In this chapter I’m going to cover one thing, and one thing only, and how to reduce and modulate its effects: cortisol.

Cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, is found to be chronically elevated in early risers as well as night owls forced to get up early. While cortisol is essential for normal functioning and you’d die a very fast death without it, having too much of it will absolutely, positively put you in an early grave. And our morning-obsessed society is killing people by forcing them to get up early and therefore keep their cortisol levels chronically elevated.

With that in mind, here are some easy and simple ways to lower your body’s cortisol levels. (Note: You should check your levels first using a diurnal saliva cortisol test kit, which can be obtained from your doctor, or online, including Amazon, with all lab fees included. I consider the occasional test a bargain in exchange for knowing where my levels are and the ability to take corrective action when they’re off.)

Eat Healthy

This probably sounds simplistic, but think about it: How often do you eat foods that are not particularly good for you?

By “healthy” I’m referring to “cortisol lowering.” This includes avoiding a high-sugar diet or simple carbs in general, avoiding trans fats and refined fats, avoiding or limiting caffeine and alcohol (duh!), making sure your nutritional needs are met with quality vitamins and supplements, and eating enough healthy fats and protein.

Now, when most people think of a “healthy” fat, they think of something like olive oil, which is indeed good for you. However, with the cover blown off the lipid hypothesis, medical science has found that saturated fats are actually good for you. Yes, you heard me right: Saturated fats are healthy. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run something by my doctor and his response was, “Eat more fat!” (It’s good to have a young doctor who is actually up to date on this stuff; it seems like most of my older relatives are taking statin drugs, known to cause dementia, because their doctors went to med school an eternity ago and don’t keep current. Or maybe they’re just beholden to their pharm rep. Who knows.)

Check out the book Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We East Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health by Mark Hyman, MD (Little, Brown and Company, 2016). As you may have deduced, it was my own doctor who recommended the book, and I can indeed state that once I put it into practice, I lost fat, put on muscle, and just generally feel better eating a diet rich in saturated fats. The author also has an accompanying cookbook in print to make the journey easier.

Relax, Relax, Relax!

When I’m stressed, my wife tells me to go shooting. Spending an hour or so at a shooting range with some of my favorite guns is extremely therapeutic for me and I walk out happy, upbeat, and relaxed. However, you don’t have to be a gun slut like me to achieve relaxation. There are many ways to do that, some of which you already know work for you, so here are some of the more effective ones I’ve found.

Self-hypnosis

This should fall under the “Relax” category but I broke it out separately because of the incredible, positive effects it had in alleviating my stress and anxiety during a grueling 18-month IRS audit covering two years of both business and personal tax returns.

That’s also how I know of Dr. Steven Gurgevich—I used his “Relieve Anxiety with Medical Hypnosis” on a daily basis to achieve that outcome. He has many others, such as RelaxRx and dozens more on his website, with many available at Audible.

Unlike meditation, which, while guided with an app, is still something you actually do on your own, with medical hypnotherapy you mostly just relax and listen. You’ll be asked to do some breathing exercises to become deeply relaxed, as well as some guided imagery. All I know is that it works. For me, anyway.

I say “for me” because medical hypnosis is only effective if you believe it will be. If you’re a naysayer, or believe that all hypnosis is the equivalent of a Las Vegas hypnotist comedy show, you’ll block your mind from going into trance, either consciously or unconsciously. Either way, I recommend giving it a try. For me it’s my first-line treatment when I’m especially stressed or anxious.

Exercise—Within Reason

If you’re like most people who go to a gym to work out, you can’t help but notice the regulars who carry around gallon jugs of water and intently watch themselves doing bicep curls in the mirror.

When I say exercise within reason, what I’m saying is that you don’t have to become one of these self-absorbed muscle-head types. In fact, that’s one of the worst things you can do for your stress levels! My gym expressly prohibits gallon jugs of water, loud grunting, and tank tops. Be dignified or GTFO is their modus operandi.

Heavy lifting like that increases cortisol levels. This is why professional bodybuilders and their trainers learn so much about how to delicately balance lifting hard with maintaining healthy cortisol levels, since cortisol is muscle-destroying, or catabolic. What most men, and some women, do in the gym is to lift and lift until they can’t lift anymore. However, past a certain point, the benefits disappear and cortisol takes over. It not only negates the benefits that more moderate lifting would have provided, it also wrecks your health in general, as you already know.

I learned the pitfalls of typical weight training from a friend who is himself a bodybuilder. (And no, he’s not like those regulars at all.) He limits his workouts to a surprisingly short amount of time each day—as in under 10 minutes—and the man is huge. He wasn’t always that way, either; we were also friends about 10 years ago when he let himself go, lost muscle, and put on a belly. He got back to all his bodybuilding hugeness with those surprisingly short workouts!

So, whether you do cardio, weights, Pilates, barre, or anything else, do it in moderation. Excessive exercise raises cortisol levels, which in turn raise your stress level and damage your health.

