The Stress Hormone Called Cortisol
The Stress Cycle Cortisol Keeps Us in
Preface
Content Warning: this post contains content involving ab*se, cycles of ab*se, anxiety, depression, anger, add*ction, and PTSD. There are also parallels mentioned in regards to coping mechanisms that one could have during a traumatic situation, to the coping mechanisms that one could have developed during the pandemic. However, it is worth noting that this post isn’t making comparisons to both situations. I only share my own personal experience of ab*se to better articulate how someone can become unknowingly stuck in an endless cycle of stress hormones, and how we can acknowledge and honor our natural trauma responses. I will also add that when mentioning the body’s add*ction to Cortisol, I am not placing blame on the victim of ab*se. I am simply passing on knowledge I learned from my own experience of the danger of never ending stress on the body. In circumstances of ab*se, it is never the victim’s fault. Please only read if you are comfortable doing so.
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Recently, I have been consoling a lot of friends who have stretched themselves too thin way too quickly soon after getting their COVID-19 vaccinations, and have ever since been trying to balance between mania and depression. Additionally, this dance between action and apathy has reawakened uncontrollable stress kickback in people who have had prior history with trauma, as well as provoked new reactions and behaviors in people who might not necessarily have past trauma. I think we all predicted this: people will get vaccinated, the world will slowly start to open up again, but no one will be quite the same mentally and physically. I can’t blame anyone at all for wanting to do everything and anything all at once. I think I’ve picked up a “new hobby” every other week, went full force obsession with it, and took from it all the energy it could give me until I was bored. Then, I moved on to the next thing.
I always used to say, “the body needs work, the body needs rest.” I fully lived by that. The body feels fulfilled with work, but I’m not just talking about occupational work, of course. I am speaking about action, “the art of doing”, hobbies, exploring the world, expression, conversation, showing you love someone, etc. I know lots of people who enjoy their career and feel satisfied doing it, however, to say we were all made to do occupational work is ableist. I also don’t agree that we were manifested into existence for modern capitalist ideologies, but that’s a post for another day.
The other side to the statement above is, “the body needs rest”. The body, the soul, the mind, and the heart- they all need rest. Literally not doing anything is healthy [ I really mean doing absolutely nothing ], and I will explain what I mean by that further in this post. I am a very action-driven person. I’ve identified with the careers I’ve maintained, and the loss of my career has damaged my pride. When I had three jobs at once, I had to learn when to rest. I had to give myself grace when I knew it was best for me to decline a modeling opportunity, say no to an extra shift at my job, or know when to stay at home and rest when my friends were out getting together. At this point in time, I am no longer able to determine what my body needs, not because I do not have occupational work to base my energy levels off of, but because I have had to rework my entire life’s structure to co-exist with this pandemic. I am not alone in this. People have lost jobs, and had to find a way to make ends meet. Some people were able to keep their jobs, while companies and small businesses had to reshuffle the way they do things. Families were torn apart, or brought closer together under one roof without much respite from each other. Some of us were left with nothing, or close to nothing, and had to find something to occupy our time without a sense of fulfillment.
The pandemic, I believe, has obscured our innate knowing of when our body wants us to “do”, and when our body wants us to rest.
Some would argue that we’ve rested since early 2020, but have we really? Everything we’ve all experienced on a global level has put us all into fight, flight, or freeze on loop. Unfortunately, we are still experiencing it, since we are still in this pandemic. For my fellow PTSD readers, “fight, flight, or freeze” is a common phrase we hear often. If you are not familiar, it is a term for a physiological response to trauma, danger, and even anxiety. A fight response is to attack or confront the danger. A flight response would look like fleeing from the danger. A freeze response is similar to an “out of body experience” in which you feel you cannot fight the danger, nor do you feel like you can outrun it. People with PTSD , like myself and so many others I know, have an overactive trauma response, but everyone has a fight, flight, or freeze response. Depending on how you react is situational. Oddly, but not surprisingly, the situation we are in has kicked up old feelings of trauma for myself, as well as a lot of people I know who have PTSD/C-PTSD. I am starting to notice some old behaviors come back that I thought I was healed from. The risk of being faced with a similar trauma repeatedly, is that our bodies can get comfortable, or addicted, to the trauma response. This is all thanks to the stress hormone called Cortisol, and its feed-back loop.
Stress and the Stress Hormone Called Cortisol
Cortisol is the stress hormone that we naturally produce in mildly stressful to highly negatively impactful situations. Stress can be anything from spiritual, mental, physical, and chemical. It can affect anyone in situations involving family, society, career, relationships, and financial matters.
