Stop Blaming Cortisol

Cortisol gets blamed for almost everything: stubborn belly fat, anxious mornings, brain fog, and that tired-but-wired feeling that makes sleep impossible. But cortisol isn’t a villain hormone you need to “shut off.” It’s a messenger, and when it stays high, it usually means your body is living in a constant state of stress response.

We walk through what cortisol actually does in a healthy body, how the cortisol rhythm follows your circadian rhythm, and why chronic elevation can feel like a full-body derailment. Then we get to the real root that rarely gets explained clearly: a dysregulated nervous system. When you’re stuck in fight or flight (sympathetic drive), your body can’t recover well, can’t heal well, and can’t regulate hormones the way it’s designed to. That’s why sheer willpower, perfect dieting, or more supplements can still leave you feeling stuck.

We also talk about the modern stack of stressors that quietly keep the system pinned on “go”: overtraining, under-eating, too much caffeine, energy drinks, pre-workout stimulants, and the nonstop mental load of phone notifications. From practical sleep schedule consistency to balanced training, plus when support like chiropractic care or counseling can make sense, we focus on nervous system regulation as the path forward.

If this hit home, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a quick review so more people can stop blaming cortisol and start fixing what’s underneath.

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Transcript

Tired And Wired Cortisol Confusion

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Feel tired, wired, not sleeping, gaining weight, even when you're doing everything right, you've probably been told it's cortisol, but no one has told you why your cortisol is high. Welcome to another episode of Living Full Life Podcast. I'm Dr. Enrico Lochkori. This week's podcast all about the hormone cortisol and how it means very little to the overall reason of why you feel the way you may feel. It's a reactatory, a reactive hormone to circumstance and timing and circadian rhythm. So it's a natural cyclical hormone that is pretty much the natural espresso shot for the for the body. The body produces it, it gives you an instant energy rush at certain timing during the day. And that's why it spikes right before you wake up. It's what wakes you up. And then it tapers off after that and is responsive to your daily activity. It's a stress hormone. It only reacts to stress. And remember, if you go back to my earlier podcast years ago, we have a few about stress. And stress is physical, chemical, emotional, mental. Those are the ways and the forms stress can affect us. And not all stress is negative. Stress is a negative word that we use, but stress is not all negative. Gravity is a stress, pushes us and keeps us on the ground. That's a good thing. Otherwise, we'd be floating everywhere. Probably not a good thing. And it has negative effects to it. When we sit, puts more pressure on our ergonomics. As we age, our skin starts to sag a little bit. So it's got some negatives to it, but gravity is both positive and negative, right? And same thing with exercise. Stressing your body with exercise, like going for a walk or lifting heavy weights, is stressful. It requires energy. It pulls. It may even tear some muscle fibers, which is good, causes some microinflammation. You're like, oh man, that sounds bad. It's not a bad thing. The body builds back better and stronger, which is a good thing. It's a positive stress. Too much exercise, trying to bench press 315 pounds when you can't. It's a great way to tear your pec tendon or your bicep tendon, right? That can be stressful and harmful. So stress is everything. Cortisol reacts to stress. It's a stress hormone. It's not bad necessarily. It helps survival, energy, and alertness. We need it. The problem is when it's chronically elevated. And this is quite an epidemic with a lot of people. It's elevated in a lot of people. So what cortisol actually is, or what high cortisol does when it's high all the time, it's tied into some noticeable things, belly fat specifically, poor sleep, anxiety, hormonal issues, brain fog, you know, chronic stress disrupts hormones, sleep, digestion, and immunity. And because there is no direct cortisol solution out there, like an injection, hormone replacement, you can put something to combat cortisol. You can't. Cortisol doesn't have an antagonist that shuts it down. It's interesting. Unlike a lot of the other hormones that we play with, where we can balance them. We can balance estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. We can start playing a balancing game in the body with that from the outside in. Not always a smart thing to try and play chemists with the body, but for a lot of people, these things can well can work, can help with for underperforming organs like pituitary, thyroid, adrenals, yada, yada. And the and the and the list goes on when it comes to that. So belly fat, poor sleep, anxiety, hormonal issues, brain fog. I think that's just on etched on the back of an American passport. I think that's what all Americans feel. Those that's what they have. You check those all off, and you're like, oh, you now are granted your American passport. Here you go. You're you're truly a U.S. citizen. Because we all we all suffer with that. Why? Because our cortisol is elevated as a result of