Podcasts · High Capacity – Nervous System Regulation, Stress Management, Burnout Recovery, Somatic Tools, Anxiety, Boundaries, Overwhe

492 - Do You Have High Cortisol? 5 Signs and What's Actually Going On

13 Oct 2026 · 25 min · Episode 192

You're exhausted all day, and then weirdly wide awake at 10pm.

You crash at 3, patch it with caffeine, and pay for it that night.

The weight around your middle won't shed the way it used to.

You catch every cold going around and hold onto it for weeks.

If you've been quietly collecting symptoms like these, you've probably seen the internet's answer: it's your cortisol, and here's a $10 tea to "balance" it.

Cortisol has become a villain word. But cortisol isn't the enemy.

The problem was never that you have it. The problem is the shape of the curve, and when you've been running activated for months, that curve shifts and starts showing up at the wrong hours in the wrong amounts.

This week I walk through five signs your cortisol curve is off and what that actually means.

What You'll Learn:

• Why you're tired in the morning and wired at night, and what it says about your cortisol curve • The 3pm-crash-to-caffeine-to-bad-sleep loop, and how it quietly feeds itself • Why "high cortisol" feels like your personality instead of a problem • The sign that looks like calm and almost never is

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Links in the notes 1

• https://michellegrosser.com/quiz