The Role of Cortisol in the Stress Response

Boom, another buzzword and common thing you'll hear on the internet, high cortisol makes you fat. Let's dive in and unpack this. If you look at all the hormones and what's happening during a stress response, cortisol is an innocent bystander it's it's basically the brain's telling it to move energy around in response to a fight flight uh freezer facade type moment so just as insulin because dr walsh told us you can't really look at this as a storage hormone we can't think of cortisol as only doing like moving around things right so in the scope of norepinephrine norepinephrine when it gets out of control it's going to make you like it's it's kind of your hurry worry type hormone so it's going to cause anxiety and it's going to cause your stress levels to go up which is then going to cause a more of a sympathetic response and when you you're not going to see norepinephrine being released without releasing epinephrine or what we call in australia they call it adrenaline so as adrenaline goes up it's going to selectively down to or down regulate insulin receptors so that as you're pushing this this glucose into the bloodstream you don't have random tissue taking it. You just want the right tissues taking it like skeletal muscle, you know, your heart, your brain and your liver and things like that. So, um, people, people like the pigeonhole certain hormones because they don't think about everything working in a matrix and everything working together. So, um, you can have a, look at a diabetic. If you, if you run labs on a diabetic, they can have high cortisol and they can have rampant insulin depending on where they are on the spectrum and depending on how much insulin they're shooting if they're shooting insulin. So shooting insulin isn't necessarily going to drop cortisol. And we've got to get out of just looking at cortisol anyways, because we need to more be looking at the nervous system and that sympathetic response and that jacked up release of norepinephrine and epinephrine as well.