[Dr. Erin Kinney] (0:00 - 0:20)
Wow, I've got this cortisol belly, I can't seem to lose it. You actually have to have enough cortisol in that account to get rid of fat cells. I need to go to the gym more, I need to cut more calories.

If their cortisol is low, that keeps draining the cortisol even further. We need to actually dial back the exercise, get your cortisol back in a normal range and work on the insulin resistance.

[Angel Foster] (0:21 - 0:26)
When we look at the effects on exercise, how it can affect weight gain, what's happening there?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (0:26 - 0:42)
You want to start focussing more on weight training and trying purposely to build muscle. They mop up glucose, they mop up insulin, because every new muscle cell that you make comes with shiny new insulin receptors. Building muscle is the number one lifestyle thing you can do to get your insulin resistance whipped and to become more insulin sensitive.

[Angel Foster] (0:42 - 0:48)
Many of us are always tracking, how many steps did I get in today? Did I get enough strain in? Did I work hard enough?

Not, did I relax?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (0:48 - 1:03)
As high achievers, we know we're good at achieving. Let's now work on, how can we relax more? When you have a rested brain, you're going to make better decisions.

It ultimately actually helps you perform better. The answer is more rest, more recovery, not pushing harder. Pushing harder just stops working in midlife, doesn't it?

[Angel Foster] (1:03 - 1:28)
It's so frustrating for us high achievers because we're so good at pushing harder. Dr. Erin Kinney, it is so amazing to have you here today to talk about a topic that I think so many midlife women are struggling with. You have a brand new book out, The Cortisol Cure, which I think is so, so needed.

What is happening in midlife? Why do we suddenly seem to experience more stress, both objectively and subjectively?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (1:28 - 3:26)
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having here. I'm excited to have this conversation. My book that is out, The Cortisol Cure, it sheds a different light on cortisol.

I think we all think of cortisol as this big, bad, scary stress hormone. We want to lower it and keep it at bay. But in reality, cortisol is the hormone that gives you energy.

It's what helps you handle stress. In the book, I call it the fix-it hormone because not only does it give you energy, wakes you up in the morning, it also acts as the body's natural prednisone. So it's what reduces inflammation.

So if you have joint pain, the body's going to send cortisol there. If you have a headache, the body's going to send cortisol there. So it does kind of help fix things in the body.

So I have this framework that I use. If we pretend that cortisol is similar to a currency that your body has in a bank account. So I call it the cortisol bank account.

When you rest, when you sleep at night, this is when you earn cortisol into this account. When you do anything else, whether that's you and I talking on a podcast, which we both enjoy, or we exercise, or we're sitting in traffic, or we're dealing with a really acutely emotional, stressful situation, we spend that cortisol. And so if you spend your 20s and your 30s spending all the time, right?

You are in a constant spend. And whether that's, again, good fun stress, like planning a wedding, or starting a business, or raising your children, or scary, bad stress, like divorce or move, it all costs the body cortisol. And if you're kind of someone who's burnt the candle at both ends for a while, right?

Or you were spending, spending, spending, but not earning enough. When we get to midlife, our cortisol accounts tend to be low. And then the body is like, whoa, I don't have what I need to spend on all of life stressors.

And I think it's just one of God's cruel jokes that midlife tends to be also the time when our sex hormones dip. And it's usually the busiest time of our lives, right? You have children.

You're at the height of your career. You might be taking care of ageing parents. There's everything else going on in the world, right?

There's a lot of things for us to spend on at a time when our accounts tend to be dwindling low.

[Angel Foster] (3:27 - 4:30)
I sort of wish I'd known that when I look back at my own 20s and 30s. Because when you think of it in those terms as having this bankrupt account and the fact that you are spending it, I don't think anyone ever mentioned to me. I was building my career as a corporate lawyer at the time in my 20s.

And then I went on to have three children in four and a half years. I must have been spending a lot then. There were lots of sleepless nights, three C-sections, lots of different things.

And I don't think that I've ever heard that I should have perhaps taken better care of myself to build up my bank account or what we're really talking about is some kind of biological capacity or reserve in preparation for my 40s when my hormones were then going to start to tank. Because most people have heard of cortisol in terms of the rhythm, right? The daily rhythm, going outside, getting morning sunlight, having a high awakening response.

But I haven't heard it framed in those terms before, whether we're either spending or banking it. What are the things then? So anything in our lives that stresses us or requires us to contribute, you mentioned, for example, us recording together, is utilising cortisol, is it?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (4:30 - 5:36)
Yeah. So basically, anytime your body is on, right? So I always tell patients, I'm like, listen, I love my job.

And I have five kids. My job and my kids are my two biggest debits for my account. But they're also my favourite things about life.

I love my work. I love the book. I love what I do for my daily job.

And I love all my children, but they're big spend. So one of the reasons why I'm really excited about this book and this framework is it kind of changes how you view stress. I think we all think of stress as this big, scary thing.

And you go to the doctor and they say, you're stressed. You need to lower your stress. You need to manage your stress.

And when a lot of us, especially when we're high performers, we love the things that are demanding us, right? We love the business that we started. We love the career.

We love whatever it is that you're doing that lights you up. But that doesn't mean it's not draining you in some regards, right? It's still a spend.

And so instead of being like, hey, we got to cut those out. It's like looking at, well, where can we make more deposits to match the spend? And I don't know that with my patient population has landed so well.

Oh, it's not like I have to keep cutting things out of my life. Where can I add in little tiny deposits so that I still have the capacity to handle all the things that I want to keep doing?

[Angel Foster] (5:37 - 6:23)
100%. It's something actually, as well, I speak to my own clients about is how can we make deposits throughout the day and take breaks and things like that? What's, before we dive into that, what's interesting to me, as you mentioned there, you may love the things that you're doing with your children, raising them.

You love your career or your business, but it's still got to spend behind it. Do you see a distinction between, you know, when we look at entrepreneurs, we can often think of founder flow or founder energy because it's this sort of self-perpetuating energy generation where it feels boundless for a period of time. Is there a difference in the way our bodies respond when we are in alignment with our values versus when we're, say, having to do a job that we really can't stand and it's long hours?

And is that more of a spend than if it is fulfilling?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (6:23 - 7:11)
So there's the physical demands of something, right? Your brain's got to be on, your body's got to be moving, but then there's also emotional demands. So if you're, you know, working something and building something that does light you up, it's almost like a tiny bit of a deposit emotionally, but it's still going to be a spend physically, right?

You still have to have the energy to get stuff done. But if you're working in a job or in a relationship or something that is also emotionally draining, that's like a double debit, right? So it's going to be draining you even more, right?

