Hannah Aylward (00:05.88)
Welcome to the Nutrient Dense Podcast. I’m your host, Hannah Aylward, holistic health coach, functional gut health practitioner, and the founder of HAN. So many people are continuously failed by conventional and alternative healthcare. We are here to do it differently. Alongside my team of functional registered dietitians, I’ve helped hundreds of women around the world overcome their chronic digestive issues when nothing else worked.

I’ve learned a thing or two about what it really takes to transform your health from the inside out, and I’m here to share it all with you. Please keep in mind that this podcast is for educational purposes only and should never be used as medical advice. Now let’s dive in. Your transformation is waiting.

Hello, my dears, and welcome back to another episode of the Nutrient Dense podcast. I’m excited to dive in today because today we’re going to be getting into all things cortisol. Now, cortisol is that stress hormone that so many of us are pretty familiar with. It really had a moment on social media with everyone posting about cortisol face, powders and drinks to decrease your cortisol, get rid of all of the symptoms of high cortisol.

There is a lot to unpack here. What I can tell you is you can’t get rid of your high cortisol levels with one powder mix, with one drink mix. I think we know this intuitively, but I just want to make that very clear. So today, let’s just go ahead and dive into covering everything from symptoms of high cortisol, symptoms of low cortisol, the different ways cortisol impacts the body, its functions, and kind of like a deeper understanding of what it is as a whole.

We’ll also get into cortisol and its impacts on the gut and our digestive function. And then also talk about cortisol and progesterone and the connection between those two. I’m jumping a little bit ahead here, but we’re kind of chronically, we’re living in a state of like chronically low progesterone. Many people are very, very stressed and most women tend to lean more towards low progesterone, higher estrogen, which can cause a whole host of different symptoms and kind of like.

Hannah Aylward (02:16.152)
hormonal imbalance like symptoms, painful periods, et cetera. So we’ll kind of dive into that further down in the episode as well. So first off, what is cortisol? And once again, you’re probably somewhat familiar with it, right? It’s not that it’s brand new to you. So cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands, which are located on top of the kidneys. And it’s often referred to as that stress hormone because it is released in response to stressful situations.

Cortisol regulates blood pressure and blood sugar levels. It suppresses the immune system. It increases our metabolism. It helps the body really cope with stress. And it also promotes that fight or flight response. So that is that sympathetic dominant response from the nervous system. So we’ve got that parasympathetic and that sympathetic dominant state. That parasympathetic being that rest and digest state. That’s where we wanna be to properly digest our food.

And then we’ve got that sympathetic dominant response, that fight or flight response. And cortisol is heavily involved in that response. Now, cortisol is really, it’s essential. So it’s essential for maintaining the body’s balance and responding to stress. We need it to survive. It’s a very important hormone. So we have to have enough of it. It gets a lot of kind of like bad press. Everyone’s talking about high cortisol, how bad it is for us.

And the long-term effects of high cortisol, they do pose many, many kind of downsides. However, we need it to survive. So it’s not all bad. It’s really the prolonged or excessive cortisol production that can have negative effects on health. So when we encounter a dangerous or stressful situation, we’re probably not gonna get away from all these situations in our life to begin with. And I talk a lot about…

building stress resiliency with my clients versus just trying to eliminate all stress because I don’t think that’s possible. Life is a little inherently stressful, right? We’re trying to hit deadlines for work. We’re trying to, you know, make sure we have money saved up to take the trip. We’re trying to take care of our family, raise children, whatever it might be. Things don’t always go our way. So life comes with a little bit of stress. Our perspective and our mindset can really help us shift this. However, we can’t really like get rid of all of it, right?

Hannah Aylward (04:33.432)
So it’s more so about really building that stress resiliency. Now, the issue is that many of us kind of live in this chronically stressed out state. So the body can’t really tell the difference between a one-time stressor and acute stressor, like having to slam on your brakes in your car so you don’t hit the car in front of you when they stop short, and living your day-to-day where you are underfed.

you are over-exercising, you are managing everything that comes with life, raising the kids, answering the emails, running the business, making the appointments on time, whatever it might be. The body can’t really tell the difference between those two. So a lot of people say, you your body can’t tell the difference between running from a tiger and the inbox full of emails, and that’s the truth. So, so many of us really live in this hyper-connected, hyper-vigilant state.

We are constantly connected to everything. Our phone is in our hands. We’ve got access to our email. I mean, I am fully guilty of checking my email at 10.30 PM while laying in bed. Whereas we couldn’t do that just a few short years ago. It was really only on the computer. And now it’s like, our work is with us while we’re going to sleep. We are scrolling social media. We’re listening to podcasts with all this new information. We’ve got access to news in.

all countries all over the world, right? This is stuff we just didn’t even have access to before. We’d hear about it weeks and weeks later and we are consuming far more information now than we ever have in the past. And that is also impacting our cortisol levels. It’s impacting our stress, our allostatic load. And that is then, you know, having negative impacts on our health. So just to be clear here, the one-off time, the one-off stressor,

When you can recover from that properly, not a huge deal. You know, that’s when your body kicks on the fight or flight state. That’s when your body kicks on these natural responses to protect you. This is necessary. We run into issues when we are always living in this state. So that’s what I want to make very clear for us. Our cortisol levels also fluctuate. So it’s normal. And what we should be looking at is a higher cortisol level in the morning.

Hannah Aylward (06:46.83)
and a lower level at night. So these levels really fluctuate throughout the day, peaking in the morning, declining in the evening. And that’s why we get that little kind of burst of cortisol in the morning, helps us get out of bed, helps us wake up, helps us get going, get moving. Once again, we need this. And then we see those levels decline as we approach the evening and they should be lower at night to help you go to bed, right? You feel tired, you have less energy, you have less kind of oomph and that’s going to help you go to sleep.

