Restoring Your Vitality With The Cortisol Cure

Most of us have heard that cortisol is the stress hormone and the goal is to lower it. Dr. Erin Kinney says that is backwards. Cortisol is your body’s energy currency. It gets you out of bed, handles stress, and helps your body heal. The real problem is running out. At 22, Erin was a marathon runner who gained thirty pounds almost overnight, couldn’t get out of bed, and cried all the time. Labs showed her cortisol was nearly nonexistent. That sent her to naturopathic medicine and, years later, to her Cortisol Bank Account framework: everything you do is a withdrawal, rest is a deposit, and healing only happens when you earn more than you spend. Recorded live in front of clients and staff at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona. What we get into: why cortisol is not the enemy the stress muscle and the relax muscle why Tim wakes up at 2 AM what alcohol and drugs do to your cortisol bank account why anxiety and depression often rise in early sobriety swapping drugs and alcohol for exercise, social media, or gambling caffeine as a credit card the earliest signs of burnout cortisol, hormones, and women in recovery why people feel exhausted even when they’re doing everything right the ten minute “toes up” what a day that supports cortisol looks like when to get labs audience questions on nicotine, chronic pain, thyroid and autoimmunity, and whether remembering hard times stresses the body a live exercise with an imaginary lemon; and Erin’s own story of burning out again in 2021 and how she got better.