Ben Greenfield

um let's say you were you couldn't or you wouldn't or you don't have the time or just can't logistically get like a blood test or a hormone test to actually see if you have hormone imbalances because frankly like that would be a pretty good idea if you really wanted to self-quantify as like go get a urinary hormone test and see if like cortisol is super low

or you have low DHEA or low testosterone or any of these things that you could actually quantify.

But that aside, some of the major things to pay attention to is, and this is something you could easily do with a wearable, elevated resting body temperature for multiple days in a row over and above what it would normally be, elevated resting heart rate,

over and above what it normally is, not for one day, but like consistent patterns.

Like usually three days or more is beginning to give you clues that there's some type of nervous system dysregulation that can be pretty tied to the type of endocrine system dysregulation that occurs from overtraining.

Poor sleep, being tired though, but like getting into bed and not being able to sleep, like tired but wired.

So it's not like you don't want to get into bed, but you get into bed and you're just like, you can't sleep.

And you're just like,

lay there awake and you can sometimes hear your blood pounding in your ears and sometimes because of the elevated body temperature and heart rate you're a little bit hotter than usual and you just feel like sleep is disrupted swelling like swelling in the fingers swelling in the legs toes just like feeling like pillsbury doughboy a little bit more often

because cortisol dysregulation is linked to blood pressure regulation and also retention of fluids.

So that would be another one.

Lack of appetite or like a drop of appetite because if you are overtraining, like if you look at this from like an evolutionary biological standpoint, in a state of famine or starvation or excess stress, your body wants to hold onto calories because it's unlikely that this is a time of like feasting and a time of caloric excess.

So when that happens, what you would tend to see is like a drop in hunger, like not, and there's assuming you're not like a GLP agonist or something like that, but you're not as interested in food.

You're not eating as much.

You start to experience some of those things that might indicate like a little bit of a down regulation of the metabolic rate.

And it's interesting because some of this stuff is like acute and then changes as it becomes chronic.

So some people that were really paying attention to what I just said would think, okay, so Ben, what you're saying is like my heart rate's elevated and my body temperature is elevated.

But then if my thyroid is dysregulated, doesn't that make like

the body get colder and slow down metabolism.

And that's what happens if you ignore all this stuff and just go for too long a period of time, then your body just starts to slow everything down.