all the other stresses. This is gonna be one of those, you know, um Steven Spielberg films where we watch, we listen to the whole podcast, and at the end, it goes back to the beginning, like, oh, that was why this whole movie happened. This is how this podcast is gonna go with hormones. We're looking at the cortisol. I'm distracting you with that. And then at the end, we're gonna be like, oh, it has nothing to do with cortisol. The real problem about all this that no one explains gets me frustrated a little bit in the functional health space and the medical space, even in endocrinology, medicine has divided itself into specialties for endocrinology, with where you go for specialists in there. However, they are so fine-tuned into pathology that they don't have this gray area of like wellness in the middle. So if you go in there and you don't have a condition, an autoimmune condition, a thyroid condition, a pituitary condition, a brain tumor, something that's affecting your nervous system, your hormonal system, they're like, I'm referring you back to primary care. They're like, Don't, you know, don't waste my time. We need a diagnosis, we need to know whether you have lupus, whatever it may be. Then I can help you. That's truly how it works. Same thing with gastroenterology, urology, all these specialties. If you don't have a condition once you're there and you're you're assessed, they send you back out. They have to. They have to by insurance guidelines, they have to send you back. So that's how this whole works. And there's no gray area for them to work, yet they're the smartest in the field when it comes to that particular study, which I wish we had access to them more, but but you can't. So it's good to become friends with them, take them out for a steak dinner, and you probably learn more in two hours sitting down with them talking over a steak dinner than you will by going to them in private practice. So, which is which is great because they're very knowledgeable in what they do in those specifics. So the real problem that no one talks about is it's not just stress, it's a dysregulated nervous system that starts to throw the rhythm out with cortisol. When your body is stuck in fight or flight, sympathetic drive, it cannot heal, it cannot recover, and it cannot regulate hormones. That's the triad that ends up happening in a dysregulated nervous system when it's in sympathetic drive, which most people are pinned to sympathetic. This is exactly what the research is now highlighting. People are realizing health issues aren't willpower, their nervous system overload. And this is why people stay stuck for many reasons. There's the people who don't do much, which is rare. The the idea of the couch potatoes in America isn't is not true. Americans work hard in all aspects. Very few people sit around and do nothing and smoke dope all day. I mean, that's not that's not the thing, you know, when in the 90s growing up, that was the thing that you know was depicted of culture is that uh that's what they do. It's not true. I haven't met very many of those people. Most people are out there grinding and working hard, and that's where we're talking about overtraining. So people who are like exercising or doing things, the type A personalities will overtrain, they overrun. Hey Nancy, uh how's your running going? Great. I ran 29 miles yesterday. I'm like 20, 29 miles. What you ran to another city? What's going on? What are you doing? Oh, I love running, I'm a runner. I'm like, okay, well, that's that's a lot. Under under eating, under eating, overtraining, under eating. When you're getting back into working out and you got that motivation, like, I'm gonna get out there, I'm gonna move, I'm gonna go start going for walks, and you start going for walks, and it goes well for four days. You're like, I'm I'm killing it. Four days in a row, I'm crushing it. I've been sitting for 14 years, but I'm finally in it. Four days in a row, kudos to me. And you should give yourself kudos. I'm buying myself a weighted vest. What? Why are you gonna add 15 pounds of body weight on you to go for a walk? That makes no sense. Extra stress, right? Stimulants. So now we're using coffee. Yes, waking up with a coffee, good way to start the day. Gives you a little boost in energy. Caffeine is actually how it has a lot of health principles to it. It's good. It's got no calories. I mean, it's just a good drink. It's great. The third and fourth one during the day, not good for our overall regulation of our nervous system. It's the constant stimulants, the pre-workout drinks, the energy drinks. We've got these teenagers drinking them at a young age. And then the constant phone use and mental stress, the constant notifications. This is a new cultural thing that a lot of generations before us never experienced. Is the constant notifications. People are glancing to their watch on their phone all the time, getting pinged, pinged, pinged, pinged. New email, new text, new voicemail, new spam call, new spam text, new new text here, new voice notification, new other app text notification, and then the other, the third app text notification, uh, WhatsApp, Google Voice, your text, your SMS, it's out of control. And this constant downloading of information is what's elevating stress levels. From my perspective as a primary health care provider, as a chiropractor, because we see so many people so often and so repetitively, I have more