Stress Hormones

What your body does with stress 👇

I think we can all agree that the holiday season is one of the most stressful times of year.

Maybe you have a sense that it affects your health, but do you actually know why or how?

If you want to train your body to be more resilient to stress (so it doesn’t have so much control over your life), it helps to understand stress hormones.

So let’s start there.

There are 2 hormones to know:

Cortisol & Adrenaline (also called Epinephrine). Here are the differences:

1️⃣ Adrenaline is released rapidly as an immediate response to stress, whereas cortisol is released in a daily rhythm regulated by the brain & the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

2️⃣ Adrenaline has fast effects to activate the body when in danger (think “fight or flight!”) Cortisol has slower effects that are not as obvious to track.

3️⃣ Whereas adrenaline increases the heart rate and can make you feel anxious during intense moments, cortisol has longer-term health effects related to metabolism, sleep, brain, and mood.

Cortisol is so central to the stress cycle that I’ll be sharing more about it and what we can do to balance it in upcoming posts.