They’re Coming for Your Stress Hormones

3 min readIF THE WELLNESS world on social media is The Upside Down, then cortisol is the Demogorgon.Spend any amount of time exploring #cortisol and you’ll witness all sorts of horrible things. Shouty influencers linking the hormone to ultra-processed foods and omega-6s and obesity. Doctors who are not medical doctors diagnosing your “cortisol face.” Long lists of terrifying supposed symptoms of chronic elevated cortisol including “pooping too much or not at all.” A seemingly endless onslaught of truly horrific AI healthslop.One refuge, it seems, comes from supplements. There are a few pills and drinks (and even tinctures) on the market that promise they can rescue you from high cortisol hell via a few active ingredients. And the benefits of dampening the stress hormone are manyfold: more calm, greater focus, better and deeper sleep, and enhanced recovery after exercise.It’s that last one—the supposed athletic edge—that we were most curious. The marketing language promoting many of these products argues that when your cortisol levels are high due to stress, even if it’s exercise-related stress, your body can’t recover properly, leading to poor sleep, low energy, and lack of performance progress.But is that even true? I reached out to Men’s Health nutrition advisor Dezi Abeyta, RDN for answers.Does cortisol affect workout performance?WELL, YES, BUT it’s not really a problem.“The cortisol spike you get from a hard workout is the signal that mobilizes fuel and organizes repair,” says Abeyta. “I wouldn't label it as the thing preventing recovery because a spike is adaptive, self-limiting, and it's intensity-dependent. You need to hit roughly 60 percent of VO2max just to raise cortisol at all.”Below that, exercise actually lowers your cortisol. (You are, after all, engaging in self-care when you workout.) “So the problem the product is solving isn't happening in the first place,” Abeyta says.It’s true that chronic cortisol elevation from overtraining or general psychological stress is a real thing, Abeyta says, but you’re not going to get that from a random Tuesday leg day.Would a cortisol-lowering supplement help with overtraining?THAT’S NOT THE issue. “When researchers look at athletes who are genuinely overtrained, they find a blunted cortisol response, not an elevated one,” Abeyta says. “The healthy athletes had the highest responses.” Scientists have studied this.The American College of Sports Medicine even goes so far as to state that resting cortisol isn’t even a useful measurement for overtraining, Abeyta says. “It just tells you the training was hard, nothing else.”If you truly are overtraining, the real issue might be that you’re “under-recovering,” not that you have high cortisol. “The three things that actually move recovery are sleep, eating enough to support the training, and managing load,” says Abeyta.Many cortisol-regulating supplements come loaded up on science-y sounding ingredients like L-glutamine, L-tyrosine, and phosphatidylserine, but these are all nutrients you’ll find in a well-balanced diet. And, ultimately, the most important nutrients for proper recovery after a hard workout session come down to the basics: protein and carbs.”If a guy is worried about stress and performance, the honest advice is to look at how much he's sleeping and eating before considering a supplement,” Abeyta says.In short, it’s no strange thing.Paul Kita is a Deputy Editor at Men's Health, where he has covered food, cooking, nutrition, supplements, grooming, tech, travel, and fatherhood at the brand for more than 15 years. He is also the author of two Men's Health cookbooks, Guy Gourmet and A Man, A Pan, A Plan, and the winner of a James Beard Award.