I’m going to suggest a very simple way to improve your overall health, especially the balance of your endocrine system. Get outside in the sun for 20 minutes or so a day. Let the sun hit your skin–forearms and face is enough–and allow some indirect sunlight to get to your eyes by forgoing the sunglasses and brimmed hat.
Why? Natural sunlight has unique health benefits. For one thing, it allows your body to make vitamin D. You can make up to 10,000 IUs of vitamin D in one sunny day. (And you can’t overdose on your body’s own vitamin D.) Vitamin D helps to regulate your immune system and reduces your risk for both infection and autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s, which can wreck your thyroid.
Sunlight has other benefits as well. It helps to set your body’s 24-hour rhythms, including the cyclic release of cortisol, a stress hormone, and melatonin, a hormone involved in sleep-wake cycles and the daily rhythm of the body temperature being higher during the day than at night. Both cortisol and melatonin also interact with thyroid hormone production. Exactly how isn’t fully known, but high cortisol levels decrease your body’s ability to convert T4 to T3, the active form of thyroid. And melatonin may influence the body’s release of TSH, which varies over a 24 hour period.
Getting enough sunlight can also help you to sleep better at night. These things can help your body heal itself, and work well with T3 therapy and/or additional thyroid support to improve metabolism, body temperature, energy and overall well-being.
REFERENCES
Acuña-Castroviejo D, Escames G, Venegas C, et.al. Extrapineal melatonin: sources, regulation, and potential functions. Cell Mol Life Sci. 2014 Feb 20.
Bechtold DA, Loudon AS. Hypothalamic thyroid hormones: mediators of seasonal physiology. Endocrinology. 2007 Aug;148(8):3605-7.
Dardente H, Hazlerigg DG, Ebling FJ.Thyroid Hormone and Seasonal Rhythmicity. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2014 Feb 26;5:19.
Mazzoccoli G, Giuliani A, Carughi S, et al. The hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis and melatonin in humans: possible interactions in the control of body temperature. Neuro Endocrinol Lett. 2004 Oct;25(5):368-72.
Mazzoccoli G, Carughi S, Sperandeo M, et. al. Neuro-endocrine correlations of hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis in healthy humans. J Biol Regul Homeost Agents. 2011 Apr-Jun;25(2):249-57.
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