should you lower cortisol before bed?

Lower your cortisol, balance your cortisol, these five foods are spiking your cortisol. Poor old cortisol seems [00:01:00] to have become, like, the baddie or the villain of the wellness world. And so is it? Is it a baddie? Or actually, what is it? Well, Cortisol is a hormone and it's produced by the adrenal cortex, part of your adrenal glands, which sit like little hats on top of your kidneys. The release of cortisol is regulated through a hormonal communication pathway involving the brain and the adrenal glands, and this is called the HPA axis.

And yes, the HPA axis is involved in your response to stress. That's why cortisol often gets called the stress hormone but being involved in the stress response is only part of its job. Actually, cortisol plays a really important [00:02:00] role in regulating the availability of your energy. It's involved in your metabolism

It influences immune and inflammatory activity, and importantly for what we're talking about today

Cortisol has its own circadian rhythm, its own daily rhythm. So having cortisol, in fact, even having high cortisol levels does not automatically mean, "Something is wrong." It doesn't automatically mean you are, in inverted commas, too stressed. In fact, you couldn't function normally without it. And so this idea of kind of blanket lowering your cortisol is potentially quite misleading.

We don't actually want cortisol to be low all the time. So it used to be thought that the [00:03:00] peak of cortisol was caused by waking up, but actually some really cool research published last year in 2025 actually measured cortisol continuously before and after people woke up, which was really hard to measure before. And it found that on average, cortisol wasn't rising faster because people had woken up.

The rise had begun while they were asleep in the later part of the night. And so why is this interesting? Well, this starts to tell us that cortisol isn't just reacting to whether you are stressed or relaxed in any particular moment. It's also regulated according to the time of day

So from its morning high, which we've just discussed, cortisol in an ideal world declines throughout the day, reaching low levels at night ready for you to fall asleep. [00:04:00] Okay. So now we get to the question I did promise that we would get here

Should you lower your cortisol before bed? Okay, well, sort of. Cortisol being lower at night is part of that healthy circadian pattern that we just talked about, and there is research associating disrupted circadian cortisol patterns with sleep problems. But that doesn't mean if you're lying awake spiraling at 1:00 in the morning that you can immediately just conclude from that, "Well, my cortisol is too high How you feel in your individual ability to sleep on a night doesn't give you a individual cortisol measurement, and actually lying there worrying about whether you've managed to lower your cortisol or not is potentially gonna cause more stress.[00:05:00]

And so then we're kinda going backwards. you're probably listening to this because you want to improve your sleep in some way. And so I think rather than trying to focus on one hormone, how about putting that emphasis into supporting you transitioning from your day, from your activities, your roles, your responsibilities, into rest and into sleep?

And yoga is an absolute master tool at this. It's incredible. You can work with the breath through yoga. You can work with the mind. You can work with the body, and you can create a clear, deliberate transition between doing and sleeping. And if you'd like me to guide you through exactly that, [00:06:00] I've created Sleep Deeply Tonight, a long sleep practice that you can put on when you get into bed.

You don't have to stay awake for it. In fact, I would be delighted if you didn't. You'll find the link to it in the show notes. All you need to do is get snuggled up in bed, press play, and let me do the rest. All right, so let's summarize. focusing on one hormone, even if it does have the nickname of the stress hormone, is probably not super useful for whole body health and for working with something so impactful as sleep

In an ideal world, yes, cortisol levels will be lower to allow us to settle into rest and into sleep. But actually, we can't really achieve that by trying to c-control one hormone. We need to achieve that by telling our brain and our [00:07:00] body, "Okay, the day is over now. I don't need to be on high alert. I don't need to be thinking.

I don't need to be doing. I need to be resting." And you can use yoga to really help you achieve that. I believe that so, so solidly. So much so, like I say, that I have a practice dedicated to that. So I hope that's actually taken the pressure off a little bit. There's lots bandied about, about cortisol at the moment, about how to lower it, et cetera, et cetera.

And I really hope that's removed some of the pressure about what your perfect level of cortisol should be for you, and instead it's looking at whole body and mind health. Grab your free practice. It's linked to in the show notes. And as always, happy practicing [00:08:00]