I know where that started.
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That started by looking on social media. And at the time, a social drink between
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friends or coming home and having a glass of wine was so normal.
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So I began believing that was normal too.
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And gosh, it felt good to kind of numb my emotions.
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But then we added on the sugar cookies and the cupcakes and then we added on
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the several mochas every day and even more busyness so that I could ignore the
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feelings that were trying to come up.
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I remember one day sitting in all of it.
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The exhaustion, the weight I couldn't lose, the body I didn't recognize,
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the marriage I desperately wanted to be fully engaged in, and kids who deserved
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so much more of me than I had to give.
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And I had a thought, and I'm going to be really brutally honest with you here
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because that's what this podcast is for.
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If this was the best God had for me, I had to ask myself if I even wanted it
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because this didn't feel good at all.
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And friends, that was my rock bottom.
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I didn't have the strength to pretend any more that I was okay.
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And that was the turning point for me. When I started looking for answers on
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my own, I began researching hormones, cortisol.
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The science of chronic stress, the science of chronic stress,
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and what it does to the female body.
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And then I started pursuing certifications. I became a certified biblical mindset coach.
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I earned one of my certifications under a practicing neurosurgeon and one under
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a master neuroscience coach.
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In all of this studying of the brain, the science of fight or flight,
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cortisol, dopamine, the gut microbiome, all of the pieces finally started coming together.
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I started going back to these doctors, but this time I went back differently.
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I walked in asking for specific tests that I wanted run.
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I did the research, and I had a hypothesis, and I started gathering the data
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that no one else offered to give me. And then I began searching for the right
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supplements for my body.
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Supplements that would specifically support hormones and my cortisol levels.
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And I remember day two of taking them.
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I sat down to read my Bible, and this was something I had been trying to do for years.
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Just five minutes. I was told, just start with five minutes.
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Because I carried so much guilt and shame that as a woman who loved the Lord,
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Why could I not sit down and read the Bible for just five minutes before the day started?
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Because every single time I started to read it, my mind would spiral.
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I would start thinking of all the to-do lists, my anxiety, my ADHD would take over.
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I would hear every noise. And then I felt, again, like such a failure.
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I would just close the Bible and I would go start my day.
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But that morning was actually different for the first time because I read the Bible for five minutes.
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And when I realized it had been five minutes and I had read the Bible,
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I think that was the first time that I felt hope.
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I truly felt like, wow, maybe, maybe the best God had for me was ahead.
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And over the next few months, the anxiety did not feel so crushing.
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The noises in my mind, the emotional overwhelm, it got a little bit quieter.
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And every day got a little bit easier. And so I thought, okay,
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this might be what healing feels like.
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But healing is absolutely not what you might see on social media.
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It's not a highlight reel.
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I know everybody likes to share the best moments, but for me, it was tiny glimpses.
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It was tiny moments of when I could sit and have a eye-to-eye,
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fully connected conversation with my kids or my husband.
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It was those glimpses that gave me hope, and that turned into cutting out foods
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that were inflaming my body.
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I did a food sensitivity test and discovered that cane sugar was actually what
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was driving my joint pain for years.
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I didn't actually have fibromyalgia. I had a food sensitivity to cane sugar
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that looked like the symptoms of fibromyalgia.
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I stopped drinking wine every night to numb what I was not dealing with emotionally.
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And then over time, I started walking.
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And discovered that 20 minutes outside can do things for me mentally that no
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medication can fix. And then I started sharing.
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I went on Instagram, and I started talking about what I had been through.
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I started talking about cortisol.
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Before it was a trendy topic, I started talking about what chronic stress does
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to women's bodies, about the symptoms that ruled my life for eight years,
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and the shift that happened. And then messages started coming in.
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And actually, I've received thousands upon thousands upon thousands of messages
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from women who have said, that's me.
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You're describing me. And here all along...
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I thought I was the only one. If you're believing you're the only one too, you're not.
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And this podcast exists because of that gap. The gap between what women are
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experiencing in their bodies, what they're being told, what they're not being
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told, and by the people who are supposed to be helping them.
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And there are some amazing doctors out there, some amazing naturopaths and experts
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and hormone specialists.
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But let's be honest, sometimes it's really hard to find them.
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But I believe that God led me through eight years of searching and suffering
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and through surgery and a hysterectomy and my rock bottom for this moment.
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To stand here and tell you that your symptoms are real, you are not crazy,
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and you do not have to walk the road that I walked to find answers.
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Every episode of this podcast, I'm going to bring you experts,
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the absolute best doctors, coaches, researchers, and women who have walked this
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road to help you understand every dimension of your health after 40.
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And it doesn't just end with cortisol. We are talking about your physical health,
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your mental health, your spiritual health, and how healing is possible.
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Because here's what I know to be true. Physical healing leads to clarity.
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Clarity leads to identity.
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Your identity leads to your calling, and your calling friend leads to massive kingdom impact.
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The enemy? Oh, the enemy. He knows that too.
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And I genuinely believe that the chronic stress, the hormonal chaos,
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and that exhaustion, that is keeping so many women from their purpose.
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And this isn't just a medical problem. It is spiritual warfare.
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And we are fighting back.
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So if you listen to this whole episode, I want you to know something.
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I see you. Maybe you only recognized one symptom that I described.
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Maybe you recognized all of them. Or maybe you're in the middle of your own
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eight years, still looking for the answer, still being told the problem is your
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anxiety or your mindset or your age.
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But I want you to know that the answer exists.
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Healing is possible, and you
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are not designed to white-knuckle your way through the rest of your life.
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I want you to come back next week because I have an amazing guest,
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and we're going to go even deeper.
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And if something in today's episode resonated with you, I want you to share
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this. Send it to another woman in your life who is exhausted,
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can't explain why, and is feeling overwhelmed.
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Because this might just be the one thing that changes everything.
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Friend, I am so thankful that you are here today. I pray this episode blessed you big time.
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And if it did, would you do me a favor and leave me a review on Apple Podcasts?
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It helps more women just like you find this show, and it may be the very reason
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that somebody else gets the answers that they need. I would also love to connect
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with you personally on Instagram. You can find me by searching cortisol underscore coach.
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That's where I show up every single day and send me a DM. I would love to connect
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with you. I'll see you next time.