CORTISOL ISN'T THE ENEMY

...but constant cortisol is. When you wake up at 2 am, wired and wide-eyed, it’s tempting to blame stress. But as hormone shifts meet the realities of modern life, the story is more nuanced – and more revealing about how we're really living.

- Andrea Kirk

Full disclosure: I’m three weeks away from my 45th birthday, and almost overnight the conversation around stress hormones has switched from being an abstract issue affecting other women to something decidedly personal.

For the past two weeks I’ve been waking at 2am, feeling inexplicably alert. The house is quiet, but my body clearly hasn’t got the memo. I now have a label for it: cortisol.

I’m likely in perimenopause, and shifting oestrogen and progesterone levels don’t just affect my cycle but also shape the way I respond to stress. I've learnt that oestrogen plays a role in buffering my body’s stress response. As it fluctuates, that buffering becomes less reliable. The dial on my stress sensitivity has been turned up, and the usual pressures of life feel a little harder to absorb. So I looked to the experts for help.

‘Cortisol isn’t the villain; it’s the messenger,’ says endocrinologist Dr Elmo Pretorius. ‘It is the body's primary stress hormone, and in short bursts, it’s healthy.’

It’s what helps you slam on the brakes in traffic, power through a deadline, or pull yourself together in a crisis. Alongside adrenaline, cortisol mobilises energy, sharpens focus and gets your body ready to act. Without it, you wouldn’t cope.

So when does it become a problem? ‘The issue isn’t cortisol; it’s chronic stress,’ says Dr Pretorius. When your body is constantly under pressure — poor sleep, emotional strain, illness, relentless deadlines — it keeps producing cortisol as a way of helping you cope. Persistently elevated cortisol levels are associated with increased appetite and weight gain, muscle weakness, high blood pressure, insulin resistance and a higher risk of diabetes.