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We hear a lot about cortisol nowadays, and while some of the information might be true, I want to bring some peace-of-mind and clarity so you feel empowered in optimizing your cortisol instead of feeling scared of this stress hormone.
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What is Fit for Hiking?
Where fitness and outdoors meet. In this space we chat all things hiking, exercise, wellness, adventure, motherhood, and metabolic health from a female perspective! Get ready to learn + be inspired to live your fullest, most adventurous life!
Hi, my name is Brady and I'm a long time fitness professional and Midwest girl turned mountain living hiking addict. In combining my knowledge of fitness and passion for hiking, I've helped hundreds of women get lean and strong for the trails. Think of this as your one stop shop for both education and inspiration on all things female wellness, trail talk and adventure. Hiking, female metabolism, motherhood, nutrition, travel and fitness are all topics you'll hear discussed here. If you are outdoorsy and active, looking to level up your health, unlock your potential, and become inspired to live your most vibrant life, you're in the right place. You're listening to the fit for Hiking podcast. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the fit for Hiking podcast. This is your host, Brady and I'm really excited about today's topic. We are going to be diving into cortisol and kind of explaining how to schedule your day to optimize your cortisol. Um, you know, cortisol really gets a bad rap, I think especially lately, there's a lot out there that's like high cortisol is the reason that you're holding on to all of your weight. And this is what cortisol face looks like. And if your cortisol is high everything is terrible. And while there is a little bit of truth to some of those statements, um, cortisol is actually a necessary hormone. We just need to make sure that we are optimizing when it's spiking and when it's dropping throughout the day for us to feel our best, to get most optimal sleep, to perform the best, and to keep all other hormones in harmony. So let's talk about how to optimize our cortisol. Because cortisol is not the devil, it's not the problem. We just want to make sure that it's in. Sync with the rest of the day. Like we want to make sure that our cortisol is peaking when it's most optimal for it to peak, and coming down when it's most optimal for it to come down. So let's talk about the cortisol curve. So ideally your cortisol should be going up and peaking in the morning. So it should start going up as soon as you wake up and get light in your eyeballs your cortisol is going to start to rise. So ideally it's kind of starting to peak mid morning. And then from there on out it is slowly decreasing throughout the rest of the day until the time where you're getting ready to wind down and go to bed at night. Okay. So that is the optimal cortisol curve that we want. This ensures that we are awake and bright eyed in the morning, ready to take on the day with high energy. And that as we go on with the rest of our day, it's slowly starting to taper off so that we can wind down in the evening and then feel nice and tired as we lay down to go to sleep at night. That is really important. And that's where sleep and light exposure are. Some of the two biggest things that will affect our cortisol curve okay. So let's talk about how to structure your day for ideal cortisol balance. So number one is to try to get morning UV exposure as close to waking as possible and optimal if you are outside or getting your eyeballs in the sunlight as the sun is rising, this is going to be the best signal to your brain that the sun is coming up. It's time to start a new day and your cortisol should start to rise at that time. So even if it's cloudy, you're still going to reap the benefits. But you do need to get outside to directly get that sun exposure on your face. That is important. So this isn't going to work from inside your house. Like you got to really actually step outside for this, even if it's just for a few minutes. Okay? This doesn't mean that you're needing to spend an hour of your morning outside every single day, because for most of us, that's not super realistic, right? So how you can do this is when you wake up, instead of immediately looking at your phone and just getting sucked into email notifications and all the communication that came through overnight and work stuff that's already coming in for the day, hold off on that and try to, you know, grab some water. If you do water first thing in the morning, grab your breakfast, grab your coffee, go outside. Maybe do your journaling, devotions, reading time, whatever it is that you do first thing in the morning to kind of set up your day. If you can take that outside as often as possible, it's not going to be doable year round, right? There's weather considerations depending on where you live, but the more often that you can get in the habit of doing this, the better it's going to be for getting your cortisol into a great place as you kick off the day. Okay, so after this other really great habits that you can do in the morning for ideal cortisol balance would be a cold shower or cold water exposure. So whether that's dunking your body in a cold water tub, which are really popular