How to Lower Your Cortisol Levels Naturally

Five key physiological and psychological triggers that disrupt your stress response and how to start shifting them

From Looking Safe to Feeling Safe

When I was twenty-five, my life looked perfect on paper: I was living in Manhattan, working as a data scientist, and often spending weekends lying in Central Park with friends. 

The only problem was, I couldn’t enjoy any of it. 

Tension was humming in my body. I felt drained most days (until I got a second wind at night), bloated, and constantly on edge. I was anxious and frustrated about the smallest things but simply couldn’t relax.

I was learning that there’s a major difference between having the external safety of a job, a caring family, and friends, and feeling safe in your nervous system. And if you don’t feel safe in your body, nothing else feels safe either. 

If you’ve struggled with a dysregulated stress response and cortisol levels, you know how dramatically this hormone can shift your view of the world. Even living in a place with people that you love can turn into a daily battle. 

When I hit burnout shortly after, I began a six year process to figure out how to heal my stress response and enjoy life again. However, I want to share what I learned so you can make it a much shorter journey. That said, bringing your stress response and cortisol into balance means not only addressing food and lifestyle habits, but also looking at beliefs and thought patterns. 

In this post, I’ll show you the five major drivers of high cortisol and how to start shifting them today. I’ve also included a quiz to help you identify your biggest trigger.

#1. The Blood Sugar - Cortisol Connection

Most people know blood sugar spikes trigger insulin. Few realize they also trigger cortisol.

When your blood sugar rises too high, your body releases insulin to shuttle sugar into cells; when your blood sugar subsequently crashes, it releases cortisol to raise it back to normal. 

If you’re living as I did in my twenties, enjoying morning croissants or sugary snacks on the run, your body is releasing insulin and cortisol to keep you balanced. The resulting signs of dysregulated blood sugar are so common that many women take them for granted: hanger or shaking between meals. 

If you’re struggling with high cortisol, balancing your blood sugar is one of the simplest and fastest steps you can take to remove unnecessary stress from your body.  To find out how, you can grab the quiz at the end of the article, which shares three tips for reducing each cortisol trigger.

#2. Restoring the Circadian Rhythm

See if this sounds familiar: You wake up groggy and jolt yourself awake with a shot of coffee. Around 2-3 pm your energy flags again and you take an afternoon coffee break. Around evening as you’re thinking of winding down, you get a second wind and hang out online until past midnight. 

If any part of that story sounds familiar, your circadian rhythm is likely out of balance. 

When your circadian rhythm is balanced, you wake up with the morning sunlight and a jolt of energy, begin your day refreshed, and stay active until your energy levels gradually wane in the evening. 

In our modern society, disconnected from the light rhythms in nature, your anchors to a healthy circadian rhythm are severed. You need to make a conscious effort to get morning light on your eyes, to turn off blue light before bed, and to sleep in darkness. 

But I can promise you, the effects you’ll feel of a restored circadian rhythm will amaze you. The feeling of waking up refreshed after a deep sleep or working a full day without an afternoon energy drop will remind you what your body’s capable of when you follow nature’s rhythms.

#3. The Slow Burning Fire: Chronic Inflammation

Chronic inflammation is one of the most important - and difficult to pin down - triggers of elevated cortisol. 

Chronic inflammation is generally related to your immune response and indicates that your body is fighting a perceived threat. Without assistance from a holistic nutritionist or doctor, it can be hard to tell whether that threat is an infection, toxins in your body, or food intolerances or sensitivities (or all of the above).

I struggled with chronic inflammation for many years. It burned like a slow fire in my body, showing up as skin issues, joint pains, and brain fog. For many years, my doctors scratched their heads. 

It wasn’t until I visited a holistic nutritionist - and became one myself - that I understood that all of these issues were manifestations of the same internal problem: an activated immune system attacking a perceived threat. 

After testing, I learned that I had food sensitivities to milk, soy, and corn. I left the nutritionist’s office with a list of foods to avoid and a major lifestyle change ahead of me. But it was worth it. Within four weeks of changing my diet, my joint pains were gone, my skin was clear, and my mind was sharper than it had ever been. 

Chronic inflammation often requires more digging than the other causes of elevated cortisol, but addressing it is like putting out a fire that’s been eating away at your body for years: you’ll benefit in every way. 

#4. Beliefs and Thought Patterns

Probably the most fundamental factor behind my elevated cortisol was my way of thinking. 

When I moved to New York City, I came with the belief that I had to succeed.  I had to avoid anyone realizing that I didn’t know things. I had to get it right. In my mind, my worth depended on it. 

With beliefs like that, it’s no wonder every day felt like a battle for survival. 

Every mistake generated enormous fear and self-criticism.

Looking back, I have a lot of compassion for my younger self, who internalized so much perfectionism and tied her self-worth so much to achievements. Though the thought patterns seem insane now, breaking them took me months of practice. 

One of the most helpful tools in doing so was a program called Dynamic Neural Retraining System (DNRS). The premise of the program is simple: your threat response can become over-activated from many sources and bringing it back into balance is a repeated process of interrupting it and shifting your attention. Over and over. After interrupting my own threat patterns about a hundred times, the process gradually became automatic. 

While I generally work with clients directly on shifting major belief blocks, I’ve found DNRS to be an incredibly helpful tool for shifting thinking patterns from threat mode to a sense of possibility. 

#5. Mindset Shift: From Doing to Being

Almost every woman I work with struggles with the following habit: a never-ending compulsion to do more. 

If you’re like most people, you probably get rewarded for your productivity at work, credit for all the things you do, and a dopamine hit when you check something off your to-do list.

It’s very rare that you are rewarded for your being: The joy you bring into a room. The depth of your presence when you’re calm and centered. In the modern, productivity-focused world, these things are treated as “soft” or intangible.

You are taught to measure life by what you do, but constantly doing can eventually stress your body. Many women I work with respond to the feeling of high cortisol by pushing themselves more, even when their bodies are at a breaking point. 

What’s the solution? 

A mindset shift: from doing to being. A shift in optimizing productivity to observing your state of being while you’re doing.

That’s why I created the Vitality Tracker. 

The Vitality Tracker is a simple, structured way to track four key dimensions of your life — vitality, pleasure, joy, and success — in just five minutes per day. It shifts your focus from what you’re doing to how you’re living. And as you know: what gets measured, improves.

If you want to shift the structure of your life from an endless to-do list to a balanced system, where your joy and vitality are as important as your success, download the tracker template and try it out. You’ll discover a way of living that’s balanced and energizing. 

Conclusion

Though it’s not an overnight change, shifting your stress response is one of the most powerful changes you can make. 

Imagine for a moment how daily life would feel if your energy was steady, your mind calm, and your body felt like a place you could rest. 

That’s what happens when your stress response comes back into balance.

If you’re ready to bring your stress response back into balance, take the Cortisol Clues Quiz. It helps you discover the main types of stress your body is responding to and three simple steps you can take to begin addressing them. You’ll also get a link to the Vitality Tracker to shift your focus from constant productivity to elevated vitality.