The worst possible advice for women’s thyroid & hormone imbalance

Why “just try harder” is the worst possible advice for your hormones, your thyroid, and your nervous system.

If you’re a woman who has been told your labs look “normal” while you feel anything but, there’s a good chance you’re stuck in a pattern no one has named for you yet. It isn’t a willpower problem. It isn’t a discipline problem. It is a chronic stress problem, and it is quietly rewriting your hormones in the background.

I see it constantly in the women who land in my practice. Smart, capable, doing all the “right” things. Eating clean. Working out. Tracking everything. And feeling worse for it.

There’s a name for what’s happening, and once you can see it, you can’t unsee it.

The lie that sounds like self-improvement

Here is the trap, and it is everywhere:

Just try harder. Eat less. Move more. White-knuckle your way through enough sad desk salads and you will finally earn the version of yourself that gets to feel good.

I bought into it too. We all did. The problem is that the trying harder is the saboteur. Every time you tighten the screws, your body reads it as a threat. Every time you push through, you’re spending hormones you can’t afford to lose.

And the most maddening part? It often looks like discipline from the outside.

What over-undering actually looks like

If you’re not sure whether this is you, see how many of these land. I’ll warn you now: most women I work with check boxes in every category.

Under-resting

• Sleeping six hours and calling it fine because you “function okay” on it
• Lying in bed exhausted but unable to turn your brain off
• Skipping rest days because stillness feels unproductive
• Waking up tired no matter how early you went to bed
• Telling yourself you’ll sleep more “when things calm down,” which they never do
• Choosing the 5am workout over the extra hour of sleep, every time, even when you’re running on empty

Under-nourishing

• Skipping breakfast to “save room” and then face-planting into everything in your kitchen by 4pm
• Eating less than your toddler because you’re “watching it”
• Cutting out entire food groups because someone on the internet (or ChatGPT) said so
• A sad desk salad of leaves and dressing, calling it discipline
• Drinking coffee until noon and wondering why you feel shaky, anxious, and thinking about food all the time
• Eating “perfectly” Monday through Thursday and losing the thread by Saturday

Over-exercising

• Dragging yourself to a 6am class on four hours of sleep because you already paid for it
• Cardio every single day because rest days feel like falling behind
• Exercising to punish last night’s dinner
• Feeling guilty for taking a walk instead of a “real” workout
• Working out through injuries because stopping feels like giving up
• Measuring the value of your day by whether you moved enough

Over-stressing

• Scrolling nutrition content at 11pm and calling it research
• Lying awake doing a mental inventory of everything you ate that day
• Googling your symptoms at midnight and convincing yourself it’s just stress
• Saying yes to everything and then recovering from your own schedule
• Calling exhaustion your personality
• Feeling guilty for resting because your to-do list is still there

How chronic stress actually wrecks your hormones

Here’s the part most wellness content skips. When you chronically over-under yourself, your body reads it as stress. Not “I’m having a hard week” stress. Threat.

And once it reads threat, a cascade kicks in:

This is not a moral failing. It is physiology. And it is reversible, but not by trying harder. By trying differently.

The stress you’re not counting as stress

Here is what almost no one names. Ambient, low-grade, easy-to-dismiss stress is still registering in your body as a threat.

Your HPA-OT axis (brain-adrenal-ovary-thyroid) does not distinguish between a lion and a comment section. It just keeps pumping out cortisol. Forty minutes of doomscrolling nutrition misinformation before bed? Your nervous system logged that. The wellness account that made you question whether you should be eating fruit? Logged. The conflicting protocols from five different influencers? Logged.

I’ve been mostly off Instagram since October. I came back briefly in December, then gave it up again for Lent, and the difference in my mental clarity has been almost embarrassing. I thought I was fine. I was not fine. The constant ambient noise was occupying real estate in my brain I didn’t know was being rented out.

You do not need a dramatic stressor to get to burnout and hormone imbalance. Sometimes it is just the drip, drip, drip.

What my students reminded me this semester

This semester I taught Introduction to Nutrition at UT Tyler and a graduate-level Women’s Health Nutrition course at Stephen F. Austin, all while interviewing for a full-time faculty position. (I found out I got it. I start in the fall. I am not going to pretend I didn’t ugly cry.)

One class was full of grad students already deep in the weeds of women’s health. The other was a general intro course. Regular people from every major imaginable who mostly just needed a science credit and had no idea what they were walking into. Honestly? That second group stopped me in my tracks more than once.

These were not nutrition majors. They had learned nutrition by ping-ponging between whatever the latest influencer, wellness account, or AI told them to do. Eat this. Cut that. Try this cleanse. They had all the rules and none of the understanding, which is exactly how the nutrition noise keeps you dependent on it.

So that’s what we built. Not a list of foods to avoid, but a real knowledge base. The kind that gives you a filter, so the next time someone on the internet tells you to eat only between noon and 6pm or to cut carbs, you have something to run it through.

A 19 year old who thought her afternoon crashes were just who she was. A 22 year old who had been period-suffering since high school and assumed that was just her normal. Young women who had been dieting since middle school showing up in bodies that research says are more likely, not less, to struggle with weight because of all that early restriction. (Research consistently shows that around 95% of dieters regain the weight within one to five years.)

They did not need to try harder. None of us do.

Why I’m writing about this now

A few weeks ago, one of my best friends passed away. She was 42. We’d known each other since daycare, which means I have almost no memories that don’t have her somewhere in the background.

She fought colon cancer for five years with a color-coded binder. Knowing her, she probably had a backup binder. And in the depths of treatment, while the rest of us were asking what we could do for her, she was already asking what she could do for us.

Truthfully, she’d be cringing to know I’m writing about her here.

Even in her final days, when I was gifted the chance to say goodbye and give her one last big hug, she asked if I wanted anything to eat and offered to share her mochi doughnut with me.

Losing someone, especially young, has a way of making you look really hard at what you’re doing with your own time. Like how many of us are so deep inside the project of fixing our bodies that we miss the actual point of having one.

When you stop the drip of ambient stress, the self-criticism, the over-undering, something interesting happens. You start to have actual bandwidth. For your life. For the people in it. For the things that actually matter.

That is the work. Not the protocol. Not the next cleanse. The bandwidth.

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