right now, or just doing a quick rinse in the shower for like two minutes with cold water, or even just getting your face submerged in cold water. All of these things are going to really help get your cortisol on the rise in the morning, wake you up and get you going for the day. Okay, so cold water exposure is a great thing that you can do. Um, another great thing you can do for ideal cortisol balance in the morning is trying to consume your breakfast with your coffee. So instead of just having a ton of coffee on an empty stomach, not super great for your cortisol. You know, it can also kind of spike your blood sugar quite a bit if you're having, like, cream and sugar in your coffee, um, you know, you're probably not going to be perfect with this. I'm not perfect with this, especially if you're in a season like as a new parent or, you know, we have a crazy, stressful job where you're just like, working night shift and you have to be up all night. Um, you got to drink some extra caffeine. I totally understand that. But as often as possible, consuming good protein and carbs with your caffeine in the morning. Um, the next is exercising in the early part of the day, if possible. So that doesn't have to be first thing in the morning. But what we want to avoid is evening workouts. So if you can try to exercise when your cortisol is at its highest, which is going to be sometime in the morning, mid morning would be great. If that's not doable, even like, you know, midday or early afternoon is great too, because you still are, you know, coming down, but you're still on the high end of your cortisol. Um, you just want to try to avoid doing your workout closer to bedtime because exercise is a stressor. So it will naturally rise your cortisol a little bit. So you want to make sure that you're not doing that, you know, in the few hours before you're going to bed. But you might find is that it just impairs your sleep quality, makes it harder to wind down at night. And it kind of disrupts that natural cortisol curve. So this might not be possible for everyone. Again, these are just suggestions. You can take a few of them. You can take all of them, but implement what feels realistic to you. This is just some information of how you can really optimize things in the most ideal way. Okay, a couple things that you can do throughout the day and into the evening. One is just trying to get outside as much as possible. Being outside is one of the best things we can do to reduce stress and to keep our cortisol in a good place. So this means like getting outside, taking some deep breath, going for a walk, listening to nature sounds, trying not to look at your device the entire time. If you listen to an audiobook instead, or you call a loved one and you chat but you're not in a stressed out state like responding to emails, scrolling social media things that can actually keep you in a stressed out state. Okay, so being outside as often as possible, even if you're just taking like little five minute breaks to pace around outside, make a phone call or go for a quick walk. Um, the next is as you start to wind down for the evening, thinking about minimizing your light exposure after sundown. So kind of similarly to why it's important to be outside around sunrise. Being outside at sundown is another great way to signal to your brain, hey, it's. Time to kind of wind down. Our light source is going away, which means it's time to rest and get ready for bed. So when we see sunset or, you know, sunset happens and then we're still in a place where there's tons of overhead lights, fluorescent lighting, we're looking at our devices, we're watching TV, and then we're looking at our phone. Our brain computes that as sunlight. Our brain thinks, oh, it might still just be the middle of the day because I'm processing all these different light sources. So minimizing blue light sources is going to be huge for starting to wind down and really get yourself in a place where you're getting sleepy and ready to get good quality sleep at night. So a couple of ways you can do this one, trying to be outside for sunset if you can. Maybe you're out for a walk with your family, or you sit outside on your porch or your deck as the sun is setting and have a cup of tea, or you're reading a book or you kind of do your relaxation activities, but you do them outside where your eyeballs can see that sunset happening. Then as you come in, one thing you can do is try to get a pair of blue light blocking glasses. This is going to help make sure that your brain isn't seeing all the light around you at nighttime. If you are someone who likes to watch Netflix, or you do like to scroll your phone at night and it doesn't keep you actively awake and keep your cortisol high when it should be at its absolute lowest. Okay, so blue light blocking glasses are great. You can get such cheap options. Yes, there are some very like high quality ones that are on the more expensive side, but you can also just grab them at like target, Walmart, Amazon and they're pretty dang cheap. Um, so this is a quick thing you can do. Throw on those walking glasses after sunset. And also just minimizing your overhead light. So if you don't need to have all your bright lights on, like start to dim your lights, turn off the overhead lights and maybe do some like lower down lamps or some candle light, or just keep light exposure