the cortisol girlies got it wrong

why your deadlifts are not the reason you feel tired, puffy, or stressed out.

The other night I was lying in bed doing the thing I promised myself I would stop doing, scrolling. Three videos in, a woman with soft lighting and a very serious face told me that lifting heavy was spiking my cortisol and that I should really consider swapping my squats for a slow walk around the block. Two swipes later, another one explained that HIIT was frying my nervous system. Then a nutritionist with thousands of followers listed the supplements I apparently needed to balance my cortisol, starting at 47 euros a bottle.

I closed the app. I felt a little crazy. Because I have been lifting heavy for years, I sleep well, my cycle is regular, I eat enough, and my bloodwork is boringly normal. And yet, for a few seconds, I almost believed that my Wednesday leg day was secretly wrecking me.

If you have been anywhere near fitness content lately, you know exactly what I am talking about. The cortisol girlies are everywhere, and their message is always the same. Stop pushing. Stop sweating. Stop lifting. Walk more, stretch, sip adaptogenic lattes, and whatever you do, do not go near a barbell unless “you want to bloat, break out, and gain ten kilos of stress weight.”

I want to talk about this, because the science behind it is actually pretty clear, and the version being sold online is mostly panic wrapped in pastel graphics.

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so what is cortisol, actually

Cortisol is a hormone your adrenal glands make, and calling it the “stress hormone” is a little like calling water the “drowning liquid.” It is technically true in the wrong context, and deeply misleading in every other one.

Cortisol helps you wake up in the morning. It regulates your blood sugar, your blood pressure, your immune response, and how your body uses fat, protein, and carbohydrates for fuel. It follows a daily rhythm, peaking about thirty minutes after you open your eyes and dropping throughout the day until it reaches its lowest point around midnight. Without it, you would not be able to get out of bed, handle a cold, or recover from a hard workout. People whose bodies stop making cortisol have a serious medical condition called Addison’s disease, and they need to take it as medication to stay alive.

So cortisol is not the villain. It is one of the hormones keeping you upright.

exercise raises cortisol (and that is the whole point)

Here is the part the short videos leave out. Every time you train hard, your cortisol goes up. That is not a bug, it is the feature. Cortisol is part of how your body mobilizes energy so you can actually lift the weight, finish the set, and recover afterwards.

Acute bouts of exercise cause a temporary rise in cortisol, with the biggest spikes coming from higher intensity and longer sessions. The key word here is temporary. Cortisol goes up during and shortly after training, then comes back down, usually within a few hours.¹

Even more interesting, the people who train regularly tend to show a blunted cortisol response to stress over time. In other words, their bodies get better at handling stress, not worse. Which means that vigorous exercise actually dampened the cortisol response to a psychological stressor later in the day, resulting in lower overall cortisol levels and faster recovery.²

Translation, the woman telling you your deadlifts are frying your hormones has it backwards. Consistent training is one of the things that makes your stress response more resilient, not less.

acute spikes versus chronically high cortisol

This is where the confusion lives, and where most of the internet panic comes from. There is a real medical phenomenon called chronically elevated cortisol, and it is a problem. It is linked to insulin resistance, belly fat, poor sleep, and a weakened immune system. That is true, and I am not dismissing it.

But a short spike during a workout is not the same thing as chronically elevated cortisol. Not even close. One is a normal physiological response that resolves within hours. The other is a long-term dysregulation of your entire stress axis, usually driven by something that is putting your body under sustained pressure for weeks or months.

Conflating the two is like saying that because sprinting raises your heart rate, running causes heart disease. It is technically a sentence, but it is also nonsense.

what actually drives chronic cortisol issues

If you want to know what keeps cortisol stuck high over the long run, the research points to a pretty consistent list, and your squat rack is not on it.

Under-eating and chronic dieting.

A meta-analysis* published in 2016 looked at 13 studies and found that caloric restriction, especially fasting, significantly raised cortisol. The authors concluded that restricting food is itself a biological stressor, because one of cortisol’s main jobs is to release stored energy when the body thinks fuel is running low.³

In female athletes, short-term low energy availability has been shown to raise cortisol, suppress muscle protein synthesis, and disrupt hormonal function.⁴ So yes, the irony is brutal. The 1200 calorie diet that gets sold as a “cortisol reset” is probably what is raising your cortisol in the first place.

Not sleeping enough.

Sleep deprivation raises evening cortisol levels by around 37 to 45 percent the following day and delays the normal drop into the quieter nighttime phase.⁵ Chronic short sleepers consistently show higher cortisol than people who sleep enough, and this pattern is linked to insulin resistance and metabolic issues.⁶

Ongoing life stress.

Work pressure, unresolved anxiety, caregiving, grief, financial strain, a relationship that drains you. The stuff we all know is hard and somehow still underestimate. This is the stress cortisol was designed for, and when it never switches off, neither does the hormone.

None of these look like a barbell (just saying 👀).

* A meta-analysis is a research method that combines data from multiple studies on the same topic to identify overall trends and produce a more reliable conclusion than any single study alone.

why this trend is specifically aimed at women

Here is the part that frustrates me the most. Almost none of the “stop lifting, it is spiking your cortisol” content is aimed at men. The same intensity of training that gets framed as hormonal damage for women gets framed as discipline and grinding for men. Same sets, same reps, different story.

It fits into a much older narrative that women’s bodies are fragile, that we should not push too hard, that we should shrink and soften instead of getting strong. The language has been updated for 2026, it sounds wellness-coded and science-adjacent, but the underlying message is the same one women have been fed for decades. Do less. Take up less space. Walk, do not lift.

And it works because it sounds caring. It sounds like someone is looking out for you. That is what makes it so sticky, and so worth pushing back on.

my personal take on that

When I stopped under-eating and started lifting heavy four times a week, a lot of the symptoms people now call high cortisol got better, not worse. I slept deeper. My cycle got more regular. My energy stabilized. The bloating I used to blame on stress turned out to be what happens when you eat 1400 calories and try to train like an athlete.

What changed was boring and unsexy. I ate enough, around 2200 to 2400 calories most days, with protein at every meal. I prioritized sleep like it was my job. I kept lifting heavy, because strength training is one of the most effective tools we have for long-term metabolic and mental health. And I stopped taking advice from anyone trying to sell me a supplement in the same breath.

If you are training hard, eating enough, and sleeping well, your cortisol is almost certainly doing exactly what it is supposed to do. The short spike after a heavy set is not damage, it is adaptation. It is your body learning to be stronger.

Do not let a thirty second video with a sad piano track talk you out of the one thing that has been shown, over and over, to make women healthier as they age. Lifting heavy is not a cortisol problem. It is often part of the solution.

Get medical advice from your doctor, not from someone whose pinned comment is a discount code.

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1. Effects of Acute Coordinative vs. Endurance Exercise on Cortisol Concentration in Healthy Women and Men, Sports Medicine - Open, 2025

2. The effects of exercise intensity on the cortisol response to a subsequent acute psychosocial stressor, Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2021

3. Systematic review and meta-analysis reveals acutely elevated plasma cortisol following fasting but not less severe calorie restriction, Stress, 2016

4. Short-Term Severe Low Energy Availability in Athletes: Molecular Mechanisms, Endocrine Responses, and Performance Outcomes — A Narrative Review, PMC, 2025

5. Sleep loss results in an elevation of cortisol levels the next evening, Sleep, 1997

6. Influence of Sleep Deprivation and Circadian Misalignment on Cortisol, Inflammatory Markers, and Cytokine Balance, Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2015