Do You Know Your Cortisol Pattern?

Did you know the stress hormone cortisol follows a 24-hour rhythm?

The pattern helps you feel alert in the morning and calm at night, like this:

☀️Cortisol peaks within 30 minutes of waking to kickstart the body for the day.

⛅ Levels decline throughout the afternoon and into the evening.

🌙 Cortisol is lowest at midnight to allow for restful sleep.

But if stress or lifestyle disrupt this natural rhythm…

⬆️ Cortisol can be persistently high, making you anxious or sleepless.

⬇️ Cortisol can be persistently low, making you fatigued and moody.

🔃 Cortisol can be flipped, making you feel tired in the morning and wired at night.

Cortisol is a “stress hormone,” but it also influences metabolism, weight, inflammation, blood pressure, brain function, mood, and SO. MUCH. MORE.

I think it’s worth paying attention to cortisol and doing everything we can to get it back to balance.

Do you agree?

Like this post if you want to see more posts about how to support your cortisol rhythm and stop letting stress rule your health 🙌

Interested in testing your cortisol levels? Schedule an initial visit with us to get started! 😍

Stress Hormones: What You Need to Know.

What your body does with stress 👇

I think we can all agree that the holiday season is one of the most stressful times of year.

Maybe you have a *sense* that it affects your health, but do you actually know why or how?

If you want to train your body to be more resilient to stress (so it doesn’t have so much control over your life), it helps to understand stress hormones.

So let’s start there.

There are 2 hormones to know:

Cortisol & Adrenaline (also called Epinephrine). Here are the differences:

1️⃣ Adrenaline is released rapidly as an immediate response to stress, whereas cortisol is released in a daily rhythm regulated by the brain & the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

2️⃣ Adrenaline has fast effects to activate the body when in danger (think “fight or flight!”) Cortisol has slower effects that are not as obvious to track.

3️⃣ Whereas adrenaline increases the heart rate and can make you feel anxious during intense moments, cortisol has longer-term health effects related to metabolism, sleep, brain, and mood.

Cortisol is so central to the stress cycle that I’ll be sharing more about it and what we can do to balance it in upcoming posts.

Like if you found this helpful ❤️ and message me for help.

Morning vs. Evening Exercise: New Research

Does it matter when you exercise?

It’s always great when we can work smarter and not harder to reach the same goal, right?

When it comes to exercise, we know that physical activity reduces the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, but here’s a new study that looks at whether it matters what time of day we exercise.

After looking at data from 93,000+ healthy adults (from the UK Biobank), the results showed…

✅ Morning & afternoon physical activity were associated with a 9%-10% lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

❌ Evening physical activity was not associated with a lower diabetes risk.

I’m not suggesting you ditch your evening walk, but this study suggests we get the most bang for our buck when we move our bodies earlier in the day.

What’s your exercise preference—early or late?

Reference

Tian C, Bürki C, Westerman KE, Patel CJ. Association between timing and consistency of physical activity and type 2 diabetes: a cohort study on participants of the UK Biobank [published online ahead of print, 2023 Sep 20]. Diabetologia. 2023. [link]

What’s the Happiest Age?

What’s the happiest age?

Sounds like an impossible question to answer…

…which is why researchers pooled data from long-term studies of close to half a million people (460,000+) to find out.

This type of research is called a meta-analysis, and it’s the most reliable way to answer tough questions that get different answers from different individual studies.

They found that happiness & life satisfaction:

↘️ Declined from ages 9-16 (it’s tough being a teen!)

↗️ Then increased until age 70 (that’s encouraging!)

↘️ Declined again after that (possibly related to overall health)

Happiness is a vague concept that can seem elusive, but the good news is that you don’t have to follow trends!

Happiness is related to so many other aspects of health that everything you do to feel better could also have a side effect of happiness.

Like…

🥦 Eating vegetables.

🚶 Going for walks.

💧 Drinking water.

✍️ Journaling.

🧘 Meditating.

❤️ And doing things you love.

What are you doing today for your happiness?

Reference

Buecker, S., Luhmann, M., Haehner, P., Bühler, J. L., Dapp, L. C., Luciano, E. C., & Orth, U. The development of subjective well-being across the lifespan: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin. 2023; 149(7-8):418–446. [link]

Artificial Sweeteners: Yes or No?

The truth about artificial sweeteners ⬇️

In case you haven’t heard, there was this huge study run by Harvard School of Public Health of more than 30,000 middle-aged female nurses in the US called the Nurses Health Study II.

The women submitted info about their eating habits every 4 years for 15 years.

One finding was that women who ate more processed foods were more likely to develop depression, but now…

A more detailed analysis looked at specific components of their diets and found the only thing significantly associated with a greater risk of depression….

Was artificial sweeteners ❌

This study does not prove causation (it only shows association), but my question is this:

Is it worth the risk?

Reference

Samuthpongtorn C, Nguyen LH, Okereke OI, et al. Consumption of Ultraprocessed Food and Risk of Depression. JAMA Netw Open. 2023;6(9):e2334770. [link]