Stress is the body’s natural reaction to a threat of its natural balance, or homeostasis. When learning about dealing with my own personal stressors, I realized so many things can trigger a stress response. It might be a good idea to note that not all stressors are easily dealt with. It’s not effective to ask everyone dealing with their own struggles to view their situations analytically. In some cases, you could say that my way of healing was from a privileged perspective. Chronic stress could be due to discrimination, oppression, inequality, chronic illness [paired with lack of proper health care or access to it], and lack of help/understanding from the community or society. It is of my opinion that these situations should be looked at on a global and societal level, and not placed on the individual going through it.
Of course, I will mention my indirect mentor Bailey Haddad, and what she says in her PCOS Reversal Guide about Cortisol and Stress. I find it very important to look at stress from a scientific perspective, just as much as a spiritual perspective:
“Your main stress hormone is cortisol and is produced by your adrenal glands. In a period of acute stress, such as a dangerous situation or an impending deadline, cortisol makes you more alert, increases your focus, and makes you more motivated. This normal response to stress is helpful in these acute situations. When this stress response doesn’t switch off — and cortisol keeps being produced — it becomes a problem.
Cortisol is also involved in blood sugar regulation, metabolism, and your immune response. Chronic stress (and chronically high cortisol levels) can contribute to lowered immune function, inflammation, mental health issues, cardiovascular disease, low libido, skin and hair problems, low energy, digestive disturbances, and of course, hormonal imbalances […]
A high cortisol level means that adrenals are chronically overstimulated or that other tissues in the body are producing high amounts of cortisol in order to combat inflammation […]”
This stress response’s main function is to respond to a stressor, but then rapidly return the body to a normal state. The HPA axis, or the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, is at the helm of the stress response system within our nervous and endocrine systems. If you are subjected to stress over an extended period of time, it will be harder for the body to recover. This is especially dangerous for people with already imbalanced hormones.
Haddad speaks on HPA axis dysfunction:
“This can result in HPA axis dysfunction — a term that describes the suboptimal functioning of the signaling pathways and subsequent hormone cascade that occur between your hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenals. HPA axis dysfunction leads to an altered stress response, which essentially results in your body becoming less sensitive to stress hormones, such as cortisol.”
If your body is constantly over-producing cortisol, along with adrenaline and other hormones, you remain in a state of agitation, depression, etc. If you aren’t given the space to allow your body to go from its natural state from fight or flight, you can never adjust back to your state of natural being. This means that your body will remain in a state of unbalanced hormone levels.
This wasn’t a new concept for me when I read this a couple months ago. I learned about cortisol from researching with my therapist on ways to break away from an abusive relationship, unfortunately. I guess you can say that’s why Bailey’s research about cortisol resonated, because I had already put some “self-love” routines into practice in order to break the cycle of abuse years ago. One of my favorite podcasters, Imogen Roy, mentions that self-care is simply caring for your nervous system. Furthermore, I certainly needed a brush-up course on dealing with heightened and constant stress from the pandemic’s emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual negative effects it has had on all of us.
You can develop a resilience to stress, and your brain will constantly seek that adrenaline/dopamine balance, and each time it happens, your brain wants more of both.
As mentioned before, stress isn’t one-size-fits-all. I am only speaking on my personal relationship with stress, and my specific overactive trauma response that developed. You can become chronically stressed about any number of traumatic situations, and you can easily become addicted to the signaling hormones, followed by the happy hormones.
So, what are the symptoms of overactive Cortisol?
Severe fatigue
Extreme exhaustion, or not able to fully feel “awake”
Excessive napping to escape reality
Anxiety
Constantly getting sick
Prolonged feelings of depression
Irritability
Difficulty sleeping
Acne
Weakness
High blood pressure
Headaches
Let’s be clear, I am not making parallels to the sacrifices we’ve made during this pandemic [ like wearing masks ] to a toxic relationship. I am not that pompous. I think conflating the two is very dangerous. I know it can be a stretch to speak about my personal experience with trauma in a post that contains our trauma responses that developed from our new living conditions under this pandemic. Nevertheless, I want those who live with PTSD, and who are also noticing their trauma responses are acting in an inflamed way during this time, to know that they aren’t alone, they aren’t crazy, and our bodies are responding to danger and stress in the ways that our bodies only know how. I think we can make space for discussion about the mental effects of how the living situations have changed our “base line” of existing. Not just for people with C-PTSD/PTSD, but for people who do not have hyperactive trauma responses as well. Especially now that a few months after the US being open, we are hearing about variants that will potentially set us back in some variation. I keep hearing from friends who have been in various traumatic situations saying the same things lately:
“I am as tired as I was when I was healing from [insert specific traumatic event] all those years ago.”
“I am having nightmares of my evil ex out of nowhere.”
“I am waking up in fear of something that isn’t there anymore.”
“I am afraid to close my eyes or sleep.”, etc…
Why? Cortisol. That’s all I’m saying.
