Cortisol and Brain Health

Hey everybody. In this video, we're going to talk about stress, cortisol, your stress hormone and brain health, cognition, memory and more. I am Dr. Diane Mueller. I'm the owner of my Lyme Doc medical clinic. And let's get started. So cortisol is a stress hormone. A lot of you all have heard of it. Most people when they think of cortisol, they think bad and they think weight gain, especially around the abdomen. So cortisol has got a really bad reputation and it is a stress hormone. It can cause weight gain around the abdomen, it can cause memory issues. Right. And cognitive decline. So it definitely has a reason for getting a lot of this bad press. But one of the things I want to make sure that you're understanding about cortisol is it is not all bad. Cortisol is actually really, really good for you. You need cortisol. And if you did not have cortisol, if your cortisol plummeted too low, you would actually end up in the hospital. And if it was too low, you would even die. Right? Because it's so important. It helps with so many things. It helps with, it's at the right level if it's doing what it's supposed to do. It helps with energy, it helps with mood, it helps with your blood sugar regulation so that your blood sugar doesn't fall too low. Right? So it's does a lot of different things that are really important for health on a day to day basis. But when cortisol gets too high, which it can usually through prolonged stress, it can wind up causing abdominal weight gain, it can cause cognitive problems. Sometimes chronic stress over long periods of time can do the opposite. It can make the cortisol wind up going too low. So either stage, either component is very poor. Possible. But one of the things to really understand is you absolutely want enough cortisol and you want to test cortisol because it does make a difference. You want it in its perfect range. And the most ideal way to check cortisol is to do a cortisol awakening response, which ideally you want to do this about 30 minutes after you wake up. So you want to do this right away. In the perfect world, you would do this more through saliva, but you can also do this through blood. I say perfect world because cortisol awakening response is when you, or when you get blood drawn, you actually will get a little bit of a cortisol spike for most people because having a needle in your veins is a little stressful and cortisol is a stress hormone. So sometimes Salivary tests can be slightly more accurate for really finding that cortisol awakening response. But blood tests can work very, very well. They're more likely to be covered by insurance. You just want to go to the lab as soon as possible after you wake up in the morning and take it as soon as possible. And what you're looking for is you're actually looking for your results to show cortisol a little bit on the high end at that point of day. If you want to do more investigative tests for cortisol, you would actually do something like a cortisol times four. And my favorite test for this is actually a urine test. And what you would do for this is you would actually test cortisol throughout the day four different times using urine. So you can actually see what your cortisol is doing. Because in proper health, it goes spikes in the morning and it slowly basically descends during the day. And every point in the day is going to have its normal value, right? What it's normal, what is not normal. So you can get a really good sense of what cortisol's doing when you do a urinary test because of the. The different times of day will have different levels of where cortisol should be. Right. So that's really important to understand. And for the purposes of this video, the point, one of the points that I wanted to make is that we see that when cortisol levels are really high, we actually can see low brain activity. We can see negative emotions. We can see that we can also have the opposite. We can see that high brain activity as well. Right. So we can see just the brain activity that has changed and we can see reduced cognition. So we want to consider. When we're looking at cognition, we're looking at brain fog. We're considering all the different root causes you'll see on this channel. But get your cortisol tested. It's an important hormone for brain health. It's an important hormone for energy. It's an important hormone when we're talking about chronic fatigue or chronic infections. So there's so many different things that cortisol is important for. And if you want to just have energy throughout your day and be the ability to go through your day and your job and function high, you absolutely want to consider what cortisol is doing because this can impact your brain, your mood, your energy, your day in so many different ways. Okay, I hope this has been helpful. Please do subscribe to this channel. If you're interested in getting this testing done, please check out my DIY program where you have access to order labs direct to consumer. So you can check out that link in the show notes below. And that's all for now. See you in the next one.