points of contact with my patients than any other primary provider does, which is very unique in our field to be a primary care provider and have these points of access each time. An adjustment is simple, it's easy to book, it's easy to get in with us, it's the way we run our business. And people can come in once, twice, four times a month, depending on the frequency that they're at. They can choose any level of wellness care that they want. They come in monthly, they come in every two months, whatever it is. That's still whether it's four, six, twelve, twenty four times a year that I get to talk to them for those 10 minutes. That's you add up that time, 24, that's two hours, three hours of contact time with a primary care physician, that we can guide them and motivate them in the right direction. And that's where chiropractic fits in so well. And I highly highly advocate finding a great one and having that in your back pocket for that point of contact to hold you accountable on overall health. The nervous system controls all stress responses in the body. If the spine is not functioning properly, signals are distorted and stress response stays on. So people who stay well adjusted have documented through the tech that we use in our office better response rates and better balance in their autonomic nervous system. It's just the automatic effect of being regulated and being adjusted that helps the nervous system communicate better. So chiropractic helps not only restore posture, but restore proper communication, shift the body out of fight or flight and towards homeostasis, and improve adaptability to the next day's stress. So when you get adjusted, it regulates the body back to neutral, pulls us out of sympathetic drive towards balance, towards rest, digest, and healing. So it pulls us out of there from gas pedal being pinned down all day, immediately affects within seconds after getting adjusted to hours. Then the next few days, they're in homeostasis, which gives them better sleep and better healing, and they can rebalance again. And then as stress starts to pile up again, this is why we see people who choose weekly care. There they are in high, um, high stress situations through work and their life where they're coming in weekly. They're just the stress level is that high, they know it, they function better by doing this weekly, so they stay on weekly. There's other people that do twice a month, once a month, once every three months, whatever, whatever retired people come in every two months, whatever it may be, that helps them function better. So here's the big truth when it comes to cortisol. You cannot out-diet, out-exercise, or out-supplement a stressed nervous system. You can't do it. There's no, there's no way you can sit down. Okay, I'm gonna focus, I'm gonna turn my health around, I'm gonna get my stress under control, I'm gonna change my diet, or I'm gonna change my exercise or start exercise, or I'm gonna take these supplements. There's nothing that you can do if you have a stressed out nervous system. If you feel stuck, it may not be your diet, it may not be your workouts or your efforts, it may be your nervous system. And with proper guidance, it's not always just seeing the chiropractor. It's sometimes I'm telling people listen, here's a card to my counselor, go give them a call. They might guide you to another counselor, but we need to you need to sift through the mental stress that's going through your through your head. I'm picking up on that. And no matter how much we're adjusting you, you bounce right back to the stress flight or flight. And we'll see that, we'll pick it up, and we'll guide them now. Whether they do it or not, so you can lead the horse to water, right? That old saying. Or you may need an endocrinologist, or you may need this primary provider, or you may need this specialist, or you may need to do this type of diet, or you may need to do this type of detox or whatever it may be, guiding them in the right direction. That is what it's all about with cortisol. Stop looking at cortisol, stop blaming cortisol. Cortisol is the result. Cortisol is the result. The normal, if you want to go back to the circadian rhythm podcast, I forget if that's from season two. I can't believe we're in season almost season four here. Um, when you go to that, I've done a few of them. There's three of them. So just put in cortisol or stress or circadian or sleep. And we talk about the cyclical movement of the circadian rhythm and how and how a bed, a sleep structure, a sleep schedule so vital to a long life, a long life, long and healthy life is a sleep schedule. It's just there's no bending the rules. You go to bed at 10, you wake up at six. You go to bed at 11, you wake up at 7. You go to bed, like there's no bending of this. As an adult, you can get six to seven hours of sleep too. So you can go to bed at 11, wake up at six. You go to bed at you know, 10:30, you wake up at 5:30, whatever it may be. And it's routine, and you never break that. And when you do this for weeks and months, and then the years start to go by, and you just do this, you can tell just from one hour, going to bed one hour later and waking up at that same time in the morning, you're like, I'm I wake up to I woke up tired to I feel tired. I feel like I need that extra hour. Your body just gets used to it. It's pretty amazing once you get dialed in because that rhythm is almost perfect. And with