I mean, because I work with a lot of patients that'll come in, you know, in their jobs, they've worked there for a long time and it's a toxic workplace environment and they're overworked and don't have boundaries. And in that kind of thing, again, they've got the physical spend and they have this emotional weight of the fact that they hate their job, right? So that it almost just compounds the amount of energy it's spending for them.

[Angel Foster] (7:11 - 7:16)
It's like overspending or putting things on a credit card, right? You're going above what you have.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (7:16 - 8:15)
Yes. Well, and I think, you know, I touch on this a lot in the book where, you know, a lot of us, we're usually aware of like what we're spending, you know, like how much energy it's taking of us, like in a physical sense. But I think what gets missed often, even in the functional health space is how much energy it takes to hold in an emotion.

So if you're angry at your boss or you're, you know, feeling guilty because you're a mom working a job you hate and don't have enough time for your children and, you know, and that's, which is a common thing I see in a lot of my, you know, working moms, they feel like they don't have enough time to give to either thing, but they hold that emotion in. And it's like, you know, if you've ever cooked with an Instapot, like how much steam and pressure is in there and like it keeps building and building and the amount of energy, again, it takes to keep that in there is enormous. And that will drain your system faster than anything.

So again, if you're working in something or in a relationship that's draining your energy emotionally and you're not, you don't have an outlet to get that out, it's going to have a huge toll on your cortisol bank account and then ultimately everything in your body.

[Angel Foster] (8:16 - 8:44)
And that sort of trend towards, I guess, burnouts ultimately. I want to kind of come back to that then in terms of the spend. Could we look at like symptoms that people might see?

Because a common one that gets talked about a lot, especially in midlife is this idea of the cortisol belly. It's become quite a popular term that the reason that you're gaining weight, some of it is hormonally driven, potentially in some individuals, but also cortisol driven. What's happening there?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (8:44 - 11:41)
So typically what happens is no, you know, in midlife, a lot of women end up with, you know, when I run their labs, their cortisol is actually quite low. Now, no one ends up with an overdrawn bank account without first overspending for years, right? So if you overspent your energy account in your twenties and your thirties, probably you were running on higher cortisol for quite some time.

And when cortisol levels are high in the body, it will trigger an increase in glucose, right? One of cortisol's jobs is to recruit glucose from the liver, even if you haven't eaten to help give you energy, right? And so elevated levels of glucose, even mildly over a prolonged period of time can start to create an insulin resistant type state.

So typically what happens when a woman comes into my office in their forties and it's like, wow, I've got this cortisol belly. I can't seem to lose it. It's not that that actually came on in their forties.

It was probably developing for years, right? So they developed insulin resistance. And then once you get to your forties and here's what most people don't realise is you actually have to have enough cortisol in that account to get rid of fat cells.

In this analogy, let's pretend your body is like a house and inside your house, you have your kitchen, your bathroom, your laundry room, you have your, you know, your dining room, all of the rooms that your body wants to keep clean and functioning. Weight you want to lose, whether it's five, 10, 20 pounds is equivalent to a basement closet filled with junk. It's not high on the body's priority list, right?

Your body wants to, again, keep the kitchen operating well and clean the bathroom and the laundry room. Those are again, liver, kidney, bowels. We want to keep those things moving.

Now, in order to clean out a basement closet, I would ask you, Angela, what do you need to have if you're running a household? You need to have time and you need to have energy to do it, right? So I think we all think of like, oh, I exercise and I cut calories and the fat just magically disappears.

No, it is a huge metabolic process to actually remove fat from the body, particularly like belly fat, right? It takes a lot of energy. So if your energy account is majorly depleted on top of an insulin resistant state that's been building for years, it's going to be virtually impossible to lose weight.

So it actually, it's not the current cortisol. It's the years of overspending that kind of put you in that situation. Does that, does that make sense?

And this is what, this is what makes it so hard is it's usually not, there's not an overnight fix for this. I mean, we can talk about GLP-1s because those can be a fantastic help for women in their forties. But, you know, I mean, I've treated women for years where, you know, they're like, oh my God, I've been doing this for six months and see nothing.

But it's because that the situation they're in took years to develop. The other thing that I see often women doing in their forties is they're like, oh my God, I'm gaining this belly fat. I need to push harder.

I need to go to the gym more. I need to cut more calories, which if their cortisol is low, that keeps draining the cortisol even further. And it just makes the problem even worse.

So usually the answer for forties when they're like, I'm doing all these HIIT classes, I'm doing this. I'm like, no, no, no, we need to actually dial back the exercise, get your cortisol back in a normal range and work on the insulin resistance, which usually means eating regular meals, like keeping blood sugar balanced. It does not mean fasting or, you know, cutting calories.

And so it's kind of the opposite of what you think would work.

[Angel Foster] (11:41 - 12:22)
And when we look at that abdominal weight gain, if we put it in those terms, right, I'll often say there's kind of three things to it, right? Because you may have adipose tissue that you can grab and hold onto, and that's not so threatening, or you might have visceral fat behind the abdominal wall, but also with stress, you may just have some bloating, right? Which is puffing and inflaming the gut lining.

Yes. So I think it's hard for women because then, you know, you sort of ask them the question when you go to sleep at night and you have a good night's sleep, does it reduce? And then you wake up in the morning and then they're confused.

Was it an intolerance or is it that actually I was more relaxed? So is what you're saying the way through this to build that bank back up and replenish cortisol because we need it is actually to introduce more recovery.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (12:22 - 14:17)
More recovery and more rest. And I think, you know, I think again, a lot of us and myself included, because I share stories of myself in the book, listen, I've burnt out multiple times in my life, which is probably why I'm so passionate about this, because I'm like, I know how bad it feels when you burn out. And I also know how good it feels when you're, you know, incorporating enough rest.

And I think we all need more rest than we think we do, because in today's really fast paced life, there are so many spends that we have going on, right? Sometimes patients will be like, oh yeah, when I rest, I sit on Instagram and I scroll, which your body is resting, but your brain, there's all kinds of things that are getting triggered and it might keep your body in a stress state. So there's a lot of things that might again, feel relaxing, or I can't tell you how many of my patients will say, what do you do to relax?

Oh, I go to the gym, which is great, great to go to the gym, but exercise is technically more stress. It's another debit. So it's just making sure, again, it's making sure we look at your life.

Hey, do I have enough deposits to match what's coming out of that account? Because every time you spend more energy than you earn, it's going to show up as a symptom in the body. And one of the things, you know, we touched a little bit on like why this hits so hard at midlife, but in this analogy, your sex hormones, your oestrogen, progesterone, testosterone, they're like your savings account, right?

So when cortisol gets low, the body will go, oh, there's some progesterone over there. Let me pull from that. Which means you'll still have the cortisol to keep going, but at the expense of your sex hormones.

Now, when we get into midlife, it's like your savings go bye-bye. So then, you know, the body is like, wait, I don't even have any progesterone to pull from, but here's what I'll do. I'll start to upregulate adrenaline.