So high or low cortisol levels can indicate various different health conditions as well. We can have things like adrenal insufficiency, but really we’re more so looking at HPA axis dysfunction where our hypothalamus and our pituitary gland in our adrenals, they’re all in communication all the time. But when the communication gets a little off, we end up with kind of dysregulated cortisol levels. Obviously cortisol is also going to play a role in anxiety. It’s going to play a role in blood sugar dysregulation.

things like Cushing syndrome, et cetera. So once again, cortisol is actually, your cortisol is helping your body handle these acute stressors. We’re gonna run into issues when we have that long-term damage from the chronic elevation of cortisol or the chronic depletion, which does happen after chronic elevation. And I’ve been in both scenarios personally. So I’ve had clinical checked on labs, high levels of cortisol at one point in my life.

And then I also had checked on labs, low levels of cortisol in my life and they’re both unpleasant, but I honestly think low cortisol is worse and we can, we’ll kind of get in, get into all of that. So let’s talk about some symptoms of high cortisol, cause this is what everyone thinks they have and, and some of you do and some of you don’t. And the only way to really verify that is via testing and we’ll talk about different testing options too, but

What is high cortisol and what does that look like? Right? So high cortisol is essentially when these cortisol levels remain elevated due to chronic stress. This can come with many different symptoms. So it can come with weight gain, especially abdominal fat. It can come with anxiety. It can come with sleep disturbances, irritability, high blood pressure. You can have that feeling of being tired, but wired. So you feel kind of tired throughout the day. And then in the evening you get that like wiry feeling. You almost get like a second wind in the evening.

Hannah Aylward (09:09.784)
tired but wired, also, you don’t really have that real energy, right? You’re kind of running on fumes a little bit. You might be having some high blood sugar like cravings, once again, noticing anxiety, the racing thoughts, the frequent irritability, having really a poor stress tolerance. So you feel like you’re just like at capacity, like you’ve hit your max. This can definitely happen to me when I have been high stress for too long.

It hits a point where then like the smallest little thing will really set me off, right? Like I don’t have the tolerance. I don’t have the wherewithal to withstand another stressor. And I’m sure that resonates with some of you. You hit the breaking point where you’re just like, I can’t take anymore. So that poor stress tolerance, right? Cause when you are not existing in that high cortisol chronically stressed out state, a stressor here and there, not really a huge deal kind of part of life. When you’re at your max, it’s going to send you over the edge.

You may also notice a loss of lean muscle mass. So you may be trying to build muscle in the gym, but if your cortisol levels are chronically elevated, you might actually be losing muscle mass or seeing kind of some of this muscle wear occurring. And in some cases when our stress threshold gets extremely exceeded over an extended period of time, you’ll likely find yourself no longer really able to adapt to the stressors as well anymore. And

you know, resonating with some of those symptoms. So those are the most common symptoms of high cortisol. So how do we get there? What actually causes us to have these higher cortisol levels? The chronic stress, right? The burning the candle at both ends, the people pleasing, the never saying no, the lack of boundaries, whether that’s in your personal life, your work life, your relationship, not sleeping enough. So going to bed too late.

Even if you’re getting the eight hours going to bed too late can still be unsupportive of cortisol levels, but especially the lack of sleep, right? So sleeping like under seven hours, most women need a lot more sleep than that, which I know speaking to all the moms out there, you’re like, I roll, try again, never gonna happen. So, you know, there’s other things that we can do here to support healthy cortisol levels, but just know that your sleep is incredibly, incredibly important. So if you’ve been…

Hannah Aylward (11:29.048)
going without enough sleep for a long time, that’s gonna hit your body pretty hard. Having just an unhealthy lifestyle, right? Or sometimes we’ve got these underlying medical conditions like Cushing’s syndrome. Now, that’s not what we see primarily in our clients. We have worked with clients with Addison’s disease before, with Cushing’s before, but typically we’re more so looking at these clinically high levels due to all of these other chronic stressors that have taken place over time. So,

If you are, like I said, not sleeping enough, if you’re over training. So when I had high cortisol levels personally, I was taking probably like five HIIT classes a week because I just really, I used to really not like my body and I really wanted to make my body a lot smaller. And I was kind of a little obsessed with how my body looked. Interestingly enough, it never really looked the way that I wanted it to. I was just kind of like burning myself into the ground.

Now that I treat my body with a lot more care and I work out way less and I’m much easier on my body, my weight kind of just fell into place. I don’t really have to think about it anymore, which is like the joke in all of it because I was like burning myself into the ground trying to get the body composition that I wanted in the past and it just wasn’t working. So when my levels were very high, I was really over training.

And I was also under fueling. So I wasn’t eating enough food to really fuel these workouts. Now, most women won’t do so well with multiple HIIT classes per week. So this is a big thing to kind of own and recognize in your life if this is resonating with you. Most women are gonna do better with we’ve got walking and we’ve got strength training, Pilates, yoga, these things that are a little less intense. That doesn’t mean that all high intensity training is out.

But if you’re doing that, you have to make sure that you’re properly refueling. And it’s just another stressor in the bucket. So when we’re looking at your stress bucket and all of these different stressors that come on into your bucket, if you’re adding on four to five hit classes a week on top of not eating enough, on top of chronic gut issues and infections, on top of poor sleep, on top of a really high workload, it’s too much, right?

Hannah Aylward (13:48.672)
If you’re adding these hit classes on top of a really solid foundation, you are sleeping adequately at night. sleep with, you’re not restless. You’re sleeping all the way through the night. You’re getting a good eight to nine hours. You’re eating enough for your body’s needs. You’re not dealing with like gut infections. These things kind of contributing to inflammation. You don’t have a high toxic burden. You’re not burning the candle at both ends. You will probably be able to tolerate it a bit better. I would say in general though,

the fasting and the intense HIIT exercise classes, whether they’re classes or it’s like Barry’s Bootcamp or it’s Orange Theory or something like that. When we’re looking at women that have a history of that, when we are working with these women, we’re not seeing their hormone health looking too good, right? And we can test that and we can kind of get into options there. So the chronic stress, the lack of sleep, the overtraining and the under eating are gonna be really big contributors to this high cortisol state.

