Gutsy Chick Podcast

The Gutsy Truth About Cortisol: What Your Body’s Really Saying

• Amanda Smith • Episode 71

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In this episode of the Gutsy Chick podcast, we’re talking about cortisol—your body’s primary stress hormone—and what it really means for ambitious, high-achieving women. I’m walking you through my S.T.R.E.S.S. rocket framework, inspired by my days in aerospace, to help you understand how energy, recovery, blood sugar, and hormone balance all work together behind the scenes. 

If you’ve ever hit an afternoon crash, felt moody for “no reason,” or wondered why you’re doing all the things and still feel off—this one’s for you. It’s time to stop pushing and start recalibrating. Let’s launch into healing—the gutsy way. 

 

In this Episode:  

00:00 Introduction to the Stress Rocket Concept 

01:56 Understanding Cortisol and Its Role 

06:47 The Throttle: Managing Energy and Stress 

10:38 Recovery: The Importance of Rest 

12:43 Energy Systems: Blood Sugar and Cortisol 

15:45 The Sugar and Sex Hormones Connection 

19:59 Conclusion: Systems Check for Daily Launch 


Other links mentioned: 

The Secrets of Body Whispering Private Podcast: https://bodywhisperhealing.com/private-podcast 

Watch Gutsy Chick Podcast on YouTube!

Check out more from Amanda:
Website: Body Whisper Healing
Instagram: @Amanda.G.Smith
Facebook: Body Whisper Healing
Pinterest: AmandaGSmithBWH
LinkedIn: Amanda (Ritchie) Smith

Take the Gutsy Chick Quiz to find out how your type A, high achieving mindset might be holding you back from healing your chronic health issue: https://gutsychickquiz.com





