1576. High Cortisol: Like a Lion's Chasing You! – Part 1

Ever feel like you're being chased by a lion? That’s exactly how your body reacts to chronic stress by flooding your system with cortisol, the stress hormone. While this fight or flight response can save your life in a true emergency, living in a constant state of stress wreaks havoc on your health.

In today’s episode, Dr. Martin unpacks the science behind cortisol and its impact on your body—from disrupted sleep and suppressed melatonin production to inflammation, immune dysfunction, and chronic illnesses like heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

 

TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE

Announcer:  You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.

Dr. Martin:  Well, good morning everyone, and hope you're having a great start to your day. We sure appreciate you guys coming on. Have you had your coffee yet? I'm just having another cup. What I want to talk to you a little bit about this morning, a new study that came out on cortisol. Okay, now you know what cortisol is, your adrenals secrete cortisol. And cortisol is a hormone and it's very much involved in your life. You don't even think about it until it goes south. And what do I mean by that? Well, cortisol is involved in getting you up in the morning. That's normal. It elevates your blood pressure, it elevates your blood sugar, it starts to wake you up. And cortisol sort of follows what we call a circadian rhythm during the day. So high in the morning starts to level off, and then by nighttime, or at least it should be down to very low levels because your body's getting ready to go to sleep.

In the world in which you and I live today, that is what is such a big problem, okay? And the reason is because the world is sort of upside down. There's so much stress. Now, in our newsletters, we talk about getting chased by a lion. And it's kind of funny because if you got chased by a lion, your cortisol would be through the roof because it's a big part of your adrenaline. It's a big part of your fight and flight. So if a lion is chasing you, you ain't fighting, you're running and you ain't outrunning the lion, okay? But what we were saying in newsletters is your body can't differentiate between a lion attacking you where you're like this or you're under a lot of stress from the environment, the family dynamics, relationships, worry of finances, all of the above. Your body doesn't differentiate that it just secretes high levels of cortisol to keep you in the fight or flight. If you're in the fight or flight, you're not resting or digesting.

So what does that mean? Well, the number one issue with cortisol, the number one problem really with cortisol more than anything else is sleep. Because if your cortisol is high, you're going to have trouble sleeping. If you're having trouble sleeping, your cortisol is high. So you're in a vicious cycle and millions of millions of North Americans fight that every day. Now, let me just talk about cortisol and sleep for a minute. What cortisol does, and we didn't even know this before, okay, because I've been studying cortisol for a long time. Anybody that's followed me over the years, let me just grab you a book. Here is it for my Quebec viewers. "La syndrome de la fatigue chronique puis la fibromyalgie." And here was my thesis. When I got my PhD, I wrote my thesis. Here it is and this is in 1996. Chronic fatigue syndrome, free radical damage. Okay?

Now what I put in here and what I put in these books was chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, which I believe, and I think I can prove it, are two sides of the same coin. It is adrenal gland exhaustion from secreting way too much cortisol over a long period of time. In my opinion that's how you got chronic fatigue, because way back in the day they were saying, well, it was the yuppie flu. It was the Epstein Barr virus. Most doctors thought it was in between people's ears because they didn't know how to diagnose it and they didn't know what to do about it. And I was talking about it years and years before mainstream medicine even agreed that it could probably be a condition. I wrote about it, I studied it. I was looking at cortisol levels way back when, and that was very much involved cortisol, because cortisol is on your side until you can't turn it off.

And this is what I found. And it was in mostly women. It wasn't all women, but mostly women. And these people were exhausted. These people had brain fog. These people had usually fibromyalgia with a lot of pain, unexplained. A lot of inflammation markers were prevalent. And that's what I wrote about way back when. So I was very familiar with the adrenal glands and your stress glands. And they're good. They're on your side. They put you into the fight or flight. If someone scares you, if you're walking at night, you're walking to go out to your car at night and you hear footsteps behind you, cortisol is involved in that. And that's good because it'll get you to run or fight, but you don't want that to be turned on all the time.

