Cortisol Isn't the Enemy!

What if cortisol isn't the enemy we've been taught to fear?

In this episode of Penney for Your Thoughts, Penney Megginson sits down with Sheila Malkani of PowerCube to rethink the conversation around cortisol, stress and women's health.

We often hear that cortisol is "bad" and that the goal should be to lower it. But cortisol is an essential hormone — and understanding how our bodies respond to stress may be far more useful than simply trying to eliminate it.

Penney and Sheila explore what happens when the body is under stress, how our stress response can change through different stages of a woman's life, and why recovery matters just as much as the stress itself.

They also look at the relationship between stress, exercise, nutrition, fasting, hormones and the nervous system — and what this can mean for our energy, performance and long-term health.

The bigger question: rather than trying to avoid stress altogether, can we become better at adapting to it and recovering from it?

This conversation is part of the newly relaunched Penney for Your Thoughts: Longevity, Mindset & Women's Health — exploring the science and practical tools that can help us not simply add years to our lives, but add more LIFE to our years.

Topics include:
• Cortisol and the stress response
• Chronic vs acute stress
• Women's hormones and stress
• Exercise as a form of stress
• Recovery and resilience
• Nutrition and intermittent fasting
• Nervous system regulation
• Healthy aging and longevity

🎙️ Penney for Your Thoughts: Longevity, Mindset & Women's Health

✨ Home of Glowgevity — because longevity isn't just about living longer. It's about living better.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

We're constantly being told to lower our cortisol, lower stress, and stay calm. But what if we're actually focused on the wrong things? What if the goal is actually to just let stress happen because it's inevitable? And to actually focus on how we can respond better and uh recover better from stress. I'm Penny Meginson and welcome to Penny for Your Thoughts, conversations on the science of living well. I'm joined here at PowerCube by Sheila Malcani. And Sheila, you're a nutritionist and a metabolic health specialist and a practitioner in traditional Chinese medicine. So welcome. And we're here and we're going to be talking about cortisol hormones, perimenopause, and then all of that. So let's get started. So you were talking about cortisol not being the enemy, and we should actually appreciate cortisol. So why?

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Yeah, it is one of my several pet peeves in this space because we tend to pigeonhole things, especially hormones. You know, this hormone does this, that hormone does that. And our bodies are just so much more amazing and complex than just that simple notion. And cortisol, in fact, is our critical vitality hormone. A vitality hormone because without cortisol, if you don't have enough cortisol, first of all, you don't get into action in the morning. It's super important to have a big cortisol spike in the morning before you wake up to get you going, to get you out of bed, to get you moving. We need cortisol to manage our immune response, so our immune system to mobilize the resources on that. We need it for our brain function, for our cognitive function. We need it for our bone density. Essentially, cortisol mobilizes energy. And I think when we start thinking about it that way, then we don't see it anymore as the enemy, but as something that we just want to make sure that the fluctuations of it and the stimulation of it happens in the right context.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Okay, so what would happen if we're not having an appropriate cortisol response?

SPEAKER_00 2:06

So typically the ranges can be quite wide. So it can be anything from not having enough energy to even get out of bed in the morning. That's when you don't have enough cortisol. That happens actually quite a lot. It can be the difference between, you know, having a complete meltdown because you spilled your coffee and just staying calm in that moment. Okay. And it's about staying inflamed too long. All of these things show that there's an imbalance in terms of how the cortisol is rhythmic throughout the day. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

So when we say that we need our cortisol to be lower, it's really asking the wrong question.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Exactly. I much more preferred to look at it as are we uh pulsating it at the right moment during out the day. And so maybe to put this into a framework, the way I like to think about it is we need to understand that there are four critical hormonal axes that we have. And all of these hormone axes, they speak to one another, so in a vertical chain, and under each other. So every one of them points to the other part. So let's start off with the corticotropic axis, which is the one that is linked to our adrenal glands. That one speaks directly to the gonadic axis, which is our gonads. So it's testicles for men, it's ovaries for women, which is connected then to the thyroid axis, the thyrotropic axis, which is our thyroid gland, super important to manage the overall temperature of our body. And that's not just about feeling cold hands, et cetera. It's also about getting the energy into the cells and reducing the enzymes at the right temperature. And then the fourth one is the somatic tropic, somatotropic axes, which is the one connected to our pancreas and essentially mobilizes how insulin can take the food that we eat and the other metabolites into our system. And so all of these speak to one another and they're all connected to our nervous system. So this connects back to your ingoing question. This is the neuroendocrine connection that we sometimes tend to forget.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

