-: Now, as we dig a little bit deeper into cortisol
and their stronger counterpoint, catecholamines
and the relationship to insulin, a big part of cortisol
is that we understand it negates the effect of insulin.
So cortisol and insulin are going to be competing
in each other for what is happening in term of,
is nutrition going into the blood, or is nutrition
coming out of the blood and being stored, right?
So that's this constant battle,
and that's what we're just talking about with that seesaw.
So, if we look at cortisol, mobilizes fat,
you know, from the liver to be used, right,
so that's catabolic to the liver,
but we're giving nutrients to the muscle tissue.
So, one thing I don't like to do is say things
are just anabolic or catabolic.
That used to be, you know, years ago,
the way that I'd look at things.
Now, it's like tissue-specific, what is the effect?
Most hormones are nutrient partitioning.
So in the proper conditions, we're getting nutrients
from fat cells, we're getting nutrients from the liver,
like glucose from the liver, fatty acids from the fat cells,
and we are transporting them somewhere.
They're not just going into thin air.
It's not catabolic.
Cortisol doesn't be like, hey, release energy,
and then that energy just like dissipates,
we just sweat it out or something, like it's just,
oh, it's just wasted.
It's like, no, that goes to, goes to good use.
So by driving glucose and by driving fatty acids
to the muscle tissue, in a way, you can think of it
as almost like anti-catabolic, because the more nutrients
I can get from the blood to the muscle tissue,
the less muscle glycogen I have to burn through.
The more fat that I can get to the muscle tissue,
right, the more, the less carbohydrate that that muscle
has to rely on, provided it can use that fat fast enough.
So it really kind of depends on the training demand.
But the big picture is
we are driving nutrients to something.
So to the muscle, the muscle is getting nutrients.
It may itself be in a catabolic state
because it's burning nutrients for exercise,
but that's not cortisol that's making it catabolic.
It was catabolic on its own.
Cortisol's actually limiting how catabolic it is
by replenishing nutrients to the muscle tissue.
So look at all of these things not as simply catabolic
or anabolic, but in terms of, how are they
distributing nutrients from one tissue to the next?
What is that long distance
communication thing that's going on?
What things are being catabolic?
What things are being anabolic?
What things would be considered anti-catabolic, which,
in a sense, that would probably be the closest thing,
is that cortisol can be anti-catabolic to muscle tissue
in the correct environment, you know, and like,
when it is elevated because we are training.
If we're not training and we're just stressed out,
that's a totally different situation.
Now we have cortisol that's like, mobilizing this stuff,
and the muscles aren't really getting it,
because the muscles haven't, you know,
they're not increasing their nutrient uptake,
'cause they're not exercising.
So, what I would say here is if we look at cortisol
is it inhibits non-survival
or we'll say essential energy consumption.
So, when we are stressed, our body is trying to partition
nutrients to the things that it thinks need to be running
for our immediate survival from a physical perspective.
So that's to the cardiovascular system, and that's
to the muscular system, and then the nervous system.
It's making those three things,
which are the things that we use in training.
So that means it's partitioning nutrients away
from things like the digestive system from detoxifying,
from any sort of repair process,
or, you know, things like that.
So, cortisol, you can think of like when cortisol is high,
some of the things that are gonna be low are things
like thyroid hormone, which are essentially saying,
hey, everything can run.
When stress hormones are high, they say no,
not everything can run.
Only the things that need to run for survival get nutrients.
When we look at catecholamines,
catecholamines are essentially faster-acting,
stronger stress hormones than cortisol.
So that's our epinephrine, norepinephrine,
or adrenaline, if you will, right?
So those are stronger.
They're gonna basically revolve around the same way,
but to a greater degree.
So the impact that they're gonna have
on fatty acid release is greater.
The impact that they're gonna have
on glucose release in the liver is to a greater degree.
The impact that they're gonna have
on cardiovascular output is of much, much greater degree,
and that's probably the biggest one.
When catecholamines come out,
we really see that elevated heart rate.
So when you get stressed to the point where that happens,
like, you will notice that your pulse picks up.
If your blood sugar dips a tiny bit, like,
there's a small change maybe in your heart rate, right?
It elevates a few points, and, you know,
you're circulating or you're circulating a little bit
more nutrients, that's just from the cortisol.
When catecholamines gets released, right,
that's when you can like, feel your heart pounding,
right, that type of thing.
So, or, you know, if you're in really good shape,
you might not get to that point, but like,
unless you're super, super stressed out,
but it's a significant jump in heart rate.
We're not talking like it goes up a few beats.
We're talking it goes up like tens of beats,
if that makes sense.
So, when we improve cardiac and cardiovascular
and muscular system output, we're gonna get
improved reactivity to neurological stimulus.
So that nervous system, when it fires, it's gonna
fire harder, under the influence of catecholamines.
That's all about fueling that fight or flight response.
So this, this whole cascade functions very similar
in terms of an energy perspective.
So we've got brain, all right, is going to say,
okay, catecholamines are getting released.
We're gonna release a whole bunch of fuel.
Heart rate's gonna get elevated.
We're gonna constrict blood from anywhere
that it doesn't need to be and send it only to where
it needs to be, so digestive tract gets no blood.
No digesting right now.
Only muscles, nervous system, and cardiovascular system
get, you know, blood and nutrients right now.
If we're training, cool.
Muscle contractions are gonna go through the roof.
They're gonna have plenty of nutrients to do that work,
which is great if we're training
or we're fighting for survival.
If we're not, if this is emotional stress, so to speak,
right, I have this massive surge of nutrients coming out.
