The Cortisol Pyramid Scheme

And Why to Never Trust a Beautiful Dipshit on TikTok

This article has been invoked by many readers, and I am thrilled to write it - we’re taking a deep dive into the most annoying MLM scheme on the internet: hormone balancing, stress hormones in particular.

In the last year or so, I have seen the most internet yapping about cortisol and how to lower it. This narrative comes almost entirely from the evil kingdom of “wellness” influencers and has a high cross section with “beauty” and “flat tummy hacks.” I’ve seen videos about swapping morning coffee for water, I’ve heard yoga teachers with 50k followers say social media is the problem, I’ve seen the fucking Kardashians launch “chill” gummies with the byline of “lowering cortisol” - can you imagine Travis fucking Barker talking about ashwaghanda or people with more money than god promising you anything you can count on?

Like most things, the gullible consumer is usually had by a combination of factors: their own lack of knowledge, their lack of understanding of their own body, and the multi billion dollar marketing machine that is the supplement industry. I feel that in order to understand what a product can or cannot do for you, you must understand what it’s targeting, and what the results of that ‘treatment’ or ‘targeting’ may yield. When a physical attribute, such as commonly referenced “moon face” or “cortisol belly”, are the top key words in a treatment, you must apply extreme discretion, because only in an ego driven, capitalist model does our health have anything to do with a geographically unique beauty standard. Read that as many times as you have to. Let’s dive in to where stress comes from, what contributes to stress, and its effects on your actual health.

Everybody has heard about the fight or flight response, an evolutionary response which heightens our senses in order to deal with a perceived acute risk or threat. To me, an adrenal response feels like really cold water pouring into my belly - when you slam on your brakes, when you think you missed a meeting, when you realize you sent the screenshot to the person whose text you screenshotted - we’ve all been there.

When your eyeballs and your ears perceive a threat, signals travel to your brain and put your automatic nervous system to work - this system is comprised of your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system. First, your sympathetic nervous system sends a message to your adrenal glands. From here, epinephrin, aka adrenaline, starts to circulate throughout your body. Heart speeds up, lungs open up, you become more aware of your senses, you basically become the cocaine bear. At this point, your parasympathetic nervous system sends signals to your HPA axis (hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands), to release a couple hormones (from the H, to the P, to the A, ayyyyeeee) which releases cortisol. Once the threat subsides, your cortisol level falls. If you cycle through this process, say, after hitting the brakes and avoiding a collision, your body repairs itself and you recover, maybe adding a greater stopping distance the next time you drive. But in cases of chronic stress, recovery slows down, affecting many systems in your body.

Chronic stress - the lack of the signal back to the brain that the threat has passed - is what happens when this cortisol lowering transmission dampens and ultimately goes away - even though the acute threat may be gone, the hypervigilance remains. Chronic stress is an incredible threat to virtually every system in your body, beginning with the dampened response to threat and ending with life threatening complications. Many cases of chronic stress have been linked to childhood trauma, separation from mother, and physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. PTSD or CPTSD have been linked to both higher and lower irregularities in the concentration of cortisol. Traumatic events, anxiety disorders, high tension jobs - many links to stress response exist. The problem is, measuring cortisol in the body in a meaningful way is almost impossible at the concentrations which are most common - your cortisol levels shift throughout the day, so a test is usually more of a snapshot than a movie. These findings, while anecdotal and in some ways consistent, are not sure-shot links the way touching a hot iron leads to a burn. So rather than speculate, we owe it to our bodies to understand how to support these systems and influence the things we can control while we navigate recovering from the experiences and traumas which lead to stress.

Wait, Anna, this is getting kind of serious… I thought we were going to make fun of influencers? We will. But understanding what contributes to your stress can literally save your life. I need you to stay with me.

Let’s establish this: not everybody is chronically stressed. Not everybody who feels stress daily is chronically stressed. Fight or flight is a term which should be reserved for instances of great trauma, yet gets thrown around and adapted to very benign situations. The systems in your body exist to combat the day to day low impact stressors and feeling that is totally normal. The language surrounding the cortisol conversation is dangerous in the way that it suggests everybody is in some sort of hormonal imbalance which is fundamentally untrue. I have been diagnosed (as much as a person can be) with cPTSD due to prolonged experiences of trauma as a child. Coupled with the cPTSD is severe depression and anxiety, something I have to be medicated to live with, fully impervious to ashwaghanda and Kardashian gummies. For years, I was convinced I had adrenal fatigue (literally not a real term), that my cortisol must be totally out of whack, and that all of my problems, weight fluctuations, and digestive issues were due to cortisol. I had thousands of dollars worth of testing done and my cortisol levels came back completely normal. This is true for many people I’ve spoken with with similar stories.

What was contributing to all of my issues? Wow, the same things that contribute to the malfunction of all of our systems - diet, alcohol consumption, and lack of consistent physical exercise.

We can dive into the nutrition bit first, but let’s go back to cortisol as it’s released as part of your maintained stress response. Cortisol and insulin are directly tied in an antagonistic way - cortisol spikes your blood sugar while insulin regulates it. Through prolonged and chronic stress, cortisol dampens the insulin response, leading to insulin resistance. It’s about to come full circle here.

