How to Fix High Cortisol For Good

As most people, when I started taking care of my health and when I started working out, I thought that as long as I bring the same mentality as with every other area of my life, you know, this effort mindset, if I just put in the work, I'll get to where I want eventually. Which, with the results in my hand, couldn't be further from the truth. Because one of the key things that I didn't understand about health and about your physique and your body and you actually being healthy is that it's not an effort game. It's not the one that puts in the most amount of effort that will, that will get the best results, right? I love the analogy. I'm gonna say it again, the Google Maps analogy. So let's imagine this: you and me are heading towards a specific city. We're standing at the same starting point right now. You have no clue in which direction you're going towards, right? I— you have a car, you can drive as fast as you want. I'm gonna walk there, but I have Google Maps assisting me, telling me exactly which step to take. I'm most likely gonna get there quicker than you to this exact destination because of the fact that I have a laid-out plan for me. And you can put in as much effort as you want, you're as much effort as you want, you're probably just gonna drive around in circles. This is how you have to view health, and this is what I didn't understand when I started. I thought effort, effort, effort, as long as I'm putting in the work, 5 workouts a week, following all these roided-up bodybuilders online and these fitness influencers. I was doing everything perfect on paper, but nothing happened. And one of the key things that I didn't understand, that was I was completely fried from a stress perspective. Completely fried. My cortisol was sky high. You can just see in this picture, this is 3 years ago. Sure, I've built some muscle, but I'm looking bloated. I'm holding on to so much water retention. My hormones were in the gutters. I had no libido. I had brain fog. I was super fatigued. I was Sleeping very, very bad, and I was just thinking to myself like, "What am I doing wrong?" On paper, I'm doing everything right. I'm listening. I have the perfect workout plan. I'm listening to all these people. I'm doing everything right. I'm counting every single calorie that enters my body. I'm trying to get shredded here. I'm eating probably 1,800 calories. Nothing is happening. And then we fast forward to now, where three two and a half three years later, where I'm probably eating. I don't even count, but you know. Roughly speaking, three to three point five k calories. I'm working out three times per week, and I'm just not winging it. But I understand that effort is not the thing that is going to take you to where you want health-wise, right? And everything shifted for me, and everything this this whole thing started for me when I understood. Then I sat down, and I realized like I'm doing everything right on paper, yet nothing is happening. Therefore. There, I have to be doing something wrong, right? So I completely restructured my focus regarding health because the only thing that I really wanted when I was here was to feel good and wake up energized and have energy throughout the whole day and have high libido. That's what I wanted. I completely dropped wanting to get shredded and wanting to get big because I felt so shit. And when I then made that switch from How can I look good? To how can I feel good internally? Everything changed. And funny enough, I got into the best shape of my life and everything just fall into place. And that is because health is internal. The physique is a byproduct of you actually being healthy from the inside. There's a reason in nature, you know, this doesn't look healthy compared to this. This looks healthy, right? This is wired so many thousands of years in our biology. Because, you know, a good physique looks healthy and looks good because it's healthy. A bad physique, someone that is overweight, fat, chronically stressed, looks bad because it's unhealthy. Of course, some nuance to this as well, as I've said in another video. If someone is absolutely roided up and they are pinning I don't even know how many things every single day, but they look good, you know, they're not healthy, right? Understanding cortisol, understanding stress was one of the things that I didn't understand. And when I understood that, everything shifted. So So in this video, I'm going to break down exactly how to fix cortisol and high stress and high cortisol for good. First of all, also, if you're new to the channel, welcome. My name is Lucas. I'm just a regular guy from Stockholm, Sweden. And over the last 4 to 5 years, I've dedicated all my time and energy to try to solve complex health problems. So, and all we do on this channel is just breaking those down into small, easy, actionable implementations so you can just walk away with clarity and no uncertainty and have a clear action plan On exactly how to fix your problems. So if you watch this whole video to the end, you'll have a step-by-step bulletproof framework that will fix your cortisol for good. Let's dive into it. First of all, we have to understand what cortisol actually is. Cortisol is your body's primary stress hormone, right? Once again, stress. It's produced by the adrenal glands, and its job is to help you respond to stress. Cortisol helps you wake up in the morning, increase energy, mobilize fuel, and increase alertness. In a healthy body. Cortisol follows a natural rhythm: high in the morning, gradually declining throughout the day, and very low at night. This rhythm is what allows you to feel alert in the morning, focused during the day, relaxed in the evening, and sleepy at night. But in modern life, this rhythm completely gets destroyed. Most people have high cortisol. Today, people are stacking stress on top of stress, not just physiological stress, but physiological stress as well. For example, poor sleep, overtraining, constant