Then we have the more emotional stuff. So the things like, you know, chronic perfectionism and being very type A and never feeling like you’re doing enough and never feeling like what you’re doing is good enough and always having to outperform someone else. And all of this really stemming from a place of like trying to prove yourself. So it’s never enough. It’s always go, go, go. You’re always taking on more. This will elevate your cortisol levels. So it doesn’t really matter how much like magnesium you’re taking or

you know, how much protein you’re eating. If you’re being mean to yourself and nothing that you ever do is good enough. So let that sink in because that plays a big, big role here. And that was also a big part of my story. I’ve always been, you know, leaned more towards hyper vigilance. I’ve always been a high performer, a type A, all of that kind of stuff. So I had it coming at me from many angles, but the interesting thing is all of that also fueled.

the dislike for my body and the over-exercising and the under-reading, right? These things are all connected and they influence one another. So the lack of boundaries, right? The never saying no, the always saying yes, the always taking on the projects, always being there when someone needs you. I’m not saying to not be there when someone needs you, but you have to take care of yourself first or you simply cannot do it. So all of these things are underlying causes of high cortisol.

Hannah Aylward (16:06.868)
Just another note on the under eating and the fasting, because we get a lot of questions about fasting. It really had a moment. I feel like it’s phased out. But when we look at women that have been fasting for a long time, typically their cortisol levels are not doing so well. A menopausal woman can handle that a bit better. Men can handle fasting much better. But if you are like an actively menstruating female, you probably won’t do well with a lot of intermittent fasting.

Now that I would put in a different category than like a gentle fast overnight. So when we’re looking to rest the digestive system and we’re looking to allow our migrating motor complex, which is a, it’s a kind of like a nerve regulated function that helps to move through debris and through the intestines. It’s kind of like the, I call it the broom that comes and sweeps through the small intestine and sweeps the debris into the large intestine. This is really important.

Allowing our migrating motor complex to do its thing is important for reducing risk of SIBO, for reducing things like bloating and indigestion and all of that. So allowing the body to do what it’s meant to do overnight with a gentle fast of like 12 hours, I think is a great call. The migrating motor complex really kicks on and it does its job after about 90 minutes. So we want to give ourselves in general, you know, three to four hours in between meals.

We want to make sure that we’re getting in a good fast overnight to support our digestive function, to allow the body to do what it needs to do. However, that’s 12 hours worth, hopefully sleeping a lot of that, right? So hopefully we’re sleeping like eight to nine of those hours. So that’s really not that much time after dinner or before breakfast, for example. When we start pushing that 14 to 16 hours, that’s when we’re going to start to run into issues with our, with our cortisol levels.

And we’ll see this on labs with people when people are under eating or they’re fasting, their cortisol kind of curve is pretty dysregulated. There are also a lot of like bigger risks when we’ve got these chronically high cortisol levels and when we have chronically low cortisol levels and I’ll get into those next. But when we see cortisol levels be high for a long period of time, we’ll get that a week weakened immune function. We’ll get more digestive issues. It’s going to impact our hormonal balance as well.

Hannah Aylward (18:24.248)
We’ll see cardiovascular problems. We’ll see impaired cognitive function. High cortisol really heavily impacts the gut. So I’ll kind of get into that connection in a little bit there too. So that’s kind of more information for you about high cortisol specifically. So we talked about what causes it, how did we get there? We talked about common symptoms. So if you resonate with a lot of those symptoms, it’s pretty likely. And then we also talked about some of the risks of having these chronically high levels.

Once again, your body can repair and respond to a single stressor. The reality is that for most of us, it’s not a single stressor. It’s like living the day to day in a chronically stressed out state. And I can hold so much empathy and space for everyone that’s resonating with this right now because this is all my body knows, let me tell you. I am more familiar with running in a high cortisol, chronically stressed out state than I am relaxing, supporting my nervous system, turning off resting.

It is more natural for me to go, go and run, run, run and be on nonstop than it is to wind down and turn off. So it takes a lot of like repatterning and shifting of subconscious beliefs to really get us there. Cause once again, if we’re looking to get out of this chronically high cortisol that we may be experiencing and we have a lot of these symptoms.

Yes, we can talk about like solves and fixes and action steps to take next, but we also have to take into consideration our own belief systems and our personal patterns that are leading us to existing this way, that are kind of leading us to always running in this high cortisol state, like the perfectionism, like the codependency, like the people pleasing.

like then it’s never enough, right? That stuff is also gonna have to be examined because it doesn’t really matter how many minerals you throw on top of that. It’s like just having holes in the bottom of the bucket. So if you’ve got your stress bucket and you’re working to support your adrenal function and you’re working to support these high cortisol levels with things like balancing blood sugar through the food that you’re eating.

Hannah Aylward (20:28.018)
or a lot of mineral support, right? But at the bottom of this bucket is just holes because your lifestyle and your day-to-day habits is just draining all of this. You’re never gonna refill the bucket, right? You’re never actually going to fix the issue. And that’s what most people don’t wanna hear. It’s definitely not what I wanna hear. It’s way easier to take a supplement than it is to really question like, am I showing up in the world? And do my daily habits serve me or are they actually hurting me?

because the brain, whenever we encounter wanting to make a change, whenever we encounter wanting to shift a habit, we’re gonna get hit with resistance. The brain likes to keep us safe and it likes to keep us doing the exact same thing that we’ve been doing. Your life when you widen the lens is just a big compilation of weeks, right, that break down into days, that break down into the habits that you do on a day-to-day basis. So if you are looking to

really make a change in your life, we have to on a more granular level, take a look at what are these habits that are playing out on a day-to-day basis? Because one week of healthy eating is not going to get rid of these daily habits of dysfunction, of doing things, of overextending, of perfectionism that are kind of leading us to this place.

