Metabolism And Mental Health: The Connection Between Blood Sugar, Cortisol, Anxiety & More

Metabolism gets a lot of press.

You’ve probably heard that it’s important to have a good metabolism to stay in shape.

Recent research is now shedding light on metabolism’s role in mental health.

Your body’s ability to properly utilize micronutrients, glucose specifically, has a profound effect on your mental state.

There are many reasons for this, most of which are the interplay between blood glucose, hormones, and catecholamines.¹

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In fact, blood sugar may be the most influential determinant of your body’s physiological stress hormone response.

Once in circulation, these stress hormones can dictate your mental state.

In this article, I’ll explain the connection between blood sugar and stress hormones, how blood sugar directly affects your mood, and what you can do to optimize this system.

How Does Diet Affect Mental Health?

We know that mental health is highly influenced by diet.²

As many countries worldwide adopt, a western-style diet made up of mostly fast foods, fried foods, sweets, refined grains, processed meat, and a reduction of fruit/vegetables mental health conditions continue to worsen.³

In fact, the Western-style diet has been independently associated with a greater risk of developing anxiety and depression.⁴

One of the major reasons for this may be the western diet’s influence on blood sugar dysregulation.

Blood Sugar and Mental Health

Much has been written about the connection between blood sugar and mental health.

We know that people with diabetes and chronically elevated blood sugar are 2-3 times higher and have depression.⁵

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Anxiety is also present in 40% of diabetics (type 1 and type 2).⁶

This is also a bidirectional relationship as depression raises diabetes risk by over 60%.⁷

There are a number of physiological reasons why blood sugar dysregulation negatively influences mental health.

Both hyper and hypoglycemia have been tied to increased heart rate, blood pressure, and overall inflammation.

These physical markers are also associated with higher instances of anxiety and depression.⁸

Metabolism and Mental Health: The Connection Between Blood Sugar, Cortisol, Anxiety, and Depression anxiety and depression Anxiety diabetics diabetes memory cognitive mind

While we know that mental health issues are multifactorial, there is plenty of evidence to assume that controlling your blood sugar can help improve overall cognitive function.

Blood Sugar, Depression, and Anxiety

Depression and anxiety can be tied directly to both hyper and hypoglycemic conditions.

A study examining depression in 3,742 diabetic patients showed that individuals who have experienced severe hyperglycemic events had more than twice the risk of depression than those who had not experienced a hyperglycemic event.

And those patients who experienced severe hypoglycemic events had a 75% elevated risk of depression.

The bidirectional relationship likely enables a harmful feed-forward cycle, with depression and severe glycemic events increasing the other’s risk.⁹

Another meta-analysis of 24 studies showed that depression is associated with hyperglycemic conditions.¹⁰

For many people, anxiety is a more pressing condition when blood sugar is dysregulated.

Hyperglycemia specifically has been shown to incite anxiety.¹¹

The science seems to be clear that your quality of life becomes substantially diminished when you have dysregulated blood sugar.¹²

The most important thing to understand is that this is all in your control.

A diet high in low glycemic foods, aka junk food, can help eliminate depression, anxiety, and psychiatric disorders.¹³

Blood Sugar and Cognitive Decline

Dysregulated blood sugar can be a catalyst for overall cognitive decline.¹⁴

One of the big reasons is the interplay of insulin and insulin resistance.

It’s been shown that insulin resistance can slow down cognitive function.

This may be due to insulin being a vasodilator.

It increases blood flow to promote glucose delivery to the muscle, tissue, and the brain.

In insulin-resistant individuals, the vasodilator function is blunted, which leads to impairment of insulin action coupled to a decrease in the delivery of blood and glucose to the brain.¹⁵

This is one way to explain cognitive disorders associated with insulin resistance and blood sugar dysregulation, including:

Blood Sugar and Metabolism

Buckle up because we’re getting into some basic biology.

Your blood sugar is measured by the amount of glucose circulating in your bloodstream.

Glucose is the end product of either carbohydrate being broken down from food, or stored glycogen being mobilized endogenously.

It’s important to note that glucose is the fastest acting fuel source for your cells’ ability to produce ATP.

ATP is the main form of cellular energy that comes from a series of biochemical reactions that break down glucose in the cellular mitochondria and fuel virtually every energy-requiring process in the body.²¹

Despite what, your keto zealot friends tell you, glucose is necessary to power your body and brain.

But there’s a lot more to the story.

Mainly, how does your body know how much glucose to keep in the blood at any given moment?

Blood Sugar Homeostasis

Your body is always trying to keep things balanced.

We refer to this as homeostasis.²²

Regarding blood sugar, your body wants to keep the optimal amount of glucose in the blood in a goldilocks zone. Not too much, not too little.²³

There are hormones, insulin, and glucagon, excreted from the pancreas and control the flow of glucose in and out of your bloodstream.

However, these are not the only hormones affecting glucose in your blood.

Stress hormones like cortisol are also directing glucose in the blood.

Oddly enough, blood glucose is also dictating cortisol.

This interplay of glucose and hormones can have profound effects on your mood.

Understanding and ultimately working to optimize your hormones through blood sugar control can greatly improve your mental health, sharpen your focus, and boost overall cognitive abilities.

The “Fight Or Flight” Sympathetic Nervous System

Stress and blood sugar have a special relationship that’s over 2 million years old.

Our body’s stress response has evolved to maintain blood sugar homeostasis.

It does this through the autonomic nervous system, which pulls the string of the HPA Axis.

For most of these 2 million years, keeping blood sugar stable was easy.But now our modern diet provides more glucose than our bodies are designed to handle, and this excess is playing out in rising cases of metabolic disorders.

