It interacts with so many body systems.
It affects greatly your metabolic flexibility.
It is the hormone that enable us to cope with stress (whether a real or a perceived stress - because the body does not recognise the difference)
You’ve heard about cortisol, the stress hormone that our bodies release in response to stress and in anticipation of stressful events - that means anything and everything in AND around you:-)
Cortisol is there for you every single morning of your life (there are however few exceptions), cortisol starts increasing even before your feet hit the ground getting off the bed in anticipation of your usual day.
What follows the increasing cortisol after that is the work of our amazingly super smart body to wake you up and prepare you for the day. Perfectly timed neurochemicals and cascading hormones coordinate on the morning neural-freeway to awaken the brain's dynamic synaptic patterns, as well as prepare the liver, heart, blood pressure, temperature, and muscles for action - you are ready for the day!
Cortisol has numerous roles in our physiology and without it we will not be able to function. It fluctuates as necessary to address each stress including stress that you have not anticipated on your usual day. This also include the stress of eating what we are not supposed to eat, not moving regularly, too much exercise, not sleeping enough, genetic variations (we called SNP), side effect of long term medication, dealing with teenagers, horrible bosses, lazy employees, pollution, and many more. As you can see, these are life stressors and can happen on the same time and forcing your cortisol to work non stop and make the adrenal gland (the gland that produce cortisol) overwork, tired and finally give up.
When you are on multiple stress accumulated for too long (see this if this sample scenario fits you - you are a busy person at work, you do not have time for proper lunch because you go to gym on lunch break, you must bring your work home because there is not enough time at the office, you stuck in traffic on the way home where two or three teenagers awaits) you are likely to have either high cortisol (at the beginning of the stress) as your body compensation to deal with it OR low cortisol (when the stress is too tense for too long and your adrenal starts giving up). Too high or too low cortisol would make you less resilient to stress. But when your cortisol lost its ability to fluctuate (either when it is high or low), you lost your resilient and you will be prone to many many negative health indicators - meaning you are likely to be sick.
You can only test cortisol fluctuation by testing the level a few times during the day. It is called 4 times saliva cortisol testing. You can check whether your cortisol is high or low from blood test in the morning, but it does not tell you the whole story.
When you have low cortisol and it has lost its ability to fluctuate, you are a “flatliner” (below) and it can reach the state of a medical emergency where immediate treatment is required to avoid death. What happens though, it takes time to reach a flatline cortisol so we keep on pushing ourselves beyond our limitation. You would start feeling tired quicker, slow in taking decisions, aches and pains, losing the zest of life before it flattened but you would likely ignore it until your body ignores you and do not function as usual.
Listen to your body… we live in a fast pace and competitive environment, the environment we are not designed to be.
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