And we talk about this on the program a lot because I wrote a book back in 2011, Serial Killers: Two Hormones that Want You Dead, cortisol and insulin. And it was because my practice was overwhelmed, if I can use the word with people that had high cortisol and high insulin and developed insulin resistance. I wrote books about it and I had a radio show. I talked about it all the time. And most people weren't that familiar with cortisol, including your doctor, because the problem with medicine, they're usually late to the dance. And when it comes to cortisol, unless you have Cushing's or Addison's disease, diseases of the adrenal gland, they don't even measure it. They don't think of it unless you're a functional medical doctor. Cortisol, it's stress, it's life. Who cares, right? It's not that serious. You're not dying. So you got a little bit of stress, deal with it.

But we know that cortisol pours gasoline on the fire of inflammation. Now we know that. And the new study that came out, we talked about this last week just for a minute, we didn't get a chance to get into it too much. Cortisol inhibits. This is hot off the presses guys. Cortisol inhibits melatonin. What? Cortisol inhibits melatonin. So when your cortisol is up, you're not taking in the melatonin. Okay? Remember now, melatonin, because people think of melatonin as a supplement, and you can get a supplement of melatonin. I'm not big on the supplement of melatonin. I'm much bigger on the sun because the sun, the sun's out today here in Northern Ontario. And if I just look outside on a sunny day, I'm getting melatonin in my eyeballs. A dark room at night. You get melatonin. That's why we love the sleep mask, right? Why do we like the sleep mask? Because when you're in a dark pitch black room, you're secreting much more melatonin.

But one of the things that blocks melatonin is cortisol. You got to get your cortisol down. And it's not easy in this day and age. And we live in a cortisol, crazy world, and a lot of that is 24 hour media, 24 hour social media, 24 hour stress. Stress seems to be on steroids today. We've talked about this in the past, like mental health in young people. It's incredible the amount of young people that are on SSRIs and they're stressed to the hilt. And my dear friend there, Dr. McEwen, she'd know all about this, teaches psychology at the University of Tennessee. Knows all about this. It's an epidemic today. So cortisol again is on your side, guys, until it's not. And in my practice, not only chronic fatigue, but what I saw, it was almost every patient that came into my office in the year, I'm going to say around 2004, 2005, it seemed that every, I couldn't get over it. It started to affect because we measured cortisol. We used to do a urine test for cortisol, and it was through the roof on most people. It was affecting them.

We've talked about some of the symptoms you get of cortisol. It pours gasoline on inflammation ion. Some of the signs are like brain fog, belly fat, a lot of women, they're eating properly, they're doing everything right and they got belly fat. And that can be a sign of high cortisol and elevated blood pressure. A lot of people are walking around, their blood pressure is above normal and it's all stress related. Two S's, sugar and stress. Sugar will elevate your blood pressure. Stress elevates your blood pressure, it elevates your blood sugar. Remember, cortisol in the morning is getting you up in the morning. What does it do? That's why I tell people, don't tell me your blood sugar in the morning. Doc, my blood sugar is high in the morning. Why are you taking it? Don't take it in the morning first thing because it's supposed to be high. Your blood sugar will go up in the morning because cortisol is involved in that.

But think about cortisol through the day and your blood sugar goes up. Well, what goes up must come down. So your insulin, cortisol directly affects insulin. Why? Because if it's elevating your blood sugar, well, you need insulin to bring your blood sugar down. Cortisol is very much involved in insulin resistance. You get a double whammo and in that book, two hormones that want you dead. I talked about the relationship of cortisol and insulin. Two serial killers that want you dead. Insulin over a period of time will kill you because it's very much related to all the chronic diseases that you can think of. Okay? Think of a chronic disease, heart disease, insulin, diabetes, obviously insulin. Cancer, insulin's got a big effect on that. Alzheimer's, insulin, type three diabetes. And remember, cortisol will pour gasoline on inflammation.

So now you've got cortisol, and if you listen to most doctors, I might even have a book here this morning, I'm just trying to think if I see it. Anyway, I do have a book in my library here. One of my colleagues wrote this book, the Inflammation Cure. But they relate inflammation to being at the root of all chronic disease. So I mentioned heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, autoimmune, diabetes, all the big ones. These doctors think, well, one good thing, I like it because they're thinking outside the box. Say, well, inflammation's involved when you've got damaged blood vessels, inflammation. But you know what we say it on this program all the time. Inflammation's not Houdini. It takes insulin. Insulin resistance, that causes inflammation, leaky gut, that causes inflammation. So when you have the root cause, you can do something about it. And then cortisol pours gasoline on the fire of inflammation.