at a minimum to kind of set the mood of like, okay brain, we are winding down for the night and we're getting sleepy. Like, same thing as you would do if you have a kiddo. Like when I'm trying to get my daughter in the mood to go to sleep. We're not going to keep the TV on full blast. We're not going to keep tons of lights on as bright as possible. Right? We're going to start to dim the lights, try to minimize noise, and get her in a place where her nervous system is ready to go to sleep. Same thing applies to us as adults. Um, the next is to do a brain dump journal in the evening. So if you notice that you just are someone who scrolls social media, or you watch a ton of shows and you're not super happy with your sleep quality, or you just feel like your nighttime routine isn't what it could be, then kind of examine those patterns and say, is there something else I could do to get myself in a sleepy state and really prepare my brain for sleep? So whether that's reading instead of watching TV or doing a brain dump journal and turning off your phone for 30 minutes before bed. Um, I think brain dump journals are awesome because oftentimes we go to bed and we're still carrying a lot of the stress from the day. We're still thinking through conversations that need to be had tomorrow, or things that you forgot to do for work, or things that are on your to do list. Um, and it just keeps your brain and so active it makes it hard to just fall asleep and wind down. Right? So having a brain dump journal routine in the evening, um, is a great, great habit to take up if this is something that you struggle with. Also a warm shower or bath in the evening. So similarly to why it's helpful to do a cold shower in the morning. While it sounds counterintuitive, the heat from the shower actually helps to cool your core body temperature when you lay down, so getting your core body temperature down a couple degrees is going to help get you in the best possible sleep quality. Our bodies sleep better when we are cool. We don't sleep well. When we're hot, we're more likely to just kind of toss and turn. So another way that you can set yourself up for a good quality sleep is a cool room with good airflow taking a little warm rinse off or bath before bed. And, um, also trying to minimize light exposure in your room as much as possible. And then, uh, we really should also kind of talk about the parasympathetic nervous system versus the sympathetic nervous system, because when we're talking about stress, it's important to understand how your nervous system plays a role. And you are always kind of falling into one of these two categories. Either you're in your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest state, or you are in sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight. So ideally we want to spend as much time in our parasympathetic nervous system state as possible, especially while eating and just going about daily tasks. When we enter sympathetic nervous system state, it's when we're doing something like exercising or experiencing something that feels like a threat or a stressor. Um, you know, having like a jarring experience, maybe like you're driving down the road and you almost get hit by a car, right? That's going to cause panic and pull you into that nervous system state of, I need to react quickly. I need to get out of this threat. We don't want to spend a lot of time in that sympathetic nervous system state, because that means that we are chronically high stress. And this chronic stress is unfortunately becoming super common in our society because we have so much stimuli happening all the time. We have so many stressors were aware of, like every big threat going on in the world, we're aware of even just the stupidest small drama that's going on in everybody else's lives around us because of social media. And we're constantly having access to people. People have access to us through our phones. So you almost never get just a true break, right? Like we don't hardly ever have times where we don't have cell service and people can't get Ahold of us. And, and, you know, we're we're always kind of aware of everything which can lead to just constantly feeling stressed out. So we want to actively try to stay in our parasympathetic nervous system state as much as possible. And that starts with awareness. One you want to think about, are you someone who is kind of type A? You find yourself very anxious or stressed a lot of the time, like you are someone who is constantly like thinking about worst case scenarios or just someone who's very high strung. People describe you as always anxious or worrying about things or thinking everything through. If that's you, then you probably struggle with staying in a parasympathetic nervous system state, and this might be something that you really want to pay attention to. Okay. So if you find yourself frequently heightened or anxious, here are a few daily practices that you can take on to regulate your cortisol and just try to prevent being constantly in that fight or flight. High stress state. Number one is face dunks, so dunking your face in ice water sounds insane. But this is one of the best things that you can do to kind of reroute your nervous system and get into a better place because it stimulates the vagus nerve, which is directly lined up with the parasympathetic nervous nervous system