{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Under Load","title":"Cortisol Tests, Recovery, and Burnout: A Doctor Reads the Evidence","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":963,"description":"I slid twenty kilos onto each side of the bar and stepped under it.\nSixty kilos with the bar. Ten reps at that weight is a warm-up for me, the set I do without thinking about it. I got to five and had to rack it.\nNothing had gone wrong. I had slept badly, so I told myself that was the reason. Then it happened again the next week, and the week after.\nI am a physician, so my first move was to go looking for a number that would explain it. That search is what this episode is about, and it ended somewhere I did not expect.\nIn this episode:\nWhat the largest review of sleep loss and physical performance actually found, and the reason it could not explain my own morning. The review left out exactly the situation most working adults are in, which is worth knowing before you read the headline.\nThe 2003 study that changed how I think about my own judgment. People restricted to four or six hours in bed continued to see their performance decline for two straight weeks, while their sense of how tired they felt stopped changing. The researchers said they were largely unaware of it.\nThe drive home I have told almost nobody about. My wife asleep in the passenger seat, an hour of fighting to stay awake, and the ten or twenty seconds I do not remember.\nWhy I ordered a saliva cortisol test, and what a review of 190 studies says about whether cortisol can tell you anything about burnout.\nAdrenal fatigue, and what two endocrinologists found when they went through fifty-eight studies looking for it.\nYou can now buy a cortisol curve as a stress score, and this is the part I want people to hear. The lab work behind those kits is real. Doctors use saliva cortisol to screen for Cushing's syndrome. The problem sits somewhere else entirely, and there is one question you can ask any company selling you a number.\nPsychological detachment, which is the ordinary business of your mind leaving work the way your body does, and what the workplace data shows about who manages it and who does not....","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/D6GUGKGhv_DEKkMXOUaw9zVKHR_WqCVlo9ECODchftY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8wODc1/MzQxYzZmMTk4MDBl/ODhhM2E4NWIwYTFj/OWExOC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}