I'm going to give you some adrenaline to give you energy, which a little bit of adrenaline is okay, but too much adrenaline will give you that tired, but wired feeling. You get anxiety out of nowhere. You know, you're in that can mess with blood sugar and you don't feel very good.

Yes, you're awake, but it's like staying up all night and drinking five Red Bulls in the morning, right? Nobody feels that good when that happens. So again, so this is why midlife, the answer is more rest, more recovery, not pushing harder.

[Angel Foster] (14:18 - 14:54)
Yeah. Pushing harder just stops working in midlife, doesn't it? It just stops working in midlife, which is so frustrating for us high achievers because we're so good at pushing harder, right?

We're so good. And that's the way we've always gotten things done, right? And no one warned you about this bank account that you were really depleting.

When you say that your testosterone, your progesterone and your oestrogen are like your savings account, what's the mechanism here? So let's take somebody, they were building their career throughout their twenties, then introduced parenting while still elevating where they were in that moving up within an organisation or building a business alongside their kids. They hit their forties.

What happens at this point?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (14:55 - 16:02)
For women in their forties, typically progesterone is the first hormone to start to decline. So it'll kind of start to decline and oestrogen declines some months, but then other months oestrogen kind of does this all month. It goes up and down, up and down.

But progesterone is typically in a female. The first thing the body will start to pull from to, and if you're sitting at your computer on your phone, you can Google molecular structure of sex hormones versus cortisol. They're all steroidal hormones and they have very similar backbones.

So it's pretty easy for the body to kind of shunt them back and forth. So again, the body will basically rob Peter to pay Paul. Because when you have a lot to do, cortisol is the hormone that's going to give you energy to help you do it.

And so if that account is low, again, the body will start to pull from those sex hormones. But so what we tend to see in forties is women particularly will start to struggle with sleep. That's usually the first thing we'll see is they're like, I keep waking up in the middle and I get anxiety.

I might be having hot flashes and they're not necessarily menopausal as of yet, but we're starting to see kind of the, you know, they're overdrawn in their account and we're starting to see the impacts of that. And it's like, you know, in their twenties, they had a lot more sex hormones to pull from. Right.

And the body's like, oh, I don't have that anymore. What am I going to do with this?

[Angel Foster] (16:02 - 16:23)
I suppose what interests me there then what you've described is a lot of women will then go and see their doctor who, if they're good and they're trained in menopause, may prescribe menopause hormone therapy. But actually they might not quite be into that phase of perimenopause yet, but actually they've just been like depleting that account. And what really needs addressing first is this cortisol.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (16:23 - 17:03)
I see patients like that, that will go and they will start on HRT and then, you know, and they'll feel pretty good for a couple of months, but if they don't change their, you know, energy spending habits over time, they'll be back in the same situation. And then either they need to raise their hormones or the hormones just don't really work. I find that the magic typically happens for this stage of women is taking the hormones and also working on, you know, building in the rest.

Because, you know, I think oftentimes when you get into your forties, you have a lot going on. It's hard to just completely overhaul your life and stop the spends, right? So sometimes like giving the little extra influx into the savings account, but then starting to make small deposits starts to really make a big difference.

[Angel Foster] (17:03 - 17:14)
Before we talk about the, I suppose, diagnosing that this has happened, you mentioned the sex hormones. What effect is this chronic cortisol elevation having on your thyroid?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (17:15 - 18:11)
Oh yeah. So that's a great question. So in the, you know, let's talk someone in their twenties and thirties, who again is overspending, might have a little bit of elevated cortisol, elevated cortisol will actually impact your conversion of T4, which is the inactive thyroid hormone into T3, which is the active thyroid hormone.

So it essentially, it will start to dip your thyroid a little bit. It won't always cause a true thyroid disease, but in a lot of women, it'll call, it'll cause what's called a subclinical hypothyroidism. So you might start to have thyroid like symptoms, which that can also contribute to weight gain.

Some of the belly fat, thyroid weight gain can kind of be a little bit more all over. We can start to see some more brain fog, hair loss, you know, changes in skin, sometimes mood changes, like anxiety can get worse when thyroid is low. So can depression, you might see changes in your eyebrows and metabolism slows down quite a bit on a whole.

So again, you may not have a full diagnosable thyroid condition, but it does have an impact on the thyroid.

[Angel Foster] (18:12 - 18:27)
And now this is compounding the weight issue that you've been struggling, right? Because it gets even harder for a woman listening to this. How would she know that she has ultimately taken that bank account to zero or maybe even to a deficit?

How do you diagnose this?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (18:27 - 20:43)
Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of it is symptom based. I mean, I think if you're struggling with fatigue, particularly in the morning, like you're having, you get a decent night's sleep, but you're having a really hard time waking up.

You might be drinking a little bit more caffeine than is maybe normal, or you cannot function without caffeine. So caffeine in this analogy is like spending money on a credit card. So your account's low.

You're like, oh, great. Let me drink my coffee. Coffee is like, you're like, okay, I'm going to keep spending and my body's going to let me.

If you're drinking a lot more caffeine, that can sometimes be, I had a patient a couple weeks ago that was like, oh, I'm here. I'm just coming in for a wellness check. And I feel fantastic.

And I have so much energy. And this woman was drinking 10 cups of coffee a day. And I go, wow, what would happen if you didn't drink your caffeine?

And she goes, well, I wouldn't get out of bed. I was like, okay. So she's basically been living on credit for years.

Right. So I'm not going to make her get off of caffeine right away, but we're going to work on some other, you know, other things to, and here she thought she was perfectly fine. Right.

But she's just, at some point, if she keeps spending like that, her body, you know, like a bank will be like, I'm sorry, we can't keep spending. We're going to, we're going to cut your line of credit. And then you're really going to feel bad.

Brain fog is another really big one. Like people will start to be like, I just don't know what's going on. Because cortisol also, it helps you focus.

It's what, you know, when you get a good night's sleep and you're 20s and you wake up and you're like, I'm ready to take on the day, that's, that's your cortisol peaking and giving you energy to take things on. And then another one to kind of think about, if you exercise, if exercise gives you a tonne of energy, like you work out and then for the rest of the day, you feel phenomenal. And you maybe are having some of these other symptoms that can usually be a sign that this might be more thyroid related.

If you work out and you feel good for like an hour, but then you crash later in the afternoon or you're abnormally sore with muscle aches and fatigue, and maybe you get a headache after doing a hard workout. That is a like 100% sure sign that your cortisol account is low because exercise, you know, is a major deduction from the account. If you're again, working out and then your cortisol crashes afterwards, you're really not going to feel great.

I have a lot of patients that are like, Oh my God, I gotta keep going to the gym. And they're drinking caffeine so they can function the rest of the day. And their muscles are achy.

