Short video transcript (Dr. Doni Wilson) explaining cortisol’s role and daily rhythm, how acute stress causes temporary cortisol spikes, and how chronic/recurrent stress or unresolved trauma can dysregulate cortisol and thereby disrupt other hormones; offers reassurance that cortisol can be reset toward optimal levels.
You don't need to be a scientist to understand your hormones. Let's make it simple. For example, your stress hormone cortisol, is a hormone that is not the same all day. It actually fluctuates with our circadian rhythm. Cortisol, we want it to be higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day so that it's at its lowest when we go to sleep. And then when we wake up the next morning, it comes up again. Now, when we're exposed to stress of any kind, stress, even from the alarm going off, that can affect your cortisol levels, in which case your brain tells your adrenal glands to make more cortisol as a stress response. And what would be a healthy response would be the cortisol increases and then comes back to an optimal level after the stress has passed. The thing is, is when we're under chronic recurrent stress, or if we have unresolved trauma, our cortisol levels can get stiff, stuck. And cortisol acts essentially as a supervisor to all the other hormones and messengers in our body. So if cortisol is too high or too low, it's going to be sending a stress signal to your other hormones like insulin and estrogen and so on. And so whenever we are stuck in a stress response or trauma response, we're actually causing a ripple effect of stress throughout our body. The good news is we can help our bodies to recover from stress and trauma, and we can reset our cortisol back to optimal levels.
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