251. 2 Types Of High Cortisol

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Dr. Martin: Are you tired or exhausted? If you are, then you have a problem with this very specific hormone. This hormone is also the number one cause of insomnia. It’s the reason why people can’t fall asleep, they can’t stay [00:00:30] asleep, or both. It’s also a major cause of anxiety. In fact, it’s the leading cause of anxiety in people over the age of 40. Also, if you have a problem with this hormone, you’ll also have things like brain fog, fat gain around the belly, hair loss, cravings for sugar and salt. You’ll be sick frequently and you’ll even develop some environmental allergies.

Dr. Martin: Now what am I talking about? I’m talking about the hormone cortisol. Now we’ve written a book years ago. How many years ago [00:01:00] would you say this book is?

Dr. Martin: Oh it’s about 10 years old now, I would think.

Dr. Martin: And it’s funny because the book is called Serial Killers, Two Hormones That Want You Dead. And the book was written specifically about two hormones. One was insulin, which we do talk a lot about as well, and cortisol. So we’ve been talking about the effects of cortisol for a long time. And what we want to do quickly here is just give you an idea how cortisol works because once you understand this, then you’ll see the effect that it has and why it’s become such a big problem [00:01:30] that we see today.

Dr. Martin: So imagine for a second that you’re walking down the street at night time and it’s dark out and there’s somebody walking on the sidewalk behind you and they’re catching up to you. This is what happens inside your body, your brain. So your hypothalamus tells your pituitary to stimulate your adrenal glands, and your adrenal glands are these two little organs that sit on top of your kidneys.

Dr. Martin: Yeah.

Dr. Martin: [00:02:00] Adenal, right?

Dr. Martin: Chestnut shaped. They’re just little weak guys.

Dr. Martin: They’re just little. Yeah, they’re not big. They sit on top of your kidneys, your brain tells your adrenals to start doing a few things. So your adrenals will secrete adrenaline and it will secrete cortisol. And really the purpose is to get you into that fight or flight. You have a part of your nervous system is called flight or flight. So your body is doing everything it can to get itself ready for that purpose. So one of the things that happens is you secrete this cortisol and [00:02:30] then cortisol, one of the main functions of cortisol is actually to raise your blood sugar levels and it makes sense because your body thinks it needs energy for something very quickly. So it wants to bring your blood sugar levels up quickly, which is what cortisol does. And cortisol also actually will hurt a lot of other things.

Dr. Martin: We’ve listed a few things on this chart just to give you an idea. It will hurt your bone formation and it just causes a ton of inflammation.

Dr. Martin: Yeah, because the idea of course with cortisol is it was [00:03:00] meant to last for a very short period of time. Somebody comes behind you and scares you, you want to punch them or run.

Dr. Martin: Yeah. And it’s like, we like to give the example of a lot of the racing car movies I’m thinking of like Fast and the Furious, whenever they’re behind in the race they push this button. It’s like nitro, right?

Dr. Martin: Yeah.

Dr. Martin: It just kind of like, and that’s what that is. It just gives you a shot of energy and that’s the point. It was never meant to be a long lasting long time burning. And here’s something else that’s very important to understand, is that cortisol is [00:03:30] a cyclical hormone that’s tied directly to our circadian rhythm.

Dr. Martin: Now what do we mean by that? Well, the hormone is released based on a time of day, based on sleep and wake patterns. And this is what we’re going to talk about here because this is the key to understanding why cortisol is such a big problem today. So if you are healthy and you have healthy levels of cortisol, then what happens is right before you start waking up in the morning, your cortisol levels increase. And that makes sense because your body [00:04:00] is trying to bring up your blood sugars a little bit. It’s trying to bring up your heart rate a little bit. It’s getting ready to get going through the day. And then as you go through the day, cortisol levels start to drop, so around noon they go down, 4:00 PM they go down and they go down as you’re sleeping and that’s important again, because as you start to sleep by the end of the day, you need your heart rate down.

Dr. Martin: Cortisol raises your heart rate, it increases your breathing, it increases your brain wave patterns. All these things have to [00:04:30] taper off as the day goes on, but that’s a normal healthy cortisol pattern that you see there. Now the thing is, here’s what we see in our clinic. There’s really two types of problems that we see with cortisol. The first one is what we call type one cortisol. So I’ll just describe quickly what happens in terms of cortisol levels and then maybe you can talk a little bit about how they present to your clinic with this kind of chart here.

Dr. Martin: So type one, they have what I call a reverse [00:05:00] cortisol curve. So they have low cortisol levels at the start of the day, and then as the day goes on, their cortisol levels actually increase so that by the end of the day, their cortisol levels are really high and you can imagine the effect it would have on somebody. So what would this type of person here present like?

Dr. Martin: Well, in terms of symptoms, they would be brain fog, they don’t feel as good, they’re not sleeping very well. Of course, they might get to sleep, [00:05:30] but they can’t stay asleep. Or they’re having trouble even getting to sleep because of what, again, cortisol is getting you into that fight or flight and they don’t get into a good restful sleep. Belly fat develops. They wonder why they can’t lose weight. Their sex drive is gone. They might even be starting some anxiety. I always say that depression, okay? Depression, clinical depression, always starts [00:06:00] with anxiety. So cortisol is always involved in that anxious state that actually down the road can lead even into pretty severe depression. But all of those symptoms, the belly fat, you don’t feel good, mood swings, even headaches. You start getting headaches, your skin can change. You start getting adult onset acne.

