Cortisol — Power-plant Critical
A quick summary of one of the major causes for the depression epidemic sweeping the globe.
Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, nor am I turning a profit on anything mentioned below. This is free information intended to help everyone who may need it from one patient to another.
As brilliantly researched by Dr. Craig Koniver, whose work is the basis for this article, Cortisol is THE stress hormone responsible for your fight or flight response. You may also know the glands responsible for its production are the Adrenals, located on the top of each of your kidneys. What you may not know is that it has a vital role to play in your day to day life in regards to allocation of energy, the body’s immune functions, healing/repairing functions, pain regulation as well as the major role it has in mood stability.
Let’s start by talking about the catabolic/anabolic cortisol cycle. Catabolic is when we are in production mode, the natural state of alertness and productivity. The Sun is up, we’re up. Anabolic is the repair mechanism our body engages at night while we sleep when our cortisol is low. The anabolic state is composed of three hormones: Testosterone, Growth Hormone and Melatonin. You may have heard of the use of anabolic steroids in weightlifting being used to increase mass and recovery. The reason it is called an anabolic steroid is because it is a hormone booster that directly enhances the levels of the three anabolic hormones. Anabolic steroids are used when a lifter is exceeding the biological wear and tear cap of their bodies and needs additional growth hormone to repair the damaged tissues while under the natural rhythm of the low cortisol anabolic state.
Our body is designed to function with the natural rhythms of the world we evolved in. This may be a sensitive statement for some, but it remains an accurate one. We have a constant condition that cannot be altered — the cycle of day and night. From an evolutionary perspective our cortisol has adapted to be present in our blood stream at higher levels in the morning, just before sunrise (approx. 4am in all of the respective time zones around the world) while much lower levels are present in the evening (approx 10pm). The reason for the difference in levels has much to do with our biology in accordance with our relationship to the Sun. In the morning, because humans are not inherently nocturnal creatures, our adrenal glands push a higher amount of cortisol into our bodies in order to wake us up and prepare us for the day to come. By traditional standards over the last one to two million years, this means we would have energy for such tasks as walking long distances for food and water, hunting, making tools, defending ourselves from attacks from either wildlife or other humans and parenting our young. Stress, as we traditionally experienced it, is healthy. It allows us to do what makes us feel alive. Without it, we would have no drive to survive. But what if we take that same system, change the environment, along with the conditions of survival? The answer is a generational compounding effect that drives our internal powerplant into permanent overdrive. A fight or flight response that becomes harder and harder to disengage.
Let’s take a moment and break down our current economically driven lifestyle. In the last few hundred years, leaving out the obvious examples of historic slavery and exploitation of course, we have become quite industrious. Such industry demands a workforce in order to generate the needs of the society around it. But a workforce also has needs. To eat, breath, mate and sleep. Without a balance one will surely fail the other. To attain balance, the workforce within the industry must rely on the minds of the architects who maintain it. They must trust that what they are told is true. That a portion of their time must be leveraged in order to feed the industry that will in turn feed them, as well as those they love. However, this system, which owes its birth to the Industrial Revolution, did not have adrenal science to consider while deliberating over such leverage.
Today, we have an emerging understanding of the science with the reports being nothing short of damning. Our reticulated activating system, which is attached to the brain stem, is constantly being over-triggered from our current lifestyle. That system regulates your adrenals and fight or flight, which eventually leads to chronic decay of our mental and physical state. This may come as no surprise, but humans are one of the most adaptable species to have ever lived. We have developed strong genetics capable of allowing us to survive in the most hostile conditions on the planet. This effect is further compounded by the technologies we have developed. We can sometimes live for decades in a cortisol compromised state without any obvious signs of trouble other than the “common” (I use this term with disdain) reports of feeling sleep deprived or having trouble getting to sleep. Then all of a sudden we go for a test and we have diabetes, or high blood pressure, joint/muscle pain, reduced organ function, anxiety, depression, Alzheimers, leaky gut, nerve damage… These are all down the line results of that disruption/depletion of the body’s natural power plant — your cortisol. Without the proper allocation of cortisol, your body cannot make repairs.
After decades of successive damage (auto-immune, injury, irregular work schedules leading to sleep disruption between 10pm and 5am) and other socio-economic stresses, your adrenals burn out, your cortisol fails and your body goes into permanent survival mode where all of your resources are simply being put toward keeping you alive. The irony is, you can no longer live. The result of adrenal burnout is experienced first as anxiety, then crippling depression. Of course other causes of depression may be in play, but the end result is the same dark, crushing feeling of a loss of one’s life. We don’t need to look as far as we’d imagine to find a victim of this biochemical disaster. In today’s world, that person could be you, or the person closest to you. We are also learning that varying degrees of adrenal burnout vary widely, as do the symptoms/disease manifestations that eventually give them away long after the damage has been done.