If you’re looking to get to the bottom of your hormone issues, your gut issues and cortisol dysregulation, you can’t do the same stuff afterwards that actually got you there. We’ve got to make shifts here. So this is where a good life audit can really come into play and just kind of jotting down, like, what am I doing on a day-to-day basis that’s no longer serving me? And how can I swap it out? How can I delegate it or how can I just drop it, just let it go? And what can I put in?

in place of that to be more supportive for me. So if you are dealing with the symptoms of high cortisol, first off, you know, the only way to fully make sure that we are looking at high cortisol, because a lot of the symptoms for high and low overlap would be testing. So when we work with clients, we can run a salivary cortisol panel. It’s a very simple panel. You’re going to test at four points during the day.

Hannah Aylward (22:46.06)
You don’t want to test cortisol in the blood. You don’t want to test it at just one time because once again, remember we’ve got that curve. So when we’re looking at your cortisol pattern, your cortisol awakening response, we want to get information about your cortisol levels when you wake up, 90 minutes after you wake up, and then throughout the day, including in the evening. So that’s why if you’ve had your cortisol levels checked with your doctor and you’re just simply going for like blood work and it looks normal.

It really depends on like what is normal, what time of the day was it, how did it look for the rest of the day, et cetera. So sometimes people will be fine in the middle of the day, but in the morning and the evening they’re off. So really, you know, that salivary cortisol panel can be really helpful. And then it’s something you could consider asking your doctor for as well. You know, we run it, a more functional leaning practitioner will run it. Your more traditional practitioner may not really work with that too often. The other option that we have is the Dutch test.

So that’s really a functional hormone panel. It’s a urine sample. So we can also gain insight into your cortisol levels through this urine sample, along with estrogen levels, progesterone, and so much more. So it’s a really in-depth functional hormone panel that we will run sometimes. We don’t run too much of them, because we like to work on a lot of the other foundational stuff first. So once again, the symptoms of high cortisol being that usually that weight gain in the abdomen, that excessive abdominal fat,

frequent irritability, having anxiety or the racing thoughts, high blood sugar cravings, you’re feeling that tired but wired feeling, loss of muscle mass, poor stress tolerance. You just can’t handle quite as much as you once could and you’re irritable and you’re kind of like triggered, know, overall. So what are some solves for this? So what can we do, right? The first thing to do is to make sure that you’re actually eating enough.

Are you getting in enough protein? Are you getting in enough fat? And are you getting in enough good quality carbohydrates? So when we go really low carb, we can also run into issues with cortisol levels. And if you’re not eating enough protein, we can also run into some issues there. So we wanna be aiming for, you know, on average, 100 grams of protein per day. We want you eating three to four times a day, spacing those meals out three to four hours. We wanna make sure that you’re not under eating calorically.

Hannah Aylward (25:02.146)
That’s a big thing here too. And then we want to avoid the intermittent fasting. So the gentle fast overnight for 12 hours is fine, but we want to make sure that you’re eating breakfast ideally within an hour of waking up. This is really going to help to support healthy cortisol levels and that kind of natural curve that, that we want throughout the rest of the day. And your breakfast is very important for also setting up your blood sugar levels for the rest of the day. It’s like the most important. So if you are listening to this,

and you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by like all the adjustments to make, the biggest thing to start with is adjusting your breakfast, making sure that you’re eating 30 grams of protein within an hour of waking up and eating enough. So a scoop of protein powder and water is not enough here. We see some clients coming in with that. That’s simply not enough. You need more calories. You need more carbohydrates. So a full smoothie would do it. Something with, you know, almond butter and chia seeds and protein powder.

and greens and carbohydrates from fruits, things like that, that would be fine. Something like three eggs with like some Greek yogurt and berries, that would be great. You could do some organic breakfast sausage with eggs. You could do some Greek yogurt, like I mentioned, with berries and walnuts and honey, maybe a drizzle of almond butter, maybe a little bit of gluten-free granola. That would be great too. Greek yogurt is great because it’s super easy and it’s pretty high in protein. So this is one of the first things to start with, right?

Make sure you’re eating breakfast. Stop skipping breakfast if you are, and make sure that you’re going and getting in 30 grams of protein within an hour of waking up. If you make one shift from this, if you’re not doing that already and you make one shift and it’s this, you will feel the difference. And that’s, I’m not even exaggerating there. It’s pretty, it’s pretty shocking how impactful it actually is. Cause it is so simple. So start there.

The other thing we have to make sure that we’re doing is we’ve got to get sleeping. Like we cannot be going to bed too late and we’ve got to make sure we’re getting enough sleep or you’re just going to be fighting an uphill battle. make sure to wind down early, put your phone on, do not disturb. Try to not check your email in bed like me, which I do from time to time and really, you know, prioritize your rest. A hot bath before bed can be great. Like with Epsom salts, magnesium salts.

Hannah Aylward (27:13.03)
Reading before bed can be great. Try to get off the screens, all of that kind of stuff. And even if you have to wake up very early, just try to get in bed on time aiming for between seven to nine hours. The other thing we have to do is we’ve got to stop over training. So if you’re doing many hit classes, taking many hit classes a week, we’ve got to scale that back. I would prefer you walk, move your body, dance, move in a way that feels good, but don’t run yourself into the ground. And if you are

currently struggling with high or really low cortisol levels, we’ve got to pull back on the training. The long distance running, the bootcamp classes, that kind of stuff. We’ve got to pull back on that. Strength training is fine. When we’re lifting heavier and we’re doing fewer reps and we’re also taking adequate breaks in between rests, that’s kind of in a different category. I love strength training. has

has endless benefits, honestly. It’s so impactful for our overall health. So I recommend it to everyone that I speak to, honestly, all my friends, all my family, all clients. Strength training is truly the bomb. We just want to make sure that we’re not, it’s not hit, right? So we’re not pushing our limits with each training session. When I went from HIIT classes and running to walking and strength training,

My body composition changed without me even trying. And that may sound even annoying to hear, but it was not something I ever believed. I literally started exercising less and my body composition just fell into place. I also like don’t have cravings anymore. And I used to, I used to struggle with binge eating and then I would over exercise to quote unquote burn it all off. I mean, it was my relationship to my body was a disaster.

was a living in my body was not a fun place to be. I didn’t like living in my body. I kind of hated my body. I didn’t like the way I looked. I didn’t like the way I felt and I was constantly fighting it. So when you when you’re also dealing with these high and low cortisol levels, you’ll tend to get high and low blood sugar and that can cause a lot of cravings too. So I don’t I eat like way less sweets than I did before and this is without any effort.

