05-07-2025
Easy Ways To Regulate Your Cortisol Levels in the Morning and Have a Stress-Free Day
Good morning! As you probably already know, cortisol is the big hype of 2025. High cortisol levels! Cortisol deficiency! Foods and supplements and practices for balancing that cortisol! We've gotten just as obsessed with lowering the levels of this steroid hormone as we are about keeping our collagen levels high.
And that's life: Certain trends and topics of conversation are cyclical, and right now, what we're interested in—given our stressful lifestyles—is lowering cortisol levels. Especially when you live in a big city, leave home in a hurry, and get into a crowded subway car: Frankly, it's hard not to arrive at work stressed, exhausted, and with levels of this tricky hormone skyrocketing. But cortisol is necessary to be able to function and move through the world. As psychologist Brenda de la Peña tells Vogue: 'Every morning when we wake up, our body generates a natural cortisol spike that helps us to get up and running. The challenge here is to keep it stable and sufficient for the whole day, preventing it from spiking more than necessary or staying elevated all the time.'
So: The goal is to keep cortisol stable and regular, but without beating ourselves up about being emotionally stressed. What it is about, says de la Peña, 'is to raise awareness about the tendency to activate the automatic pilot, [which we do to] save cognitive resources. We live our day to day lives in a fairly automated way, exhausting ourselves, and reacting to things that happen around us. In reality we can simply choose to let them pass. Our energy is limited, and stress does not exactly play in our favor.'
'We must establish a strategic and firm commitment to the habit of consciously choosing what we decide to spend it on,' she adds. '[We must] foster a state of inner calm that allows us to listen to what we need. We can make the small day-to-day decisions with a firm and calm attitude, instead of an anxious one.'
What happens when cortisol is high or unstable?
An established and consistent early morning routine is so important for avoiding your cortisol skyrocketing before you even arrive at the office. And if your mornings are chaotic and stressful? You can expect symptoms like constant exhaustion, irritability, pain, muscle tension, digestive problems, or even hair loss as signs of high cortisol levels. These vary from one person to another, but it's what should usually raise the alarm about the need to respond differently to everyday life.