state. Okay. So that's a really helpful thing that you can do cold exposure in general. But face dunks I feel like is a more practical thing for the average person. So if you're like, I am just freaking out, I'm going down the spiral. I really need to reroute my thoughts. Doing a quick face dunk in cold water is a great way to do it. Specifically getting your eyelids in cold water. Okay, the next one is deep diaphragmatic breaths. I feel like we all know. Oh, take a deep breath. Take a deep breath. But how often are we actually doing this in our day to day life? And this is something I catch myself all the time too. I'm always doing like shallow breathing. My shoulders are up to my ears and I'm just stressed out. Um, so if you can take a few times a day, you know, whether it's right before your meals, you're sitting down to eat, you're already setting aside that time, or you're out for a walk or you're driving or whatever that best time is for you, and take like 2 to 3 minutes to take deep belly breaths where you're really fully expanding your belly with air and then exhaling. Out the mouth and really getting good deep breaths. This is one of the best things that you can do if your body is in a sympathetic nervous system state. To switch that over, I recommend that my clients do this after their workouts because like I said before, exercise is a stressor. So if you go straight from a really intense workout to getting in your car and driving in stressful traffic and then going back to your job where you're stuck in stressful conversations, chances are you're just kind of staying in that heightened nervous system state and you're never coming back down to rest and digest. So it's very important to do the things that are necessary to get you back into a good place, instead of just kind of walking on autopilot in a stressed out state. Um, so really thinking about that with your workouts and then also around your eating, because if we are mowing down our food and we're in a stressed out state, our sympathetic nervous system is actually the opposite of being able to rest and digest. So if we are stressed out while we're eating, we're eating on the go. We're trying to just eat as fast as possible or we're multitasking. We're working while eating. Um, you're probably not going to properly digest your food. So if you are someone who struggles with chronic bloating or just feeling like super upset stomach after you eat, chances are you might be in a very stressed out state as you're trying to digest your food, and your body just can't do it because it thinks that it's trying to fight off a threat. And that's more important than digesting your food. Okay. All right. Other daily practices, cuddling a dog or a loved one. This might feel silly, but it is so important to get loving physical touch. Um, this is something that's going to release some lovey happy hormones for us. And it really has been proven to help lower stress. Um, going for a walk in nature like we talked about just getting outside, going for a walk, hearing sounds like water running or birds chirping has been proven also to actively lower cortisol. Turning off your phone for a while, just being out of reach from people not knowing where your phone is, putting it in a room where you're not looking at it, and then going about your day for a few hours and join your evenings with your family or your friends. Not feeling like you always have to be aware of when someone is trying to contact you or the notifications to your phone. It seems so silly that we even have to bring this up. But like think about this was not even a thing a few years ago. You know, like 20 years ago it was home phones or nothing. And so if you didn't reach out to someone on their home phone, you didn't have access to them. So we really did have a better separation of what was going on in our social life and work life and just what's going on in the world. Like, you could really kind of separate from that and just be and I think we need to get back to that because how our, our world works right now. I mean, it's no wonder that so many of us are just constantly freaking stressed. Um, so don't be afraid to put your phone away or turn it off for a while, okay? Um, the next is laughter. Laughter is so beneficial for getting your body out of a stressed out state. So those are just a few of the things that you can do. Obviously, activities like yoga where you're naturally incorporating some deep breathing activities that you just like, things that are fun for you, dancing, you know, playing pickleball, playing tennis, going skiing, going hiking. Activities that bring you joy are going to be amazing for keeping you in a non stressed out state. Okay, so doing some more of the things that genuinely bring you joy with people who bring you joy. All right. So now let's talk about exercise and stress. We kind of talked about how we want to focus on deep breathing after exercise. But how much is too much when it comes to stress. So let's talk about the stress bucket analogy. I really like this analogy because it's helped me understand why some other people in my life can do crazy amounts of running and hit and be totally fine, and my body has not always reacted super well to that. The reality is, it's different for each person based on their personality type, based on their life factors, stress factors, overall stress. So we really