So they're taking all these anti-inflammatories, you know, but the answer here is again, to not really push harder with the exercise. It's, Hey, let's incorporate some more rest days there. Which is very difficult.

[Angel Foster] (20:44 - 21:14)
I know, it's very difficult. And I'm always trying to do it, isn't it? Because at the end of the day, as you say, we all just feel so motivated by what we're doing.

So driven and often driven to do more. When we look at the effects then on exercise, let's look at, you've mentioned around how it can affect weight gain and specifically fat gain or even weight loss resistance. But also when we look at muscle, what's happening there, because often women will not see the same results from their workouts.

So that's when they start pushing even harder, right? And they're not.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (21:15 - 22:47)
Yeah. So I think this will, you know, obviously this is going to be very individualised, right? To what's going on with you personally.

But, you know, I usually, my midlife women, we want to start focussing more on weight training and trying purposely to build muscle because muscle is essentially what burns calories. When we do cardio, which is the mistake I see a lot here in the States, women will push I got to burn more calories. I got to burn more calories and they keep doing more and more cardio.

Cardio actually is a catabolic thing. It breaks down muscle. It does burn calories while you're doing the cardio, but it doesn't really do anything for the rest of the day.

Versus if you go to the gym and you lift heavy enough to build muscle, when you have more muscle cells, they mop up glucose. They mop up insulin because every new muscle cell that you make comes with shiny new insulin receptor. So if you had maybe been struggling with insulin resistance before, every new muscle cell that your body builds will have all of these new insulin receptors.

So building muscle is the number one lifestyle thing you can do to get your insulin resistance flipped and to become more insulin sensitive. So listening, you're like, oh yeah, I exercise a lot, but I mostly do cardio or I lift weights. But, you know, when you lift weights and you, let's say you can do 20 reps of whatever exercise you're doing, the weight isn't heavy enough.

Like you need to be doing reps where when you get to the eighth rep, you can barely finish right without, you know, you want to be able to finish keeping your form. But if, if it's really easy, it's not heavy enough to actually increase muscle mass. And I see a lot of people making that mistake.

They're like, oh yeah, I lift. I lift three times a week, but they're like, I'm not seeing any gains, but they're actually not lifting heavy enough. And I think sometimes women are fearful when we lift heavy, we're going to get bulky.

I don't know if you see that in your realm.

[Angel Foster] (22:48 - 23:04)
Yeah, I do. And I think there is also still this kind of, I guess, common idea that I just, I must be doing more cardio or I must layer on top. And if I've just done a, you know, a resistance training session, then I must do a little cardio.

Yeah. And it's just more isn't always more.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (23:04 - 25:12)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and again, if you think about it, like cardio is, it's a major spend, right?

And let's say that you have, maybe you're listening and you, your kids are grown and you're retired or you're, you're not spending a lot of energy in the rest of your life, then cardio is going to be great for you, right? You can go do the cardio because we do, you do want to train. You know, this kind of brings up another topic I have in the book where I talk about, you have two muscles of your nervous system.

You have a stress muscle and you have a relaxed muscle. And if all you do is work out the stress muscle by doing cardio and building businesses and raising your family, doing, doing, doing all the time, as us high achievers like to do that muscle gets really strong, which there's nothing wrong with that muscle being strong. We want to have a strong stress muscle to handle everything.

But if you never work out your relaxed muscle, when you go to try to relax, it's going to feel really uncomfortable. You're going to sit on the couch and, or maybe you try to meditate and you feel guilty and anxious and you can't, you feel like you can't get into that relaxed state. There is nothing wrong with you.

It just means you haven't practised or developed that muscle. And I think that's why a lot of women have this urge. I got to do more cardio because their stress muscle is just in overdrive.

It's like, like, wait, wait, wait, we got to do this. We got to do this. But you know, let's pretend that your stress muscles, like your back muscle and your relaxed muscle or like your abs, every time you go to pick something up, the back muscles are going to fire and eventually you could injure your back.

Right. And the fix here is to develop the core so that when you pick something up, you can choose which muscle activates. And so that's kind of the idea we want in life is like, hey, you know, if you're sitting in traffic and someone cuts you off, you can't really do anything about that.

Do we need this? Do you need that as a cortisol spend? Or could we just be calm about that?

But if you don't have that relaxed muscle, you're not even going to be able to access that. So you might jump into fight flight and sometimes fight flight turns into a fight. Or example, like if you're, you know, if you're constantly mad at your partner as a female, like he forgot to buy milk or he forgot to do this, you know, sometimes stuff happens.

But if you're always feeling like you're snapping at your partner, the ones that you love, that can also be a sign that your system is a little stuck in a fight flight state. Right. You're not able to like, okay, you know what?

This is not really worth my energy of being stressed about. This is not worth the fight kind of thing.

[Angel Foster] (25:13 - 25:15)
Yeah. And it takes training, as you say, to do that.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (25:15 - 25:52)
It takes training. Yeah. I don't know.

I feel like, you know, I wear an aura ring and my favourite thing about the aura ring is it tracks the amount of time that you stay in a restore state. I mean, I came from years of someone who was always trying to get 10,000 steps and, you know, do all run all the miles and do all the things. And now, you know, my achiever brain still wants to do stuff, but I'm like, let me see how hard I can relax.

It's so funny. My coach laughs. She's like, this is such a high achieving thing.

Let me see if I can win at relaxing. I'm like, but that's what I'm doing now. I'm trying to win at relaxing.

I know there's probably still some issues with that, but it's working well for me because I'm like, ooh, how much time did I spend relaxing today? Because I know I'm going to be busy and get a lot of stuff done, but I don't always know that I'm going to make sure I relax.

[Angel Foster] (25:53 - 26:23)
I love that you've turned it into that, Erin, because in all honesty, you know, so many of us, right, are always tracking how many steps did I get in today? Did I get enough strain on my, you know, on my, did I get enough strain in? Did I work hard enough?

Not did I relax? You know, one of the things I look at on my trackers is, you know, what was my sleep stress? Did I actually manage to transition into that fully parasympathetic state, you know, and get really restorative sleep?

Where that is a kind of badge of honour, because I think you're right, that sort of appeals, doesn't it, to that high-performing mindset?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (26:23 - 26:57)
It feels good, yeah. Yeah, I can be rewarded for restore. I'm really hoping this book will kind of shift the conversation and be like, you know what?

Yeah, we clearly, us high achievers, we know we're good at achieving. Like we've won that category. Let's now work on like, how can we relax more?

I think, you know, the more rested and relaxed we are, the better wife we can be, the better mom we can be, and actually the better entrepreneur you can be, right? When you have a rested brain, you're going to make better decisions. You're going to have better ideas come through.

