Is Cortisol the Enemy? What High-Performance Leaders Need to Know About This Stress Hormone
- Brainz Magazine
- Dec 4
- 5 min read
Lauren Callahan is a nutrition coach, ultra-endurance athlete, and doctoral student. As the founder of Ultra Nutrition, she helps athletes go from injured and tired to resilient and unstoppable with gut health, plants, and peptides.
Cortisol can get a really bad rap sometimes. As high-performing leaders or athletes, we are aware that high cortisol levels can come with the territory. The enormous amount of stress we place on our bodies and minds, whether that be through high training loads or demanding careers, can cause cortisol levels to rise and stay in a perpetual state of elevation. We are also all too aware of the consequences: stress kills, the experts say, and is truly related to just about every adverse health outcome you can think of.
But is stress all bad? More specifically, is cortisol, our stress hormone, all bad? Interestingly, it’s not.
Cortisol is in your corner
You might be surprised to know that cortisol actually helps your body and mind respond to stress, helps you have energy, and helps you fight inflammation.
So why do we talk about cortisol like it’s a bad thing?
While cortisol plays an important function in your body and mind’s ability to adapt to stress, you’re really not supposed to have all of it all day long. Cortisol is meant to be produced in your body in a wave-like pattern, where your highest levels happen in the morning, and your lowest levels happen at night. This allows you to experience peak energy levels as soon as you start your day, but feel relaxed in the evening so that you can fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night.
When cortisol goes wrong
What happens when this wave-like rhythm gets disrupted? It can happen for a number of reasons. Even one night of bad sleep, one really stressful day at work, or one extra strenuous day of training can cause a disruption in the cortisol rhythm and raise cortisol to an unhealthy level.
Now, the very thing that was originally intended to help you respond to stress better is causing you to be more stressed and irritable, to hold on to fat around your middle, to crave junk food, and to not sleep well the next night. Not only that, it creates a horrible feedback loop where it now becomes harder to fall asleep because your cortisol levels are so high, and now they’re high the next day because you didn’t get good sleep.
It goes on and on. You never feel rested, even when you do sleep. Your patience and mental clarity are gone, your emotional regulation is fried, your creativity is stifled, your energy plummets, and your ability to get a good night’s sleep is a thing of the past.
And that really kind, helpful person who says you just need to go and get a good night’s rest? You’re ready to scream in their face and tell them where they can go.
The midlife dilemma
Cortisol is not inherently bad. It’s actually good. But now we’re in a situation where it’s toxic.
And no surprise, this is especially problematic for men and women in midlife. Changing hormones have a direct impact on our cortisol levels. For men, declining testosterone levels can mean the difference between cortisol that is supportive, or cortisol that is damaging, and for women, declining levels of estrogen and progesterone can take away their natural buffer to cortisol spikes, making it especially hard to regulate their sleep. And as we have seen, this directly impacts your cortisol levels the next day, and subsequently your mental and physical health the next day, creating that negative feedback loop that is a slippery slope to chronic stress and some serious mental, emotional, and physical fatigue, not to mention an array of negative health effects.
What can we do when cortisol is out of balance?
So what can we do to reset our cortisol rhythms into that healthy, wave-like pattern that is truly supportive of our energy during the day, restorative sleep at night, healthy metabolism, lower inflammation, and physical and psychological well-being?
Watch the caffeine. Too much caffeine, especially in the afternoon or later, can cause spikes in cortisol levels. Reducing caffeine amounts to no more than what you would find in a standard cup of coffee, and only in the mornings, will reduce unwanted cortisol spikes.
Cut the junk. Eating sugary foods and ultra-processed foods are notorious for also causing cortisol spikes. These foods are stressful to your body, your body would much prefer to have whole, largely unprocessed foods, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds, and legumes. These foods provide a healthy balance of energy and a perfect supply of the micronutrients your body needs. And importantly for our conversation here, they are not stressful to your body. Cutting out foods that crash your system will support healthy cortisol patterns.
Take care of your gut. Scientists are calling your gut your “second brain,” and with good reason. It is related to every aspect of your health. In this case, a healthy gut equals healthy cortisol levels and healthy sleep patterns. Your body naturally produces its own melatonin, a sleep-regulating hormone, through processes in your gut. Eating fiber-rich foods, fermented foods, and more plants (fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and legumes) supports a healthy gut and helps to facilitate stress- and inflammation-lowering pathways, as well as your melatonin production pathway. Taking care of your gut health will keep cortisol within its healthy parameters.
Reset your cortisol rhythms with peptides. If your body is in a negative feedback loop with cortisol, you may hugely benefit from a gentle reset to your system using bioactive precision peptides. Peptides are short chains of amino acids (the building blocks of protein) that act like tiny messengers in the body, helping control things like healing, energy, and hormones. Bioactive precision peptides are specially designed peptides that target very specific processes in the body, like improving sleep, reducing inflammation, or boosting recovery, with more accuracy than regular peptides.
Combining a bioactive precision peptide that promotes deep, restorative sleep with a peptide that promotes healthy neurotransmitter balance, fights fatigue, and fuels ATP production will work synergistically to reset healthy cortisol patterns.
How do you know if you need to reset your cortisol rhythms?
If you are having a hard time sleeping, don’t feel rested when you do sleep, perpetually feel stressed or tired, or notice that you’re holding on to weight around your midsection, it might be time for a cortisol reset.
Cortisol isn’t bad. In fact, it’s exactly what your body needs as part of a healthy response to normal stress so you can feel and perform at your best. However, when it gets out of balance, it can be toxic to your creativity, leadership, energy, mood, mental clarity, and overall health. Supporting healthy cortisol levels and even resetting a healthy cortisol rhythm may be exactly what you need as a high performer to revitalize your energy and leadership.
Read more from Lauren Callahan
Lauren Callahan, Ultra Endurance Athlete Nutrition Coach
Ultra endurance athlete, nutrition coach, and doctoral student, Lauren Callahan, is using science-based nutrition, compassionate coaching, and plant-forward strategies to transform endurance athletes from injured and tired to resilient and unstoppable. Passionate about gut health, plants, and peptides, she guides endurance athletes to use nutrition to improve their health, mood, performance, hormones, and recovery.
