[00:00:00] Vesna: Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna Hrsto, and thank you for being with me here today on this podcast, where I'm going to talk about how high performing women can regain peak physical energy and mental clarity. Today, I'm going to talk about high cortisol versus low cortisol and some of those similarities.
[00:00:19] So, what is cortisol to begin with? It gets thrown around and it gets a really bad rep, reputation, okay, the dose matters. too much cortisol is no good, but some cortisol is important for us. So cortisol is our main kind of chronic stress hormone. There's been a lot of research around it, and there's a really great book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, about how cortisol affects our health in all the different ways.
[00:00:47] It's quite incredible. So, stress is always going to be a factor when we're looking at inflammation, poor health, anything that makes us sick or tired, cortisol is going to be there. Okay. Elevated cortisol over time, but sometimes, you know, we can have high cortisol or we can have low cortisol. And it really depends on the stage of the stress response that we're in.
[00:01:09] So there are three key stages. The first one is kind of this acute level of stress. So You know, it's only short term stress and we get a lot of adrenaline pumping through the body and it feels like you could move mountains. It feels like you can get so much done. It almost feels like a little bit of a good place to be, but you pay the price for it over time.
[00:01:32] But the high adrenaline state is only in the short term and then it goes into cortisol. And so the second stage of the stress response is having high cortisol. And this looks like waking up tired, waking up anxious. Okay. Having anxiety and overwhelm daily. It looks like waking up in the middle of the night or unable to fall asleep.
[00:01:55] You start to get the belly fat, you get bloating, you get frequent colds. The real symptom [00:02:00] picture of high cortisol is this revved up system. So the anxiety and the poor sleep and the bloating. Then over time, if the stress has not been reduced or if stress hormones have not been reduced in the system. It eventually causes low output of cortisol and this third stage of the stress response is known as HPA axis dysfunction.
[00:02:24] it looks like low cortisol, but you can still carry some of the symptoms of the high cortisol. So often when I post this on social media, the low cortisol symptoms are the constant tiredness where you're dragging yourself around. Um, regardless of how well you've slept or if you've had a week off, you've got low mood, low motivation.
[00:02:43] It looks like depression, but it's not. Okay. Burnout can look like depression. You don't have the motivation, you've got the brain fog, and then you start having complications with like your thyroid or you have perimenopausal challenges or PMS, right? And that third stage of the HPA axis dysfunction, you can have symptoms of both.
[00:03:04] So often people will say to me, but I have. You know, symptoms of high cortisol and low cortisol, and that is really that third stage of HPA axis dysfunction. This means there is impact to different systems within the body and We really have to acknowledge our symptoms because our symptoms are the alarm system that are telling us We're not okay.
[00:03:26] Okay. We can't ignore these symptoms any longer. We need to rest. We need to take care of ourselves. We need to, you know, take the foot off the accelerator. We need to eat better, whatever it is, but the symptoms are there to get our attention. If we ignore them, they do get louder, they do get worse, right?
[00:03:44] And it's not uncommon for people to really push themselves into severe states of burnout where they have to take time off work, they can no longer run their businesses, they really need to withdraw. Because the body has just basically [00:04:00] almost, I guess, shut down to conserve its energy and to do the repair work that you weren't willing to do because you weren't listening, right?
[00:04:06] And this happens so innocently because we just think that we're going to be okay. Okay, as someone who's been through burnout, I know the edge that I can get to, right? Push yourself too far and, uh, you don't get enough rest or you just, you know, Keep working harder and harder, you know, you recognize the signs, but if we ignore the signs, then the body takes over the action itself in order to save you, right?
[00:04:31] To, to save your health, to save your life, maybe even, right? And so it's really important that we acknowledge that these symptoms are only there to get our attention. They really are doing us a favor, even though it doesn't feel like it. And we really need to, to pay attention and to take action.
[00:04:45] Now, as I said, cortisol gets a bad rap, but We need cortisol because in one hand, so cortisol, what it's trying to do is help us to adapt to our stressful situation. Your stress, maybe the emails that you go through in the morning or the fear of making a mistake and letting someone down, the perfectionism.
[00:05:09] It could be something so not life threatening, but it's registering in our system as life threatening, okay? And so cortisol is there to help us to adapt to our stress. It helps us to fire up our body and give us what we need in order to, you know, fight or flee that situation.
[00:05:26] And so, We want to use it to our advantage. Too much cortisol drops our IQ, doesn't make us very rational, it keeps us in a state of anxiety and fear. The normal amount of cortisol, so when we wake up in the morning, we have cortisol at our highest level, so we wake up with energy. We wake up with the get up and go to do what we need to do, right?
[00:05:49] But if we're not waking up like that, it's often that cortisol is not getting high enough in the morning, and so we're feeling tired. We're dragging ourselves out of bed, going for the coffee, caffeine straight away in order to [00:06:00] get going, right? So, using cortisol as our advantage is that it does fire up the body, okay?
