Hormones and Emotional Regulation: How Brain Chemistry Affects Mood
You woke up feeling just fine. Yet, later that afternoon, you felt low, irritable, and anxious. Nothing happened, so why do you feel this way?
The answer, in many cases, is your brain chemistry, and, more specifically, your hormones. Hormones don’t just regulate your physical health; they shape the emotions you feel, how you handle stress, and how well you sustain when life gets hard.
When hormones are balanced, you feel like yourself. When they’re not, even normal days can feel hard to manage. Understanding this delicate balance and how hormones affect mood is key to taking action on how you feel. This article will cover:
- The connection between hormones, the endocrine system, and mental health.
- How hormones and mood swings are linked.
- The role of cortisol and emotional regulation in your stress response.
- The self-reinforcing loop between psychiatric symptoms and hormonal imbalance.
- Treatment for hormonal mood disorders.
Your Mood Is Based on Chemistry
Hormones are the chemical messengers produced by your body. These messengers are released into your bloodstream and travel to organs and tissues. They regulate many different processes, including:[1][2]
- How much energy you have.
- How your brain functions.
- How you feel emotionally.
Hormones interact with neurotransmitters in your brain, too. Neurotransmitters are your brain’s signaling chemicals, and like hormones, they impact your daily functioning in many ways, including your emotional experience. These systems interact with one another on a deep level.[2]
There’s a link between the endocrine system and mental health as well. Think of the endocrine system as your body’s mood regulator. Its network of glands produces and releases hormones, while its primary structures (the hypothalamus and pituitary gland) serve as its command center. These structures coordinate the release of hormones throughout your brain and body, including the regions involved in emotional processing.[3]
It doesn’t take a large shift in hormonal levels to produce noticeable changes in your mood, either. Small changes in hormone levels can alter your energy, focus, and stress sensitivity as well.[2]
Explaining how hormones affect mood requires a discussion of four key neurochemicals that have an outsized influence on how you feel:[1]
- Dopamine drives pleasure, motivation, and the reward cycle. It’s responsible for the feeling that makes you want to do something again.
- Serotonin stabilizes your mood and helps regulate your appetite and sleep. Low serotonin levels are associated with depression, which is why the most common antidepressants target serotonin.
- Endorphins are your brain’s natural painkillers. They’re released when you experience something good or pleasurable, like listening to music, laughing, and developing a strong emotional connection with someone else.
- Oxytocin is released when you develop social bonds and experience physical touch. It reduces stress and anxiety and facilitates psychological stability.
Hormones and mood swings are closely tied. Low motivation, emotional flatness, and unexplained anxiety also have measurable biochemical processes in your brain and body.[4][5]
It’s a dynamic system as well. Hormones affect your mood, and your emotional state feeds hormone levels.[5] Understanding the causes of mood swings in adults often requires looking at this bidirectional relationship.
Stress Hormones and What They Do to Your Brain
What might be confusing is why you get stuck in a long emotional spiral when other people recover quickly from stress. The answer lies in your body’s two-stage hormonal response: one system activates in seconds, and another activates a few minutes later.[3]
The first system to activate during stress is the sympathetic nervous system. It releases adrenaline and noradrenaline that trigger the fight-or-flight response. When this happens, you feel:[3]
- A rush of energy.
- Heightened alertness.
- A racing heart.
- Other symptoms.
After that, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activates and releases cortisol into the bloodstream. This is an important component of the stress response because it helps you maintain energy and manage the stressor, whatever it may be.[6]
Cortisol and emotional regulation go hand in hand: at the right dose and the right time, it helps support emotional regulation. It signals your brain that it can return to a calm baseline after the stress passes.[6]
However, things don’t always work this way. Sometimes, cortisol levels remain elevated, and when that happens, physical and mental side effects can occur.
When Cortisol Works for You
The effects of cortisol typically begin within 30 minutes of the original stressor. Its release tells your brain it’s okay to calm down:[3]
- Your brain’s emotional alarm signal reduces.
- Rational thinking returns to normal.
- Your brain returns to equilibrium.
