Beauty-Health

Cortisol is best known as a stress hormone because it’s released when we’re feeling anxious and scared or are <a href="https://nutritionstripped.com/nutrition-stripped-lifestyle-02-stress/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">under pressure</a>.
When your body gets into “fight or flight” mode, cortisol raises your heart rate and blood pressure, tenses up your muscles, stops digestion, and mobilizes your blood glucose. All of this build-up is meant to help you protect your body. So is cortisol really a bad thing?
Learn how you can minimize high cortisol levels and use it in a healthy way to improve your immunity. We weren’t born with these stress systems in place to put us in harm’s way. Too much of one thing can be bad — and that rings true for cortisol. We’re all familiar with the bad side effects of too much cortisol: increased risk for heart disease and diabetes, IBS, and weight gain. But cortisol contributes to a lot of bodily functions that are vital to your health.
<h3>Where Is Cortisol Produced in the Body?</h3>
To understand how cortisol increases, let’s dive into a little anatomy lesson about where this essential hormone is produced. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid produced by the adrenal glands and is vital for carrying out a variety of important bodily functions. Your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal glands, also known as the HPA (hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal) axis, are responsible for secreting the hormone.
In case you’re not familiar, your hypothalamus is located at the base of your brain just above the pituitary gland. Your hypothalamus helps control regulate your body temperature appetite, and the release of hormones. It also controls your emotional responses. Then, there’s the pituitary gland, which is part of the endocrine system and produces essential hormones for a variety of bodily functions.
The adrenal glands are located above your kidneys, and they produce sex hormones and cortisol. You might have heard about adrenal disorders, like Cushing’s and Addison’s disease. Cushing’s disease is when your adrenal glands produce too much cortisol while Addison’s disease is when they produce too little.
You might have also heard about adrenal fatigue syndrome. While it’s not an accepted medical diagnosis, adrenal fatigue is believed to occur when you’re extremely stressed. Your adrenal glands are overworked trying to keep up with the demand for cortisol production. The result is feeling fatigue and experiencing weight loss, body aches, hair loss, and skin discoloration.
When you experience something stressful or perceive danger, your HPA axis triggers the release of cortisol. (1)
<h3>What Does Cortisol Do?</h3>
<h4>1. Cortisol helps regulate your metabolism.</h4>
Cortisol hormones regulate your metabolic, cardiovascular, immune, and behavioral processes. (1) When you’re staying up late to work and aren’t getting enough sleep, your cortisol levels increase and signal to the brain that you need to eat more food for energy.
This triggers the release of ghrelin — the hunger hormone — to increase your appetite for carbohydrate-rich and fatty foods. Ghrelin also signals the body to stop burning energy and to start storing fat. When your cortisol levels are normal, there’s a good balance of leptin — the other hunger hormone that tells your body you’ve had enough to eat — and ghrelin.
Cortisol is also essential for delivering glucose, fatty acids, and protein to your cells. (2) So someone who lives with Addison’s disease and doesn’t produce enough cortisol may experience insulin sensitivity, hypoglycemia, and fatigue. On the other hand, someone who has Cushing’s disease and too much cortisol will have muscle loss and rapid weight gain.
<h4>2. Cortisol can help promote memory.</h4>
In fight or flight mode, cortisol induces the release of adrenaline, another stress hormone that’s responsible for getting your heart rate up and increasing alertness. This jolt of alertness and attentiveness may have some positive effects on your memory.
When you have a good balance of stress hormones, including cortisol, it can help enhance memory consolidation or long-term memory. (3) Another study suggests that stress can help enhance conditioning for negative stimuli and improve spatial explicit memory. (4) In other words, some stress can make you more resilient and help improve your memory for spatial information, like location and the way your home looks inside.
