Hey there, fabulous midlife women! Have you been feeling like your health questions are met with band-aid solutions that just don’t cut it? You’re not alone. High blood pressure and its “quick fixes” are just one of the many symptoms of midlife metabolic mayhem that are holding back so many women like you from living a vibrant life filled with joy. On this episode of the Hormone Prosperity Podcast, Dr. Kyrin tackles a relatable question from Madison—one that could be your very own. Madison’s high blood pressure is “sort of managed” by medication, but poor sleep, anxiety, weight gain (oh, the weight gain!), and other pesky perimenopause symptoms just won’t back down. Sound familiar? Dr. Kyrin takes you on a deep and empowering dive into exactly what’s behind high blood pressure—not just what mainstream medicine says, but what functional, energetic, and hormonal perspectives reveal. She covers everything from how stress and your sympathetic nervous system wreak havoc to how unresolved emotions like frustration and resentment could be physically impacting your heart health. Spoiler alert? It’s not just about salt or genetics. And no, more meds aren’t the only answer. Let's rewrite your health story from the root cause upward, together. If you’re tired of temporary fixes and ready to understand how to unlock real hormonal prosperity, this episode is for you. What You’ll Learn in This Episode Why mainstream medicine focuses on genetics and sodium for hypertension but misses the bigger picture. How your sympathetic nervous system amplifies high blood pressure—and how to calm it down. The connection between high blood pressure, hormonal imbalance, and symptoms like poor sleep, anxiety, and weight gain. The energetic perspective behind heart health—hint, it’s not just about the numbers on the BP monitor. Key Takeaways High blood pressure is often driven by stress and an overactive sympathetic nervous system—aka, your fight-or-flight response—not just your salt intake. Functional medicine focuses on why your body is sounding the alarm, not just masking symptoms with medications. Emotional imbalances like frustration and resentment could be straining your heart—literally. Addressing unresolved emotions may be just as important as addressing physical symptoms. Hormonal imbalances during perimenopause can create a vicious cycle of symptoms that make high blood pressure worse, but you can break the loop! Your Call to Action Take the Free Hormonal Poverty Quiz Could you be in hormonal poverty? Find out in just 90 seconds! 👉 CLICK HERE to take the quiz and assess where you stand. Help Other Women Get Their Bliss Back Enjoyed this episode? Please share it with a friend who’s also struggling with hormonal imbalance or midlife metabolic mayhem. Together, we can help more women reclaim their vitality and health. Don’t forget to leave us a review or rating—your support helps build this empowering community! No one deserves to live in hormonal poverty. 🛑 Drop the disempowering question, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking, “What would hormonal prosperity do?” (#WWPD) Catch the full episode now and start crafting the vibrant, healthy life you deserve. ✨ Listen Now ✨ Podcast Episode Transcript: Dr. Kyrin Dunston (00:00): Coming up, what is high blood pressure really, and should it be treated with a medication? Or what would it look like if we treated the underlying cause of it and didn't take the medication as a part of treating our hormonal poverty? Stay tuned next as we unpack this important topic. Dr. Kyrin Dunston (00:20): Greetings friend. Welcome to the Hormone Prosperity Podcast with me, the hormone prosperity coach, Dr. Kyrin . Here's where intelligent women over 40 go to get credible guidance and inspiration on getting out of hormonal poverty and into hormonal prosperity and the joy and vitality that brings. Go from asking disempowering questions like, what's wrong with me? To asking empowering questions like, what would hormonal prosperity do? Hashtag ww HPD. Join me as we dive into today's episode and get started on your journey off the couch, into your genes and back into life because bliss is your birthright and a healthy body filled with hormonal prosperity is the vehicle that gets you there. Welcome. Let's get started. Dr. Kyrin Dunston (01:12): Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Hormone Prosperity Couch. Thank you so much for joining me. As we dive into talking about Madison's question about high blood pressure and perimenopause and hormone therapy, she says, Hey folks, is there anybody here who had high blood pressure and went on HRT? My blood pressure is sort of, sort of managed by meds, but not super great. So she has uncontrolled hypertension, but my peri symptoms like poor sleeping and anxiety, can't be making it any better. Oh, and weight gain. The weight gain. And now I know a lot of you can relate. Weight gain is the