Hannah Aylward (29:13.262)
I don’t really think about it. It just kind of happens naturally. Not that there’s anything wrong with a little bit of chocolate here and there. I don’t mean it in that way. It’s more so just like everything’s, it’s much more easy to manage. It takes way less effort. So if your health has felt like a struggle for a long time, make sure that you’re doing these things. Okay, so blood sugar regulation, eating enough, quit the overtraining. We wanna dial back on that. We want to increase the sleep, increase the rest overall.

And we want to make sure that we are working with our circadian rhythm too. So we need to get light exposure in throughout the day. Most of us wake up and then we’re inside all day long. We’re working at desks or whatever it might be, and we’re almost never going outside. That’s not how we were designed to live. And it does have an impact on our health over time. It has an impact on our mitochondrial function, on our cortisol levels, our vitamin D levels.

It’s pretty crazy. So we want to get morning sun exposure first thing in the morning if you can, if you go to work before the lights even up, for the sun’s even up, as soon as you can step outside, even for two minutes, step outside, get that sun exposure in your eyes. So we’ve got to work with our circadian rhythm, which also means going to bed on time. I know it sounds really basic, you guys, but this is the stuff that truly moves the needle.

Throwing adaptogens and things like ashwagandha on top of poor foundations. Like if you just start taking ashwagandha and you’re not eating enough and you’re not sleeping enough and you’re over training, it’s simply a waste of money. Don’t waste your time. So we want to start with this foundation and then we build up from there. Supplements that can be helpful are things like magnesium and ashwagandha and vitamin C, but I’ll kind of go into depth a bit more about that after we get through this next section here. So those are the details on high cortisol.

Now let’s talk about low cortisol. So this is when you, your levels are low. You’re not producing enough cortisol. And this is where I ended up after years of, of high cortisol. So as you can imagine, running a business is not for the faint of heart, putting out all this content, managing a growing business in addition to moving, managing all of my own life stressors, right? I found myself in this place where I had no energy left and that was pretty scary for me.

Hannah Aylward (31:34.508)
because once again, as I mentioned, I’m used to running on high cortisol. I know what it feels like. I kind of know how to even manage it a bit. So when I started waking up with no motivation and no energy, I knew something was wrong. Another key was I started waking up with headaches and I was like, this is not right. I never have headaches like this. And it felt like I literally like could not get going without coffee. So I knew I had hit my limit and I pushed my body too far.

And once again, it was just after a lot of high stress. So my business grew a lot. I moved about five times in one year. I think that alone will do it for you. Cause I was, kept encountering mold like everywhere I went and it’s just not worth it for me for my health. I’m out of there. So I moved a bunch of times, you know, holding all of the responsibility that comes with all of this. And then with moving, I, you know, I would find myself without like a proper kitchen often.

and I kept moving so I didn’t have a lot of kitchen stuff set up. So I wasn’t eating enough. I was skipping meals. I wasn’t over exercising, but because I just didn’t even have the time or space, but I wasn’t eating enough. And my sleep was a bit erratic as well, because as you can imagine, just the stress that kind of comes with all that. So I started to wake up with really low energy, really low motivation, low clarity, like less focus. My ability to focus was shifting.

and some headaches and feeling like I needed coffee or I could not make it through the day. And I knew something was up. So when I ran a Dutch test on myself and my levels were very low, they were like really like, you look at the low patient value line and I was below it. So I was kind of a surprise that I was even still functioning, but I could feel it because I love this work and I love teaching you guys and I love being with you and I love my clients. And I got to the point where I was just like,

I don’t care. Like I want to watch Netflix. I want to relax. I can’t do this anymore. I didn’t have the like juice for life. That’s what I call it. Like my mojo, my mojo and my juice were just being sucked out of me. And when I don’t feel passionately about all the things in my life, I know something’s, something’s wrong. Cause I’m pretty like happy and passionate to begin with. So some other signs of low cortisol would be fatigue.

Hannah Aylward (33:51.402)
low blood pressure. So I also started going in and my blood pressure was low, which you think is good because you’re scared of high blood pressure, but then your blood pressure is really low and that’s also not good. Things like dizziness, the craving for salty foods. So I kind of switched from craving sweet foods to salty foods. The difficulty handling stress, that’s an overlap there. Muscle weakness, the difficulty getting out of bed. So if you’re someone who feels like you have to like pull yourself out of bed and you’re like, no, no, no, I can’t do it. That’s a big sign.

getting, like I said, dizzy, irritable or sleepy if you go without food for about four to five hours. So you should be able to kind of hold that. If you have big issues with that, that can be a sign of low cortisol, the afternoon exhaustion, getting sick a lot is also another sign and having low sex drive. So not feeling like you’re in the mood, feeling like you’re too stressed or you’re just too tired or you just don’t have it in you. You’re not having that sex drive that you once had. That’s another big sign.

Having a physical response to smaller stressors and heart palpitations or really overall sensitivity to things can be another sign. And then, you know, really not having the energy to do things, especially when it comes to doing things that you love. So if you’re living your life and these things that used to light you up are no longer lighting you up, you kind of don’t care anymore. You know, that’s a big sign that something is off. I think we’ve kind of normalized that. We normalized just life going on and…

and losing our desire and our passion for things because we just are tired, right? But these are all signs of low cortisol. And you wanna have the passion and you wanna have the energy to do these things that you love, whether it’s drawing or going to the movies or going for a walk or whatever it might be, it does not feel good when you don’t have that energy anymore. So once again, from my personal story, like I think the low cortisol is even worse than the high cortisol, because the high cortisol, just feels like you’re running on fumes, you’re…

You’re running on false energy, but you still have enough cortisol to make it through the day, right? You’ve got the fumes keeping you going. you’ve got low cortisol levels, like a gas tank is empty. There’s no more anything in here and you are like trudging along and you start to become a little shell of yourself and you deserve so much better than that. So some common causes of low cortisol. How do we get there? Right?

