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Cortisol is widely known as a stress hormone produced by the human body’s adrenal glands. In popular culture, it’s reputed that elevated cortisol levels from stressful lifestyles contribute to weight gain, particularly in the abdominal area. Weight loss supplement vendors have developed many cortisol lowering supplements to help with these weight and stress problems. Authors including Shawn Talbott have developed diets for people gaining weight from high-stress/high-cortisol conditions. Some of these supplements and diets have good track records for working.
Unfortunately, if you attempt to treat the symptoms of a cortisol imbalance without knowing the actual cortisol levels, you can badly damage your health.
While some of these cortisol-affecting supplements and diets can help reduce or reverse high cortisol related weight gain and stress-related symptoms, it is potentially dangerous to assume you are suffering from high cortisol levels even if you are gaining weight while under a lot of stress with poor sleep, depression, and anxiety symptoms.
Why? Because most of the symptoms of high cortisol are also symptoms of low cortisol.
Common symptoms of both high and low cortisol levels include anxiety, insomnia, irritability, memory problems, confusion, depression, cravings for sugar, and body temperature regulation problems such as chills, hot flashes, and night sweats. Thus these symptoms alone cannot distinguish between these two related conditions. This confusion is particularly worrisome because many treatments for imbalanced cortisol can severely worsen the condition if the patient is suffering from the low levels rather than high levels of cortisol. The reverse, treating somebody with high cortisol as if they have low cortisol, can also cause significant harm.
The only way you can know with reasonable certainty which cortisol imbalance condition applies to you is to get a series of four saliva cortisol tests spread throughout the day. A single blood test is not enough to get a clear understanding. One blood test alone may make it appear your adrenals have not totally failed and convince your doctor you don’t have Addison’s Disease, a total or near total failure of the adrenal glands. Yet in fact the adrenals could be nearing failure and cannot elevate the cortisol levels during the late stages of sleep as they should be able to do.
Properly functioning adrenals glands should pump out large amounts of cortisol not long before you wake up and less during the rest of the day. A series of four tests should show a curve that starts high at waking and drops throughout the day until a low level at bedtime. Often people who are getting a blood test in the late morning or afternoon will have seemingly normal cortisol levels when in fact most of the day they are suffering with either far too little or far too much cortisol.
It is critically important to your health to do a saliva cortisol test series before you try to treat symptoms that appear to be caused by stress and a change in your body’s cortisol levels. If you do not do so, you may worsen your health problems and land yourself in a hospital with the results of a cortisol deficiency crisis similar to what happens to people who have failed adrenal glands or Addison’s disease.
Often many of these symptoms can also be caused by neurotransmitter imbalances. It’s helpful to take a urine test to evaluate your levels of common neurotransmitters along with the set of four cortisol tests and a DHEA test to evaluate adrenal gland function.
I’ve previously written about how these tests are helpful in my article . That article provides sources where you can obtain these tests even if your doctors are the typical mainstream GPs and psychiatrists who behave as if they know nothing about adrenal fatigue and neurotransmitter imbalances.
Mainstream doctors often dole out SSRI antidepressants such as Celexa, Zoloft, and Prozac and benzodiazipine anxiolytic medications including Xanax, Restoril, Valium, and Klonopin without doing any testing at all. This is a common path to developing drug dependencies that can take years to correct yet entirely fail to correct the underlying problems. Sometimes, patients become so sick from these drugs and/or the underlying problems that are not being fixed that they actually die. In many cases, it is my belief such deaths could be prevented if some more effort was put into identifying the root causes of their conditions via hormone and neurotransmitter testing. Such tests are often effective at identifying a cause, but unfortunately they are seldom used due to ignorance on the part of doctors and patients.
People who suffer from high cortisol levels are likely to experience increasing damage to their adrenal glands unless the stressful conditions stop. If they do not, these people are likely to go on to develop very low cortisol levels as their adrenal glands stop making significant levels of cortisol.
This is a remarkably common progression even though it may sound counter-intuitive. It is caused by the physiological strain on the adrenal glands from prolonged intense cortisol production as the adrenals battle to keep the body running under high stress. As the adrenal glands pump out high levels of cortisol for months or years, they start to wear out and eventually partially or totally collapse.
As the adrenal glands collapse from exhaustion, you may find you develop a few new symptoms, some of your symptoms worsen, and others actually reverse. These are all clues as to the true nature of your problems. But most doctors will miss these clues as few are educated about them.
The symptomatic changes from the collapsing adrenal gland function often manifest via the development of chronic pain throughout the body. They are often accompanied by a drop in blood pressure and changes in blood glucose and triglycerides.
The increasing chronic pain is often the most obvious symptom. It can manifest as chronic dull aches, joint pains similar to arthritis, and muscle weakness seemingly everywhere. It sometimes increases to very intense pain, often around the kidneys, sides, and lower back near where the adrenal glands are located.
Chronic pain is often debilitating. Often these pains are worst at times when your cortisol levels are the lowest, frequently from around bedtime to waking time or a couple of hours later. This tends to severely worsen your sleep. Some people may try painkillers and antiflammatory medications and get little relief from them. The consequent inability to get restful sleep worsens the condition in a rapidly destructive cycle that impacts your mental and emotional well-being.
You may find yourself unable to get up in the mornings, needing frequent naps, having panic attacks, being more moody, or unable to focus and concentrate. Your coworkers (if you can still work) and even your friends and family may accuse you of being paranoid, irrational, angry, and unpleasant. Those are all symptoms that most people cannot help but notice.
Cortisol helps the body deal with pain, inflammation and stress. When the adrenal glands can no longer make sufficient quantities, you therefore lose much or all of your ability to handle pain and stress. Chronic pain and low cortisol therefore go hand in hand for many long-suffering patients.
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