stimulation, caffeine abuse, undereating, blood sugar crashes, toxic environments, work stress, relationship stress— all of these things increase cortisol. Here's the problem: your body doesn't know the difference between real danger and modern stress. To your nervous system, an angry email, sleep deprivation, notifications, financial stress, and running from a lion in the jungle all activate the same stress response. And when cortisol stays elevated for long periods of time, that's when the real problem starts to kick in. It's called the silent killer for a reason. Here's just a couple of the things that happens when we stay chronically elevated stress and cortisol for a longer period of time. You get digestive problems. You've heard me talk about this multiple times. If you have super high cortisol and you're sitting down and you're about to eat your food, the last thing your body's gonna do is actually digest the food and absorb the nutrients that you're eating. You can eat the best of the best food, the highest quality grass-fed beef and oysters and caviar and whatever. If you're stressed and chronically stressed while you're eating it, you're never going to see any results from that at all. And it actually can make more damage than good because if you're eating in a stressed state, that can cause massive inflammation, chronic inflammation. It can cause gut dysbiosis. It can cause small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It can cause all these problems even if you eat the best of the best food. Food in the world. Hormone disruption as well, you know, high cortisol suppresses testosterone, growth hormone, literally every single thing in— or every single hormone, um, in your body is affected by it. And that is going to lead to, you know, low libido, poor recovery, brain fog, fatigue, chronic inflammation as well, fat gain. Same thing there, cortisol will increase your fat storage, especially around the stomach area. And that's what you see in everyone, everyone that is super, super high stress, they store all the fat around The stomach and around the abdominal area. So that's what happens. All these bad things. It's like a negative flywheel. You know cortisol cortisol is high, stress is high. Everything just becomes shit. But on the positive side of this as well is that when everything is good is a positive flywheel. So it's like a rising tide lifts all boats, right? When stress is is is good, when cortisol is low, you know you improve digestion, you improve hormones, you improve everything else, right? So it goes up together. It also goes down together. So we want to make sure. We are clear on or which side of that equation we're on, right? We're rising everything together rather than damaging everything together. So let's go into the actual protocol, the 3-pillar framework to fix high cortisol for good. First pillar is going to be elimination, then rebuild, then align the system. So let's go through them. Let's start with pillar number 1, eliminate the drivers of high cortisol. Before we try to fix anything, you first need to stop the things that are constantly driving cortisol up. Because most people today are unknowingly stacking stress on top of stress. Your body has what I call a stress budget. Every stressor you add fills that bucket and eventually it overflows. So the first step is eliminating the biggest cortisol drivers. Think of it— I've showed this before, but think of like if we have this bottle, this is how I want you to think about it. This is your— you can fill this up every single day with stress. This is your budget. Your nervous system doesn't understand what you're filling it up with or which specific area of your life you're allocating the budget towards. But this is your budget. So you have a finite stress budget. There is tools that we can utilize to increase your budget to get a bigger, bigger bottle, right? Which is kind of what we're going to cover here as well. But if you accumulate too much stress, you're going to enter into stress debt. This is where most people end up because they stack so much stress, so much stress, and then they end up in stress debt and then it's going to overplay to tomorrow. And then like that's when all the problems starts to To compound. So you want to view this as how can we go up to roughly about around here, not fill it all the way up, just under. That's like the ideal, the sweet spot. Because once again, stress, it's not bad. There is nuance to this. It's chronically elevated cortisol and stress that is the problem. First thing, first problem people always do, overtraining. Yes, exercise is good, but too much high-intensity training becomes a massive stressor. Especially when it's combined with poor sleep, calorie restriction, and high general life stress. Your body doesn't see intense workout as fitness; it sees it as survival stress, which spikes cortisol. If you're training hard every single day, doing tons of HIIT, constantly pushing to failure, you're likely digging yourself deeper into the cortisol dysregulation. When you're training too much, obviously you're accumulating too much stress. So the thing here is like most people. Once again, exercise is good, but if you have your bucket so filled up already and then you just absolutely bombard it with even more stress from training, you're gonna fuck yourself up. So what you have to do is be very, very intentional with your training and understand that you can't— like, a massive high-intensity CrossFit high rocks session when you have very high stress load in general is one of the worst Things you can do. Second thing that destroys it is poor sleep. Sleep is one of the biggest regulators of cortisol. Obviously, if you constantly sleep poorly, your cortisol rhythm becomes completely disrupted. Instead of instead of cortisol being high in the morning, low at night, it becomes chaotic. You wake up tired, you feel wired at night, and your nervous system never truly recovers. Chronic stimulation. One of the biggest