And so if we want anything, any action to happen, if we want to have energy throughout the day, if we want to have, you know, the ability to jump around with our kids or hike up that mountain in record speed, we need cortisol and we want to make sure that we get it at the right moment throughout the day. So when does the stress response become problematic? Essentially, we need to understand that the nervous system has two main branches. So there's the orthosympathetic, which is the activated part of our nervous system, and the parasympathetic branch, which is the what we call the rest and digest. But again, that is overly simplified. What we need to remember is that we're oscillatory bearings. Human beings are oscillatory beings. So everything comes in waves, right? We breathe in, we breathe out, we wake up, we sleep, our heartbeat. So everything is an oscillation. So if we think about it in that way, if we want to be at the very top, we also need to be able to recover very deeply. And I'm making this big link. Why? Because the stress response becomes a problem if we're constantly in this activated state and we forget that we need the recovery state in order to be able to re-engage at the correct levels. Okay. A way to think about this is if you would imagine a pressure cooker, for example, on a gas flame. The parasympathetic system is that flame. How much can I dial that flame up? And we want that tonus to be really high. If you think about babies, like you know, if you think babies when they're sleeping, you can do all kinds of things around them. They will not wake up because they have a very strong parasympathetic tonus at its core, which we tend to lose as we get older. And we lose it even more when we are constantly in this activated state. So I would rather phrase the question out: how can I make sure that I'm recovering as hard and with the same intention as I'm thinking about training and my nutrition and all the other aspects that we tend to focus a lot about. So is that what's meant by chronic under-recovery? Exactly. And so what I find across the board, but specifically amongst women, is that that is a big issue. So we're chronically under-recovered, chronically often underfed. And that creates a chronic stimulation of this orthosympathetic branch without making space for the recovery. And if you think about it in, you know, back to babies, you know, like when a baby is cranky and not in a good mood or just not feeling well, what are the first three things we ask? We ask, did it sleep enough? Super important, did it sleep well? We already know if that's off. For sure, nothing else is gonna happen. Did it eat? How's the digestion going? Is there bloating? Is there constipation? Is there other things? With babies, we tend to always ask that. We don't really ask that ourselves anymore, but it's such an important part of our overall well-being. Right. And then, of course, you know, is that baby, is that person actually been able to move around and get the kind of activity in order to feel that it can express itself and get, you know, get rid of that good energy as it has. So if we keep those fundamentals in mind for ourselves as well, and we really deliberately focus on the quality of our sleep that we're getting, the length and the quality of the sleep, if we really focus deliberately on our digestion, making sure we're getting the nutrients in, the macro and micro level of nutrients in, yeah. We and then we get the training in, but you we already have three big parts of that puzzle to really make sure that we are training the parasympathetic axes of the nervous system, the way that'll help us also. Okay, you mentioned chronic underfeeding. Let's talk about that. Yes, one of my favorite topics. So back to the point, cortisol mobilizes energy. And because cortisol needs to mobilize all these elements for our body to be fueled, for our body to be functioning, for the immune cells to work, for the brain to work, it needs to mobilize that energy. So if we're not getting it from food, because we're not giving it enough calories, but also not enough of the macronutrients, this is where we can do a whole episode just on protein. Right. Absolutely. But it's going to try to mobilize it from other elements. And so you're constantly keeping the cortisol activated because you're just not getting enough of the substance in. Okay, so where does intermittent fasting come into this? Yeah. So intermittent fasting is a much talked-about topic. And I think first of all, we need to be clear on what is fasting, first of all, because you know, keeping your dinner times early in the evenings and keeping a 12-hour window where you don't eat, I wouldn't declare that that's fasting. That's just regular eating in line with the circating rhythm. So for sure, you shouldn't be eating in a window three to four hours before you go to sleep. And ideally, you would get your eight hours of sleep. So, you know, if you add up the math, you've already been fasting, if you want to call it that, or not eating. Yeah, so maybe we're just using the word improper. So I think that's one super important part. The other aspect is if you go into these 16-hour fasting windows, etc., if I do my math, the feeding window, that sounds bad for humans, but yes, the window, which I will eat, is very short. And so for most people, that means you're just going to skip one meal at least, sometimes maybe even two. And so back to the point about getting enough substances of energy in that we can mobilize, it's nearly impossible mathematically to get your protein needs. And if I just stay on protein. So, you know, the average person over the age of 40 needs about two grams of protein per kilo of body weight. So for most women, that's 100 grams up. If I don't eat three meals, I don't know mathematically how I'm going to be able to fit those in. Because, you know, to get 40 or 50 grams of protein in one meal, I mean, that's 500 grams of pure chicken. You know, it's it's just a lot of portion. Most people will not get there. And so that's my biggest worry. We focus too much on that aspect, and we don't focus enough on making sure that we actually get the nutrient that we in in order to fuel ourselves correctly.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Yes, yes. And what changes during perimenopause that affects women and their stress response?

SPEAKER_00 9:42

So, one of the most important factors that affects cortisol is the drop in progesterone. Progesterone is a natural break on this hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. And that is super important because remember, we're oscillatory bearings, so estrogen will plummet. We talk a lot about that, but so does progesterone. And if we for every stimulus, we also have a break system. So we're all constantly in the stance. And when progesterone drops, then the stance just isn't working properly anymore. So naturally, progesterone will drop. That's number one. The number two is that we become naturally insulin resistant, which also means that we can't get energy into the cells the way we need to. So back to the point about cortisol wanting to mobilize energy. You essentially, to make it short, constantly overactivating, trying to pull in more cortisol in order to get the energy that your body needs at time. Okay, and this isn't just for the women, this affects men as well. Absolutely. So men, you know, I'm pretty sure that the next big topic that's going to be coming up is andropause. It's of course a little bit mm different because it's not this sudden drop in hormones as we see for women. So the effects are maybe more gradual, but men absolutely, as of the age of 30, have already a decline in testosterone. And so this balance between cortisol and testosterone for men also tends to go off. And you see that just as well, how men, you know, when they hit the middle ages, also will get that little ring of fat around the midline section. Because that is a specific kind of fat. We call it hormonal fat that can mobilize estrogens and convert testosterone to estrogens, which is, you know, one of the main hormones that we need in order to make the cells supple and actually to function properly.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Let's talk about that ring of fat. Yeah, that's quite a common, popular thing. I think everyone's out there trying to find the solution. What do you think the solution is or combination of things?