Hannah Aylward (36:13.42)
We really get there after having high cortisol for too long. So when we’ve got prolonged periods of high stress over time, essentially if we were to test you catching you before you got that low cortisol, you probably were high cortisol for a long time, right? And eventually over time we get that HPA access dysfunction, the communication between the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenals gets off and then you’re not producing enough cortisol.

Other things like Addison’s disease, of course, that’s kind of in a different, a different category. We have worked with clients that do have Addison’s disease before, but once again, you know, more so we’re talking about those, prolonged stressors over time. So this could also be a lot of childhood trauma. This could be not processing your emotions. This could be the people pleasing. It could be the burning, the burning the candle at both ends. So when I’m talking low cortisol, what I, the term I usually use for

with clients and with my community is burnout. So that’s what you probably resonate with, right? That feeling where you’re just like, I’m burnt out, I’m burnt to a crisp, I don’t have the energy, I don’t have the passion, I don’t really wanna do anything and I just don’t have it in me anymore. That’s that low cortisol feeling. And what’s great is when we work to support a healthy cortisol response, to support healthy cortisol regulation, you’ll get your energy back and you’ll get your life back, which is the great fun part.

but there are also risks that come with low cortisol levels. So we can have the reduced ability to manage stress, low energy. We can also have possible complications with blood pressure regulation. And we can also, it usually comes with an increase in autoimmunity as well. So it’s not something to play around with. And I say the same thing when it comes to gut issues and that’s not to scare you. It’s really just like, if your body’s sending you all these signs and symptoms, we’ve got to listen because it’s a matter of time before it gets worse.

The other thing that will happen over time is when our cortisol levels are too high for a long time, it’ll start to impact our thyroid function. It’ll start to impact other hormones. So it’s not gonna just stay high cortisol. It’s not gonna just stay stress. It’s also gonna start to influence our gut function and it’s gonna start to influence our progesterone levels as well. So both cortisol and progesterone are produced from cholesterol in the adrenal glands and ovaries. And this means that they share the same precursor hormone.

Hannah Aylward (38:37.772)
and the body has to decide essentially how to prioritize the production of each. So the adrenal glands are producing cortisol, right, during stress via that HPA axis, while the ovaries produce progesterone primarily during the luteal phase of your menstrual cycle, which happens after ovulation. So when you think luteal, you can think last. That’s like the last part of your cycle that happens before you start that cycle again with menstruation. So.

That’s when your body is really producing that progesterone. Your body also produces progesterone when you ovulate. So you ovulate, you have that ovulation phase, and then we’re producing a lot of that progesterone in our luteal phase. So we want to make sure that our luteal phase is long enough. We don’t want it to be like 10 days. We want it to be a bit longer so we can get that nice robust progesterone production. We also have to make sure that the body feels safe enough to ovulate. So…

tracking your cycle can be a really powerful tool here to make sure that you are ovulating because if you’re not, that’s going to be the first thing that we want to address, right? We want to make sure that you are indeed ovulating. So you are producing adequate progesterone. Now in order to ovulate, your body has to feel safe enough, right? Because ovulation is when you can get pregnant. Your body is not going to want to get pregnant if it doesn’t have what it needs. If it’s too high stress, if cortisol levels are too high, if you aren’t

eating enough, if you’re over-exercising, this is going to impact your ovulation and then impact your ability to get pregnant, but also impact your progesterone production. So under stress, the body is going to prioritize the production of cortisol over progesterone. Now the body’s immediate response to stress is to increase cortisol levels to help deal with that stressful situation, right? However, this increases the demand for the cholesterol used to produce both cortisol and progesterone.

And as a result of this, our cortisol production can be high and then our progesterone production can be low, leading to lower progesterone levels, especially if the stress is consistent and it’s chronic, right? So as I mentioned, we’re kind of living in this era of low progesterone because everyone is chronically stressed and under eating and over exercising and inundated with information and stressors at all times. So we have to make sure that we are supporting healthy progesterone production.

Hannah Aylward (40:59.82)
And in order to do that, we have to support healthy cortisol levels. And in order to do that, we have to support healthy blood sugar regulation because you can’t balance your hormones without balancing your blood sugar because when your blood sugar levels drop really low, your body’s going to push out cortisol to raise these blood sugar levels because obviously low blood sugar is dangerous, right? So if you are not eating enough or if you’re fasting or if you’re eating a lot of carbohydrates and not enough protein,

we can see these blood sugar highs and lows. And then once again, when they’re low, the body’s gonna secrete cortisol to raise the blood sugar levels. So you’re gonna be running on this cortisol roller coaster, even if you’re meditating, even if you’re doing your breath work, you have to be eating enough and you have to be eating enough of the right stuff. So we’ve got to be regulating our blood sugar levels. So back to that progesterone piece, the long-term stress can really create a situation where the cortisol levels remain elevated.

extended periods of time and then kind of reduce those progesterone levels over time as well. know, main takeaways here, we have to regulate cortisol levels in order to make sure that we ovulate because when we ovulate is when we produce progesterone and we produce a lot of that in the luteal phase of our cycle. So essentially, if you’re running on cortisol nonstop, that’s going to start to hit your sex hormones. It’s going to start to hit progesterone.

with progesterone and estrogen, they are basically playing a little dance together. Your hormones are never quote unquote perfectly balanced, right? But sometimes we can lean more estrogen dominant, not actually because we have high levels of estrogen in the body, but more so because the estrogen is so high in comparison to our progesterone levels, because a lot of us run lower progesterone. So then we end up with symptoms of low progesterone, which can look like irregular menstrual cycles.

