(Sara Gottfried, M.D. – Huffington Post) — Have you heard of the “cortisol switch”?
The Good
Here’s the scenario. When you’re stressed, you feel the positive vibe of cortisol — the rise of energy, the focus, the charge, the ascent. Cortisol is the main stress hormone made in your adrenal glands and it’s designed to get you out of danger. Cortisol has three main jobs: raise blood sugar (to feed muscles so you can run or fight), raise blood pressure, and modulate immune function.
The Bad (aka, the Switch)
But here’s the rub (as Shakespeare puts it)… “the cortisol switch.” Your body ceases to register the positive aspects of cortisol, and you switch to the negative aspects of cortisol. It takes about 18 minutes.
It’s like when you drink regular coffee and feel like a rockstar, for 18 minutes to be precise. Then you get hit the wall, get all jittery and anxious. Thoughts erode. Blood sugar rises, then precipitously drops. Acidity increases. You get heavy and dumb.
The Long-Term Badness: From Muffin Top to Insomnia
Over time, high cortisol, when sustained, is linked to high blood pressure, prediabetes and diabetes, increased belly fat, brain changes such as atrophy of the hippocampus (where memory is synthesized), depression, suicide, insomnia, and poor wound healing. In fact, fat cells in the belly have four times more cortisol receptors compared to fat cells elsewhere, so you just keep reinforcing the muffin top as your cortisol climbs and stays high. It’s not pretty.
The best end game? Prevent the cortisol switch.
Cortisol is like that. It’s an impulsive little hormone that makes you feel smart and on your game one moment, and then turns on you. And the positive side of cortisol, prior to the switch, can be addictive.
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Unfortunately the worn out cliché of just relax or words to that effect along with a little exercise and all other niceties and home remedies I never seen them to work, (that would be too easy) The net is full of anecdotal remedies and endless repetitions of those anecdotes in the form of references, while in reality the problem of high cortisol production remains.
Science has few answers too, yes, there are some crude squashing methods of the adrenals but they open a new set of problems and are more dangerous than having too much corticosteroids, what is needed is a drugs that can be adjusted and destroys any “EXCESS “ in circulation without side effects.
After years of high cortisol output the glands do actually enlarge due to their overproduction, as far as I have read from reliable sources adrenal fatigue from producing too much cortisol is just a myth, I wish it was a real condition, that would be like light at the end of the tunnel. Is a rough ride to overcome and mostly consists of palliative support, sorry for being so negative, if someone knows of a REAL solution to the condition I would like to know.
After reading about so many cures they started to sound like the old fabled bar of my younger years where the bar was full of women waiting to attack you as soon as you entered the bar.