[specialist]

My cortisol levels were way out of whack. Getting them under control helped. Definitely my first treatment resulting in real benefits.

For some of us, insomnia is a multi-factor disease. So I had to do All The Things. My sleep hygiene regiment is a superset of everything listed here.

Ultimately, I needed proper diagnosis and then treatment of my sources of chronic pain to attain somewhat healthy sleep patterns. Pinched nerves, aka "bone spurs", in my spine.

I definitely had to jump thru all the hoops to get to this point.

[stooliepidgin]

How would someone control their cortisol levels? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, medical/pharma interventions, and/or something else?

[specialist]

Having done it, I still honestly can't say what worked. Per @rojeee, this list is more or less the kind of stuff I did.

"11 Natural Ways to Lower Your Cortisol Levels"

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/ways-to-lower-cortisol

Additionally:

1)

My naturopath prescribed supplements. Lots of stuff for night time, going to bed. Like chamomile tea, melatonin, magnesium ortate (for muscle pain), ashwagandha, and L-theanine. And some stuff to perk up in the morning, like DHEA drops. The general idea is to over time nudge the daily cortisol and adrenaline cycle back to "normal".

I'm not recommending this stuff. Just relating what I did, experimented with. For all I know, all the benefits were due to placebo effect. And being very motivated to fix my sleep.

I had first read up on each supplement. I figured none were harmful (to me). So the worst that'd happen is I'd waste some money.

2)

I'm skeptical of naturopathy and against homeopathy. In the future, I believe we'll call the good (useful) bits "nutrition", which will just be rolled up into wellness and eating right.

Probably the biggest benefit of having a naturopath (that I liked) was life coach stuff, being accountable to someone. In that way, I got lucky with the 3rd practitioner. The first two I consulted were total quacks.

3)

I did test my daily cortisol level cycle. Spit tests. At the time, the support for the accuracy of these tests was pretty thin. Even so, my tests before, during, after adopting my sleep hygiene regiment seemed to indicate that my cycle became "normal".

These tests seemed to correlation with my lived experience. Which means almost nothing. Self reporting is notoriously unreliable, which I've experienced many, many times.

YMMV.

[rojeee]

Thanks, very interestering to hear about your experience.

[rojeee]

More aerobic exercise, less anerobic exercise, more meditation, etc.

[jbotz]

Magnesium helps with that as well [1] (see my comment above in this thread). In general, magnesium is involved in lots of biological processes, but especially those involving hormones.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33030273/

[specialist]

Yes and:

If OTC magnesium citrate upsets your stomach, maybe try the other variations. I settled on magnesium glycinate lysinate. (Cheaper than magnesium orotate, which also worked for me.)

[misev]

Anaerobic exercise may have a temporary bad effect on cortisol, how are the long-term effects though? In moderation I suspect it is a net positive long-term.

[rojeee]

It's a good question that I don't really know the answer to but I can offer some experience. I do a lot of running and 80% of my training is below the aerobic threshold, with 20% above (so anaerobic). After aerobic sessions you recover quickly and can do them day in day out for prolonged periods of time with no increase in chronic stress. E.g. running 100km/week. Effects are higher HRV, lower cortisol and lower resting heart rate. Anerobic workouts, on the otherhand (including any weights sessions I do), need to be done sparingly. The day after a hard workout your HRV will be lower, resting heart rate will be higher, cortisol will be higher. Too many anerobic sessions in a row and you'll start getting into over-training syndrome territory, so you really need to be careful! So I guess the TL;DR is the only way anerobic exercise decreases stress/cortisol is by not doing it or doing it sparingly. E.g. It is my opinion that people who only lift weights are probably unhealthy because they have consistently high levels of chronic stress.

[misev]

I do a lot of running as well and have observed the same effects. After anaerobic sprints or a race of up to 10k, sleep HRV drops / HR is higher and running HR:pace is elevated for up to a week. However, usually this is then followed by some improvement in all of these metrics compared to the baseline before the hard workout. Anaerobic exercise builds/maintains especially fast-twitch muscles, and higher muscle mass has positive influence on many health markers; as we get older we slowly lose muscle mass, but the losses are predominantly fast-twitch muscles [1]. So I believe anaerobic workouts are very important, despite causing quite some stress temporarily. Totally agree they require a lot of recovery inbetween.

Unrelated, out of curiosity, when you say 80% of your training: is it in mileage/time? Or some effort metric like TRIMP, calories, avg. HR, or so? Or something else?

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7493202/

[rojeee]

That's good you've observed the same effects and definitely agree that anaerobic training improves fitness and teh associated markers over time. When in my teens I did a lot of running but back then I didn't have a HR monitor and probably most of my training was anaerobic and still managed to improve well over the years. I suspect I was taking on high levels of stress which ultimately led me to quit running when I started university.

Interesting that you mention sleep HRV. I use the Oura ring and have observed that my sleep HRV is super super low at the moment, like 15/20ms but when I check it in the morning with my polar H10 strap then it will usually come out between 60-80ms. Tried to figure out what causes it but not had any luck so far. I don't think I'm over-training or have any other issues.

I follow Phil Maffetone's training methodology [1], which has worked quite well for me. So currently, 80% of my training by distance/time is between 135bpm and 145bpm. The training is mostly steady runs between 7km to 25km. The remaining 20% is a mixture of progression runs, speed training, and intervals.

Initially, for the first 6 months of training, all my training was below 145 bpm and was quite slow at 6min/km but now I can do 4.30min/km at 140bpm and I'm still getting faster!

Cheers

[1] https://philmaffetone.com/method/