I am going to put a big spin on how you look at stress and cortisol by teaching you about what I know from aerospace. You're going to learn how to launch a rocket today. Your stress rocket, the S T R E S S rocket. fact, welcome back to the gutsy chick podcast. I'm your host Amanda Smith, former aerospace and mechanical engineer on NASA's Artemis program and several other NASA projects and programs. Turned medical intuitive. I learned that the body was more important to me and sharing my knowledge about the body was more important to me than launching spacecraft. I don't know, right? Crazy. Right now, you're in a series of episodes on what I call the three S's. These are your foundational hormones that if you manage to get right all the other four hormones fall in line. Women my age are usually more concerned about their progesterone, their testosterone, and their estrogen. Well, none of those are part of the three S's. The three S's are stress, cortisol, which we're covering on this episode today. Sugar, insulin, which there are several episodes on this topic because it's very near and dear to my heart because a lot of people in my family have diabetes. And the last is sex, which has to do with oxytocin or our pleasure hormone. And in my humble opinion, if you get that one right, all the rest fall in line. So let's dive in. Let's launch this rocket, shall we? First you need to know a little bit about cortisol. Most of us understand that cortisol isn't a good thing. creates a cortisol belly and it dysregulates all the rest of our hormones. Also true. And we should have a work life balance. That's hogwash. We all have to work to make money to survive in this world unless we were part of generational wealth. I guarantee you the majority of the women listening to this show are not that. So a work-life balance in my humble opinion is complete and total hogwash. But knowing what to do to help stress regulate itself throughout the day, that. That's why you're here. Notice I'm outside. Yeah, this is a big, big way to regulate your stress. Just get outside, just sit outside. It has unbelievable health benefits. And if you've been watching any of my social content, you know that I am about to host a retreat in October of 2025. And it's all about getting outdoors and learning how to heal yourself in the great outdoors. So you're going to hear some of that today as I break down S T R E S S. So the first S in this acronym is your systems check. Stress is your mission control. Cortisol is your mission control. If you've ever watched any of the space movies, Armageddon, one of my favorites, even though it's so bad when it comes to the actual physics. Apollo 13, the Martian, although not all of that is correct in its physics either. You'll notice that mission control is where they're letting the people who are sitting in the rocket know we are either a go or a no go for launch. That's what cortisol is. Cortisol gets you up in the morning. actually wakes your body up. And it's tied to your circadian rhythm. If you don't know what that is, well, our circadian rhythm is how our body functions throughout a day. cortisol gets you up in the morning, which means cortisol is high in the morning. And then throughout the day, your cortisol should decrease and melatonin takes over at night so that you can fall asleep. Now, this mission control systems check, it should look like my body wakes up naturally, potentially before an alarm. Or maybe you don't even use an alarm like me. Your body can sync up with the sun and wake up with the sun. That's how I wake every single day. My daughter and I do not use alarms. We allow the sun to wake us and we wake up with enough time to get her ready for school every single day. That school is in session. So this cortisol as your mission control, some of the things that it's doing is checking to make sure, are you ready to go in the beginning of your day? It adjusts how much adrenaline is in the system throughout the day. It adjusts how much fuel you need throughout the day. And it adjusts your blood pressure throughout the day. So if you have chronic stress and your body doesn't actually come down from high cortisol, well, you're burning all through your fuel and your blood pressure is rising and rising and rising. And eventually, we end up with engine burnout. Let's jump into T. This one is all about your throttle. How much go juice are you using throughout the day? How much fuel are you using throughout the day? And I don't just mean food as our fuel, but that's part of it. This is more about our nervous system balance. Sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system. When our cortisol goes high, we are in fight or flight. As we go throughout our day, we start to tend toward that rest digest recovery phase, which happens to be the next letter. Fight or flight isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's the thing that's getting you out of bed so that you can do your systems check with mission control. But if we're riding in that high stress zone, that high chronic zone of cortisol, we're burning the candle at both ends. The rocket now has a rocket engine at the top and the bottom. Not ideal to make this system go. so we can get temporary thrust but then get pushed back down because we've got thrusters moving in the wrong, stinking direction. We really need our body to go from a high thrust to get out of Earth's atmosphere, gravity is a thing and it's really hard to get out of, to just propulsion thrusters, which is what we use in the vacuum of space on our spacecraft. just little bursts throughout the day. That is what our cortisol should look like as we move through our day. But we all live in the real world. Our cortisol is going to spike in times that we need more motivation to do something like go to a meeting or record a podcast. I'll tell you right now. After I am done recording every single podcast I have stress sweat and have to go change my shirt and that is because I am motivated to do this for you. That's hard as all but if I were to remain doing a podcast all day every day well I'm gonna need some ways to recover. Which leads me into the next letter. R. This is our recovery. Now when it comes to flight, when it comes to launching a rocket, the astronauts get to go into recovery once they get to space. They are in high stress as that sucker is launching through Earth's atmosphere. But once they are in space, they can start to chill a little bit. recover. Recovery and repair and rest, those three R's are what you're looking for and it's what you want to notice that your body goes into by the end of the day. If you head to bed and all of a sudden your brain is churning and churning and churning and you need to get up, you need to go potentially move your body, your cortisol just spiked. that is not an ideal situation for rest and recovery. Those eight hours each night, eight hours depends on the person, that is your time for your body to recover from the previous day or