What I think it can be useful for people to understand is that many things will spike cortisol throughout the day, stress, cold water, exercise, but the idea is that it comes down to baseline or near baseline rather quickly. One of the worst situations as you pointed out is when the highest level of cortisol is consistently shifted to the afternoon period.

In fact, that's a pretty reliable signature of certain forms of depression. This is work by my colleague David Spiegel at Stanford Psychiatry and the great Bob Sapolsky, Robert Sapolsky of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Behave, et cetera, and Fame, lots of popular books there. I think that if people are trying to regulate their cortisol and they just understand that basic contour that the baseline should rise pretty quickly after one rises in the morning, so it's easy to remember, rise, rise, rise out of bed and rise cortisol with light, bright light, with exercise, with caffeine, these things will all increase cortisol.

And then across the day, it's normal for cortisol to spike, but then to use some of the down regulation methods that you described, in particular the breathing methods and exercise itself, as the case may be. But then to really pay attention to how much psychological and physical stress is occurring in the six hours or so or eight hours prior to sleep, does that seem like a good broad contour of how to have a healthy pattern of cortisol release?

Because you actually want the cortisol to reduce inflammation and initiate or participate in the recovery process. You will not see any progress from exercise training without a large spike in cortisol. It is critically important when we think of phrases like cortisol, inflammation, stress, this is not bad. Physiology is not personified, right?

Things don't hate you in the body, right? It's all, it's not good and bad. They just are. The more you try to suppress cortisol, the more you suppress adaptation. What you want is exactly what you mentioned, large spikes met with large quick recovery. And you want to do that throughout the day and get that hormetic stressor.

This is, so going back to your ashwagandha and rhodiola issue, I think it would be very short-sighted for people to do that as this is a prophylactic. If you blunt cortisol, you're going to cause immunosuppressant. - Especially early in the day. - Totally. - Taking ashwagandha before going to train is counterproductive.

- Yeah. We do not just, this is not a baseline part of our foundational package, right? If you go look at the athlete foundations or the athlete resilience protocols I've put together, you're not going to see these things in there for that specific reason. Any form of cortisol regulation needs to be done strategically.

If you are excessively high and we're bringing you back down to normative values at the right time, then great. If you're normal though, then taking you down lower than that is actually problematic. The same thing is actually true since we're here for oxidative stress, foreign information, antioxidant use. We mentioned I think earlier about taking vitamin C and vitamin E post-exercise will actually blunt adaptations or at least it has the potential to do so.

Same thing, right? If you're modulating this response just because and you have not done so because of actually biological testing that indicated you needed to do such, then you actually may be making things worse. We see this constantly with people who take a number of supplements and substances for sleep and then they wake up the next morning groggy and your cortisol is suppressed.

Okay, great. Then they take something for stimulation and then the rest of the day they're trying to reduce. Then you're in this nasty cycle. Instead of just getting out of the way and letting cortisol do what it's supposed to do and then making sure again you're teaching it. So this is actually a coachable response.

You can coach your own body to go down in the later part of the day and go up in the earlier part of the day. You want to make sure that you are driving that train with intent and so again to reiterate, if you don't need that, you shouldn't do it.

If you don't need to lower cortisol, you shouldn't walk around doing it. You're just going to suppress the state even far and this is what's needed. This is needed for anabolic response, so you're not going to grow muscle if cortisol is not spiked. It's going to compromise it rather.

So you want to be intentional with these practices, especially in the form of supplementation. Be very, very intentional. I've heard it said that carbohydrates, in particular starchy carbohydrates, can inhibit cortisol and this could be through the tryptophan amino acid related pathway. It ratchets up to serotonin release. Probably some other things too.

I mean the idea that carbohydrates just stimulate serotonin is a little bit overly simplistic. >>COREY: No, those cellular mechanisms, AMPK going up and immediately turning on there, yeah. >>AJ: Right. So I think we've all experienced this. We're stressed. We're stressed. It doesn't necessarily even have to be highly processed, fatty carbohydrates like potato chips and dip or these kinds of things.

It can also be a bowl of rice, a bowl of oatmeal, a bowl of pasta, which here I'm not trying to demonize carbohydrates. I do ingest carbohydrates minimally or non-processed carbohydrates most of the time, but not all the time. They have a fairly potent effect on lowering stress and perceived stress and even quality of sleep, which is not to say that somebody has to load up on them like crazy unless their glycogen is really depleted.

We talked a lot about this in the endurance episode. I know we'll touch on it more in the nutrition supplementation episode. But in thinking about the relationship between carbohydrates and cortisol and what we've just been talking about in terms of cortisol as being vitally important for the adaptation trigger or triggering adaptation, it's probably a better way to put it, but that it can blunt cortisol taken post-training or maybe in the evening before sleep.

What are some of the basic ways that one can think about and maybe use carbohydrates in specific ways in order to, let's say, control cortisol rather than quash cortisol? You actually have alluded to it a number of times already. We oftentimes will give people a lot of carbohydrates at night for some of these reasons.

You're going to feel fantastic. A lot of people it helps you sleep, both get to sleep and stay asleep, sleep quality. You talked about specifically, remember, think about it this way, cortisol at its core is an energy signaling molecule. It says we are in the need for energy. Great.

Epinephrine is the same way. You'll start seeing, for example, cortisol will liberate free fatty acids, put them in the bloodstream, get you prepared to do something. The problem is if it's continually elevated throughout the day with no down regulation, we start running into issues, right? So again, this is the differentiation between, "Oh, my cortisol is slightly elevated all day," versus, "I had a really big spike after training, I had a really big spike after a breath protocol, et cetera, and then it went back down." So that being said, if you then ingest carbohydrates, it is quick to see the signal, we have nutrients, we have energy, again, specifically carbohydrates, therefore cortisol can sort of go back down.

You don't need to be liberating free fatty acids and preparing the need for fuel. So you can help yourself go to sleep for many, as you pointed out, many mechanisms actually of why carbohydrates will help you sleep at night for some, not all people, but some. That would be one of the relationships it has with cortisol.