Stress affects every part of your body – from your sleep to your digestion, energy, and mental clarity. And when you’re constantly in a stress state, it’s hard for your body to be in a healing state. 

That’s why today I want to share five ways to lower your stress hormones and bring more balance to your life – no matter how hectic things are.

Here’s how to get started:

Step 1: Eat cortisol-reducing foods
Cortisol is your body’s main stress hormone, and it has a lot of side effects from mental function to mood to digestion and more.

But by eating certain foods we can reduce cortisol, especially carbohydrates. 

Carbohydrates help switch you out of that fight-or-flight stress response and bring you back to your prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of your brain where you can think clearly, make decisions, and feel calm. When you’re in fight or flight, you’re stuck in survival mode – reacting emotionally and unable to solve problems rationally.

👉 But the key here is balance. Eating small amounts of starchy carbs like bananas, mangoes, or rice can help reduce cortisol. Too much sugar or processed carbs, however, will spike your blood sugar and elevate cortisol again.

Combine carbs with protein (like chicken, fish, or yogurt) to keep your blood sugar balanced throughout the day. This way, you can avoid glucose fluctuations, which mimic the symptoms of anxiety and stress.

Step 2: Create space in your calendar
Our stress hormones tend to keep going up as the day progresses and when we pack our calendar with back-to-back meetings and tasks with no space between, we have no space for them to come back down.

This is why it’s really important to create pockets of time throughout the day to decompress. Even just a five-minute break to step outside, get some sunlight, or stretch your body can lower your stress hormones and give your mind the space it needs to recharge. 

👉 We’re terrible at predicting how long things will take, so make sure you build in extra time between tasks to avoid that stressful rush.

Step 3: Simplify your to-do list
The mental load of a never-ending to-do list can be absolutely overwhelming. Our brains tend to obsess about things when we’re trying to keep everything in our mind. 

To ease that burden, I recommend putting everything down on paper (or in an online app).

Once you’ve done that you’ll be able to clearly see what is really urgent, what can wait, and what is probably going to cause a roadblock. 

👉 Now you can separate all your tasks into a “Do Now” list and a “Do Later” list. 

Put everything that is urgent or is going to have the greatest impact on the “Do Now” list and everything else on the “Do Later” list. 

Focus on your “Do Now” list, and let go of the rest for a day or two. This clears up mental space and allows you to be more productive with the tasks that actually matter.

Step 4: Prioritize sleep
Sleep is like a magic pill, if we could put it in a bottle it would be the most powerful remedy in the world – and it’s an absolute non-negotiable for reducing stress levels.

Most women just aren’t getting enough sleep – they’re staying up late, running on empty, and trying to function on less than five or six hours a night.

You need a full eight hours of sleep every night to reset your cortisol levels, allow your brain to detoxify, and process your emotions. 

And you have to get to bed before 10pm – I call it the power of 8 before 10!

👉 The sleep you get before midnight is when your body does its deepest, most restorative work. If you miss out on this window, you’re missing the chance for your body to truly recover overnight.

Step 5: Shift into a clear state of mind
If I had to boil down your mental states into two (obviously there’s way more than that but for the purposes of this explanation), you have noisy thinking and clear thinking.

Noisy thinking is when you’re stuck in overanalyzing, trying to figure everything out, and unable to let things go. A lot of cortisol is being released when you’re stuck in this noisy mental state which then triggers the stress response.

👉 A clear mental state, on the other hand, allows you the space to access creativity and problem-solving. This is the state where you can perform at your best – where you feel confident and ready to take on challenges.

We really want to value this clear state of mind and create space for it because when we shift away from the noisy thinking and give ourselves time for mental clarity, we’ll find that solutions to our problems naturally arise. 

So these are the key areas you can focus on to reduce your stress hormones and cultivate a state of mind that promotes lower stress levels.

If you know you’re ready to do this but you’re unsure of how or where to start and you want support to take that first step to a clearer mind where you’re functioning at your best, then I’d love to invite you to my upcoming masterclass.

I’m going to break down my 3-step game plan to feeling calm, clear, and in control – no matter how busy or stressful life gets. Because I’ve been where you are now and I tried a bunch of things that did not work – like uprooting my whole life because I thought my stressful life was the problem.