I have an elevated heart rate, right,
my nervous system is agitated, nowhere for anything to go.
What am I gonna have to do?
I'm gonna have to then super-compensate.
So, that's another situation.
When you have stress, not just,
so we talked about the insulin/cortisol
being set off by the muscle tissue being very depleted
and putting an extra demand on the body.
The other way that that happens is
when we have stress that is so stressful
that we get a massive catecholamine response,
that likewise is going to cause a massive surge
in nutrients, a disproportional surge in nutrients
that, if not being consumed by the muscular tissue
and physical activity, is going to result
in an overcompensatory insulin response.
We're gonna get an insulin response
that is disproportionate to what's going on,
and then this vicious cycle will start.
And that's another way that we can get ourselves
into that insulin/cortisol seesaw,
is by having basically stress to the amount
where we're getting catecholamines, you know, released.
Now, an important takeaway is that one of the reasons
that we may release catecholamines is because we have
become, we'll say, resistant to cortisol.
So the term adrenal fatigue is commonly used,
but I think the current debate is there is,
there isn't really adrenal fatigue.
It's not that we lose the ability to make cortisol.
It's that the signaling.
It's like, well, the adrenals are really capable
of making the cortisol still in most people
that have adrenal fatigue symptoms.
What's happened is their body has kind of desensitized
to the cortisol, because they're under some sort
of constant stress, whether that be chronic inflammation,
meta-inflammation, some sort of toxicities,
mental stress, environmental stress.
Something is causing cortisol to constantly be elevated
to the point where now, the body doesn't quite respond
to that cortisol as much as it needs to
to balance the blood sugar.
So, what happens is that in order to keep blood sugar
balanced, we get this burst of catecholamines.
When this happens to people at night,
because they can't balance their blood sugar,
they wake up, and they wake up wide awake,
like, alert, like an alarm just went off
or somebody shook them out of their sleep.
The reason that they wake up like that
is because in order to balance their blood sugar
at night, their body had to release catecholamines
instead of a slow dose of cortisol.
So overnight, when we look at sleep, growth hormones
should release early into sleep and help us save glucose,
and then as we get into the later hours,
closer to waking, right, our body starts releasing cortisol,
a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more
to start stabilizing that blood sugar as we get close
to the point where eventually, it peaks up,
and we start, and it actually wakes us out of our sleep,
which should be like a nice waking, right?
That whole waking up like startled and alert means that,
okay, when that cortisol was supposed to kick in,
it didn't do its job, so blood sugar went too low,
and to keep you alive, you had to release catecholamines
to bring your blood sugar up.
But it did it to set your rate now, that now you have
this high, your nervous system is agitated, whatnot.
You're wide awake, right?
You're like, wide, wide awake.
That is catecholamines being active, because something
is messed up with your cortisol regulation,
either your ability to make it or your ability
to basically be sensitive to it or use it
to actually stabilize your blood sugar like it should.
If we look at insulin, insulin is our message, again,
that we have a large amount of nutrients available,
and we should store it, right?
We have more nutrients in the blood than we need.
When the stress hormones are high,
that will compete with insulin.
So if you have a lot of nutrients in your blood
and you're stressed, then it's gonna take
a larger amount of insulin to get that to go down.
So stress hormones are gonna keep your blood sugar elevated.
So when you're constantly stressed,
even though insulin might keep you from getting
super toxic levels of blood sugar, your blood sugar's
gonna stay a little bit elevated, because some
of those stress hormones will be competing with this.
Insulin also shifts what cells are using for fuel.
So, when we sense that there is an excess of glucose,
that means, hey, instead of just having to store
all this glucose, if you can burn glucose,
go ahead and do it.
We're not in glucose conservation mode,
so burn all the glucose that you want.
So, muscle tissue will actually start using more glucose.
So, insulin tells cells to start using glucose
for fuel as well, which is one of the reasons that we
can see like a, you know, rise in body temperature
and sometimes with people like, oh, they eat
a high-carbohydrate meal or something, all of the sudden,
their body starts burning a bunch more carbohydrates.
When we look at the promotion of carbohydrate stores
to fatty acids, so, when we look at fat cells,
when we are in a low-insulin state,
fat cells tend to be focused on, like,
not taking up any glucose, letting the glucose
go where it needs to to be used.
When we are in an insulin-elevated state,
what that says is it's now okay for the fat cells
to take some of that glucose, too.
Normally the fat cells would only take up
extra fatty acids as needed and store those, because,
you know, the fat cells are there as an energy reserve.
So why would they take energy unless they actually need it?
Let's save the glucose, the fast-acting energy,
for all of the metabolically active tissues.
Insulin is that sign that there is so much around
that even they can have some, right?
And so that's where we get actually that storage
of carbohydrate as fat as well.
Insulin can also inhibit certain metabolic processes,
so like, the gluconeogenesis or the ketogenesis,
which are our ability to either try and make a,
you know, trying to make our own glucose.
Obviously, if there's a ton of glucose around,
I don't need to be making my own from protein.
So, that process can be shut off, which is very good,
because that's a wasteful process.
And then the same thing for ketogenesis, which is that,
okay, this is my way of limiting
this other gluconeogenesis process from going on.
That's gonna get shut down by insulin as well,
insulin that says, hey, we have plenty of excess.
I don't need now to run this process
where I'm breaking up my fat into smaller, easier to use
pieces, because I have plenty of nutrients to go around.
I don't need to put myself into a starvation or stress mode
in terms of nutrients that are available.