Stress, Cortisol and the Black Body
It can be hard to keep up with what’s happening in the wellness world, but the algorithms have spoken and the word on everyone’s lips is cortisol. The stress hormone is being talked about over Sunday brunches, endless videos on cortisol-reducing hacks and Google searches for it are spiking.
As our daily stressors seem to be increasing by the second, we’ve normalised being stressed to the point where our conversations are centred around how busy and overwhelmed we are. We do so without acknowledging the consequences that stress can have on our physical, mental, and emotional health.
While it seems like one day everyone’s fixated on sound baths and the next it’s gut health; cortisol is well worth looking into. Especially as there’s a higher prevalence of stress for Black people, which can lead to poorer health outcomes. Public health researcher Dr Arline T. Geronimus, details this in her book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life on the Body in an Unjust Society.
Geronimus explains, “Weathering is about hopeful, hardworking, responsible, skilled, and resilient people dying from the physical toll of constant stress on their bodies, paying with their health because they live in a rigged, degrading, and exploitative system.”
From maternal mortality for Black women being almost four times higher than for white women, to Black people in the UK being three to four times more likely to have high blood pressure; we are starting to see a greater correlation as to why, as Geronimus writes, “weathering afflicts human bodies — all the way down to the cellular level — as they grow, develop, and age in a systemically and historically racist, classist society.”
So, what is cortisol anyway?
Let’s go back and look at what cortisol actually is, we spoke with NHS and private GP, Dr Tosin Ajayi-Sotubo, who explained that, “cortisol is often referred to as the body’s ‘stress hormone’ because it usually rises in response to stress or stressful situations. Having the right amount of cortisol in your body is essential for your health, not only does it help the body respond to stressful situations but it plays a crucial role in a range of functions in the body, including controlling blood sugar levels, regulating your metabolism, reducing inflammation, and helping with memory and cognitive function.”
This is important to take into consideration, as when it comes to wellness, there can often be a very all-or-nothing approach. If you do a quick scroll on your phone, you’ll be convinced that cortisol is strictly bad news and we must eliminate it immediately. But, that’s clearly not an accurate description. There’s also other ways that cortisol helps our bodies, as registered nutritionist, hormone expert and women’s health expert Lola Ross describes, “when cortisol is functioning well, it can have a positive influence on the health of our skin. Cortisol is an anti-inflammatory, so it supports the skin’s immune function, and cortisol also regulates our sleep-wake cycle.”
We need cortisol but in our over-stressed daily lives with never-ending to-do lists and demands on our time and attention, it’s easy to see how our levels can increase and bring us out of balance. Ajayi-Sotubo goes on to explain, “chronically high cortisol levels due to ongoing stress or underlying health conditions can have negative effects on your health, including weakening the immune system, weight gain, acne, memory difficulties, diabetes and more.”
When it comes to skin, brands such as Wild Source, Disciple and Keys Soulcare have focused their messaging on mindful rituals, slowing down your routine and the mind-skin connection which encourages us to treat our time in the mirror as a place to reduce some of the stress that can aggravate skin conditions. Ross who runs a nutrition and skin health clinic in Notting Hill says, “during stressful periods, when cortisol levels are elevated, it can have detrimental effects on our skin - disrupting sleep, upsetting other hormones and rather than acting as an anti-inflammatory, stress can lead to sustained low-grade inflammation in the body.”
We may not always be able to see what stress is doing to our physical bodies in the short-term, but we can often feel it the most, when it comes to our mental health. We have a tendency to think about stress as something that happens in our minds and can identify with the feeling the most when we’re swamped with work deadlines, rushing to make a train or worrying about things like finances. Alex Holmes, psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, and author of Time to Talk: How Men Think About Love, Belonging and Connection, explains the other ways that high cortisol levels can play out for us.
“Even if you feel like you have the stress under control, when you’re in fight and flight, your body is not in rest and digest. Your sleep can be disrupted, you might then end up finding it hard to make decisions, memory can feel slower than usual and tolerance levels can be reduced.”
With all that said, even if conversations around cortisol soon dry up in favour of a new wellness trend, keeping our levels in balance feels like a necessity. TikTok might be helpful for spreading information on areas of our health that we might not have considered before, but it’s also a hotspot for misinformation. As with all things health and wellness, trust that your body is your body and there’s never a one-sized fits all approach to this.