Fatigue, low energy, anxiety or mood swings, trouble sleeping, trouble conceiving, right? We have trouble getting pregnant, weight gain. So when progesterone is low relative to cortisol, it can lead to a hormonal imbalance really that looks like estrogen dominance, right? Where there’s too much estrogen relative to progesterone. That can also lead to painful periods. It can lead to more PMS. It can lead to more cramping, breast tenderness, heavy bleeding, clotting, that kind of stuff.

Hannah Aylward (43:25.11)
It’s all connected. That’s the amazing thing about this work is that it’s all connected. Regulating your cortisol levels is essential for optimal energy, good sleep, good skin. It has a big impact on your skin as well. Good gut function. Like it’s all connected here. So when we start to hit some of these things at the root, we can see a lot of these symptoms get a lot better. The other amazing thing is that progesterone has a calming and anti-anxiety effect.

and can kind of help to counterbalance the effects of cortisol on the body. So it can help to lower the excessive cortisol in the system, especially in these stressful situations. So once we get like really on that hamster wheel, right? So if we’re chronically stressed, we’ll typically have less progesterone, but then progesterone is like that feel good hormone that’s kind of calming and anti-anxiety. So we won’t have any of that to help to reduce the stress. So…

It’s a never ending cycle, right? Which is why we’ve got to address things really at the root. The other thing to note is the connection between our cortisol levels and our gut health and our gut function. Obviously I can’t do a podcast episode without touching on that. I spoke a lot about this more in depth in episode one, where I talk about how trauma influences your gut and your hormone health. So go have a listen to that if this is really resonating with you. However, high cortisol levels, right?

This is gonna impact our stomach acid production. It’s gonna impact our enzyme secretion. Cortisol impacts our gut motility. This is all going to influence our digestion and our digestive pain and our digestive symptoms because we need adequate stomach acid and pancreatic enzymes to officially break down our food and absorb the nutrients from our food. Our gut motility, we want our gut motility on point. That’s gonna influence things like constipation. It’s gonna influence things like bacterial overgrowth and SIBO.

And then we also see this decrease in intestinal immunity when we have high cortisol as well. And high cortisol will wear away at that mucosal layer of our gut lining. So it starts to damage our gut barrier. It can contribute to things like leaky gut or intestinal permeability. And I went way in on that on a whole other episode where I break down leaky gut, exactly what it is and what you can do about it. So check that out and we’ll link it below if that really resonates with you.

Hannah Aylward (45:42.474)
And all of these things, the combination of all of these things, right? So high cortisol, we’re not producing adequate enzymes, we’re not producing adequate stomach acid, we’ve got damage to our gut lining, our intestinal cells aren’t regenerating at the rate at which they should be, we’ve got decreased intestinal immunity, our gut motility takes a hit, all of this, what does that mean? It looks like bloating, it looks like IBS symptoms, constipation, diarrhea, eventually bacterial overgrowth, eventually things like fungal overgrowth.

Once again, all of these things are connected. So if we want to, quote unquote, heal our gut, if we want to repair our gut and our digestive function, we also have to take a look at our cortisol levels and our nervous system because of this deep connection between cortisol and our gut function. So we talked about progesterone, we talked about gut function, we talked about different symptoms between high and low.

And we did talk about some strategies to support healthy cortisol levels. So just to kind of recap there, and I’m realizing now I didn’t go into much detail about how to support levels if they’re low. The good news is that a lot of the tips for supporting cortisol regulation if you are resonating with high cortisol levels are the same for if you’ve got low cortisol levels because it’s kind of the same root cause, right? It’s the chronic stress over time.

The biggest thing that we want to avoid if we have not done testing. So if you are listening to this, you know you have an issue, but you have not confirmed with testing and you’re not working with anyone. We want to avoid things like adrenal glandulars and we want to avoid certain adaptogens because if we don’t know if you’re working with low levels or high levels, it can cause kind of more problems if we bring in the wrong supplement. So the basics that you can implement, whether if you’re not going to get testing or if you’ve got symptoms across the board,

Cause that happens a lot too. You’ve got symptoms of both high and low. Once again, we want to go back to that blood sugar balance. We want to emphasize sleep. We want to dial back on the training. All of those things are still important, whether your levels are high or low. We also want to look at mineral support. So things like magnesium, things like sodium, potassium, and then vitamin C. So our body needs a lot of these to properly function. These are very supportive of adrenal function.

Hannah Aylward (48:05.41)
So if you are dealing with high or low levels, increasing things like magnesium, vitamin C, sodium potassium are a great place to start. So you can look for different electrolyte complexes in order to do that. You can add a pinch of sea salt to your morning water. Vitamin C is very easy to get through food. So, know, bell peppers, citrus fruits, things like that are high in vitamin C. You can always supplement there too. If you’re supplementing, you know, we’re looking at probably a thousand milligrams three times a day.

in order to actually make a difference here. So I don’t live to give out like specifics like that on the podcast. We’re not working with you yet. If we are, we’ll talk about it in session. just kind of vitamin C is it’s pretty, it’s pretty like not basic, but simple, right? It’s not going to cause much issues. you consume too much vitamin C, you’ll basically just go to the bathroom. It’ll kind of force a bowel movement. Other than that, it’s not too like toxic or anything like that.

But we need to think of your body, if you’re in this big state of depletion, you’re going to need a lot of re-pleasion. So I’m not talking about one little capsule of vitamin C or something. We’re probably going to need more than that, right? We also have to plug the holes. We have to plug the chronic stressors, but talking, you know, once again about supplementation, vitamin C, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and then we’ve also got things like B vitamins. So making sure that you’re consuming enough B vitamins. This is where a good B complex can come into play.

