56. Cortisol Isn't the Enemy: Why the Goal Is Recovery, Not Less Stress

Written By Brittany Broderick

Cortisol is having a cultural moment. I can barely scroll through wellness content without running into some version of it. Morning routines built to prevent a spike. Foods blamed for keeping cortisol high. Warnings about coffee, too much exercise, too much work, too little sleep. All of it folds under one enormous umbrella: your cortisol is too high, and that's the problem.


Of course there's truth buried in a lot of this. Chronic stress matters. It's the reason the Body-First Healing Program exists, because so many of us are living in long-term states of stress and survival, and that has real consequences in the body. I see it every day, and I would never want to minimize it. But in our rush to label hormones as good or bad, and states as regulated or dysregulated, I think we've forgotten something fundamental about being alive. Your body was not designed for the absence of stress. It was designed for a relationship with it.


LISTEN, FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE:


Cortisol is not an error

Cortisol isn't a mistake the body makes when we get stressed. It's one of the ways the body becomes capable of meeting a demand. It's released through the HPA axis and plays a role in energy availability, metabolism, immune activity, attention, and our circadian rhythm. It's supposed to rise and fall. For most of us it rises naturally in the morning to help move the body from sleep into activity.


So the idea that any spike is inherently bad starts to fall apart pretty quickly. Our biology is dynamic. Heart rate moves. Blood pressure moves. A healthy organism isn't one where every variable has been flattened into stillness. What matters isn't simply whether cortisol went up. What matters is why, how intensely, for how long, how often, and whether the body gets a real chance to recover afterward.


A stress response that mobilizes energy for a hard workout is not the same biological story as living for years in an unpredictable home where your body never gets convincing evidence that the threat has passed. The body may recruit overlapping systems in both. The context is completely different. When we skip that nuance, cortisol becomes the villain instead of a messenger, and we risk becoming afraid of the very physiology that helps us survive, go after what we want, and become resilient.

Regulation is a capacity, not a feeling

I've taught nervous system work for more than a decade, and the misconception I keep coming back to is the idea that regulation means calm. Calm is a state. It's a feeling. Regulation is a capacity.


If someone runs toward you aggressively, I don't want your nervous system beautifully still. I want it mobilized. If you're running up a mountain, I want your heart rate to climb. If your child steps toward traffic, I want a surge of energy available before you've had time to think.


There's a concept in biology called allostasis. Homeostasis is often described as stability. Allostasis is closer to stability through change: the body continually adjusting its physiology based on what it predicts is coming next. Health isn't static. It's responsive.

What muscles, bones, and forests already know

Think about muscle. Protecting a muscle from every form of load doesn't make it stronger. Strength develops when the muscle is asked to meet a demand beyond ordinary movement, followed by real recovery and repair. Bones work the same way. Remove meaningful load for long enough and they don't just hold on to their strength. Our biology is economical. Capacity that's never required doesn't stick around.


That doesn't mean more stress is better. Keep lifting heavier without letting the tissue recover and you don't get infinitely stronger. You get injured. Train hard while undernourished and sleep deprived, and the same activity that could have built strength starts to extract more than the body can restore. The equation isn't "stress is good" or "stress is bad." It's something closer to demand plus rest, multiplied by consistency over time. There has to be enough repetition for strength to grow, and enough space between demands for the system to integrate what we asked of it.


I see this in nature too. Some forests evolved in relationship with periodic fire. Grasslands exist in relationship with grazing. That doesn't mean every disturbance helps. A forest can burn too severely, or be disturbed again before it's regenerated from the last event. The distinction is between a disturbance the system can metabolize and one that exceeds its capacity to restore. That's true for forests, and it's true for you. A healthy nervous system isn't one that never leaves calm. It's one that knows how to return.

When healing overcorrects

Nervous system work has moved into the mainstream because so many of us, myself included, spent years overriding ourselves. Ignoring fatigue, pain, resentment, and the body's requests for rest, because endurance was rewarded. So the corrective movement has emphasized slowing down, honoring capacity, restoring safety, and getting out of survival mode. Those ideas are foundational to this work.


But every corrective movement can become an overcorrection if we lose the nuance. I've watched people start reading any activation as evidence that something is wrong. A hard conversation is "dysregulating," so it gets avoided. A demanding workout becomes suspect. Discomfort becomes proof we made the wrong choice.


Sometimes that read is accurate. Sometimes your body really is telling you an environment is unsafe, a workload is unsustainable, or a relationship isn't good for you, and nervous system work should never become a sophisticated way of talking ourselves into tolerating genuine harm. But sometimes the body isn't saying "this is dangerous." Sometimes it's saying "this is difficult." Trauma can make those two sensations extraordinarily hard to tell apart. If your history taught your nervous system that activation was usually followed by something overwhelming, then activation itself starts to feel like a threat.