That’s why you often feel a sense of calm and clarity after an initial burst of stress.[6]
When this process unfolds as it should, your brain’s ability to learn from emotional experiences is enhanced, recognizing that certain situations aren’t as dangerous as they first seemed.[7]
When Cortisol Works Against You
Cortisol and emotional regulation can go awry, particularly if chronic, low-grade stress is involved. Your body’s stress response was designed to address immediate, short-term threats. When those threats (perceived or otherwise) become long-lasting, your body’s cortisol levels remain elevated much longer than intended.[3]
Common effects of this can be damaging and may include:[3]
- Lowered immune function.
- Disrupted appetite regulation.
- High blood pressure.
- Increased central fat deposition.
Chronic stress and elevated cortisol levels can also damage structures in your brain:[4][6]
- The hippocampus, which is involved in learning, memory, and emotional regulation, is particularly vulnerable to prolonged cortisol exposure. Damage to this area of the brain reduces its ability to stop your body’s stress response.
- The amygdala, which is your brain’s threat-detection alarm, becomes overactive, making your brain overly sensitive to perceived threats, resulting in negative emotions and a greater likelihood of anxiety.
- The prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational thinking, emotional control, and maintaining perspective, loses its functionality. When this happens, the amygdala goes unchecked, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and emotionally reactive.
Dysregulated cortisol levels don’t just make you feel worse in the moment, though. Instead, dysregulation eventually changes how your brain processes incoming information.
This can create a negative cognitive bias, leading you to notice negative experiences more often, dwell on them more frequently, and remember them more clearly than positive experiences.[4]
This phenomenon is present in common mental health issues, too, like depression and anxiety.[8]
Reproductive Hormones and the Emotional Brain
Stress hormones often take center stage when it comes to mood, but for many people, reproductive and metabolic hormones are more directly connected to the emotional experience.
Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone actively shape how your brain processes emotions. Each has receptors throughout the brain, including in the regions that govern your emotional regulation and stress response. These hormones influence several neurotransmitters, including:[2][4]
- GABA.
- Norepinephrine.
- Serotonin.
- Dopamine.
While men also experience hormonal shifts, women’s hormone levels can fluctuate more frequently and more dramatically. As a result, women face a much higher risk of hormone-related mood disruption.[2][4]
Women are twice as likely as men to have hormone-related depression. This difference follows the reproductive years very closely, beginning at puberty and declining sharply after menopause.[2][4]
Estrogen and Mental Health
Estrogen and mental health are closely linked. Estradiol, one of the most common forms of estrogen in premenopausal women, is a powerful mood-regulating hormone. It supports the production of dopamine and serotonin and enhances the effectiveness of serotonin receptors. Additionally, estradiol supports neuroplasticity in the hippocampus and strengthens the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate the amygdala.[4]
When estrogen levels are high, women usually feel emotionally strong, socially connected, and focused. When estrogen drops, though, the brain lacks some of this support, which can lead to:[4]
- Stress reactivity.
- Low mood.
- Anxiety.
- A negative outlook.
Progesterone and Mental Health
Progesterone can be considered the calming partner to estrogen. It helps you relax and sleep. When its levels are stable, it also promotes feelings of calm and emotional steadiness.[2]
When progesterone levels are low, negative emotional experiences can occur. Anxiety, sleep disruption, and irritability are common. These symptoms mirror those that often occur in the days before menstruation or the period of time after childbirth.[2]
Testosterone and Mental Health
Testosterone plays an important part in mental health as well. Though it’s most often thought of as a male hormone, it’s also present in women and is a crucial component of influencing:[2]
- Confidence.
- Energy.
- Motivation.
When testosterone is low, you might experience problems with concentration, reduced motivation, and low mood. Fatigue is also common when testosterone levels dip. These symptoms might sometimes be misdiagnosed as depression, given the similarity to depressive symptoms.[2]
The Broader Hormonal Ecosystem
Reproductive hormones aren’t the only ones involved in mood regulation. Thyroid hormones are also a crucial component. When thyroid function is low, you might feel fatigue and experience low mood and brain fog. Moreover, stress suppresses thyroid functioning, making thyroid-related mood symptoms that much worse.[2][3][8]
But your mood is never the result of a single factor, let alone a single hormone. For example, everything from growth hormones to insulin to appetite hormones shift under stress. As they change, you experience downstream effects on your emotional state. Chronic stress is a factor as well; it can reduce reproductive hormone production and compound mood vulnerability.[3]
Mission Connection is here to help you or your loved one take the next steps towards an improved mental well-being.