Our bodies remember how we’ve dealt with excessive stress once before. We hold that information in our bodies, and I am only giving one example from experience on how that applied for me as an individual. I am also speaking for people I know who have been in similar situations. However, this can look very different for you, or anyone else.
This pandemic has obscured our innate knowing of when our body wants us to “do”, and when our body wants us to rest. We want to get back out into the world, and do everything we can get our hands on, but we are coming straight out of a heightened overactive trauma response that has gone overlooked for a year. No judgment here, by the way. Our focus was shielding ourselves from the virus while looking to science for vaccinations, and that’s valid, too. Still, we aren’t totally able to gauge what our bodies need to feel fulfilled or well-rested. Back in April of 2020, we all touched on a question that we knew we were going to circle back to: how will these living circumstances affect our mental health? Well, now we are here more than two years later, and I think it’s time to start really analyzing how it is currently affecting us and/or how it has already affected us. We are in a turbulent, but uninterrupted state of stress that we have not ever experienced before.
Because of the specific traumatic events I endured from the pandemic, I experienced severe depression that I could only describe to my friends as the depression I had when I could not leave a toxic relationship. However, because it is an invisible virus that I am trying to evade, my trauma response has been enigmatic. The way my body has responded to this last year is somehow familiar, with added unfamiliar ways of coping. My “freeze” response looks more like languishing. You’ve probably heard that word floating around a lot recently, and it’s because psychologists are finding that more and more people are languishing. However, if this is your first time hearing that word, languishing is the opposite of flourishing. It can look like apathy and loss of interest in life. Personally, I feel like a hamster running on a wheel. Because the danger is there, but not visible. Furthermore, because my body has become “used to” this new way of living recently, I’ve noticed my fight, flight, and freeze responses are quietly on a loop, like a silent movie on a film reel in an abandoned room in a mansion.
This is what this cycle looks like for me:
Fight: Mania. Wanting to “do” something, and being angry and moody that I can’t do everything all at once. Obsessing about a new hobby, and doing it for hours without rest for a few weeks. Deep-cleaning my whole house in a frenzy without taking breaks or stopping to eat. Wanting to go, go, go! Being unreasonably irritable when plans are forced to halt. Aggressively learning something new, as if it is an act of rebellion against being static for a year.
Flight: Evading. Losing interest in the hobby, and not knowing why. Feelings of guilt and self-hatred set in, and so I recoil back into Hermit Mode. Being hard to get a hold of. Hiding from human contact. Scrolling through my socials, and hating myself for it. Crying for no reason. Not wanting to discuss my emotions, or just generally being difficult to communicate with. Deleting my socials. Turning my phone on Do Not Disturb.
Freeze: Languishing. Depression. Not wanting to get out of bed, because I feel there isn’t a reason to. Nothing cheers me up. I feel completely neutral about everything presented to me. I do not experience joy. I can’t bring myself to enjoy any hobbies of mine. Not doing anything productive or helpful all day long. Not being able to retain any information. No appetite. Having a hard time listening. Being forgetful. Saying “I don’t know” or “I don’t care” to any and all questions I get asked about what I need, how I feel, or what I want to do.
If you resonate, and think you may be languishing, I highly recommend listening to Imogen Roy talk about languishing on her enchanting podcast A Year of Magical Living. In this episode, she speaks on how she broke her pattern of languishing in this 20 minute episode below.
A Year of Magical Living with Imogen Roy
14. Practical Magic / How I Ended A Cycle of Languishing
“Rest is Our Divine Right.”
So, how can we learn to deal with stress, if we are able to? Earlier in this post, I suggested that doing utterly nothing at all can be quite healing. This is yet another lesson I learned from Imogen Roy in episode 16 on her podcast. In this episode, Imogen goes through how we can take a “Truly Restorative Break”. She explains how doing nothing at all, without guilt or shame, is giving your body that restorative break. Scrolling on your phone isn’t giving yourself a healing break. Answering emails in bed isn’t it. Watching videos on YouTube isn’t giving yourself a healing break, either. Closing your eyes for 10 minutes in silence, sipping tea in the dark, meditating in the sun, and taking a long, hot shower are all ways in which we can give our bodies a positively therapeutic intermission. The greatest thing that I love about Imogen’s lessons, is that not only is she, what I can only describe as nearly a ‘Master of Energy’, but she works in a way that is grounded in science, biology, and psychology. If you couldn’t already tell, I love the merging of magic and science in a functional way. After all, isn’t it the same thing?