I talked about this in many, many programs over the years. I wrote about it in several of my books. Cortisol and cancer. Breast cancer ladies, almost invariably, breast cancer. It's estrogen driven. Oh, my doctor said it's not estrogen driven. Look, I'm telling you, it's always estrogen driven. But cortisol is very much involved because when stress, think of it, you're running from a lion. Your body's not thinking about your immune system. It's thinking about survival. So immune system, nah, that gets laid aside. So when your cortisol's high all the time, your immune system doesn't work properly. And for cancer, you need your T cells. You need them to be operating properly. You want your immune system to be at its highest level. That's how you fight cancer. It's one of the biggest things you can do to fight cancer. Keep your immune system at the top of its game. Well, when cortisol's high, you're not at the top of your game. You can't be, you're in the fight or flight.

And you guys know this. We talk about rest and digest. You need to be resting and sleeping properly in order for your brain. So when it comes to Alzheimer's, yeah, elevated blood sugar for sure. But the other thing is you're not detoxing properly. One of the biggest things in your immune system, yeah, your T-cells, your navy seals, for sure, for sure, for sure. But the other factor is the detoxification process. If you're not sleeping properly, your glymphatic, your self-cleaning oven in your brain's not even working properly. That's a major factor in Alzheimer's. Your liver, which is your detoxification organ numero uno, even ahead of your kidneys and your lungs, you detoxify. But not if your cortisol's high. And most people, not all people, but most people, they're walking around today with a liver that's full of fat because of their diet, full of sugar and crappy carbohydrates. Now their liver's gummed up. They don't detoxify properly, then their cortisol is high. They don't detoxify properly, they sleep properly. They don't make enough melatonin to get into a good REM sleep. The five stages of sleep that one needs.

So guys, it's such a vicious cycle and it's difficult enough to navigate in this day and age. We live in a world that's different. Everything is fast, high speed. There's a lot of progress in the world. I can't even wrap my head around AI. Can you? I can hardly wrap my head around it. I know nothing about it other than it's scary to me. Are you kidding me? AI. But a lot of things are happening. A lot of things are happening in the world, just the technology. And you know me, I can't keep up. That's for sure. I have a hard enough time producing this program. I am so technology compromised, I can't keep up. But my son has me laughing all the time because he's such an expert in all these new techs and including AI, my word. But you see the other side of that is cortisol. The other side of that is stress. And you need to do everything you can to get your cortisol under control because it has such a detrimental effect on our bodies.

So we got a lot of studies that are coming out, some very, very interesting. I think you'll find them interesting. I certainly find them fascinating. I love to keep you up to date on that. And then remember, Friday is what? Question and Answer, your Q and A time. It often runs into Monday Q and A. Okay? And you've asked such good questions. I love it. Okay, I love it. So we're not scared of your questions. We love your questions. We invite your questions, question me. Okay, we love that. So that's on Fridays, so send your questions in ahead of time to info@martinclinic. Sometimes you put a question right here, and you know what guys? First of all, once I start the program, I don't see the scroll hardly at all. I can't focus in on the scroll and hey, I'm a senior. I can't do both. So if you ask a question here, please. Okay? Would you please send it to info@martinclinic.com because you send it there. I'm going to answer it. If you keep it here, you put the question in the scroll. A lot of times I don't even see it, guys. I'm not going to answer what I can't see.

And usually if I have something in my head and I'm trying to get it out, you don't want to sidetrack me because I'll get on a rabbit trail and I'll never come back. Okay? I'll never come back. Okay, so guys, send in your questions. We love you dearly and sincerely, and you're the best audience in the world. That's number one. And you've made this program, The Doctor Is In, the number one health podcast and broadcast in Canada. Now let's make it number one in the USA too. Why not? I can't see why not? Now you guys do that, okay? You do it by liking on Facebook on your smart device. Download The Doctor Is In podcast. You can re-listen to this podcast. I know I speak fast, but we love you dearly. If you don't get our emails, then sign up at martinclinic.com. Okay? We love you. We'll talk to you soon.

Announcer:  You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!