that rhythm is the rhythm of life in a lot of eastern um cultures, uh European cultures, the rhythm of life. And it's found across all the blue zones, people who live to 100 plus, and these villages that live to 100 plus around the world, the rhythm of life. And sleep plays such a major role in that, and they they have zero flex on their sleep schedule. They're like, no, it's 10 o'clock, it's time to go to bed. I'm going to bed. And there's nothing that breaks it. Some nights, you know, New Year's Eve, whatever it is, some parties, whatever, you can do that, but they are, you know, 99% of the time sick. And what it does is the cortisol rhythm will start to sink, according to our circadian as well. And you get these two tuned up, and your nervous system has that time to regulate, heal, and repair. And it just starts to work like clockwork. There are effects that we talked about with stress, with poor diet over long periods of time, causes chronic inflammation along the gut and organs that can also disrupt those rhythms. And um, overtraining seems to be a direct response to cortisol that can actually spike it and keep it spiked because we're overtraining. The human body, for those of you that love to overtrain, man, I you know, in the gym, I don't know how you can overtrain because the body, the muscles burn out, right? So overtraining in the gym, I don't know how you'd sit there for an hour lifting the whole time. I mean, you just get tired, you just burn out, unless you're doing full body workouts all the time. But it's more the cardio people. When you're sitting there for an hour doing a stair stepper, or you're signing up for half marathons and full marathons, iron men, and the training that goes into this, the human body is not designed to do that. Just because these people do it and they win Olympic medals for it, and they do all this stuff in the summer games and whatever it is, good for them. But the human body, humans, the Homo sapiens, are not designed for long distance, long events. We are carnivores and herbivores, so we get the both best of both worlds, and we're not designed to do that, to run from Athens to Sparta, right? The marathon. We're not designed for that. It's a one-time thing to get away and survive the predator attack. You know, the cyber uh saber-toothed tiger is chasing you from Athens and it's hunting you down, and you got to make it to Sparta or be Eden. Yeah, that's the adrenaline and the cortisol that's running to keep you alive. That's fine. But you can't do that every day. You can't be running from the saber-toothed tiger every single day, seven days a week, 30 days a month. It's just that that long, we're not this, it's a breakdown system. So a dysregulated nervous system and the stress response breaks down our entire system. Some interesting studies, which we won't get into here in agriculture and the cattle industry, growing up in Alberta, Canada, huge, it's like Texas, huge cattle industry there. A lot of friends and family work around cattle, feed. I learned a lot knowing friends of the family and thus teaching us all that. The stress response in the animals and how it translates to the meat at the at the butcher. And it's drastic. These people without, you know, beakers and vials and labs testing the chemicals in them in the muscle just by just by physiological, taking care of the animal, bringing it to be slaughtered, putting the meat on the table, and the differences that happen in high cortisol animals and low cortisol animals from either the way they were raised, the feed that they were given, the stress, the inflammation in their body, to the natural ones that are grass-fed, grass-finished, peaceful, you know, one by one, taken to the slaughterhouse, you know, being pet right before they uh they're slaughtered. And the cortisol levels have been shown in the meat and the quality of the meat as well, uh, translates to what we eat as well. So we were designed to not be in fight or flight all the time. Makes a big difference in everything across all the point of that was across all animals. It makes us all unique to be animals, but we're not designed for that. I'm not knocking on people that love to do their marathons and all that, but that chronic stress training over time may be another reason why we can't get our cortisol levels and hormone levels balanced. We see this in the in the high-intensity fitness industry a lot. Poor skin, rosacea, eczema, skin conditions. That's just hormonal. That is just bad hormone balance. And it's because of overexerting and stress. These people not only working out and pushing themselves, but many of them work as well. They have a job, maybe even families and other stress too. So they're just piling the stress onto their life. So that's in the fitness industry. Most of us listening right now, we're not, we're not doing that. We're not competing for for shows or the Olympics. But that there's there's a balance between high intensity and doing nothing. And we have to live right here in the middle and to have a healthy nervous system and a regulated nervous system. So if this was interesting, share the podcast. Uh, that's the best way to get to more listeners. Uh, subscribe to the podcast on your favorite channel Spotify, Apple, Google Play, whatever you guys listen to on there, YouTube. And make sure you share it. And if you have any questions, info at fulllifetampa.com. Stay well, stay healthy, take care.