How to Reclaim Your Brain in 2026 - Dr Andrew Huberman - #1042

Most people think about cortisol as a bad thing that you want less of. Is that the right way to think about it? Not at all. Cortisol has been labeled a stress hormone and it is involved in stress. You have a bout of stress, you've got a spike of cortisol, so to speak.

Cortisol, like other steroid hormones, is bound to things and there's a free form of cortisol, that's the active one. You don't want your free unbound cortisol to be chronically high. But we need to really think about why it was called a stress hormone in the first place. And the main reason is cortisol's job is to deploy energy sources for your brain and body to be able to react to things, think, and move.

So cortisol naturally goes up a bit during stress and it comes back again, provided you don't ruminate on that stress too much. on the stressor, that is. The big eye-opener for me was when I actually went into the modern textbooks on cortisol, not the ones that most medical students learn from, but what the endocrinologists, the specialists really learn from, and what the circadian and sleep biologists now understand, which is the reason you wake up every single morning. even if you have an alarm clock is because of something called the cortisol awakening response. So if we just step back from a a typical healthy 24 hours, it looks something like this.

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