Latest / The b.reathe Blueprint Podcast / The Truth About Cortisol, From Someone Whose Body Makes None
Transcript
- katie: If this episode resonated, it's usually a sign that your nervous system isn't asking for more effort, it's asking for more capacity. And that's exactly why I created the Success Hangover Check-in. It helps you see where your energy, recovery and nervous system capacity might be under strain, so you can rebuild performance in a way that actually lasts. You can find the check-in through the links in the show notes, and if you found this helpful, share it with someone else who carries a lot but rarely slows down. TikTok has decided that cortisol is the enemy. Cortisol face, cortisol belly, cortisol detox, hundreds and millions of views all telling you to lower your stress hormone. Flush it out, get rid of it. I find this fascinating because my body does not make cortisol at all. I live with a rare condition called Addison's disease. My adrenal glands do not produce the hormones the body needs to survive stress. So every day I take the hormone that TikTok is trying to detox. I'll see you in the next episode. I carry an emergency injection of it. Because without cortisol, I would not be puffy or anxious or holding weight around my middle. I would be dead. So today I want to do two things. I want to tell you the story of how I found out because there is a lesson in it for every high performer, whether your hormones work perfectly or not. And I want to clear up what cortisol actually is. Because if you are blaming a hormone for how you feel, you are aiming at the wrong target. Let me start with the story. I was 16, nearly 17, and for years I had been exhausted in a way that I thought was just me. I slept through breaks at school, through lunches, through evenings, I craved s- I craved salt constantly, I was losing weight, and because I was the kid who handled things, the kid who did not make fuss, nobody joined the dots, including me. I just thought this was how my body worked, and I pushed through it. Then one night I woke my parents at 2am to tell them my eye was sore. Which makes no sense, I know. But I would never have woken them for something small and some part of me knew something was wrong. Standing in their bedroom, I passed out. Not dramatically, just gone. Hospital, tests, discharged, back the next day when I could not keep feed down, hours of waiting, and then finally a doctor looked across the whole picture instead of just the pieces. The exhaustion, the fainting, the weight loss, the salt cravings. And then he found it. Addison's disease. If it had been missing that night, if it had been missed that night, I would not be here. Now here is the part of the story I really want you to hear. Because the diagnosis is not the lesson, what happened next is. They started me on medication my body could not make for itself. And almost overnight I had energy. After years of sleeping through my own life, I could stay awake. I could think. I could do things. And do know what my first thought was? Not, I should protect this. My first thought was I need to make the most of this. I felt behind. I felt like I had lost years. So I pushed. I built a business young. I worked in a male dominated trade where I had to be better just to be taken seriously. I trained hard. Later I fought in Muay Thai fights that someone with my condition probably should never have said yes to. I treated energy as something to spend, not something to protect. And I spent all of it, again and again, until my body forced the issue in ways I'll talk about another time. You do not need a rare disease to recognise that pattern. Think about the last time you came out of a depleted season. After an illness. After a brutal project. After a holiday. after a rough year. The energy comes back, and what do we do? We do not bank it, we spend it. We say yes to everything. We accelerate, because energy feels like proof that we are fine and feeling behind is unbearable. Energy is not proof that you are fine. Energy is an asset. And high performers are the worst asset managers of their own energy I have ever seen, because every returning ounce of it gets reinvested in more output. Right, now let's talk about what cortisol actually is. Because living without it has given me a strange kind of clarity about what it does. Cortisol is not a toxin. It is not a flaw. It is one of the most important hormones you have. It wakes you up in the morning. That natural rise you feel after waking, that is cortisol doing its job. It mobilises energy so you can think Move and respond. It manages information. It helps you rise to a challenge, a presentation, a hard conversation, a sprint to a deadline. Courtsal is not the enemy of performance. Courtsal is the fuel of the performance. I know what missing it feels like, because when my levels drop too low, I cannot rise to anything. There is no energy to mobilize. The system has nothing to respond with. Believe me when I tell you, you want this hormone. So why does everyone feel so terrible? If cortisol is so useful, what is the wired, puffy, exhausted, cannot sleep feeling everyone is calling high cortisol? The problem is not the hormone. The problem is the pattern. Cortisol is designed to move in pulses and rhythms. Up in the morning, down at night. Up for a challenge, down when it passes. Stress, then recovery. Spike, then reset. That rhythm is healthy. What is not healthy is when the recovery half disappears, when every day is a demand, every evening is screens and emails, every night is shallow sleep, and the system never gets a signal that the challenge has passed. The issue is not that your body produces cortisol, it is that your life keeps asking it to. And this is why you cannot detox your way out of it. You cannot supplement your way out of a calendar that never stops. You cannot ice bath your way out of a business that sits on your chest at 4am. The hormone is downstream, the load is upstream. If the demand on your system stays constant and the recovery stays at zero, your stress chemistry will keep doing exactly what it's designed to do. So if you take one thing from this episode, let it be this. Stop asking how do I lower my cortisol and start asking where in my week does my system get the signal that is safe to stand down? Real recovery. Proper sleep at consistent times. Movement. Daylight. Breath. Moments with no demand in them. Those are not wellness extras. They're the other half of the rhythm your stress hormones were built around. And one more thing, and it matters. My symptoms were missed for years because I was capable. And capable people get overlooked, including by themselves. I'm not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. If something in your body feels persistently wrong, do not push through it and do not diagnose yourself from social media. Get it properly checked. The night someone finally joined my Dots is the reason I am here talking to you. The internet wants you at war with a hormone. I want you to make peace with a rhythm. One of us is asking you to buy something and it is not me.