But when you have too much cortisol, it actually impairs your memory and cognitive function. When cortisol binds to the cells in your hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for creating long-term memory, it can disrupt the memory-forming process. (5)
<h4>3. Cortisol helps your immune system fight off disease.</h4>
Your immune system is a collection of cells, tissues, proteins, and organs that work together to protect your body from disease. (6) During a stressful situation, your body mobilizes cells in the bloodstream to prepare the body for injury or infection. (6)
While <a href="https://nutritionstripped.com/what-is-inflammation/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">inflammation</a> and infection are bad for the body, in the short-term, they can actually help eliminate pathogens and promote healing. (6) For example, when you exercise, your body is actually experiencing stress, but it also produces endorphins, which are “feel good” chemicals that naturally boost your mood. Think runner’s high. But it’s important to note that chronic stress produces inflammation for an extended period of time and put you at risk for a variety of diseases.
<h4>4. Cortisol is vital for fetal development during pregnancy.</h4>
It’s normal for women to have higher cortisol levels when they’re pregnant. Cortisol is essential for fetal development, particularly the neural system. (7) In fact, cortisol levels increase two- to four-fold over the course of pregnancy. (7) But when levels go beyond that point, cortisol can be harmful and affect the baby’s response to stress later in life.
Studies also suggest that elevated cortisol levels can reduce blood flow to the fetus, depriving it of oxygen and nutrients. (7) So whether you’re trying to get pregnant or are already pregnant, reducing your stress can help set your baby up for better health outcomes later in life.
<h4>5. Cortisol helps protect your body when you’re in danger.</h4>
As I mentioned before, during a <a href="https://nutritionstripped.com/stress-relief/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">fight or flight response</a>, your body mobilizes resources to help protect your body from injury and disease. (8). When your body encounters a pathogen, your immune system induces inflammation, and cortisol works to regulate the amount of inflammation in the body.
For example, if you start to get symptoms of a cold, like a runny nose or coughing, that’s actually your body’s way of trying to remove harmful pathogens and signal to the brain that it needs rest to recover and heal. Someone with healthy levels of cortisol and a strong immune system will be able to fight disease better and faster than someone who doesn’t.
<h4>References:</h4>
1. Smith, S. M., Vale, W. W. (December 2006) <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181830/">The role of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in neuroendocrine responses to stress</a>.
2. Christiansen, J.J., Djurhuus, C.B., Gravholt, C.H., Iverson, P., Christiansen, J.S., Schmitz, O., Weeke, J., Jorgensen, J.O.L., Moller, N. (September 2007) <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/9/3553/2597859">Effects of Cortisol on Carbohydrate, Lipid, and Protein Metabolism: Studies of Acute Cortisol Withdrawal in Adrenocortical Failure</a>
3. Luethi, M., Meier, B., Sandi, C. (January 2009) <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2628592/">Stress Effects on Working Memory, Explicit Memory, and Implicit Memory for Neutral and Emotional Stimuli in Healthy Men</a>
4. McIntyre, C.K., Roozendaal, B. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3907/">Adrenal Stress Hormones and Enhanced Memory for Emotionally Arousing Experiences, Chapter 13</a> of Neural Plasticity and Memory: From Genes to Brain Imaging
5. Klemm, W.R. (December 2016) <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/memory-medic/201612/thwart-stress-effects-memory">Thwart Stress Effects of Memory</a>
6. Morey, J.N., Boggero, I.A., Scott, A.B., Segerstrom, S.C. (October 2015) <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4465119/">Current Directions in Stress and Human Immune Function</a>
7. Wolpert, S., (March 2016) <a href="http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/women-with-impaired-stress-hormone-before-pregnancy-have-lower-birthweight-babies">Women with impaired stress hormone before pregnancy have lower-birthweight babies</a>
8. Dhabhar, F. (June 2012) <a href="https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/06/study-explains-how-stress-can-boost-immune-system.html">How Stress Can Boost the Immune System</a>
<h3>Let’s Hear It!</h3>
How do you help control your cortisol levels every day? How do you use cortisol to your advantage? What do you do to de-stress and practice self-care? Share your tips with the NS community below and post on Instagram using #nutritionstripped.
xx McKel
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All About Cortisol: How It Works to Protect Your Body

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