[00:06:06] It does fire us up in the morning and get us going. It does help us to adapt to stress, but the dose is dependent. Too much is not a good thing.
[00:06:15] So how do we start to balance out this cortisol? So as I said, cortisol should be at a highest in the morning. Now what can happen is if you're having a poor night's sleep, the cortisol can have this rebound effect at nighttime. And so it just means your cortisol curve is all over the place. And so if we want to balance it out, we want to make sure that we have good amounts of cortisol in the morning when it's the appropriate time to have it, right? When it's in our innate physiology to have high levels of cortisol in the morning when we wake up to get us going. the number one thing that I recommend here is do not fast.
[00:06:50] If you've got the symptoms of high cortisol or low cortisol or burnout or HPA axis dysfunction, there is no fasting. in this phase, Because when we wake up, if we haven't broken our fast with breakfast in this state of chronic stress, it makes it very hard for our body to regulate our glucose levels.
[00:07:10] So we wake up, we don't eat anything. Glucose levels are quite low. And if our body finds it very hard to regulate that, what it's going to do is Increase cortisol, our stress hormone, put us in a stress response to break down muscle tissue and convert that into the glucose that we need to get us through the day.
[00:07:28] So one, it's stimulating too much cortisol again. And two, it's actually going to start to change the shape of our body because we're essentially breaking down muscle tissue to keep us going. So fasting is very good down the road to optimize. Okay. So I was talking about, we want to increase our capacity.
[00:07:48] And then we want to optimize. So when you're in this phase, you want to increase capacity. You want to be able to do everything that you need to do with a clear mind, with mental clarity, and be able to regulate your emotions. So [00:08:00] there's no fasting, right? And the other thing that fasting can exacerbate is anxiety when you're in this phase, And, you know, I've talked about before having breakfast within 20 30 minutes of waking, but making sure that you have protein with that breakfast.
[00:08:13] Okay. So it's one thing to get up and eat something. It's another thing to have the right thing. So if you're combining your proteins, your carbohydrates and your healthy fats, your proteins, it can be like yogurt in the morning or a protein shake. I love to recommend a smoothie with heaps of protein and healthy fats in there and carbohydrates that helps to steady the glucose levels in the morning after breakfast.
[00:08:39] So you're not getting any highs and lows. So if you wake up in the morning and you have like a muesli, a sugary muesli with a orange juice or a sweet yogurt, what's going to happen is that your glucose levels will go very high and then they drop very low later. And when it's that low drop, that low point again, you're going to get the cortisol being released to bump it back up.
[00:09:02] Okay. So everything about managing cortisol and making sure that we can balance cortisol and regulate it. So you have good amounts of energy that lasts for as long as you need it. And then you can shut down at night and go to sleep and have a really good restorative sleep. Then we want to make sure that we're managing that cortisol curve.
[00:09:22] We want to make sure that we're having You know, the things that reduce a hyper stimulated response to cortisol. So, no fasting, make sure you have protein with breakfast. And the other thing that's really important is that when you're having a stressful day, if something bad has happened in your business or your work, Or you find you can't let something go.
[00:09:43] Something's happened. Someone said something, something happened in a meeting or over email, or you're worried about a bill or whatever it is. When you find your mental chatter, like your mind is overanalyzing it, overthinking it, It starts to build up a lot of tension in the body. You feel [00:10:00] uneasy, you feel worried, you feel fear, you feel stressed, And that already means that there's cortisol going through the body. It is time to move, okay? So the worst thing that you can do is sit around. When we get stressed, we're always often working and we continue to work. But the problem with that is that there's no outlet for the cortisol or the fight or flight response.
[00:10:20] It is designed to get us moving. Okay? And if we're sitting, it's hard for the cortisol to clear out of our body. So pick yourself up, just 10 minutes, even 5 would make a huge difference, right? Do something, go outside, run around the block, or go for a brisk walk. Whatever it is, leave your phone behind. You know, don't take any work with you and just allow your mind to clear and allow your body to clear out that excess cortisol, which otherwise is going to keep stimulating your system and make you feel terrible, make you feel stressed.
[00:10:51] So there's very simple things that you can do to regulate your cortisol. And if you're feeling the symptoms of high cortisol, low cortisol, or a combination of both, it means that there is a dysregulation in your cortisol response. There is this situation from chronic stress that has to be balanced out and it can be done through very simple little hacks or routines in your day to day that are not hard to do that take you very little time, but will have a huge impact on your hormones and the way that you feel, the way that you feel when you wake up in the morning.
[00:11:23] Okay. The way that you do your job, the way that you feel about your work, your productivity, your performance, everything. Okay. So hopefully you implement some of these habits and let me know how you go.
