You think the 2 PM crash and the 3 AM wake-up are two different problems. They’re not. They’re the same cortisol rhythm misfiring — and in this episode, a clinical pharmacist of 40 years is going to show you exactly what’s breaking it and how to reset it without supplements.
Cortisol is not the stress hormone. It’s a timing system. And when that timing system gets knocked off rhythm — by things you’d never suspect — your energy disappears by afternoon and your eyes pop open at 3 AM for no reason you can name.
In this episode you’ll learn:
• Why the 2 PM energy crash and the 3 AM insomnia are the same problem
• The real cortisol rhythm and how it’s supposed to work
• Four everyday habits quietly reshaping your cortisol curve (blue light, alcohol, intense morning exercise, skipped breakfast)
• Why perimenopause makes the rhythm less stable — and what that actually means
• Three simple resets that work without supplements
Diana Devi is a clinical pharmacist of 40 years and Argentine tango teacher. She works with accomplished women in midlife who have built the life — and need the energy to live it.
If this episode landed, share it with one woman who is lying awake right now wondering what’s wrong with her. Nothing is wrong with her. Her rhythm is renegotiating.
Grab the free Midlife Superpower resource: anagelesslife.com/superpower
Ready to go deeper? Book a session at anagelesslife.com
Connect with the Diana:
Website: http://anagelesslife.com
Facebook (Personal): facebook.com/diana.d.devi
Facebook Ageless Life: facebook.com/anagelesslife
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dianadevi/
Instagram: instagram.com/anagelesslife/
Youtube: youtube.com/channel/UC9RMEbTnK8ZltLQvhUpEsNQ
Tiktok: tiktok.com/@anagelesslife
Midlife Isn’t a Crisis – It’s Your Superpower. Discover 5 simple shifts that instantly help you look better, feel stronger, and step back into your day with purpose: anagelesslife.com/superpower
Listen & Subscribe
Transcript
I’ve been getting a lot of requests to do this episode, and I think it’s time to jump into this important topic. I’m so excited to share this with you in my Diana kind of way.
Cortisol is one of those topics that you see and hear everything about, and it’s everywhere. And what’s concerning to me is that it’s either incomplete, it’s confusing, or it’s just plain wrong. So that’s why we’re here today. I’m ready to talk about the real story of cortisol. I’m Diana Devi, clinical pharmacist for 40 years, Argentine tango teacher and dancer, and host of the Midlife Reset.
And this is Episode 52, part of Running on Full, episode two, and we’re talking about cortisol today. You’ve heard that cortisol is called the stress hormone, and that’s true. But it really does a whole lot more than that, and so that’s why a lot of what you see is kind of the incomplete story. So in order to understand what happens with cortisol, let’s just take a look at how it impacts your body.
Cortisol is the built-in alarm system for your body. You can think of it as the timer. It’s the fuel management system — and you can think of that as what it does for your metabolism. Cortisol goes up in the morning, which is what helps you get out of bed. It then goes down through the day, starts falling, and then it starts to peak and come back up about 30 minutes after you wake up.
And again, in the afternoon it is falling, going down, and then through the evening it reaches its lowest point around midnight. Then it starts to slowly build and go back up again. And it’s not something that you really know or notice. It does this quietly, so that the goal is: by the time your alarm clock goes off, you are ready to move. That’s the normal rhythm we see with cortisol and how it is supposed to work.
Cortisol is not your enemy. It is a timing system, and when it works, you do not notice really what’s going on. Your body is designed to handle a cortisol spike. For example, if you have to run away from Godzilla and you need to survive, you run away, you’re at a safe place, your cortisol level starts to drop back down to normal. The whole system resets in minutes.
The problem is your body cannot tell the difference between running from Godzilla and an email inbox that is chock-full of things that you need to do, or a difficult conversation you needed to have, or news that you watch at 10 o’clock at night, or the glass of wine that feels like you’re unwinding with it but actually is throwing off your chemical signals to your nervous system. And what it has to do to manage those for the next four hours is part of the problem.
So again, this is what you are living. It’s not a broken system. It’s a system that never gets to finish the cycle. It never is able to drop down where it needs to go before it comes back up. And the problem with that is it breaks the rhythm.
And here’s an example of what broken rhythm looks like. Notice if either of these sounds like you, or maybe both of them are familiar to you.
2:00 PM. The energy that carried you through the morning has just vanished. You can’t focus. You reach for coffee. You reach for carbs, sugar, anything to help you. And it only works for about the next hour, and then it gets worse. You push through. You’re not quite yourself. You’re not as sharp as you usually are. You’re not really you. You’re on autopilot.
3:00 AM. You’re wide awake. Your eyes pop open. There’s no reason for you to be awake. You’re just awake. Your mind is racing. Your heart may be beating a little bit faster than it usually does. You lie there watching the ceiling, and finally, at about 5:00 AM, you fall back to sleep — only to have the alarm go off at 6:30.
And most of us think that these are two different problems. The afternoon fuel slump — I need a fix to power me through. And the 3:00 AM, oh my God, I’m awake and staring at the ceiling insomnia. But they’re the same problem. It’s a rhythm problem with two symptoms.
In perimenopause and menopause, the cortisol curve becomes less stable because estrogen and progesterone, two of the female hormones, both play a role in keeping that ebb and flow going. What happens now is that the shifts might be higher or lower, or more dramatic in a shorter period of time, and it gets kind of bumpy. It can drop too fast in the afternoon. It starts its morning rise too early when it’s really still nighttime. The system is not broken. It’s renegotiating. But nobody told you that, so you have been treating it as two separate mysteries that need to be solved.