So it, you know, it ultimately actually helps you perform better, which, you know, is kind of what all of us achievers want to do, right? We want to perform better.

[Angel Foster] (26:58 - 27:28)
100%, yeah. And you're more open to ideas, to opportunities, all of these things. When we talk about energy here, so just to clarify, because when someone is spending more energy, what we're not talking about is energy that's coming from food, right?

Because actually you could over-consume calories. Are we looking more around, I don't know what to call it, mental energy, your mitochondria, how well they're functioning? Because over time, are your mitochondria affected then by this constant, relentless pumping out of cortisol and drive?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (27:28 - 27:49)
When the body is stuck in a, as a, like a nervous system overdrive, when we're stuck in that fight flight, you are going to, you burn through a lot of the nutrients like magnesium and zinc and all the things that our body needs to keep our mitochondria functioning well, you know, to keep that production of ATP. So essentially the lower account of energy, if you will, is going to affect the mitochondria's ability to make ATP.

[Angel Foster] (27:50 - 27:59)
So in actual fact, it's about putting more high nutrient dense food into your system as opposed to calorie dense that's nutrient poor.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (27:59 - 29:26)
Yes. And the other thing I think here, really important is when you speak on diet, is keeping blood sugar regulated. You know, when blood sugar goes up, usually we then end up having a crash.

And when blood sugar crashes, that also will put the body in a cortisol spend state because remember the body's going to recruit your cortisol to try to keep your blood sugar up. So skipping meals, particularly breakfast or lunch and surviving on caffeine, which is a common pattern I see in the women that I work with. You know, they just, they're like, Oh, I don't have time to eat.

I'm too busy. And I survive on caffeine. They're getting this blood sugar roller coaster, which is impact.

It's stressing their bodies out. And oftentimes, like I've noticed myself, I've, you know, worn CGMs before. If I skip lunch, I get super anxious two hours later.

And it's what will happen is my sugar will dip and then it will actually raise quite high as my body tries to like bring it back into normal. But that roller coaster of glucose doesn't make you feel good. So it's one, yes, making sure what you're eating is nutrient dense so you can get the things that fuel your mitochondria.

And, you know, cortisol is what I like to call a very metabolically expensive hormone to make. It takes a lot of cofactors and nutrients to build the appropriate amount of cortisol, particularly magnesium and B vitamins. And those, when you're stressed, get depleted quite quickly.

So, you know, sometimes like if you are travelling or going through a stressful period of life, taking supplements can be helpful to kind of help that out, but that's never going to replace, you know, good nutrient dense meals eaten at regular intervals throughout the day to keep sugar stable.

[Angel Foster] (29:27 - 29:33)
And what have you found in terms of adaptogens, adaptogenic herbs, mushrooms to help support cortisol?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (29:33 - 31:29)
They are fantastic. My two favourites are ashwagandha and rhodiola. And essentially adaptogenic herbs, they help balance, right?

So if you're in a cortisol overspending state, they'll help bring it down. If your cortisol is quite low, they can actually help raise it back up. And really what these herbs are doing is they're working on something in your brain I call the off button.

So, you know, your brain has a very, really cool thing that it does when it perceives something as a stress. It's your amygdala that decides whether something is stressful or not. So if a lion were to jump in right here into this room, my amygdala would go, oh, that's a stressor.

It sends a signal to your hypothalamus, which then eventually sends a signal to your adrenals to say pump out cortisol and adrenaline. I pump out cortisol and adrenaline, which gives me the energy and the glucose I need to run. Once I'm safe, what is supposed to happen is that same cortisol that gave you energy is actually supposed to go back to the hypothalamus and it binds to a receptor there called a glucocorticoid receptor.

And it actually turns off further production of cortisol. So cortisol is what gets you activated, but you also have to have enough of it to turn off. And if you stay in a prolonged stress state, the example I use of this in the book is March of 2020 when the world was going crazy during the pandemic and our amygdalas were getting triggered every five minutes with something new happening.

Our body goes, you know what? I don't think we're going to turn off. We're going to stay on to protect her.

So it actually stops making that off button or that receptor in the hypothalamus. So now you just stay in a constant spend state. Adaptogens, what they actually do in the body is they increase the production of those glucocorticoid or off buttons in the brain.

So it actually allows the body to calm back down if it needs to. Meditation also does the same thing when they do research on how meditation actually calms the nervous system. That's what it does.

It increases those, again, glucocorticoid receptors in the brain.

[Angel Foster] (31:29 - 31:31)
What about something like L-theanine?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (31:31 - 31:54)
So L-theanine is not going to work directly on that mechanism of action, but it helps to kind of calm the on neurotransmitters and increase the kind of slowdown neurotransmitters. I love L-theanine. It's fantastic to take in the evening, or if you struggle with anxiety to take that through the day.

And I think that can kind of just take the edge off a little bit and keep you from going too far into a spend state. It's a great thing.

[Angel Foster] (31:54 - 31:59)
But the adaptogens are having a kind of more physiological effect in terms of longer term.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (31:59 - 32:35)
Longer term stuff. Yeah. Again, I really like rhodiola and ashwagandha and a blend of those.

And you can add L-theanine in with that together. And then magnesium. Magnesium B5 and B6 are also really, really nice for calming the nervous system.

And they also help your body build more cortisol to keep the account full, if you will. So if you're listening, you're like, hey, what stack should I be doing? If you can find a blend with ashwagandha, rhodiola, and L-theanine, that's fantastic.

And then you want magnesium. And you could do a B-complex. But if you wanted to just target, again, B6 and B5 are the two kind of most important B vitamins for a stress state.

[Angel Foster] (32:35 - 32:47)
And when we're looking at the lifestyle activities, let's do a quick kind of run through. If I list some, tell me whether these are a stress or a restore.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (32:49 - 33:00)
So walking. That one kind of goes a little bit of both. Depends on how fast you're walking.

If you're like speed walking, I would take that as a debit. If you're taking a slow walk and you're kind of like taking it all in, I would say that would be restorative.

[Angel Foster] (33:01 - 33:13)
Yeah. And even if I find like, say, for example, we've just recorded a podcast or I've been in a meeting. If I go out for a walk, I feel like I can discharge the energy in a way somehow and just bring myself back to balance, to centre.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (33:13 - 33:25)
Sauna. Sauna is actually an energy spend. Good one.

It's a good one. But it's, you know, it's heating you up. You're detoxing.

It's spending. Yep. Cold plunge is spending.

It's spending. Yeah. Yeah.

[Angel Foster] (33:25 - 33:29)
In fact, you're directly raising things like dopamine and everything.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (33:29 - 33:43)
We want to stop looking as like these aren't necessarily bad as long as you have the currency to spend. I mean, you get so many benefits out of a cold plunge, so many benefits out of sauna and so many benefits from exercise. Right.

