Dr. Saira Hameed

I'm not necessarily going to call it a disorder because some women go through perimenopause and menopause and they're fine.

Yeah, so those are the two problems I think that the public would come across or which are happening at a very high prevalence.

But as we spoke about at the start of our conversation, there are many other hormones buzzing away every day inside you, doing their thing, you're not even aware of them.

And they can cause problems like the thyroid issues that we spoke about.

But for most people, most people will go through life and they won't think about their hormones.

Their hormones will do their thing in the background.

Hormones will guide them through all of life's major milestones and they will glide you through every day from getting you up in the morning, that's cortisol, to feeling hungry, that's the stomach hormone ghrelin, to feeling full, GLP-1 as we spoke about and other gut hormones and so on.

But you won't notice it.

It just feels like life.

When your hormones work well, life feels normal.

A really key message I'd love your listeners to take away from our conversation today is that we don't control our hormones.

Our hormones control us.

But exactly as you've pointed out with the insulin example, we can sort of live considerably alongside them.

So another hormone that's having a bit of a moment right now is cortisol.

And cortisol, people are very interested in because it's got the moniker, the stress hormone.

And that's right in the sense that physiologically, if we are under stress of some sort, get a very bad flu, for example, you break your leg, you're undergoing surgery, your adrenal glands will release this hormone cortisol.

But we will also release cortisol in sort of life's day to day skirmishes, like, you know, having a big presentation to do at work or

checking your bank balance and it's not as robust as you'd like it to be or having an argument with someone, you might release a bit of cortisol to sort of bolster you through that moment in time.

And there's a bit of an online movement and it's very big on social media that cortisol is somehow an enemy.

and it needs to be suppressed.