Now that we have a base understanding of the biochemical power-plant at work, how can we restore its function without resorting to drastic measures? I will quickly go over some basic steps that can be taken at home, but any information should be cross referenced with a Naturopathic practitioner, doctor or any other expert who has ways of testing you that can assess your case individually. I am not a physician, I’m simply one patient doing research who wants to help others by shaving some time off the learning curve.
First, become aware of your diet. Most of us live a fast paced lifestyle which means healthy meals are in short supply. You gut microbes are the gatekeepers to your body’s stress response. The reason for this is simple. More microbes live in your gut than you have cells in your body. You are your micro-biome. If your gut is happy, you will stand a much greater chance of restoring your natural biorhythms. Just as your cortisol can impact your health over the long term with no initial warning symptoms, so too can the health of your gut microbes. A good place to begin reading about this critical component to your health is Dr. David Perlmutter’s book Brain Maker. The cost of admission, approx 20$ new, 5$ used.
Second, restore your sleep cycles to the best of your ability. If you work graveyard and you feel fine about it, that’s great. I’m not here to tell you otherwise. But if your body is displaying the early signs of future chronic illness, it would be wise to listen to it. Keep sleep times within the natural cycle of the sun whenever possible and avoid electronics that produce blue spectrum light after sunset. Blue spectrum light is emitted from artificial lights (LEDs), phone screens, laptops and even glow in the dark paint. Personally I use the night shift settings on my phone and laptop and have set them to switch to red spectrum light after 9pm automatically. Google can show you how this is done.
Third, spend as much time in direct sunlight as possible, without sunglasses. We have photo-receptors all over our bodies, not just in our eyes. Our skin is just as good at detecting light as our eyes and manufactures hormones in accordance with those cycles. The reason sunglasses may not always be a good choice is due to the fact that they block the spectrum of light our eyes need to see to be able to regulate our hormones. Reduce how much you mess with light and your adrenals will thank you.
Fourth, learn about adaptogenic compounds and how to use them to help you adjust your biochemistry based on your specific needs. I myself use an adaptogenic herbal blend provided by my naturopathic doctor that was tailored to my needs. After six months, combined with other treatments and self education, my daily anxiety attacks have ceased.
Fifth and final, keep your body in direct contact with the Earth for as long as possible, every, single, day. We evolved in direct contact with the ground throughout evolutionary history. Our bodies, like the Earth, are bio-electrical systems that need a certain charge to function correctly. Think of an appliance in your home. Without a ground wire, it will eventually short out or even catch fire. The same is true with your body. Without a ground, your nervous system will begin to compartmentalize its functions. On average the human brain and central nervous system vibrate at a frequency of roughly 10hz. Bacteria, viruses, and even seemingly lifeless things such as rocks and minerals all carry their own charge as well. If your body’s charge becomes disrupted, as it has been since the invention of rubber soled shoes in the mid 1960s, which also perfectly follows the ever increasing report trends of chronic inflammatory diseases like diabetes, Alzheimers and countless more, we begin to see elevated stress in the body as it can no longer carry out normal functions between individual parts such as brain/heart/immune system functions.
Clint Ober, a former tradesman in electronics’, research is a good place to start to learn about this bio-electrical system. The immune system being the most obvious example, cannot distinguish a pathogen from your own body if the electromagnetic signature between your cells and that of the foreign body are indistinguishable from each other. I strongly advise a deep dive into this research as your stress response unavoidably becomes chronically elevated if your immune system begins to attack your own cells over an extended period of time. I have taken to using Clint’s ground therapy mats for sleep and desk use. I’m not here to tell you to buy one, nor will I profit if you do, I’m informing you they exist as does the research if you feel inclined to go beyond this article to learn more.
I have suffered a great deal of pain over the years from not being willing to explore for myself the vast amounts of information available to each of us outside of what we’re told on a hospital visit. I got to a point of severe mental and physical distress that persisted for over a decade due to this over-firing of the adrenal stress response. In my case, the triggers included undiagnosed food allergies, late night work schedules, limited exposure to sunlight, malnutrition and poor habits that compounded over two decades into the perfect storm that would have eventually ended my life young. Had I known what I know now, I could have saved myself years of pain and suffering and a suicide attempt or two. I could have also potentially saved a few lives. We are the masters of our health, but like all true masters, we must first be students.