So we just want to make sure we're not overspending everywhere else. If that wants to be part of our protocol.

[Angel Foster] (33:44 - 35:04)
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OK, reading fiction versus reading nonfiction that relates to my business or work.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (35:04 - 35:23)
I would say fiction is going to be more of a of an urn energy wise. And, you know, not to say don't read the nonfiction, but typically if you're reading nonfiction about your like, I actually I have to. I love reading nonfiction in the health space, but it always like keeps my brain.

And I got to do this. I got to do that. I got to talk about this on my podcast.

So so it keeps me in a spent state.

[Angel Foster] (35:24 - 35:28)
Whereas if I read fiction, I go to sleep, my HRV goes up.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (35:28 - 35:52)
Exactly. Yeah, I always show my patients. I literally I always have at least one or two fiction books in my purse at any given time that reading.

I love to read. I read all the time. I can be caught like in between patients, like reading a chapter in my book.

And it just for me. And I love if you're a reader, you know, and you have a busy brain. One, when you're reading, you have to sit down and be calm, but it distracts your brain from thinking about all the things you have to be stressed about.

[Angel Foster] (35:52 - 36:12)
And teleports you into someone else's world, right? It's just, yes, amazing. Even though you are using your brain to create the pictures and the imagery of that.

But yeah, no, it's a beautiful thing. What are the other activities? Let's look at breathwork.

So if you're doing something stimulating like Wim Hof breathing versus a 478 that releases GABA, are these different?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (36:12 - 36:38)
They're slightly different. I mean, I think any breathwork practise is going to help more regulate. The Wim Hof is going to be teaching your body how to regulate.

It's like training your stress muscle and your relaxed muscle to kind of be able to toggle back and forth. So I would probably put that in a neutral category. And any other breathwork is going to be a major restorative practise.

I love the 478 breathing. I love box breathing. Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four.

That can be a really nice, quick little reset.

[Angel Foster] (36:39 - 36:47)
I love that post-workout. Like if I've done some HIIT, I'll do some box breathing just for five minutes to bring my nervous system back or, you know, lie with my legs up at the wall. That's the other one.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (36:47 - 37:17)
Another, legs at the wall is a fantastic practise. One little micro one that is like my favourite go-to, you know, when I have busy days with patients, I take a break in the middle of the day, but in between each patient, I will go into the bathroom and I have a really nice, it's like a grapefruit smelling soap. And I will wash my hands and hum because humming stimulates the vagus nerve.

And I'll kind of just hum a couple songs and I pretend like I'm in a spa and I smell the soap. And then it's just a little like reset. And I think it's a little deposit of my energy.

And then I come back in, I feel cleared for my last patient and I'm ready for the next one.

[Angel Foster] (37:18 - 37:24)
Love it. Love it. But it takes, you know, it takes a minute and a half, right?

It doesn't take very long. Yeah, it doesn't take long. No, it's such a good practise.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (37:24 - 37:48)
What about so TV watching? Is that considered? So I would say it depends on the show.

If you're watching like a murder mystery or something that's really intense, you know, again, we have to remember brain doesn't know the difference between what it's thinking about and what's real. So if you're, you know, invested in a crazy intense, you know, show where there's gunshots and people dying, that's probably going to be a spend, right? But comedy, something easy, that's going to be a deposit.

[Angel Foster] (37:49 - 37:52)
Rom-com. What about sex? And is it different for men and women?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (37:53 - 38:35)
No, it actually, so anytime you're sexually aroused, your body cannot be in the fight flight state and also be in the arousal state. So sex actually is a fantastic deposit for both men and women. Now, if, if you're a female and sex is painful or you're doing it just to please your husband and you're not really into it, that would probably be more of a debit.

So, but if you're having sex and you're really enjoying it and you're aroused, that's an intense deposit for you. Orgasms feel great. It's also great for the genitalia.

We get blood flow there. It's very healing for the vagina. Again, if, and this can be tricky in midlife because sex hormones are changing so much.

If we have dryness, again, if there's any pain, you want to definitely talk to your doctor about oestrogen cream or hormone replacement therapy to reduce the pain so that you can actually get the benefit from sex.

[Angel Foster] (38:35 - 38:51)
But it's mostly a deposit, as you say. Yeah. You've mentioned HIIT training, any form of kind of intense exercise is a debit.

What are some of the other common activities that people might think, actually, this is really helping me manage my stress, but they're not aware that it is a withdrawal?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (38:51 - 39:22)
I mean, even like, you know, I, I'm a fan of hot yoga. I love Bikram, which, and yoga has incredible benefits because again, it's like training your nervous system, but it is still a spend. If you're doing like a hot yoga practise or a Bikram practise, you know, you're, you're detoxing, you're sweating all the things.

So it is still an energy spend, even though it is, again, it's training the relaxed muscle and the stress muscle in a good yoga practise, right? You hold a pose and then you relax, you hold a pose and you relax. So it's actually up-regulating those off buttons in the brain, but I would still consider it an energy spend.

[Angel Foster] (39:23 - 39:25)
Is Pilates the same? Is that training the nervous system?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (39:25 - 39:55)
A little bit. Again, if you're working, anytime you like work, work out a muscle and then you relax and like try to get the body to come back, right? Think about HRV, right?

HRV is heart rate variability. It's the ability for the body to go up, the heart rate to go up and then come back down. So when we train and Pilates would do the same thing, right?

Even weightlifting can do that, right? You, you work and then you rest, you work and then you rest. So it's, again, it's teaching the body to toggle back and forth.

But any form of exercise, again, is going to be a debit from the account because you're spending energy.

[Angel Foster] (39:55 - 40:30)
Yeah. Makes sense. What about the morning?

So when we look at cortisol, the cortisol awakening response goes up for that. If we've got a good cortisol rhythm for that first 50 minutes, we commonly hear about going out, getting access to morning sunlight. I personally love, I'm one of those people that you were speaking about earlier.

I love to work out early in the morning and that maintains high energy for me for the rest of the day. And actually my mood is so much better. Should we utilise that cortisol and take advantage of it?

Or should we, because it feels to me, I find it difficult to meditate in the morning because I'm one of these people who just wants to get up and go.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (40:30 - 42:11)
Yeah. Well, it sounds to me like you're working out in the morning and you have great energy throughout the day. That tells me that you've got good energy.

You have enough energy to afford the spends throughout the day, right? I'll use myself as an example. I've definitely had times in my life where I love to exercise in the morning and I still have energy throughout the day.

But when I'm a little depleted and I have a lot of other projects to do, I will skip my morning workout to be like, oh, I need to get focused work done this time. And this is when my cortisol is at its highest. I've always had a good cortisol awakening response.