SPEAKER_00 11:34

So I uh for sure think that every person, women and men, should be diligent about their insulin response. And so understanding your level of natural insulin resistance is, I think, critical for everybody. So everybody should know what their levels are. And ideally, you'd start knowing this already at a younger age. And how? How how so a blood test is is one of the most common ways to do it. So it's a fasting insulin test and your HOMA test. So you already know how insulin resistant you are as you go in. We tend to get more insulin resistant as we age. And so, why do we do that? One of the reasons is because back to the point about estrogens dropping and hormone levels dropping, you create this level of fat because you can convert that into hormones that we need. And so it's actually a protective mechanism. The body always has a logic, right? Always serves itself. And so it tries to create a layer of resource that it can use in order to support itself. So that has upsides because you're creating a little bit of estrogens, but it has a massive downside too, because it also creates a lot of inflammation, because it needs blood flow, fat cells need blood flow, they tend to move away from your vascular areas, and so they will pull in inflammation in order to get vascular flow. So it's a multi, you know, multi-line of effects that can actually happen. And we definitely don't want to let that go too far. So keeping an eye on your insulin resistance, keeping that under check is critical. And then I think also maybe being a little bit more forgiving with ourselves in terms of what our expectations are on that front, because, you know, back to the fact that it's a natural way for us to actually protect ourselves, to create also the cholesterol reserves because cholesterol is the foundational molecule of all hormones. And so it's getting just the levels just right on that front. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Now we were talking a lot about this resilience to stress. So, what is one tool that you could teach our listeners that they could even follow along right now, along with us, that you could teach?

SPEAKER_00 13:30

With pleasure. And I think maybe just on that front, the way I'd like to think about stress resilience. So instead of looking at as we need to avoid the stressors in life, it's if you imagine ourselves as a lane road, how do we get to a multi-lane road, right? So if our nervous system can actually expand to hold a lot more, then we're able to not maybe run into the wall quite as often and not as severely. And so there are many tools that we can use in order to train our nervous system to get this, what I call adaptive latitude, so to widen our lanes. And one of my favorite ones is from a neuroresearcher who uh works a lot in dementia prevention. It's a very simple exercise, what it sounds like, but when you dry it, it's actually a lot more complicated. So you take a ball and you throw it against the wall with one hand and you catch it with the other hand. Okay, so not that complicated. Where it gets interesting is when you then put an eye patch on one of your eyes. Why? Because now the coordination between between the two becomes a lot harder. So you're forcing your two hemispheres in your brain to communicate better with one another. And then you can take it up a notch again by raising a leg while you do this. And so every time you engage a difficulty on that, you're making it a little bit gradually more difficult. You're training your nervous system to communicate better and therefore to be also more resilient.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Okay. And does it matter which side you put the pattern? Both. So you do it, you do it more a bit and then switch. And then you switch. Okay. And how long should you do something like this? So the aim would be that you get at least 30 of those catches correct.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Every day or several times a day? Yeah, I mean at least once a day would be great. Okay. But again, I, you know, all these things as it get started, see it, you can make it a family challenge. It's really interesting how, you know, how everybody can up their game pretty quickly. And what's beautiful to see is that it's a training. It really is. And so when you apply that logic to so many other aspects of your life, you're gonna find that there are many different tools you can use so to be less triggered on that response. Great. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

I can't wait to try that alone. Because like, no, you're gonna be watching. Or it's definitely one determinant, the kids for sure. Uh, so I guess that the key takeaway is that we need to strengthen our bodies' ability to respond to stress, but also recover. And we really need to do the homework on just being healthier so that we our bodies have the ability to recover from stress. So it's not just in the mindset and how breathing and all of that. I that's one part of it, but it's also the nutrition and it's the sleep and everything else. It's putting it all together.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

And anything that will give you nourishment. And so, with that, I mean one point that I'm really particularly uh passionate about is connection. You know, it's so important. We are beings that respond to connection. And so, you know, friendship, and we know, especially for women, is we have massive oxytocin releases when we connect with our girlfriends. And so one of the best therapies that we can possibly have is to connect with the people that we care about, to have a good laugh and silly and connect with other human beings who give us good, yeah, you know, fill up our cup.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Yeah. So I I always say that with longevity, it's it's not about just adding years to your life. It's really about adding life to your years. And so I'm Penny Meginson, and this has been Penny for your thoughts. I'll see you next time.