WHAT IS THE RHYTHM OF YOUR CORTISOL?
Cortisol is not bad, we need it, but its rhythm that we have to be wary of in order for us to benefit from this hormone.
⚠️Cortisol is a steroid hormone produced in the adrenals as a means of reacting to stress, but also heightening our focus, providing energy, and can even act as an anti inflammatory in the proper context.
Naturally, our cortisol levels are the highest in the morning and slowly dip down as the day passes, following what we would call our “circadian rhythm”. Optimal ranges for this are as follows:
🔹️Morning: 10-18 nmol/L
🔹️Noon: 3-6
🔹️Evening: 2-4
🔹️Night: 1-2
🔹️and then the sum of all the ranges put together should fall between 16-30.
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Things that can affect one’s rhythm are any type of stressors.
Here are some things to consider if you notice particular markers are high:
🔹️Morning: A drop in blood sugar while you were sleeping
Left over elevation due to an immune response
🔹️Noon: Food sensitivities from something you ate earlier on, caffeine, blood sugar issues, drugs, environmental toxins
🔹️Evening: Food intolerances, blood sugar, environment, allergies
🔹️Nighttime: Immune response, parasites, other infections, food intolerances, blood sugar
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Keep in mind that your body’s stress response will only send cortisol to be elevated if it is in the “acute” or “compensatory phase”.
We have 3 stages of stress, acute compensatory and exhaustive phase. I have a whole post on this in my highlight Metabolism titled “3 stages of stress adaption” but to sum it up, in our acute phase we are either experiencing a momentary shock or our body has enough energy to provide a stress response to send out to our body for help. In the compensatory phase we are still symptomatic, but are losing resiliency, our bodies struggling to keep us running on stress hormones. Once we enter our exhaustive phase, our energy reserves our depleted, and hormones like cortisol will not be produced because our bodies will be focused in offering energy elsewhere due to its dwindling state.
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Thus testing our cortisol rhythm can be an imperative piece to our investigative puzzle when trying to heal!