So I have a few hours in the morning where I'm on. But if I need to be on the rest of the day, I will actually take the day off from exercise because I know my energy will crash. And sometimes, like, for example, I've had I'm in the middle of a book launch as we're recording this.

I've had a lot of extra stuff on my plate. It's all amazing and great. But my exercise actually has slowed down a bit because I'm like, you know, I have a lot of other spends.

So I'm just going to table that. So this morning I got up and normally Friday mornings I work out, but I meditated for 40 minutes instead. And then I was like, because I needed more energy throughout the day.

So I think it's also learning to check in with yourself. You might have seasons where working out in the morning feels fantastic and, you know, your energy is great throughout the rest of the day. But if you start to notice that you work out in the morning and you're crashing around 2 or 3 p.m., despite eating regular meals and doing all the other things that you can do to, you know, kind of take care of that, it might be a sign to maybe take a couple extra days off or to lower the intensity or lower the amount of time. So I think the other thing, especially as a female, our bodies change all of the time, right? Like we go through seasons and I feel like the only thing constant about being a female is change. So it's learning to like work with your rhythms.

Know, hey, during this season, maybe this is not the season where I'm exercising a tonne. Maybe this is the season where I'm prioritising meditation or reading or whatever it might be.

[Angel Foster] (42:12 - 42:23)
And for the woman who is waking up and she's just like snoozing the alarm clock, she just can't get out of bed. It's just tough. What are the best strategies to help her come out of that?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (42:23 - 43:17)
Yeah. So I think first would be looking at like what time are you going to bed? Are you snoozing and you're getting enough sleep or are you snoozing because you're, you know, you're staying up till midnight and your body is like really needs more sleep.

So looking at what your sleep hygiene looks like would be step one. If that's all great, then I think you should go to your doctor and have some testing done, right? Like look at thyroid hormones, look at sex hormones and look at your morning cortisol.

It's a blood test. You can figure out what it is. You can also do those saliva tests where you can, you know, throughout the day, you can see what your cortisol levels are doing.

But I think it might also be looking at, you know, have you been overspending in your energy account four months at a time? Because sometimes that's the reason why, you know, the end of morning energy is a little bit low. And I would also look at blood sugar.

Like, are you eating? Did you eat enough the day before? Right?

If you're someone that was like skipping meals and maybe you just ate dinner, you might feel a little sluggish in the morning. So I think it's looking at all the basics first is what I would recommend and making sure that.

[Angel Foster] (43:17 - 43:25)
Not fearing the carbs, right? So many women fear carbohydrates, but actually they help us, especially when we're exercising, they really help us recover.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (43:25 - 43:54)
If you're working out at a time, you have to have carbs. Carbs are so important. And I think, I think in your twenties and thirties, your body can handle, you know, a prolonged time without carbs.

But I know personally for me, I eat more carbs in my forties now than I've ever eaten before. And I feel better when I eat them. And I think most people, we crave them for a reason, right?

Like we crave them for, because you need them. And yeah, I mean, I think we nutritionally, we went for a swing for a while. I was like, carbs are bad.

Avoid carbs. I kind of think the nutrition industry is starting to come back around, but I think a lot of women are still fearful of them.

[Angel Foster] (43:54 - 44:17)
It's interesting, isn't it? Because I just was posting yesterday about all the benefits of carbohydrates and kind of what women think it does, which is make you gain weight, what it actually does and all the support they give your system, these sort of whole food based fibrous carbs. And one of the comments I saw that, you know, was, but doesn't your body make its own carbs or effectively its own glucose?

And it's like, but how much stress is the body under in that process? You're not supporting your body.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (44:17 - 45:19)
Yeah, I mean, the body does have its, well, you have glucose reserves in the form of glycogen in the liver, but no, we don't make carbs per se. And, and carbs, carbohydrates, especially the good ones, as you just mentioned, they're great for our gut bacteria, right? So they feed the good guy gut flora.

So when you starve the body of carbohydrates, you're actually going to have an impact on the gut. And if we start to, you know, if you change the gut flora kind of composition, that can actually change the body's metabolism over time. So, so having carbs throughout your diet will actually make you more metabolically flexible is what we call it.

So like you can, you know, I think, I think ultimately when I work with patients, I want to get them to a place where they can, you know, do their healthy lifestyle like 80% of the time, but they can have a weekend where they overindulge and drink a little too much alcohol and skip their workouts. And their body doesn't like completely freak out, right? It's like handle, you can handle more things.

You can handle all the pleasures in life and you can handle all the stressors and the body still stays pretty even. That's ultimately when I'm working with someone, that's where I want to get them to. It was a place where they can really enjoy life and they don't have to be so stressed about the health stuff all the time.

[Angel Foster] (45:20 - 46:54)
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100%. You're just giving them more capacity, right? Making the plate bigger as opposed to, so there's room on it as opposed to necessarily having to crowd it or take things off.

I love that. When we look at then HRV, if someone's looking at their wearable, because I know people can get very competitive, they look at someone else's, they want it to be higher, but even within those bounds, there is a really nice study showing what HRV ideally where it should be. And it's often actually lower than I think many people expect, but you kind of want to have it ideally up towards the 40s, right?

Even in midlife. And I think a lot of people and women that come see me when I work with them, it's below 20. And sometimes, you know, they drink a bit of alcohol, it goes below 10 and they don't have those reserves.

What have you found in your work, Dr. Kinney, in terms of helping patients improve that yeah, that HRV?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (46:54 - 48:00)
I think again, HRV is literally showing you how strong your stress and your rest muscle are. And if they're both equally strong, again, you'll be able to toggle between them pretty easily and quickly. If your HRV is low, it means if you get stressed, your body's going to stay in a stress state and it has a hard time coming out of it.

So to me, that's usually your relaxed muscle hasn't been trained. So I don't know that I've really found a supplement stack or protocol that really helps this. I mean, I've had patients take all kinds of things and it doesn't have, you know, move the needle a tiny bit, but really it's making sure you are prioritising downtime, like true relaxed downtime.

So whether that's reading a book or doing your box breathing, or, you know, if you do have a meditation practise, meditation, I think hands down is the number one best thing for improving HRV. So if it's not something that is in your practise might be something you try. I recently, I have this group, it's the cortisol cure community.

And we kind of share different ways of like how to improve HRV and how to get your cortisol account balanced. And I shared my little hack is I've listened to the same guided meditation for about four years. It's a brain tap.

I don't know if you're familiar with these. They're like a biohack.

[Angel Foster] (48:00 - 48:03)
I love brain tap. But I've listened to the same one.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (48:03 - 48:08)
And if I, which one is it? It's the become a personal success magnet. I love, I don't know.

[Angel Foster] (48:08 - 48:11)
I love it. I love his voice as well.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (48:11 - 49:06)
Oh, he's fantastic. I've met him at conferences. He's just a really cool man, but you don't have to use brain tap.