The first real stab at a definition for stress in a medical sense came from Hans Selye, an endocrinologist who initially discovered the HPA axis around the 1940s. His work specifically focused on the relationship between stress and disease, and he defined stress as ‘the body's general response to any demand for change.’ Naturally, since then, the definition has broadened, but the key note here is that the actual, medical definition of stress encompasses physical factors as well as emotional ones, whereas many stress and stress relief writings and phrasings suggest that it is only a reaction to an emotional encounter. This is huge in understanding the greater relationship between stress and illness, because the increasingly devastating effects of processed foods and lack of meaningful nutrition contribute to the greatest chronic stress of all, resulting in not only cortisol release and accumulation but the ultimate failure of every single body system.

Yes, I totally baited you with supplement deinfluencing, but I’m actually just laying out what happens to your body when you eat like shit, and it goes so much further than weight gain that you owe it to yourself to listen.

Our body is a system built for our survival. Our brain is capable of sending transmissions which happen so quickly that we don’t even notice - hormonal response, cell turnover, detoxification, all processes essential to our optimal survival. When we handicap the receptors of those transmissions, we don’t just damage one part of our body or overall health - we immediately compromise the entirety of the system. Of course, chronic disorders, injuries, autoimmune diseases, traumatic experiences, mental illnesses - all things we cannot control but greatly affect our health and prevent us from recovering as intended in a perfect body. But in order for any healing to be possible, we must contribute to supporting our body as it tries. The greatest contributor to illness in this country is constant stress on the body, and it does not have to do with emotional experiences.

Smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet, and lack of physical exercise contribute directly to cell death, chronic stress, and failing health. When a supplement promises to lower your cortisol, you need to ask yourself why your cortisol is high in the first place. High sugar content spikes insulin - triggers a cortisol response. Vitamin D deficiencies trigger a cortisol response. Vitamin E deficiencies damage your adrenal glands and stop them from sending the cortisol lowering signal. These are your insulin resistance causes. Magnesium deficiency destroys the neurotransmitters in your adrenal glands and utterly disregulate cortisol response. Alcohol consumption compromises your HPA and guess what? Triggers a cortisol response. Nicotine? Cortisol response. When we talk about chronic stress, we cannot only talk about our feelings - the chronic stress we put our bodies through on a regular basis is the deadliest kind. I assure you that breathing through your traffic jam pails in comparison to feeding your body with the nutrients it so desperately needs to be able to function as intended. There is no ashwaghanda gummy that will make up for anything mentioned in this paragraph. Your body could not possibly maintain a healthy stress response to a ‘fight or flight’ situation when it exists in perpetual stress from what you are feeding it.

Okay, that’s all the menacing that I’m going to do here, so we can bring it all back around now and get back to this moon face, cortisol belly nonsense. At this point, I think it’s fair to assume you understand the connections between chronic stress and cortisol, and cortisol’s effects on illness. I encourage you to ask yourself what places more stress on your body - is it your job or what you’re eating, drinking, and smoking? Is it your anxiety or your lifestyle of mindless consumption? By the way, if your face is ‘swollen’ specifically and only due to cortisol, you have Cushing Syndrome. This happens when a tumor grows in your pituitary gland and disregulates your hormonal stress response. This is a rare disorder. If you’re reading this, the chances of you having Cushing’s are incredibly slim, and the much more debilitating symptoms of this disorder would have brought you to medical attention by now. Short of long term steroid use, Cushing’s, chronic illness or major hormonal disorders, unwanted weight on your body can be remedied by consistent diet, exercise, caloric deficit, and nutritious consumption. That is all.

The funny thing about a diet low in processed foods and high in whole, natural ingredients is that the body rewards you for taking care of it. You feel better. You handle stress better. You hurt less, ache less, recover faster, live longer. There are so few things we can control on planet earth - what we consume is one of them.

What gets marketed to you as ‘stress relief’ may relax you in a limited sense, because to say we can mitigate the stress which causes damage to our body by taking one pill robs us of the vision of the bigger system at play - our overall health is our responsibility during our time in our vessel. I wonder why the insanely important discussion of chronic stress is brought down to something as vain as our appearance - I fear this trend in the wellness space and I hope for better fact checking and consumer resources in an age where access to healthcare and doctors who give a shit about you is limited. The only place to start getting healthier is with what you do and don’t put into your body. I have many articles going in depth on this and if you’re new here, I encourage you to read them. The earth provides, the body is capable of miraculous recovery. We must contribute to the system. When you’re eating for convenience, just remember - what’s cheap now won’t be down the road. Eat more vegetables. Eat less shit that comes out of a box. Drink water. Go for walks. You have the ability to heal your body in a way that cannot be taken away from you - unless you choose to put your health in the hands of a beautiful dipshit on TikTok.

As always, thank you so much for reading. I hope that as you consume more of this Substack, you understand that the underlying cause for both our illness and our health is deeply vested in our diet. I hope this article, and all of these articles, inspire you, frustrate you, offend you, validate you, and support you into making choices that will contribute to a length and quality of life that you deserve.

Please, today, make yourself something good to eat, something that comes from the earth and not from a package. This plate will save your life.

All of my love,

Anna