modern cortisol drivers is constant stimulation. Your brain never turns off emails, social media notifications, artificial light. Okay, fine. Your nervous system stays in a constant state of alertness, and the body interprets that as stress, and the nervous system never truly recovers. So one of the best things here you can do is also just in general, like, if you do one thing, focus on one thing. Like, the worst things— and this is where a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of my clients when they come to me have massive problems— is like, you always have this wired effort, effort, effort, effort mentality when you have to learn how to like shut off basically and just like Calm down. You don't need any notifications. You know that you don't need the stimulations throughout the whole day. That is what's going to keep you like keep the nervous system active and and keep the stress budget constantly stacking. So massive problem as well. Blood sugar crashes as well. When blood sugar drops too low, your body releases cortisol to raise blood glucose. This is why people often feel anxious, shaky, irritable. And have a brain fog, especially when they skip meals, they under-eat, and they drink too much caffeine. So we want to regulate our blood sugar levels. Then we have physiological stressors: work stress, relationship stress, financial pressure. Your body doesn't distinguish between emotional stress and physical danger. The response is the same: cortisol rises. And if that stress never resolves, cortisol never calms. Down. So step one is simple: identify and eliminate the biggest stressors that are driving cortisol up every single day. But elimination alone isn't enough because now we need to rebuild the system. Obviously, once again, like when we look at all these things, caffeine. Hopefully by now you've watched some of my other videos where we understand like yeah, the first step in in order for to fix all these things is like cutting out all the All the like artificial sweeteners and like bad, bad food, you know, processed food, all these things. But, you know, this is more of a deep dive when you've already fixed the first step. So yeah, I just wanted to make sure that pillar to rebuild the cortisol rate. Once we remove the major stress drivers, the next step is to rebuild the system that regulates cortisol naturally. So number one thing here is to fix your sleep. Sleep is the master regulator of cortisol. If sleep is broken, cortisol will be broken. Start with fundamentals. Consistent sleep and wake time. This is massive. Dark, cool bedroom. No screens before bed. One of the most powerful things for this as well is dialing in your light diet. Morning sunlight, but not just morning. You want the full light diet dialed in. I have super clear protocols for this in my coaching programs, of course. But you know, getting some sunlight in the morning, midday, and evening is usually, usually what you want to do. Getting sunlight in your eyes. Within the first hour of waking helps to reset your cortisol rhythm, which directly regulates your cortisol and also melatonin release. So dial in your sleep. Surprise, surprise, right? Same thing here for sleep in general. We have in-depth protocols for this in my coaching program, exactly how to get the best sleep of your life. I also have a video breaking that down on my on my channel. So if you're interested in that, go go check that out for more in-depth. Dive into how to fix that. Second thing: regulate the nervous system. If your nervous system is stuck in fight or flight mode, cortisol will remain elevated. You need to actively stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the system responsible for rest and recovery. Some of the most effective tools are slow nasal breathing, walking outside, ideally in nature, meditation, and just like being outside in nature in general. Even at ten minutes, ten minutes a day can shift your nervous system out of stress mode. You how I view stress is like a chart. This is also something. So this is how you can think about it. If you're accumulating stress throughout the day like this, if you're not getting the resets in, it's going to go up like this. If you're actively resetting and switching from sympathetic to parasympathetic here and there, the chart is going to look like this. It's going to go up and down, up and down, up and down. And that's how you stay, let's say, healthy. That's how you, how you keep your cortisol and your stress in check. If you don't get the resets in, it's going to go like this, this, this, this, this. That's when you get a problem. You gotta stabilize your blood sugar. Stable blood sugar keeps cortisol stable. This means eating balanced meals that includes protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates instead of skipping meals, living on caffeine, and eating highly processed foods. When blood sugar is stable, the body doesn't need to constantly release cortisol. One thing here as well that we obviously dive deeper into in my coaching program as well is something called the Randall cycle. So even though you want health, you want fats, you want all the macros in in all meals, if you constantly supply supply your body with too much fat and too much carbs, you can mess up. your metabolism and mess up these things as well. So there's a fine line between how you should structure the meals here, because your body can utilize both carbs and fats as energy. If you constantly supply super high amounts of carbs and fats in your meals, it becomes very problematic and hard, and you create metabolic dysfunction. Your body doesn't understand which of these you should pull, pull energy from, right? So you have to structure meals properly in order to support your body's rhythm and understanding of where should we place higher carbs, where should we place higher fats in order to support all these things, in order to not create metabolic dysfunction, basically. Diving deeper into this, but this is a very