When Hormonal Imbalance Becomes a Mental Health Problem
The difference between having a rough emotional week and having a clinical mood disorder is often a matter of degree. More specifically, it often depends on the severity of the hormonal disruption and how long it lasts.
Several common mental health problems are associated with this process, including depression, anxiety, brain fog, and chronic stress. Since many of these symptoms can be attributed to other factors (e.g., personality or co-occurring mental health disorders), the hormonal component is frequently missed by mental health professionals.[2][3]
The Gut-Brain Connection
Your gut is involved in your mental health experience, too. The vast majority of serotonin (90 percent) is produced in your gut, with production influenced by many factors, including your diet.[9]
When inflammation occurs in the gut, serotonin production slows while the production of neurotoxic compounds (which are damaging to brain cells) increases. Additionally, inflammation like this is tied to mental health conditions like depression.[9]
The Self-Reinforcing Loop
Hormonal imbalances are susceptible to self-reinforcing loops. For example, depression causes biological changes in your body, which in turn make every depressive episode more difficult to recover from.[4]
As the episodes become deeper and more prolonged, you tend to ruminate about them. This furthers the cycle, sustaining the hormonal imbalance that caused the mood change in the first place.[10]
Put simply, hormonal imbalance drives negative thinking, and negative thinking sustains hormonal imbalances. Breaking that cycle requires addressing both the hormonal issue and the negative thinking.[5]
What You Can Do for Hormonal Mood Disorders
Understanding that your mood changes are partly due to your brain chemistry means you can take action to address the problem. Treatment for hormonal mood disorders works on this biological element as well as the psychological dimensions of your experience.
Typically, the first step in therapy for mood regulation is a medical evaluation to rule out other potential causes of your mood shifts. If other causes are found, such as a thyroid condition, treating that condition alongside the hormonal mood disorder is likely to yield the best results. In some cases, hormone therapy can also be an effective primary or secondary treatment.[2][8] Mental health and hormone treatment are increasingly being integrated in clinical settings for this reason.
Psychotherapy is also an effective treatment, particularly to address the hormonal imbalance-mood shift loop discussed earlier. In particular, emotion regulation, cognitive reappraisal, and mindfulness-based therapies can be effective at breaking the rumination cycle and reducing inflammatory signaling in your body.[9][10]
Your lifestyle matters as well. Making changes to your daily life, including your diet, sleep habits, and exercise, is an effective supplementary approach to therapy. Light exposure and increased social connectivity are additional measures that can positively impact the hormone and neurotransmitter systems explored in this article.[1][8][9]
Balancing hormones for mental health is a process. It takes time to reverse the biological processes that have gotten you to this point. But what’s important to remember is that these are signals that something is wrong, and that you need to take action. Once you do, you’ll begin to see real, positive changes in your mood.
Find Mental Health Treatment to Support Hormonal Mood Disorders
Feeling low without being able to explain it can be frustrating, but it’s not something you have to manage alone. Science has come a long way in this field, and the expert clinicians at Mission Connection can help you navigate the complexities of regulating your emotions.
Our multidisciplinary team provides a range of outpatient mental health services, including daily group therapy with licensed therapists, weekly psychiatric care with medication management, and weekly individual therapy.
We incorporate a variety of therapeutic approaches into your personalized treatment program, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), mindfulness, psychoeducational groups, and solution-focused therapy.
Our flexible treatment options include:
- In-person programs at our locations in California, Virginia, and Washington.
- Telehealth services.
- An innovative hybrid approach that combines in-person and virtual care.
Our team is here to help and provide more information on how to start your journey toward healing and recovery. Get started online or call us for a free, no obligation conversation at 866-833-1822. We’re here to support you every step of the way.