previous days. That is what our bodies absolutely have to have. But if you're also waking up throughout the night, well, you might not be getting into REM cycle so that your body can fully recover. So those are some of the things to pay attention to if your cortisol has gotten out of control. Now on the flip side, if your cortisol is too low, this means that you always want to be in that recovery state. You always want to be in a rest state and there's no go juice. Back to the tea. You have no desire to get motivated and get yourself going. Those are two things to pay very close attention to. Your sleep is the key in this one. Other recovery throughout the day. If you were to do a really hard workout or you had an all day meeting, make sure to schedule some recovery that looks like an Epsom salt bath or getting outdoors, getting outdoors, putting your bare feet on the ground, allowing earth's magnetics. to ground you, it's electronics to ground you, yes the earth has electromagnetic field and it's going to pull down the energy for you, so fabulous. And I'm getting a little vitamin D, whether the sun's going down or not you can still get vitamin D, whether there are clouds in the sky or not you can still get vitamin D. That will also help regulate your nervous system. and help you go into sleep mode. Your body's Sarcadian Rhythms once again. The next letter is E. This is our energy system. This is a little bit tied to sugar, which is the second S in the three S's. It's definitely tied to our mitochondria because that's our energy store in our cells. That's where we get the energy to do things. And this is tied to blood sugar. So this is This is where cortisol influences our insulin resistance. When our blood sugars dip, we go into more cortisol. So if you notice right before lunchtime, for instance, that you turn into a bit of a gremlin, you get a little angry or moody, that's your, that's your blood sugar going into a dip. And now your cortisol is starting to climb to keep you motivated to go get some stinking food. If you have that mid afternoon dip, this is again where blood sugar is going. Okay, we just had a meal, a big meal for lunch. And now I didn't have good regulation of my blood sugar in the morning. So now I'm going to go need a nap. But when you're at work, what do you do? You go grab a five hour energy or a monster or some sort of energy drink, could be coffee, but something to spike your caffeine to surge you throughout the rest of the afternoon. This is an indication that your blood sugar needs better tending. Some of the things to do to help this is have a balanced breakfast. eating a balanced breakfast in the morning. helps your blood sugar level out. And it's similar to one of my other recommendations, which is when you first wake up in the morning, you're dehydrated. So have a cup of water, eight to 24 ounces somewhere in there to get rehydrated. Once you do that, your body naturally signals it's time for more water. Guess what? If you regulate your blood sugar first thing in the morning, your blood sugar will let you know throughout the day without these huge dips. to go get more fuel, to go get more food. Pay attention. The next two S's actually have to do with the other two S's in the three S's. So the next S is your sugar hormone, insulin. We're going to cover that in the next segment of the episodes. And the last is your sex hormone, oxytocin. sex hormones are actually progesterone and estrogen and testosterone, but in this case we're talking about sex specifically and how it provides oxytocin, that pleasure hormone. And how do those relate back to this whole aerospace rocket idea? So Your sugar hormone is balancing out your fuel tanks and avoiding turbulence, making sure that you're maneuvering out of turbulence. You know how planes do it where they're like, okay, we're about to experience turbulence. And then you feel the plane jiggle a little, and then you, you realize that they've moved to a different altitude or shifted directions in order to get out of it. Yeah. It's the same thing. That's how we use our sugar hormone insulin. And you're going to hear a really cool example from Amy Gallo about how insulin is a spacecraft. And I am so here for this. I love that one. So stick around for that episode. And then the last S, that's your afterburners. So again, this goes back to that propulsion system I talked about in T. where once we get into space, all we've got to use is this delicate afterburners or propulsion system to maneuver us through space. That's your sex hormone. That's oxytocin. Huh. So what did we learn? We need cortisol. Cortisol gets us out of bed in the morning so we can do our system check, make sure that we're motivated to do the things throughout the day. That is our cortisol working in our favor. And that is what we need to continue to do to follow our circadian rhythm so that we can easily get up in the morning and easily go to sleep at night. If we flip-flop it and we want to the snooze every two seconds in the morning, well, that's your cortisol going, I just need more rest! We learned about throttle control, the go juice. Our nervous system balances itself throughout the day. We ebb and flow through parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, rest, digest and fight or flight. That, that's our go juice or our slow down. We learned about recovery. R is all about. What is sleep doing to us? Can we notice I've got to, I've got to wake up throughout the night or I can't go to sleep because my brain is just going and I just need to get up and move my body some more. That's when cortisol has gotten out of control. It's taken over and it's suppressed melatonin. That's our sleepy hormone. E is our energy system. We've got to have energy balance throughout the day. This is balancing blood sugar in the morning with a nice complete breakfast with fats, proteins and carbs. And then allowing our body to give us signals throughout the day when we need to continue to fuel instead of having those crazy dips like right before we need to eat or that mid afternoon dip that some of us experience. I definitely did an aerospace. And then the last two are the sugar and the sex. which are the other two S's that we're going to cover later, but you learned one is the role of insulin and how our sugar needs to be balanced throughout the day. And whether it's creating turbulence or keeping us fueled properly. And then the last S, the sex that That's our afterburners or our propulsion system that we use once we get into space to keep us on course. So this week I challenge you to do one small systems check. How's your launch in the morning? Can you throttle up and down throughout your midday? And are you fueling yourself properly for the flight? A quick reminder, you're not broken. You're built for flight. Stay bold, stay curious, and keep listening to your body like it's a high-performance spacecraft. I'll see you next time. Stay gutsy.

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