symptom that makes women crazy more than anything else. It was true for me when I was in the perimenopause, and I know it's true for about 60% of you. By the time we're 50, 60% of us are overweight or obese by the time we're 60, it's three out of four of us. Dr. Kyrin Dunston (02:05): Maybe you can relate. And other symptoms she mentioned, a midlife metabolic mayhem, peri symptoms, poor sleeping and anxiety, very common. Definitely in the top five, the poor sleeping, the lack of energy, the anxiety sometimes depression also. So this is a great question, Madison. So let's dive into this. So number one, let's talk about high blood pressure from a mainstream perspective and from a functional, energetic perspective. So blood pressure is determined by the force with which your heart pumps blood out of it to make it all circulate through your circulatory system, all the way around your body, to your toes, to your brain cells, to your eyeballs, to your stomach, everywhere, right? That's what determines your blood pressure, the pumping force of your heart. If your heart stops pumping, you stop living, you un alive, right? So it's crucial. Now, what causes high blood pressure in a perfectly healthy human being, we need to go back to the beginning because mainstream medicine would have you believe pretty much that it's genetic or it's, it's the amount of salt that you're consuming. Dr. Kyrin Dunston (03:21): Those are the two reasons that mainstream medicine says for most cases of high blood pressure or hypertension. And they're gonna counsel you to avoid salt in your diet. Now, mind you, they're talking about NACL sodium chloride, which is table salt. They are not talking about sea salt, which is potassium has potassium, not sodium. So it's sodium. That's the culprit, not potassium. You need potassium and you need chloride. Also. You need sodium too, just not too much of it. And the way we eat these days, a lot of processed foods have so much of the sodium in them that that's what makes us sick with high blood pressure. So they're gonna counsel you to change your diet, cut the salt, but if that doesn't work, they're going to put you on a medication, a first line anti-hypertensive medication to drop your blood pressure, which has variable success. Dr. Kyrin Dunston (04:19): Usually people have progressively worse hypertension and they have to go on stronger and stronger medications, multiple medications, and they get monitored for the consequences of high blood pressure, which can include damage to your eyes, to your brain, to your heart, to all the organs in your body because every organ is supplied by blood vessels. So if they're getting too much blood pressure coming in, it's damaging them. Think of like you use your water, pick in your mouth to clean your teeth. It's very gentle sprout. If you took a fire hose and trying to clean your teeth, well, you would blow your head off with a fire hose, right? So you understand what I'm talking about. Now you say so from a mainstream perspective, that's what's going on. But from a functional perspective, we actually know and, and from an energetic, I'll get to that in a second. Dr. Kyrin Dunston (05:12): We know that what makes your blood pressure go up naturally in your body, the sig signal to your heart to increase the pressure is your sympathetic nervous system. So your sympathetic nervous system is part of your autonomic nervous system. Think automatic that has your sympathetic nervous system. Parasympathetic two branches, your sympathetic, think of, I call it the halt, big, strong, run, fast, lift, hard, do hard things, fights, right? So all the blood goes to your arms and legs, your periphery, you're not thinking you're in survival mode. Fight, flight, freeze spa is another one of those four Fs. That's the whole that's sympathetic nervous system raises blood pressure raises, respiratory rate raises, all these things. Parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite. Think of the Buddha. Mm, parasympathetic is lower blood pressure, lower respiratory rate, blood to the center, to your heart and lungs, abdomen and organs to nourish, digest your food, nourish your organs, heal you healing open only happens in a parasympathetic dominant state. Dr. Kyrin Dunston (06:26): So in order to have hypertension, you have a supertone hyper tone sympathetic nervous system that's on alert. This means stress. Sympathetic nervous system triggers when your cortisol stress hormone triggers. So it means you have a lot of unresolved stress in your body that is causing the tone of your heart and your blood vessels to be hypertonic, pump fat, blood fast, hard, and damage all the other arteries in your body. So the really, the correct way from a functional perspective to fix your blood pressure is not to give you a drug that stops your blood vessels from clamping down and make forces them to relax. But it's to find the reason why
