Page 54 - CoESPU Magazine 2017-3

tryglicerides in the blood. To a psychological level long-term exposure to cortisol damages cells in
the hippocampus; this damage results in impaired learning. Furthermore, cortisol inhibits memory
retrieval of already stored information.

At a this point, the idea that we have of cortisol it could be enough confused, since there are positive
effects and in the same time negative effects. How is it possible that?

Cortisol is an hormone and all every hormones shows some details, among which: every hormone is
a messenger, a chemical messenger that trough the blood flow brings informations from a part to our
body to another; the level of hormones in our body are not steady and are influenced to many things:
food, physical activity, drugs, biological cycles or psychological situations (grief, depression,
anxiety, fear, etc, etc). This means that if we want to know the “right” levels of an hormone, we
need to make different measurements in different times of day, or of specific period of time, and to
verify the trend or curve.

A healthy curve, normally, shows the highest cortisol secretion in the second half of the night, with
peak in the early morning, about 7-8 a.m. Following this, cortisol level decline in progressive way
throughout the day, with lowest levels during the first half of the night, around 3 a.m.

The average range of cortisol in the blood, in healthy conditions, is:
Morning 7:00 a.m. 5,0 – 25,0 mcg / dL

Afternoon 4:00 p.m. 2,0 – 9,0 mcg / dL
Evening 8:00 p.m. 1,0 – 8,0 mcg / dL

Ideally, perform the test around 8:00 a.m., and aim for the optimal range for adults is 10-15 mcg/dL.

Always at the base of psycho physiological problems, there are the alteration of this trend. It is
important to take into consideration that, the alteration of cortisol level could be the effect of bad
habits, with negative impact of health condition.

Now we are going to see some sympthoms and the respective bad habits:

When the shape is like a normal-optimal curve, but the values are higher, the person wake up hours
before dawn in a state of anxiety, with many awakenings during the sleep, and the mind is racing at
the moment of the wake up, and the energy crashes and burns sometime around midmorning (image
1);

Image 1: values are higher than normal-optimal

48