This is where we like to use things like beef liver. They’re loaded with different B vitamins, lots of B12, and it’s in a whole food form. So that’s what we recommend quite often. Honestly, getting good prenatal can be helpful here, even if you’re not trying to conceive, because prenatals are basically just like hyped up multivitamins. So if you are really depleted, sometimes they can be very helpful because they’ll have like higher levels of some good key vitamins in there. B vitamins are also going to be found in things like animal proteins.

and then grains as well. So making sure that you’re consuming enough of those. And then once again, balancing your blood sugar. I went into pretty good detail on that. Biggest emphasis here is on protein, making sure that you’re consuming enough protein, but also making sure that you’re eating enough carbohydrates. That’s also important. Carbs are not bad. We need them. And then getting in enough healthy fat as well. I like to also say, make sure you’re eating enough fiber. That’s obviously very important for our gut health, our gut bacterial composition.

Hannah Aylward (50:27.458)
supporting gut proliferation. Fiber is technically a carbohydrate. I just like to put it in another, in its own little category, because it deserves that. So make sure that you’re getting all of these things in your meals throughout the day, and make sure that you’re eating three meals a day. If you’re someone that wakes up and you’re not hungry first thing in the morning, you got to start eating something. So eat something. Don’t go two hours without eating anything. Even if it’s one hard-boiled egg or it’s like half a protein bar,

I’d rather you start with something and slowly work your way up to consuming more. A lot of women skip breakfast and they just run on coffee and I get it. I have a tendency to do that. And I really try to be mindful of adding things into my coffee. I add collagen, I add fiber. I do like a homemade cashew milk that’s really fatty. So I’m getting in calories, I’m getting in fat. My collagen has 20 grams, right? And then I try to eat that alongside like a protein bar or like a homemade oatmeal cookie protein.

bar thing that I’ll make sometimes, or the protein balls are in my cookbook. Those are awesome because you can eat like three of those. You can get in a little bit of protein and fiber and fat. So if you have my cookbook, check that out. They’re so yummy. And you can add those in pretty immediately. Even if you’re so used to not eating, I’ll even take a mug of bone broth. Like it’s not enough calories. It’s not enough food. But I’d rather you get something in than nothing is my whole point here.

Ideally, we want you eating a full breakfast. I want you eating a full plate of breakfast or a smoothie that’s gonna have enough calories, enough protein, enough fat, all of that good stuff in it within an hour of waking. But if you are not used to that, start slow and slowly work your way up. Usually the appetite starts to come back online with just a couple of weeks, like a little bit of practice, right? You’ve gotta retrain your body to eating breakfast if you haven’t for a while. So those are all some great action steps.

to begin with. then of course, you know, avoiding things like excessive alcohol intake, excessive sugar, like too much, you know, highly palatable, highly processed sugar, ultra processed carbohydrates, things like that. They’re not going to do our health any good. I think we kind of, we kind of already know that, right? And then we have to once again, take a look at our patterns and our mindset and just our stress levels overall. So if you’re listening to this podcast, one thing you can do is ask yourself, what is causing me the most stress in my life? If I’m

Hannah Aylward (52:48.972)
I feel stressed or I feel overwhelmed on a day-to-day basis. Like what’s actually contributing to that stress? What’s at the root of that? And notice that and start to make changes there and just start there, whether it’s your finances or it’s your relationship or it’s your job or it’s your health, start taking action in one of those categories. Cause what’s causing most of our stress is going to be different for each person. And while you’re doing that,

while you’re working on kind of getting some of your energy back and getting some of your time back, make sure that you’re repleting, right? Emphasis on those minerals, eating enough, sleeping enough, all of that kind of good stuff. And then we’ve got some stress management techniques that we can bring into play too. Things like yoga, meditation, deep breathing, all of those things can be helpful. But let me say, they’re not going to get rid of everything if you never let yourself feel like what you’re doing is good enough. If you never let yourself take a day off, if you…

are constantly thinking about your to-do list and constantly thinking about how things are falling through the cracks. If you are taking care of everyone before you’re taking care of yourself, we can’t slap a 10 minute meditation on top of that and expect to see a big difference, right? It’s the consistent things that we do on a day-to-day basis that are going to make the biggest difference. So let that sink in and this might be a wake up call for some of you, but please take it seriously.

because over time, the chronic stress, the high levels of cortisol will lead to low levels, which can lead to autoimmunity. And it’s also gonna lead to sluggish thyroid function, and it’s gonna lead to gut issues, and it’s gonna lead to hormonal issues, potential fertility complications. And once again, this is not fear-mongering. It’s just listen to your body and take action on some of this stuff. You’re worth it.

You’ve got this one body to live in your whole life. Take it seriously. We’re not looking for perfection, but don’t ignore it and expect it to get any better and don’t ignore it and not expect more stuff to start popping up. So you hold the power here. That’s the great news is you hold the power and changing some of this by taking some of these simple actions and being consistent with them. And it’s not about being perfect. It’s really just about, you know, when you fall off, getting back on as quick as you can.

Hannah Aylward (55:04.788)
None of us are perfect. I stay up too late. I do some of this stuff. I’m not immune to this stuff, right? It’s more so how quickly can I get back on track and how can I support my body as best as I can throughout that process. So you’ve got a lot of action steps to take here. And we talked about testing as well. That was something I wanted to make sure that we covered together. So there you have it, you guys. There’s kind of the breakdown of cortisol, what it is, what it does, the difference between high and low levels, how to test for them.

and how cortisol influences your gut function and then also your hormone balance as well when it comes to progesterone and that influence on estrogen. And then something I didn’t emphasize too much, but it does start to take a hit at our thyroid as well. So it’s all connected. If you’ve been diagnosed with hypothyroidism or Hashimoto’s, we’ve got to take this into consideration. If you’ve been diagnosed with IBS, we’ve got to look at this. If you’ve been having fertility issues, we’ve got to look at this. If you have

Other kind of hormonal imbalances, whether they’re sex hormones like estrogen, you’ve got high estrogen symptoms. We’ve got to look at this too. So it’s the important work. I hope this gave you some good stuff to start applying ASAP and I’ll see you in the next episode next week. Okay. Big hugs.

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Nutrient Dense Podcast. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and come back next week for a new episode. See you then!