How To Reduce Stress & Cortisol

Are you feeling stressed? Do you want to improve your overall wellbeing?

Most, if not all of us experience stress and anxiety here and there, that’s normal.

But what about if you’re ALWAYS stressed, you’re exhausted, lethargic, feeling ‘heavy’ in more ways than one, every day is a struggle and you just don’t feel like yourself?

You could have really high levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that plays a key role in your body's stress response but it also contributes to many of the body's other processes.

It's secreted by the adrenal glands and is involved in:

• Blood pressure regulation

• Glucose metabolism

• Immune function

• Inflammatory response

• Insulin release

Your adrenal glands release cortisol in response to stress or fear as part of the body's fight or flight response and it’s not just life-threatening events that can trigger this – daily life, work stress, excessive social media use and even residual uncertainty surrounding the pandemic can all be the cause.

Cortisol is also often high in the body because of adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue comes about as a result of long-term high levels of stress and other contributing factors such as high sugar intake, poor diet, poor sleep etc.

Symptoms include: weight gain around the middle, constantly tired, a reliance on caffeine, anger/temper or overreacting to something quite easily, your mind is constantly racing, can’t focus, feeling burnt out late afternoon or early evening.

High cortisol levels can also result in weight gain around the middle.

In order to help address this, you can put a long-term plan in place to start to heal your body. Here are some ways that you can easily implement to help:

1. Fitness Pilates! The humble Fitness Pilates class, done multiple times weekly, can be used to reconnect with your body and breath and over the weeks you will begin to heal the effects of a high stress lifestyle. The deep stretch and mobility work are so beneficial to your body and have a massive impact on peri to post-menopausal women. If you resonate with this I’d suggest choosing this restorative class over HIIT type classes.

2. Get outside in nature. Walk the dog, get into the park, go outside whatever the weather and if you can do some earthing (bare feet on the ground) then that’s proven to have a stress relieving effect on the body. Allow some space between yourself and other people and even try to avoid listening to music or a podcast when you’re out. 10 minutes a day will help, but if you can spend 90 minutes or more in a natural environment a couple of times a week then that is proven to improve and enhance your mental wellbeing too!

3. Sunlight - try to observe the sunrise/sunset and get outside during daylight hours every single day.

4. Sleep - proper sleep is imperative for good health. If you’re a night time nibbler be careful as this can sabotage your mindset and also your sleep for that night. Avoid using your phone in the bedroom, leave it in another room and get to bed!

5. Snacking/grazing - this can raise cortisol levels so try to minimise the amount of times you eat in a day. If you start eating protein rich meals with a good source of fruit and veg this is sufficient and will keep your hormone levels more stable.

6. Stressful people/negativity - can you avoid or minimise interactions with these people? Can you unfollow or mute online accounts that don’t leave you feeling good?

7. Deal with historical stress - If there’s something that has happened in the past that still upsets you it’s time to deal with it so you can move on. This could be through counselling, journaling, or simply facing up to it and dealing with it so you can move away from it.

8. Sugar - excess sugar in your diet does nothing to help stress and anxiety, in fact it makes it worse so reducing it as much as you can will begin to heal your body from the inside out.

All of these strategies will help to bring down your stress and cortisol levels and over time, and with a consistent approach, you’ll begin to see a true difference. This can take 6 months or a year, but is an incredibly important process.

Access my online Fitness Pilates classes or come to my Fitness Pilates classes in Whetstone to start feeling the benefits of a nurturing and restorative class to enhance your wellbeing in a fun and enjoyable way.