Tetragrammaton Learning about cortisol and what it actually does completely revamped the way I think about everything, health-wise, and it basically put things into bins that make it all make a ton more sense.

Because I, like most people, heard everything bad about cortisol.

It's like cortisol is a stress hormone.

It's not true, actually.

Cortisol's job is not to combat stress.

Cortisol's job is to cause the release of energy from your muscles, from your liver, so your brain and muscles have energy.

Yes, to combat stress if there's something stressful.

But the reason you wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night is because of a normal increase in cortisol, a healthy

increase in cortisol. It's called the cortisol awakening response. In all my years of learning

about neuroendocrinology, no one bothered to tell me that, but it's in the textbooks. It's just

kind of hidden there. Cortisol's job is to create energy for the brain and body. If its levels get high enough,

you wake up from your sleep. And so when you take a step back and go, okay, what do cortisol

levels look like across the day? It's basically your cortisol wakes you up in the morning

because it's rising and that ing is important not because it hits a

certain level because it's the slope is steep then after you wake up your cortisol continues to

rise and you want your morning cortisol really high this is what no one will tell you everyone's like

gutted kid cortisol nuke your memory cortisol makes you lose neurons. That's a separate issue. There are contexts where that's true.

But basically, in the first hour after waking, you have a unique opportunity to spike your cortisol

even higher, and that's what you want to do. Because if you do that, you set up a wayfront

of energy through the morning

for alertness, for focus, and it makes sure that your cortisol is low in the evening and at night,

which is also what you want. If you don't get your cortisol high enough in the morning,

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