can't just say it's black and white. One size fits all for everybody. So think about your stress buckets like all of the things that bring you stress okay. So the things that are going to go in your stress bucket are going to be like relational things that you're dealing with maybe past trauma, um, job stress, money stress, um, health stress, maybe you're constantly stressing about losing weight, um, uh, stimuli in your life. Like, if you're constantly bombarded with stimuli, you're overstimulated all of the time. Maybe you have a really stressful job commute. Um, maybe you have a really toxic relationship that you're in right now or you're going through a divorce. Those are things that are big stressors. Going through big life events is another one. Um, and then on top of it have maybe a very high strung personality. Maybe you're Type-A, like we were talking about earlier. So already you kind of tend to hold on to that stress. You're not super go with the flow and it really affects you. Well, then if you also are throwing in there like five workouts a week where you're doing an hour of hit, or you're running constantly and doing sprinting and doing all of these things that are increasing cortisol significantly, you might find that that is the thing that's kind of the tipping point for overflowing your stress bucket. Okay, so that's why it's one size fits all. Because someone else who's doing those workouts, maybe they don't have all of these big life changes that are happening. Maybe their job is not stressful at all. Or maybe their relationships are really amazing right now. Things are good in that regard. They're not stressed about losing weight overall, they just don't have as many other outside stress factors. Or maybe they're just like type B personality and they are not worried about a whole lot of anything. Okay, so that's where it is different from person to person. And you really can't compare yourself. Personally, when I was going through a divorce and a lot of stress, a ton of life changes, figuring out life again, um, there was a lot going on for me and I felt the effects of it. And despite working out a ton, doing a lot of high intensity things and then running afterward, I was still really struggling with feeling very puffy, very bloated. My digestion sucked. I was holding on to a lot of weight, and I really had to change up my workouts and pull back on intensity, pull back on workout volume in order to get to a better place. Okay, so that's where it's just different for everyone. And it might even be different for you right now than it is five years from now. So like, for instance, I had to really pull back on running in order to get my period back in order to regulate my cortisol. But last year I ran a half marathon and I was able to train for that and still feel really good. So it's not going to always be the same. So hopefully that can encourage you that if you're in a season of life where things are just so stressful and you know that you kind of need to pull back on your exercise intensity. But maybe you love running or you love your spin classes. You don't have to give that up forever, but you do need to focus on regulating your cortisol before going back to those things. Make sure you're listening to your body on it, okay? All right. So now let's talk about stress and your cycle because there's a lot of information kind of floating around about oh you need to sync your workouts to your cycle. You need to not work out at all if you're on your period, all of these things. And while there's a little bit of truth to it, it always has, as usual in the fitness industry, with all of the stuff that's on marketing and social media, it just gets skewed a little bit and blown out of proportion. So you really don't need to drastically alter your workout schedule during your period or your luteal phase, which is kind of the phase leading into menstruation. However, you can slightly scale back on your intensity and then ramp up intensity again based on where you're at in your cycle. So for instance, let's talk about our cycle. So we have menstruation which is when you're actively bleeding. And then after that you're going to go into what's called your follicular phase. So that's going to be kind of like your inner spring. You're starting to get your energy back. You're able to start really pushing it in your workouts again. So this is a great time to ramp up your intensity and go pretty hard. Then you're going to go into ovulation. This is when you're actually at your peak as far as energy and creativity, and you're feeling good. And you are also probably most likely to be able to like, do PR's, um, and push your workouts the hardest. So ideally, like if you were to schedule, if you were able to perfectly time it out where you're running a marathon or competing in an event you would want it to be during ovulation, that is when you are at your physical peak as a female. Um, the next phase is the luteal phase. This is kind of your inner fall. This is when you start to probably get a little cranky. You might start to feel bloated. You might start to, you know, have some of those PMS symptoms as you're leading into your period. And this is when you're, you know, you're still able to hit it pretty hard in your workouts, but you're going to maybe notice that your energy's not as high as you head into menstruation. That's