[FALSE START — CUT]
This is where the clinical pharmacist gets to be useful. You already know stress raises cortisol. You’ve heard that dozens, if not a bazillion times, without realizing it, and some of those are going to surprise you. In other words… So let’s cut. I messed up, Vanessa.
[TAKE 2 — CONTINUE FROM HERE]
This is where the clinical pharmacist brain comes in and is very useful. You already know that stress causes cortisol levels to rise. You’ve heard that. You’re working on it. Yoga on Sundays. You try. What you don’t know is what else is driving that every day without you realizing, and some of these things may surprise you. Some of them you may know, but not really understand the impact or role they have with cortisol.
For example, the phone screen at 10:00 PM. The light that comes from the phone is a blue light. Blue light signals to the brain: hey, it’s time to get up. So the cortisol level starts to go up. If you’re scrolling at 10:00 PM, you are sending a message to your brain that says it’s morning. Three hours later, at 1:00 or 2:00 AM, it starts to come down, but then it rebounds back up. You wake up, and you have no idea why. This is not the time to reach for your phone to doom scroll.
And I want to take a second to make this perfectly clear. When you use your phone at 10:00 PM, that blue light sends a message to your brain to make more cortisol. The cortisol level goes up when it’s supposed to be going down. After a while it starts that downward spike, but it never gets down as low as it would have before the blue light at 10:00 PM. So you don’t go down as low as you need to for the sleep you need. Then it starts to go back up again, because as part of our natural body rhythm, it’s giving you more cortisol. So you never get down to the point where you can rest and digest and really sleep well. And then the cortisol level in the morning is higher, because you didn’t clear it out to zero the night before.
So blue light glasses can help with that. There are also settings on your phone that will help with blocking the blue light. If you’re going to do that, I would put them on starting at about 7:00 to 8:00 PM. They can filter some of it, but it’s not the perfect solution. It’s not going to block out everything. It’s the next best thing to stepping away from the phone, the laptop, or anything else like that.
Number two. And I know some people are not going to want to hear this one. But you pour yourself a glass of wine at 8:00 PM to unwind. You feel calmer. You fall asleep easily. And then at 3:00 AM, boom, you’re wide awake. Here’s why. Alcohol suppresses the cortisol — dampens it down, makes it drop lower — for the first few hours. Your body goes: hey, what’s going on? The cortisol level dropped. We need to send out more. So the cortisol level starts to rebound. It goes up quickly and a lot. That’s what makes you wake up. The wine was not the problem at 8:00. The rebound is the problem at 3:00 AM.
And then what about that 6:00 AM spin class? Intense exercise raises your cortisol, and this is actually useful in the morning. It lines up with your natural cortisol peak and helps your system do what it’s supposed to do. But if you are pushing yourself and really hammering yourself at 6:00 AM on only four hours of sleep, you’re stacking a cortisol spike on top of an already high cortisol level. That throws even more things out of sync, and you really will crash in the afternoon. Your crash will get worse, not better.
The next one is not super popular either, but I think once you understand the rationale, it makes it easier to consider. And that is the skipped breakfast. Your blood sugar levels drop overnight because you haven’t been eating. This is normal. And in the morning, the body needs fuel. If you skip breakfast or eat something light, your blood sugar stays low. The body releases cortisol to compensate. It’s basically saying: I need more fuel. How does it do that? Gives you more cortisol. It sounds helpful, except the cortisol level is higher at mid-morning than it should be, which means the crash is harder in the afternoon. You think you’re being disciplined. Your body is running on an emergency response.
None of these are stress. None of them feel like they should matter. All of them are reshaping your cortisol rhythm every single day.
[THIRD ATTEMPT — SOLUTIONS SECTION]
What actually moves it? Three things. Simple. No supplements required to start.
One. Anchor your morning with light. Get outside within 30 minutes of when you wake up. Natural light, even if it’s only for five minutes. This sets the cortisol clock. It tells the system: it’s morning. This is when we peak and we fall on a schedule. It is the single most effective reset for the rhythm, and almost nobody is doing it intentionally.
Two. Create a real wind down. Not a scroll, not news, not a glass of wine as the only transition between work and sleep. The nervous system needs a signal that the day is ending. Dim the lights. Literally, overhead lighting at its brightest at 9:00 PM is a cortisol trigger. Lower the lights. Lower the signal. Lower the evening cortisol. The 3:00 AM wake-up becomes less frequent, not because you fixed something, but because you stopped breaking it. Novel concept.
Three. Eat something with protein before you go to bed if you’re a person who wakes up at 3:00 AM. It doesn’t have to be a full meal. A small amount of protein with a little bit of fat. I have a client that I’ve recommended, every night before she goes to bed, she has a tablespoon of some kind of nut butter. It can be peanut butter, almond, cashew, whatever it is. What this does is stabilize her blood sugar. No wild fluctuations. And that is one of the triggers for the cortisol surge to happen. Turkey’s another good one. Small pieces of cheese work. Something that is real food. Your body does not need much. It needs just enough to know it is not in a famine.
[CLOSE]
Here is the reframe I want to leave you with. Your cortisol isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do. The inputs that you’re giving it have changed. Some of the hormones have changed. Some of it is light. Some of it is the wine, and the phone, and the skipped breakfast, and the spin class at 6:00 AM. The rhythm can be reset, not overnight, but a lot faster than you think. The 2:00 PM crash and the 3:00 AM wake-up are the same conversation, and now you know what it’s saying.
The next episode we’re going to go into movement and how movement can impact all of this, and it will be fun. Fun things that you can do anywhere. No equipment required. There might be some music involved. But that’s what we’re doing next week.
If this landed for you, or you know someone who would like to hear the episode, please share it. You can go to anagelesslife.com, or if they want to book a session with me, there’s a button there you can push. No pressure. Just a conversation. I look forward to seeing you next week. Bye for now.