Dr. Martin: Often these are all symptoms of high levels of cortisol.

Dr. Martin: [00:06:30] And one of the things that I find interesting is that sometimes somebody with type one cortisol, they can have a really hard time getting going in the morning as well. They just… because and it makes sense, their cortisol levels are so low. So that’s type one. Here’s something else that happens after a person has been type one for a period of time, and that time varies from person to person. They end up with what we call type two high cortisol, and here their levels are elevated all day. They just wake up [00:07:00] with high levels of cortisol. It’s high all day. And then same thing, they go to bed with high levels of cortisol. So they… This really here is you’re heading down the path of disease.

Dr. Martin: There’s no question, because this person is loaded with inflammation, just from a clinical standpoint, we’ll talk about symptoms in a second. They’re loaded with inflammation, and because cortisol is raising their blood sugar levels all day, they also tend to have either they have high blood sugar levels [00:07:30] or if they don’t quite have high blood sugar levels yet, they always have high circulating insulin and that affects a whole bunch of different things. So again, this is a person who’s high cortisol all day. And again, how would they present as well with this?

Dr. Martin: Well, again, they’re… These are the type that are really exhausted. I mean, they just never get, they feel like their batteries are drained. I mean, they come in and say, “Doc,” like I will always ask a patient when I first see them, I point to myself and say, “Well look, [00:08:00] I’m 10 out of 10 energy. I’m the Eveready bunny. How about you?” And they go, “Oh, I’m minus two. I’m not even at a five, I’m at a minus two. I am literally dragging.” Now you see hair loss, the other symptoms I mentioned, brain fog, anxiety, even depression. Cravings, enormous cravings for sugar or salt, or both.

Dr. Martin: Now their immune system isn’t any good, every time there’s [00:08:30] somebody that gets a cold, they get a cold. They might develop environmental allergies that they never had or even food intolerances that they never had. They have got a legion of symptoms that just really come back to those adrenals, where the adrenals now… Type one, yeah, you still got… You can push yourself maybe to have a little energy, but when you’re in type two high cortisol, you’re exhausted and you’re [00:09:00] running literally on fumes.

Dr. Martin: Now, so just to summarize here, type one high cortisol, they’ll display some symptoms of high cortisol. Usually they complain of low energy. They may have a hard time sleeping or they have some kind of anxiety. They may also complain, as you mentioned of brain fog or cravings. They may start to notice their hair starting to get thinner or falling out. A lot of people may mention, they start to get dizzy when they stand quicker and then they also complain of low libido. So that’s type one cortisol. Type two is like you mentioned, [00:09:30] they’re exhausted. They have a decreased brain function, they’ve got some brain fog going on, they have insomnia, they may have a form of anxiety and everything else. Hair loss, dizziness. I mean they got a lot of symptoms. So that’s generally what high cortisol would look like, the two different things.

Dr. Martin: So the question is this, if your cortisol is high, either type one or type two, what do you do at this point? Well listen, this is what we use in our clinic and we’ve been using this for a long time. It’s a formula called cortisol control. This [00:10:00] formula was specifically made for this purpose. We’ve been using this in the clinic for a long time and you see this every day in the clinic. You’ve recommended this for a long time and it just flat out works for high cortisol.

Dr. Martin: Yeah, absolutely. It’s getting right at the issue, because a lot of people with all those symptoms of course, they don’t even know what’s going on. They’re not sure. Right? It’s very difficult to diagnose because most physicians are never looking at cortisol. [00:10:30] They go, “You’re fatigued, oh maybe it’s your thyroid.” Then your thyroid numbers come back, they’re within normal limits and they never seem… Your blood work seems to be good.

Dr. Martin: But cortisol is something that should be tested. This is something that we look at in the clinic. It’s very important to look at that test and then we see the results. The results are once they get on this product, it is specifically made for the adrenal glands. It regulates cortisol and the difference in sleep, [00:11:00] in energy, in brain fog, in weight loss, in libido and you name the symptoms, they are improved with this product and it’s consistent in terms of lowering anxiety and other things.

Dr. Martin: Well, and here’s just a couple of things, you could go to our website, read the reviews on this product. They’re unbelievable. These are the same. We hear the same thing in our clinic. These are strictly people that are all over Canada, United States that use our product, [00:11:30] but our clinic, we hear the same thing every day as well.

Dr. Martin: So for example, the first one here by Janet, this literally was a type two high cortisol, had every symptom in the book. She had decreased brain function, insomnia, poor sleep, anxiety, hair loss, dizziness when standing, developed foggy and fuzzy thinking, low libido and mood swings. And she says, her symptoms have been corrected. Look at all the people mentioning the effect it has on their sleep, lower anxious levels, improved energy and mood. Here’s [00:12:00] much less stressed, help them sleep and cope with life, more calm. This person three weeks and they’ve noticed improvement in my sleep and overall mood, helped me sleep at night and makes me less anxious, better sleep, more relaxed. This person, heart palpitations have decreased, so on and on these are the same things, but they were all experiencing symptoms of high cortisol and by taking cortisol control, they’ve noticed a big difference in how their cortisol, their cortisol is more balanced now [00:12:30] and it’s amazing to see the effect that it has on their symptoms.

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