Use Adaptogens

Remember when I said my low cortisol, and subsequently high cortisol, was cured through the use of adaptogens? There are several that have particular benefit for your adrenal glands and your cortisol levels in turn.

Those that I have used are ashwaganda (probably the best of the bunch in my experience), astragalus, licorice root (be aware that this can be stimulating—avoid at night), holy basil, and rhodiola. And of course magnesium glycinate, which does wonders for stress whenever it rears its ugly head.

Again, I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on television, so please, consult with your own healthcare provider prior to heading over to Amazon and ordering any of these!

Spend Enough Time Outdoors

We humans weren’t evolved to live inside man-made houses with artificial lighting.

Humans have spent nearly all of their time on earth living outdoors. When you consider that evolution lags by about 100,000 years, it’s easy to see why artificial lights and blue screens trash our sleep so badly. We simply haven’t evolved and adapted to them yet.

Getting outdoors doesn’t mean you have to spend a weekend camping in the woods. It can be a 20-minute walk on your lunch break. It can be getting outside the moment you get out of bed, which has the added benefit of helping your body to adapt to waking at that time. It can be a daily morning walk on the beach, which my wife and I did almost every day while living in Southern California prior to escaping to Texas.

Use Essential Oils

I’m not the expert in this department—my wife is. She has a nice collection of essential oils she uses for herself as well as for our girls. If one is having trouble sleeping, or has a night terror, she’ll grab just the right oil and the problem is magically solved.

I don’t think this is a placebo effect, either. One day at the drugstore I grabbed a vial of lavender essential oil for myself, and boy, does it truly promote relaxation.

I’ve gotten into the habit of putting a couple of drops on my pillow (remember, this stuff is concentrated) and a little dab on my upper chest. I really do get relaxed and sleep much more quickly than without it.

Like I said, I’m not an expert on essential oils and there are a myriad of books, websites, and articles dedicated to them. However, lavender is best known as the relaxing essential oil, so I’d start there.

Sleep!

This one is BIG, because insufficient sleep has a direct and very dramatic effect on cortisol levels. The bottom line is if you don’t get enough sleep, you’re going to have chronically elevated cortisol levels, will be at risk for a very long list of serious diseases, and will literally shorten your life, and I mean in terms of a decade or more, not just a few months.

Also, since this chapter is about how to mitigate the risks of early rising if you’re forced to do so, it’s worth mentioning again that virtually all naturally early risers, who are not forced to get up early but just wake up at that time, also have chronically elevated cortisol levels and shorter life expectancies.

I’m not going to go into specifics on how to get a good night’s sleep since that was covered in the previous chapter. What I want to emphasize is getting enough sleep.

For a night owl like me, the trick isn’t getting up, it’s getting to sleep on time. And I misused alcohol for years to achieve this, not realizing that I wasn’t actually getting enough sleep although I thought I did. That would certainly explain my ongoing fatigue and the need for large amounts of coffee throughout the day. And that’s another reason I advocate neither alcohol nor caffeine consumption; it creates a vicious downward spiral of stimulant-then-depressant, over and over, every day, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad mortem.

Go back and review the previous chapter. Once you can consistently get to sleep on time every night, you’ll find that you’re getting enough sleep—finally—and your cortisol and therefore stress levels will drop. You’ll also find yourself in better health overall and feeling better.

A Word of Caution

Even though I’ve described the highly addictive nature of so-called tranquilizers and sleeping pills, along with alcohol, the reality is that we live in a “quick-fix” society. Antidepressants didn’t come along due to medical necessity; they came along because psychiatrists have largely changed their practice from weekly sessions of talk therapy to a monthly five-minute visit to get a prescription refill. Antidepressants are also extremely physically addictive, with a few exceptions like Wellbutrin.

My point is that you must avoid the temptation to look for the quick fix. I don’t doubt for one second that the majority of readers who saw the word “relax” had their minds immediately go to thoughts of a pill to make that happen. That’s the world we live in, and the strong desire for instant gratification has sadly extended to medicine. Instead of recommending medical hypnotherapy, or meditation, or deep breathing, or any proven relaxation technique, far too many doctors will whip out the prescription pad and hook you up with Xanax or another tranquilizer, and before you know it you’re hooked and can’t stop without running the risk of very dangerous withdrawal symptoms like seizures.

A final thought on stress: I’m not saying you have to eliminate it. No one can do that. You just have to work on managing and reducing it. It’s well known that being President of the United States is likely the single most stressful job in the world. That’s why presidents age so very rapidly while in office, and why health fanatics like George W. Bush end up with 95% clogged arteries thanks to chronically high cortisol.

It’s also why most presidents in recent history work out. That includes George W. Bush, as mentioned, his dad, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. I’m not so sure about President Trump, given his physique, but then again, he’s been living on the edge all of his life and being the president is probably just like any typical day at the Trump Tower office was for him in terms of stress.

Even when I met Congressman Paul Ryan, and asked how members from both parties are such good friends despite attacking each other on the floor during debate, he said half the reason is that they’re all in the Capitol gym every morning working out together! See, those guys know how to manage stress, too!