You can use whatever you want. But if we think about, if you're all familiar with the study Pavlov's dogs, right? I remember like the study where he would ring, he would like give them a meat and they would saliva and he would ring the bell.

Eventually all he had to do was ring the bell and the dogs would salivate, even though there was nothing that they were smelling, there was no food in front of them. So it was training the nervous system to have this reaction. So if you train your brain that every time you listen to something, this is going to calm you down.

If you get stuck in a stress state, all you have to do is listen to that one thing for a couple of minutes. I mean, when I get in a really stressed out tizzy, I will just put all I have to do is listen to two minutes of that brain tap meditation and my body melts. It's like, oh, it's time to relax.

So we think about our systems as being really highly trainable, right? Again, we've talked about training the relaxed muscle, training the stress muscle, but you can, you can train your body into meditating. It just takes repetition, just like going to the gym to build a muscle, right?

[Angel Foster] (49:06 - 49:47)
Yeah. And meditation is amazing. Do you know, it was really interesting when I was recently on holiday, I was watching.

So I actually had very, my HRV was really high despite the fact that I was working really hard in the lead up to the holiday. I hadn't had one for, or you call it a vacation for a while. And we were moving around quite a bit on this trip.

And so in the first part of the, of the holiday, we had rented a home. So there's much more space for the five of us. And then as we started moving around, we then went into an apartment and then we went into hotels.

And so when we were then in hotels, you know, sometimes we would have like interconnecting rooms. So the space we were in got smaller. And so I was then more exposed to kind of my teenager's circadian rhythm, which tends to shift later.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (49:47 - 49:50)
Later, they sleep until noon. Yes. I have a couple of those.

Yes.

[Angel Foster] (49:50 - 50:10)
And they go to bed later and the lights are seemingly on later than I would have them in these things. And it's really interesting to watch my HRV because although the holiday was a hundred percent recharging my batteries, I loved every moment of it. We laughed.

It was so joyful. It was so much fun. Actually, my HRV was not as good on holiday as it was at home.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (50:10 - 50:19)
Although I would say like, in America, we're like, oh, a vacation is one without your kids and a trip without your kids is a trip. It's not a vacation or holiday, it's a trip.

[Angel Foster] (50:20 - 50:21)
It was a trip maybe then. Yeah.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (50:22 - 51:03)
But also I think sometimes when you travel, right, because our nervous system is always scanning for all kinds of things. When you're not in your normal routine in a place that your nervous system trusts, even though it's a beautiful hotel or Airbnb that is a safe space, your body is a little bit more on lookout, right? It's a little bit like, oh, I want to make sure I protect her.

This is not something I'm familiar with. So travel inherently will add. It's so funny.

I love flying. I love airports. I've always been that way.

I love to travel. But I remember when I first got my Oaring, I'm like, wow, every time I fly, I'm in a stress state the whole day. And my HRV drops.

And even though I feel happy, but it's just all the little tiny things that travel. You're not at home. You're not in your home safe environment.

So it is an extra spend when you're travelling, even if you love it.

[Angel Foster] (51:03 - 51:20)
It's very true. And also there's lots of like on a plane, like people's mobile phones. And in a hotel, for example, then there's just so much Wi-Fi and extra things that you're not exposed to.

Before we close, one question I have for you. I saw some research that going to bed by 10.30 p.m. supported adrenal function. Yes.

Yeah.

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (51:20 - 51:59)
Oh, it's actually very true. You get more restorative sleep in the hours before midnight than you do in the hours after midnight. So yeah, if you can go to bed, I mean, I usually try to tell my patients like 10 p.m. is the ultimate goal because then you'll get those two hours are so restorative. And it's because it kind of keeps us a little bit more on the circadian rhythm of what's happening with the sun. Right. So going to bed at 10 and waking up at 6 versus going to bed at midnight and waking up at 8, even though it's the same amount of sleep, it's not as restorative to go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8.

10 p.m. It is then. 10 p.m. Or 10.30, you know, any amount of time before midnight is going to be more restorative. Yeah.

Yeah.

[Angel Foster] (52:00 - 52:04)
Thank you so much. Is there anything that I haven't asked you here that you would like to share?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (52:04 - 52:08)
I don't think so. I think we covered a lot. This is a great chat, a great chat.

[Angel Foster] (52:09 - 52:31)
We've covered a lot of ground. And I think for those that want to go deeper, the Cortisol Cure is the place to go. Super excited.

It's such a needed book, I think, for so many people, because what you share and teach is just so practical. And I love this framework. I'm going to really hold that area in my head now in terms of am I withdrawing or am I putting a credit, you know, am I putting a deposit into my cortisol account?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (52:31 - 53:03)
One last thing I was going to share. If you go to my website, DrErinKinney.com, there's an assessment at the beginning of the book. It's called the Cortisol Debt Assessment.

Think about it like your credit score for your cortisol bank account. And you can actually take it online on my website. So if you want to go check it out, you get a score based out of 180.

And it looks at your external life load stressors, which are things like work and kids and kind of how you relate to those. And then it looks at your internal stressors, which are kind of things that are happening inside your body. And I'll give you two scores.

And it's a good way to just be like, hey, how's my bank account doing? What's my score look like? So you can go check that out.

[Angel Foster] (53:03 - 53:16)
That's exciting. I need to go check that out. And we will put it in the description as well.

Everyone can go and check that out and pick up a copy of your book. Thank you so much for coming on. Please share.

Where can everyone connect with you? Instagram or any other social?

[Dr. Erin Kinney] (53:16 - 53:21)
Yeah, Instagram. And I have a podcast called The Dr. Kinney Show. You can go check that out.

But I'm also on Instagram. So you can check me out there.

[Angel Foster] (53:22 - 53:24)
Amazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Kinney. You're welcome.

Naturopathic doctor and author of The Cortisol Cure, Dr. Erin Kinney, explains why cortisol isn't the villain we think it is, but a "fix it" hormone you earn through rest and spend through everything else. She unpacks why decades of overspending leave midlife women with a depleted account, why that stubborn belly fat took years to build via insulin resistance, and why the instinct to push harder with more cardio and fewer calories only drains you further.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

- Why cortisol is your "fix it" hormone, not just a stress villain

- Why your midlife belly fat took years to build, and why you need cortisol to lose it

- How the body robs your sex hormones, then floods you with tired-but-wired adrenaline

- Why pushing harder with more cardio and fewer calories backfires

- How to tell your account is overdrawn, from morning fatigue to crashing after workouts

- Why building muscle, not cardio, is the top lever for flipping insulin resistance

- Which everyday activities are secretly a spend versus a deposit

- Which adaptogens and nutrients refill the account, and why carbs matter more than you think