your inner winter. That's when you are going to feel the least creative, the least physically energized And you're probably not going to want to try to set PR's or run a ton, or do a lot of high intensity things. This is actually when we're most susceptible to injury as females. And it's just energy wise, not going to benefit us to push our workouts the very hardest. However, you can still work out. You just probably will want to rest more, not pick up the heaviest weights that you've ever used, and maybe not do hit classes, spin classes, or a ton of runs. Maybe you're more walking, hiking, doing slow, low intensity, steady state cardio, lifting weights in a moderate, um, you know, weight range. I still do my workouts all month. However, I just scale back on intensity, listening to where I'm at, my cycle, and also what my body is saying, because naturally when I'm on my period, I'm more crampy. I'm not feeling super energized. So my workout intensity is naturally going to be lower. Okay. So just kind of listening to that and being aware of where you're at in your cycle, it also can kind of justify like, okay, no wonder I don't feel super awesome today. Like I'm in my luteal phase about to start my period. I don't need to push the hardest workout I've ever done in my life. Okay, so just making those micro adjustments. Really does help and is the best way that you can quote unquote cycle sync. Okay. All right. Let's talk about signs of potential cortisol imbalance that you can just look out for and then start to kind of implement some of these practices that we've talked about today. One is digestive issues or bloating like we talked about. If you are constantly eating in a stressed out state or you're living in a in a sympathetic nervous system state chronically, then naturally you're eating in that state and you probably will have digestive distress. So that's a really big one. That's a big indicator. The next is weight gain in face or belly sleep issues, moodiness. You're never hungry. You just have like no natural hunger cues. You wake up and you're not hungry at all. Um, tired and wired is a really big one. So meaning like you're laying down at night and you feel like you're actually getting a burst of energy that shows that maybe your cortisol curve is off. If you are more tired in the morning and then energized when you should be winding down at night. Chronic fatigue or feeling just weirded out if you're not in a high stress environment. If you're someone who, like, thrives on stress, and then when you're not in a stressed out time, you don't know what to do with yourself. That's a good sign that maybe you are chronically stressed, like you are someone who thrives on the stress, and you never let yourself just truly get out of that state. Okay, so those are just some potential signs of cortisol imbalance, or that things are just not optimized as well as it could be. And that's where you can start to implement some of the things that we talked about today. Scheduling your day out, light exposure. Uh, cold and heat exposure for optimal energy and sleep. Getting outside as much as possible. Um, implementing some of the things that we talked about in the evening for optimal sleep time. Um, being aware of your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system states how you can be aware of your stress bucket, as well as how to scale back or ramp things up based on where you're at in your cycle as a female. So I hope that you guys have found this helpful. I think just being aware of your stress is the first step and just knowing, okay, I am freaking stressed right now and I need to actively do some things to get myself in a parasympathetic nervous system. And that's number one in taking care of yourself. Sometimes waking up at 6 a.m. and doing the super high intensity workout on an empty stomach is not the answer. Sometimes it's actually the less healthy option. Okay, so being aware of that and listening to your body is huge. So I hope you guys liked this episode. If you have any questions about cortisol, if you are interested in setting up habits that support your health long term, as always, check out the application link in our show notes for our Mountain Metabolic Coaching. Having someone who can help you kind of put all of this together with the workouts, the nutrition. Taking a holistic approach is what we do. We don't compartmentalize because as females especially, we have to look at the whole picture to make sure that we are getting the results that we want and optimizing our health. So if that is something that interests you, then definitely check it out. You can apply and I will reach out to schedule a call with you. So we can just kind of chat through what you're looking for and whether or not the program is a good fit. All right, you guys, thanks so much for tuning in today and I will catch you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the fit for hiking podcast. As always, I hope it leaves you feeling inspired and informed on how to take your health and adventure into your own hands. For more content like this, be sure to follow along with my daily posts at Ponytail Underscore. On a trail that's ponytail underscore on a trail. You can also stay up to date on my new episodes being released at Fit Underscore for hiking, and find more free resources at Pony Tail on a trail.com. Happy and healthy trails.