Activation is not trauma. Discomfort is not always danger. And safety is not the absence of stress, challenge, or demand. Part of healing is discovering that activation no longer automatically predicts catastrophe. That you can have the difficult conversation and remain intact. That your heart can race without you needing to make it stop. A life organized around never becoming activated isn't necessarily a regulated life. It may simply be a very small one.

Needing recovery is not the same as being incapable

There have been seasons in my own life where the amount of change around me was undeniably huge. Big endings, grief, parenting through a lot of change, business decisions made without any guarantee of what came next. There were days when the wisest thing I could do was reduce the demand. Dinner became whatever took the least from me. That wasn't weakness. It was responsiveness.


But there was another story available to me in those seasons, one a lot of us have absorbed from nervous system culture: "My nervous system can't handle this." I don't want to build an identity around that sentence. There's a real difference between recognizing that your body needs recovery and deciding that your body is incapable of stress. One builds relationship with the body. The other builds fear of it.


Writing a book was stressful. Building a company was stressful. Parenting has asked more of my nervous system than almost anything else I've done. I wouldn't trade any of that for a perfectly calm life. I want enough range that when life asks me to rise, something in me can rise with it, and when the demand is over, I know how to come home again.

Stress and repair in relationships

This shows up relationally too. A lot of us imagine a secure relationship as one with very little conflict, as though being healed enough means we'll never activate each other. But relational health isn't built through the permanent absence of rupture. It's built through repair.


Two nervous systems misread each other, get defensive, or need different things at the same moment. The question is never whether the relationship stayed undisturbed. It's what happens after. Can we return? Can we stay curious about each other's experience without abandoning our own? Can we tolerate the temporary uncertainty of disconnection long enough to find each other again? Repeated rupture followed by genuine repair teaches the nervous system that connection can bend without disappearing.


If your early relationships taught you that conflict meant abandonment, withdrawal, or days of silence, an ordinary disagreement in adulthood can carry the weight of catastrophe. Healing isn't finding a relationship where conflict never happens. It's discovering, slowly and repeatedly, that someone can disappoint you and repair, that you can disappoint someone and remain worthy of connection, and that a relationship can become stressed without being destroyed.

Three tools for building a recoverable body

1. Build capacity, not tolerance. If you spent your childhood surviving chaos, you may already have an extraordinary tolerance for stress. Maybe you work the 16-hour days, function on very little sleep, and keep performing long after your body has asked you to stop. That system doesn't need more tolerance. It needs more choice. Capacity means I can move into stress without automatically overriding myself. I can tell the difference between the discomfort of growth and the pain of self-abandonment, and choose accordingly. For those of us who chase activation because it's what feels familiar, the work may be learning that rest isn't a threat. For those of us who organize our lives around avoiding activation, the work may be discovering that stress isn't automatically danger. The answer was never avoid stress or embrace stress. The answer is relationship.


2. Notice when the demand has actually ended. Modern stress rarely has a clean ending. An animal escapes a predator and the event concludes. We finish a hard meeting and replay it for six hours. The external demand ends, but the internal one keeps going. Recovery often begins by making the ending more perceptible. Physically leave your workspace before starting the next part of your day. Notice the moment a difficult conversation is actually over instead of analyzing every sentence. Let your body move after something activating instead of sitting frozen while your mind tries to solve the sensation.


3. Pay attention to dosage. The same challenge can build capacity one day and overwhelm it the next, because capacity isn't fixed. If you're underslept, grieving, or financially stressed, what your system can metabolize is different than after a week of real rest and connection. That isn't inconsistency. It's biology. And rest shouldn't only arrive after collapse. Recovery belongs inside the cycle, and it can be remarkably ordinary: a meal without your phone, consistent sleep and wake times, five minutes of sunlight, movement that feels good, laughing with someone, a quiet evening outside. These moments matter not because they'll magically lower your cortisol, but because your system needs somewhere to put the resources back.

A gentle reminder

The goal is not to become unstressed. The goal is to become recoverable.


The next time you hear someone talk about cortisol as though your body would be healthier without it, remember that your stress response isn't evidence that your biology is failing you. This week, you might ask yourself: Is the demand I'm carrying appropriate for the resources I actually have? Does my body get a real chance to recover? Can I recognize when the demand has ended? And maybe one more underneath it all: Have I been trying to build a life with less stress, when what I actually want is a body that trusts itself more inside the inevitable stress of being alive?


If you want support in your own nervous system work, you can always join Britt in the Body-First Healing Program.


Connect with Britt:



Body-First Healing Resources:



Brittany Broderick
Next

55. Somatic Practice for Seasons of Transition: Finding Choice When Certainty Isn't Available