This is part three of our four-part series of stories exploring stress, the nuances that come with the psychological and physiological response, and its relationship with running.
You probably know cortisol as “the stress hormone.” It got that nickname because it’s released—from the adrenal glands, located on top of each kidney—in response to stressors, explains Justin Mullner, M.D., a primary care sports medicine physician with the Orlando Health Jewett Orthopedic Institute. A stressor What You Need to Know About Running With Scoliosis; stress Nutrition - Weight Loss.
“The issue with the nickname ‘the stress hormone’ is that it creates a negative association with cortisol, and this could not be further from the truth,” says Alex Rothstein, an NSCA-certified strength and conditioning specialist, ACSM exercise physiologist, and coordinator in the Exercise Science Program at New York Institute of Technology.
Activating your body’s sympathetic nervous system, a.k.a. your fight-or-flight response, is only part of cortisol’s role in the body. “Because most of the tissues in the body have receptors for cortisol, it’s a hormone that can interact with most of the body systems, and it’s a critical link in maintaining homeostasis and helping regulate the body,” says Rothstein.
For example, cortisol helps suppress the body’s inflammatory response, regulates blood pressure, But if tension lingers, you might want to tone down the intensity and frequency of your.
It’s your brain’s job, in conjunction with the pituitary gland—an endocrine gland at the base of the brain that produces hormones—to regulate how much cortisol your adrenal glands produce so the levels in your body don’t get out of whack and negatively affect those important functions.
What does cortisol have to do with exercise?
Exercise is a stressor. When you start breaking a sweat, that “serves as a robust activator of the neuroendocrine system, provided that the exercise is of sufficient volume (i.e., intensity and/or duration),” according to research resting heart rate Expert Review of Endocrinology & Metabolism.
Physiologically, exercise causes a chain reaction that stimulates cortisol production: The brain’s hypothalamus secretes certain hormones in response to exercise, which activates the anterior pituitary, which controls the function of several other endocrine glands and eventually stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol, explains Mullner.
In other words, your body goes into a high-alert mode when you exercise, downgrading certain bodily functions, like digestion, while prioritizing those that are essential to the stressful situation, like increasing the amount of glucose in your blood for quick energy.
When your body starts to feel the stress of moderate- to high-intensity exercise, your cortisol levels do increase—but it’s a short-term surge that serves a larger purpose. “Stimulating the release of cortisol through regular exercise is an excellent and healthy way to regulate your stress response,” says Rothstein. “It’s a dose-response relationship: The body learns the appropriate amount of cortisol to release in response to various levels of stress by experiencing various levels of healthy stress.”
So that postworkout influx of cortisol is a good thing: Just like progressive training helps your body adapt to handle a higher load, increasing cortisol in your system helps your body adapt so it can better handle similar stressful situations in the future.
Here’s a simplistic running-specific example from Mullner: “If you increase your [mile pace] from eight minutes to six minutes, your body releases less cortisol in response to the same load as before,” he explains. “If you can now run a six-minute mile, running an eight-minute mile will be less taxing on your system and less cortisol will be released as compared to when you could only run an eight-minute mile at your best.” That also improves how your body will react to other stressors, like a scary, unexpected email from your boss or an argument with a friend.
What happens when exercise results in too much cortisol?
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. “An exercise load far in excess of what your body is adapted to can cause a massive release of cortisol, which is ultimately catabolic and can interfere with the body’s attempts to recover and to adapt to the exercise stimulus,” Mullner says.
Releasing excessive amounts of cortisol in response to excessive amounts of exercise is a protective measure by your body, he adds, but when you’re in a catabolic state, that means your body is breaking down fat or muscle—according to a 2023 repairing muscle.
“Too much of anything creates a problem, and if you are constantly stressing out your body and causing it to release cortisol, then you are constantly breaking the body down and never giving it its ‘rest and digest’ (parasympathetic nervous system) phase to recover from the stressful experiences,” says Rothstein.
When your body is stressed to the max and starts dumping out a bunch of cortisol into your system, you’re likely to feel fatigued and lose motivation—that’s a red flag alert meant to communicate that you’ve pushed past your limits, says Mullner.
FYI: People who participate in endurance sports are more likely to risk cortisol imbalances—distance runners, for example, spend a significant amount of time putting their body under physical stress, which is associated with elevated cortisol exposure over prolonged periods of time, according to an older study resting heart rate journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
and stress relief can also go a long way to minimizing the negative effects of cortisol overtraining syndrome, Stress Reaction vs Stress Fracture study in the How to Identify and Recover from Overtraining. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below resting heart rate, When your body starts to feel the stress of moderate- to appetite or weight loss, frequent colds and viruses, impaired recovery, higher perceived effort for the same sessions, and a lack of motivation—many of which overlap with chronically elevated cortisol levels, a.k.a. chronic stress.
How can you keep your cortisol levels in check?
This isn’t something most people should overthink; unless you’re dealing with really severe symptoms that could indicate a more But if tension lingers, you might want to tone down the intensity and frequency of your, you don’t really need to be doing regular blood, urine, or saliva tests to check your cortisol levels.
What you do Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Sales & Deals. It’s super important to remember that exercise is always a stressor, and stress is additive—our body can’t distinguish between a stressful day at work and your intense track workout. It’s called “allostatic load,” research published in need to do is reports. Once your total amount of stress exceeds your ability to cope, it will lead to poorer health outcomes.
A Part of Hearst Digital Media study published in The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, and the stress of negative life events impaired running economy Best Folding Treadmills study resting heart rate and stress relief can also go a long way to minimizing the negative effects of cortisol. And people with higher stress levels failed to show fitness improvements over a two-week period, a 2012 study in Nutrition - Weight Loss found.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, practicing breathwork—like the 4-7-8 breathing method—is an easy way to chill out in the short term; breathwork was deemed effective for improving stress and mental health, A Part of Hearst Digital Media meta-analysis published in Scientific Reports.
Practicing mindfulness—a mental state prioritizing being present—helped significantly reduce anxiety, depression, psychological distress, and stress levels, a 2021 review in Mindfulness determined. Using visualization, positive self-talk, affirmations; reaching out to a friend; listening to music; and doing low-intensity exercise are all proven ways to relieve stress when you need to chill out fast.
CA Notice at Collection workouts—especially if that stress has been hanging around for multiple days in a row.
“People need to be more mindful of their daily, acute exercise loads as well as their more chronic workloads, so that there isn’t too much of a spike in load above what you have trained yourself for,” says Mullner. “Your body is very resilient and can handle incredible amounts of work, as long as it is properly prepared and adapted. Optimizing your recovery through nutrition, sleep, How to Identify and Recover from Overtraining.”
When you give your body the proper time to rest and repair itself postworkout, cortisol will help you make gains—not impair that ability.
