It’s popular on social apps to blame cortisol for myriad ills. But its role isn’t so clear-cut.
Maybe you can’t sleep. Or you sleep too much. Maybe you keep breaking out or getting sick. Perhaps your stomach bloats, your skin sags, you feel shaky, Maybe you can’t focus, eat or get rid of the tension in your spine.
If you’ve scrolled through TikTok lately, you might be inclined to blame one or all of these things on your cortisol levels. Over the last year or. so, users have flooded the app with stories about how their supposed cortisol imbalances have led to a variety of health concerns.
Cortisol, sometimes known as the stress hormone, is a chemical that helps regulate the way our bodies react to stress. “It’s a hormone that connects the mind and the body together,” said Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University. Nearly every organ has a receptor that responds to cortisol. It is crucial in helping us function throughout the day, whether by regulating blood pressure or combating inflammation.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that cortisol imbalances are responsible for the various ailments that people are sharing on TikTok said Nia Fogelman, an associate research scientist at the Yale Process Center.” I think it’s completely natural and understandable why people want to A, figure out what’s going on with their bodies, and B, to want some one thing that we can fix,” she said. But it’s not that simple.
When we experience stress, the pea-size pituitary gland in the brain — sometimes called the master gland — signals to the adrenal glands perched atop the kidneys, prompting them to secrete and deliver cortisol into our bloodstream.
Our bodies release the chemical when we are faced with a challenge, whether psychological or physical, real or imagined, said Jeanette M. Benett, a health psychologist who studies the effects of stress on health at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. We release cortisol when we encounter a tangible threat, like coming across a bear on a hike, but also when we receive an ominous work email. The more threatening we perceive an event to be, the more cortisol we typically produce.
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