In recent episodes of her podcast, Imogen speaks on the Ultradian Rhythm, and how important that is to tap into if you want to work with your own energy. She passes on some tools and advice on how to honor your body’s activity and healing cycles. An Ultradian Rhythm oscillates and mirrors our sleep cycle in reverse. It works in a shorter period, only circling back every 90 minutes, whereas the Circadian Rhythm works on a 24-hour cycle, regulating our sleep and wakefulness. Here are some excerpts from Imogen’s podcast, but you can learn more about the Ultradian Cycle in episode 6 :
“Circadian Rhythms are hormonal rhythms alive in our bodies, in every human of all genders, that occur on more, or less, a twenty-four hour cycle. Circa means ‘around’. Diem means ‘day’. An Ultradian Rhythm works similarly, except they run several times in a day. So, what does this have to do with living a more magical life? Well, in the 1950’s a Sleep Researcher, called Nathaniel Kleitman, discovered that the human body tends to move through 90 to 110 minute hormonal cycles that govern our energy, and it’s actually the same cycle in reverse as corresponds to the human sleep cycle where the brain is moving through rest and activity, and the activity is what gives us the REM sleep when we dream. So during the day, there is a mirror effect. Essentially, the brain has the capacity to be energetic, to output, to be active for about 90-110 minutes at a time, after which there is a period of fatigue of about 20 minutes. This is where the Ultradian Healing Break must occur.”
The Ultradian Healing Break is something Imogen defines as a magical practice to master the Ultradian Cycle. It is quite literally, doing nothing after 90 minutes of activity. If you are someone who is in old patterns of inflamed trauma coping behaviors, or someone who thinks they are languishing, and/or someone who cannot break their cycles of intense mania and apathy, try taking short bursts of breaks every 90 minutes. You can start off by trying to close your eyes for 5 minutes, and see if your intervals get a bit longer each time. You should aim for 20 minutes.
Imogen adds:
“How come this is a core piece of our human experience- our biological makeup that governs our moods, our energy, and yet we’re not told about this? And nothing in our workplaces, our lifestyles, our schools is set up to honor this experience of activity followed by a necessary break to replenish the hormones?”
I mention this because understanding that our entire systems that work within our being need activity, followed by a period of rest. Our bodies are not set up for either extremes. This is not accidental, by the way. Capitalism thrives off of us not knowing how to master our own energy cycles. I will mention one other crucial lesson Imogen passes on in episode 16 titled, “How to Take a Truly Restorative Break”, which I will link below. She cites The Nap Bishop, Poet, Artist, and Activist Tricia Hersey, who leads The Nap Ministry. Tricia Hersey is liberating and uplifting the Art of Napping. She says that “Rest is Resistance”:
“We don’t need to rest to be more productive.
We need to rest because it is our divine right as human beings.
It is not something you earn, it is something that is essential for your humanity.”
A Year of Magical Living with Imogen Roy
16. Practical Magic / How to Take A Truly Restorative Break
Imogen ends her episode by saying that doing nothing to heal and hear our inner wisdom is the most powerful practice. It is the most energetic doorway to an effective, magical life, only because we are working within our own energy- one of many magical and practical tools we were born with. Rest is our divine right, and we have not been resting well since 2019, if we ever did. We are making up for lost time, lost energy, lost materialistic things, and so on, in a cyclical series that keeps us tethered between compulsion and lethargy. I personally believe that I am sub-consciously overcompensating, and I am noticing these behaviors in my friends in the same way. In doing so, my body is trying to cope with trauma and stress in the ways it only knows how based on my lived experience with my personal trauma. We can honor our body’s instinctive reactions to stress by allowing ourselves to really rest. We can start saying “no” to situations and people who bind us to perpetual anxiety. We can give ourselves grace when we know we are too tired to take up an opportunity or task, especially if it inconveniences us. We can make note of our behaviors, and allow our bodies to guide us to what our bodies really need in this new way of living. Does the body need “work”, or does it need rest? If it’s rest, then we should genuinely give our bodies rest. I invite you to honestly ask yourself- are you comfortable with being in a chronic loop of over-production of cortisol, and to the up and down of overactive hormones currently? Are you stuck trying to “feed’ your anxiety as a coping mechanism? Are you noticing past behaviors of coping from a traumatic event creeping back up now? In what ways can you work with your body to rest well when it is time to take a real healing break?
Want more information on cortisol and stress?
Check out these blog posts below:
Remediating Mars by Confronting Cortisol
Learn how to remediate Mars, while also decreasing the stress hormone cortisol.
Mars in 8th House Sagittarius
Do you have Mars in a Sagittarius 8th House? Find out what this could mean!
Venus, the Decorator of Sacred Space
Lean how to make an altar dedicated to yourself.
Melatonin, Neptune, and The Moon
Connecting the Science & Spirit on Sleep: What is melatonin, what does the literature say about it, and how can we implement it in our Dreamwork, Dream Magic, and Sleep Rituals?
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