By: Dr. Brent Myers, DC
April 7, 2014
Cortisol is one of those "good/bad" hormones. Too much at the wrong time of day and you won't fall asleep or, you wake up in the middle of the night. Too little in the morning and your energy level is worthless and you can’t get out of bed, too little during a workout and your performance drops.
What exactly is cortisol?
It is a hormone produced by the Adrenal glands in response to stress. When a stressful event occurs the brain releases a chemical called ACTH into the blood which then enters the adrenal glands and tells the glands to release cortisol. Now in the “caveman” days our body used this as our “fight or flight” mechanism to handle extremely stressful events, like be chased by a saber toothed tiger. The release of cortisol and adrenalin at the time we were being chased by the tiger gave us a better chance to get away and survive. However, nowadays we have far less saber toothed tigers chasing us and many more cell phones ringing, emails to send and children to take from one place to another.
The problem with our lifestyle now is that all these small stressors consistently task the adrenal glands, they really do not know the difference between a tiger chasing you and being late to work. In the past we would only use these hormones in times of extreme stress, now it is happening on a daily basis.
As Charles Poliquin, a world renowned strength coach and developer of the Charles Poliquin website, points out in his great video on cortisol, one of the differences between now and a hundred years ago is that we have 500 times more stress than our ancestors, which means our adrenal glands our unable to keep up with all this stress we have.