interesting topic as well that a lot of people overview. If you like it, super, super healthy, super good. This is a pretty, you know, This is intentionally pretty low volume of carbohydrates because it's a pretty high fat meal in general, right? Avocado, high fat ground beef, some cheese, lower amounts of carbs. Because if this was like, if I had a shit ton of rice here as an example, and I had this super high fat as well, it becomes very problematic for your body to understand how to go about breaking this down. So we want to give our body the correct and easy inputs, so it becomes very, very easy for your body to also understand and do the right thing at all times. Smart training. Exercise should improve your resilience to stress, not constantly increase it. Focus on strength training, walking, mobility instead of doing high-intensity training every single day. Recovery is where the adaptation happens. So when you go into the gym as well, instead of doing like super high amounts of reps and a shit ton of volume. You want to go in and you want to do almost the least amount possible with the most amount of intensity and the most amount of precision. And then you want to throw in things as stretching, rotational work to make sure we're not having a super dehydrated fascia, which is also one of these things that is going to mess up your cortisol. If you're staying— if your fascia is stuck and, and dehydrated, you know, that's also something that causes inflammation and high cortisol. So Mix up your training, do a lot of good, very— have a good variety in it. Train hard and train little. That's how you want to go about it. That's what you want to do to rebuild the system. Then the last pillar is going to be to align the system. What regulation actually means. The final pillar is something most people completely overlook, and that is the system alignment. Crucial problems don't happen because of one thing. They happen when your entire lifestyle is out of alignment with your biology. Humans evolved with sunlight during the day, darkness at night, movement throughout the day, and periods of calm and stillness. But modern life flips that completely upside down. Artificial light at night, constant stimulation, little movement, and high physiological stress. When you start aligning your lifestyle with your biology again, cortisol naturally begins to regulate itself. You wake up energized, you feel focused during the day, and you naturally become tired at night. Clarification here as well. Once again, high cortisol isn't the enemy. Cortisol is essential for energy, focus, and performance. The real problem is chronic stress without recovery. And the solution isn't another supplement. It's fixing the system that regulates stress in the first place. Once you eliminate the biggest stressors, rebuild the core system, and align your lifestyle with your biology, your body naturally shifts out of survival mode. And that's when you start to experience better energy, better digestion, better sleep, better hormones, because your body is finally working with you instead of fighting against you. Of course, there's some supplements that can help with this as well. Once again, that's things that we deep dive into in my coaching program. There's things as L-theanine, Taurine, B vitamins if you're burning through a lot of stimulants, mineral balance is super, super important as well. There's things that we can utilize, that's things that we deep dive into my coaching program or in my coaching program as well. If you're constantly feeling wired but at the same time exhausted, you're not recovering properly, you're dealing with brain fog, energy crashes, and it feels like all the work you're putting in, the workouts, the diet, the discipline isn't actually giving you the results it should. High cortisol and chronic stress are very likely one of your biggest bottlenecks. I can almost guarantee you that because once again, I'm gonna reiterate this, but this is exactly the situation that I found myself in. I had the perfect workout plan according to these bodybuilders and these roided-up fitness influencers, perfect macros, tracking every single, every single gram. I had brain fog, energy crash, dependent on caffeine, sky-high cortisol. I was fatigued. Fast forward to now, I do 3 workouts a week. I'm prioritizing true health over aesthetics. I have sky-high energy, zero brain fog, laser-sharp focus, and low cortisol. And I just enjoy— I wake up energized, I wake up not gasping, I have no afternoon crashes, I'm not relying on caffeine to get through the day, and everything is just really, really nice, to be honest. And fixing my cortisol and fixing my stress budget is one of the key things. That helped me with this. And once again, this is why also with all my clients I'm taking the approach that I'm taking, because for a lot of these people, you know, let's take you, Will, here as an example. He's a founder from Sweden, super high work stress, super high stress in general. He doesn't have a lot of like of his budget available. And this, the problem here, you can almost see it like it just looks from a hormonal perspective that everything is messed up. 4 months later in this case, Absolutely jacked and dialed. This doesn't happen from just a good training plan and just a good meal plan. It happens from fixing all these things around it, fixing the stress, fixing your hormones, fixing your gut health, fixing all these small little details. That's what creates true health and crazy results. Same thing with Tonda, business owner from Czech Republic. Same thing here. I've been training for multiple years. Four months later, boom. Two months as well. Forty-year-old dad from Sweden. These are just a few of the examples. Land and business owner from the US, effort, effort mindset, skipping sleep, building his business, focusing on all these things. 