Higher metabolic disorders and blood glucose dysregulation means rising stress in the body.

When a stressor presents itself, your brain switches into the sympathetic nervous system, also known as fight or flight.²⁴

This is in direct opposition to your autonomic nervous system’s chill, parasympathetic mode commonly referred to as “rest and digest.”

When your body is in fight or flight, it prioritizes survival over everything else.

Your body’s ability to make sex hormones, rest, and digest is totally diminished.

Meanwhile, your heart rate increases, your eyesight sharpens, your attention is piqued, and you become more alert.²⁵

These physical reactions naturally require increased energy expenditure.

Your body delivers this in the form of glucose to be used by the cell.

Cortisol is what steps on the gas and gets the energy to the cells for optimal response.²⁶

Stress and Blood Sugar

When we discuss “stress,” it’s important to understand the different forms of stress we’re talking about.

Of course, there are emotional stresses like deadlines, sitting in traffic, or trying to book a flight.

However, most chronic stressors are physiological.

You can experience a physical stressors from chemicals in your environment, chemicals in your food, and inflammation.

Stress, loosely defined, is any stimulus that disrupts the body’s internal balance.²⁷

The physiological stress response is controlled through your body’s HPA axis.²⁸

HPA Axis

Your HPA Axis is the information superhighway made up of your hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands.

The HPA Axis works within your sympathetic, aka fight or flight, nervous system.

Its job is to ultimately keep the body in a balanced state of homeostasis by supercharging energy delivery, aka glucose, to the muscles, organs, and tissues that need it.²⁹

When your brain senses a stressor, both emotional and physical, your hypothalamus communicates to your pituitary gland to alert the adrenal glands that the body needs more glucocorticoids (aka cortisol) circulation.³⁰

In many instances, your HPA Axis kicks in simply because a high glycemic insulin response was triggered and left the blood in a hypoglycemic state.³¹

The HPA Axis makes glucocorticoids like cortisol to help restore blood glucose available, which is good.

Unfortunately, you now have increased circulating stress hormones, which can wreak havoc in other parts of your body, including your brain.

The HPA Axis’ Diurnal Pattern and Circadian Rhythm

Under basal conditions of little or no stress, cortisol secretion follows a diurnal pattern characterized by high concentrations early in the morning and a steady decline throughout the day.³²

This is known as the “diurnal slope.”

This diurnal pattern is designed to wake up in the morning, have enough energy to get through the day, and then fall asleep and stay asleep at night. This is also referred to as your circadian rhythm.

As cortisol lowers throughout the day, your body produces other hormones, including testosterone, estrogen, and melatonin.

An overactive HPA Axis can lead to a disrupted circadian rhythm. Cortisol output is weak in the morning and potent in the evening.³³

A disrupted circadian rhythm and diurnal cortisol pattern can result in daytime fatigue, sleep problems, illness, and mood disorders like depression and anxiety.³⁴

Dysregulated blood sugar is a recipe for an overactive HPA Axis response, which leads to a disrupted circadian rhythm and all the adrenal-related problems that follow.³⁵

How Does Elevated Blood Sugar Affect Cortisol?

When cortisol is released, then blood glucose rises.³⁶

This is due to cortisol’s promotion of gluconeogenesis and its primary function of making glucose available in the blood.³⁷

On the other hand, chronically high blood glucose keeps cortisol pumping, and chronically high cortisol keeps blood sugar elevated.³⁸

And because the HPA Axis is a negative feedback loop, eventually, this whole system will stop, and you will begin to experience dysregulated cortisol.³⁹

By stabilizing your blood sugar with diet, supplementation, and adequate sleep, you can effectively modulate your HPA Axis and stress hormone response.

Negative Feedback Loop

The negative feedback loop of the HPA Axis means that when the hypothalamus senses cortisol in circulation, it discontinues the production of cortisol in times of need.⁴⁰

This throws off the entire diurnal pattern of daily hormone production.

This happens when your cortisol is abnormally raised due to exposure frequent exposure to stressors such as high-glycemic foods, environmental toxicity, and inflammation.

This means low cortisol in the morning and too much at night.

We refer to this as “wired and tired.”⁴¹

Your morning cortisol is necessary to get you out of bed and feel vibrant, while low nighttime cortisol translates into higher melatonin and deeper sleep.⁴²

As dysregulated cortisol becomes chronic, you’ll begin to experience more serious issues leading eventually to Cushing’s syndrome.⁴³

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In fact, depression, among other psychiatric disturbances, are prevalent in Cushing’s syndrome.⁴⁴

How To Fix Metabolism and Brain Health

If you are like most people eating the western diet, you will benefit from making a few changes to optimize your mental health.

Some dietary changes to make include:

Lowering sugar and carbohydrate intake
Eliminating high fructose corn syrup
Eliminating or substantially lowering processed foods
Eliminating fried foods
Eating whole foods like fruit, vegetables, and high-quality animal products.
Eat more protein
Avoid carbohydrates in the morning.
Try intermittent fasting

Nootropics and Supplements That Can Help

This is a short list of nootropics and supplements that can help regulate your HPA Axis stress response and blood sugar status.

Devices That Can Help Stabilize Stress and Blood Sugar

Conclusion

If you deal with mental health disorders or cognitive decline, stabilizing your blood sugar should be one of the first things you do to boost your brain naturally.

As this article highlights, there are many connections between blood sugar, metabolism, stress, and mental health.

In fact, it’s widely accepted that stress lies at the heart of most chronic diseases. This includes mental health issues.

Fortunately, there are many low-cost, low-risk methods to boost your metabolism for cognitive enhancement.