4 months later, jacked, diced, in his own words, better business leader, better, better CEO because he's actually someone that, you know, you can look up to. He's not just talking the talk, he's also walking the walk, right? Same thing with Rasmus. Some other examples. You've seen Ludwig here on my channel as well. Ludwig is one of my best friends. This is once again, this is one roughly a year ago. This is a few months ago. So here Ludwig is working in finance, right? Very high stress job as well. Super, super high stress. Didn't really focus on anything. Putting in the work in the gym for 10 years, nothing really. Of course, built some— built a good foundation, but then dialing all these things in, dialing in the nutrition, dialing in every single thing in— absolutely ridiculous, right? Luca as well, 40 days. I've shown this before. High stress business owner. Fixing everything, dialing everything in. Forty days later, boom! This you don't see this anywhere else because this doesn't happen from just for your regular fitness from your regular fitness coach because I'm not a fitness coach. I'm a health and performance coach. This is not something this the superhuman protocol. My coaching is not for you if you just want a training plan and nutrition plan. Is for you if you want to absolutely dial in your health as a as a whole. The like you want to dial in the full picture and you understand. That a good physique will come as a byproduct of you actually being healthy from the inside, and this is a prime example of that. Forty days—you don't get this in forty days by just fixing the training plan. You get it by dialing all the small little variables in around, right? Forty days—you've seen this same thing here with Noel. Six months, ten kgs up on the scale, holding the same body composition. This is like you don't get this from just the right training. It's dialing in the hormones. It's dialing everything in. Noel is a business owner from Sweden as well. Arthur, same thing here. Business owner from Portugal, high stress, looking bloated, inflamed, and then two months later, washboard abs, looking like an absolute unit. Alex, business owner from Sweden as well, bloated, inflamed, holding on to fat around the stomach, and then boom, two months later, shredded to the bones. Ian as well. These are just a few examples. Miguel, one of the Miguel looked at one of the other videos, the chronic stress video. And then he took action. He joined 7 days between. It's here, it's 7 days between. And here you see it from him. You don't get this from just training and nutrition. You get this from focusing on, on everything and dialing everything in. Same thing with Leo here as well. Been training for 10 years, bloated, inflamed, doing everything wrong. Doctor from Brazil. Boom, 3 months later, 120 days, looking like a Superman. So if you're interested in this, if you're interested in, in hearing more about the Superhuman Protocol, which is my coaching program, that's where we do twice a month one-to-one. You have a full Laid out action plan on everything regarding all these small variables around health. You don't want to spend seven days a week meal prepping and being in the gym. You want to focus on the things that are giving gonna that are gonna give you the most amount of leverage and the most amount of ROI time-wise invested, right? Then this is for you. This is for you if you have a busy schedule, you have a high stress load, and you want to absolutely maximize every single minute. Of your day with small little things, with small little tweaks, and focus on the things that are going to give you the most amount of leverage. Because that's exactly how I do things myself. I'm a business owner at the end of the day. I don't want to be in the gym 7 days a week. I want to make the things and I want to do things that give me the most amount of return on investment always. So if you're interested in that, check out the first link in the description where we'll have— you'll have a call with me or my right-hand man, Anton. We'll map out your current situation, see if the Supremium Protocol is for you, tell you a bit more of how everything works. And then we'll take it from there. But you we get one of the things here as well. We get so insane results with all clients, or I get it with all clients because of the fact that I do a current situation analysis with all clients. So whenever someone comes comes in, I review exactly how you how you're doing things right now and where you're going wrong, and then I can just pinpoint. It's not a one size fits all. There's not no such thing as a one size fits all because everyone's life is looking different. But by understanding how your exact life looks. I can pinpoint this is where you're going wrong. This is exactly what we should be fixing first, and by doing so, we get so insane results. In Luca's case here, it was stress. It was eating inflammatory food, and was not managing his his stress levels, and also having no clue at all about like his gut health, and actually focus on making sure that the food that he's eating is actually being absorbed. Right? Same thing with after eating a lot of inflammatory food. So you get the point. By seeing your full Your current situation, I can pinpoint this is where you're going wrong. This is where we fix boom crazy results instant. So if that's something for you, check the first link. If not, I hope you take some really good notes from this video. Focus on on fixing your stress, and it's going to absolutely change your life. Focus on fixing high cortisol and lowering it. It's going to be a game changer for every single aspect of your life. I promise you. And if you have any questions about it, drop them below. If you're new to the channel, drop a subscribe, whatever these guys say, I don't even know. Or if you don't want to do that, don't do it. Hope you enjoyed the video. If there's any questions, shoot me a message, maybe on IG as well. You can always shoot a message there or drop them in the comments. And thanks for watching, guys. I'll see you in the next one. This was how to fix high cortisol for good.