Detox While You Sleep

Having to drag yourself out of bed even after a good seven hours means something’s off . Your hormones may be the culprit. Find out how to reset them.

You got plenty of sleep, and yet it takes Herculean effort to move from the mattress. If this is a typical morning for you, don’t blame it on laziness. Studies have recently confirmed the physiological reason behind your morning exhaustion: Your cortisol levels are out of whack.

While we usually think of cortisol as affecting stress, it’s also responsible for making you feel alert and awake. Normally, as morning approaches, cortisol levels in the body begin to rise; gradually at first, to draw you out of the deeper phases of sleep, and then more dramatically, to help you pry your eyes open. This boost, known as the cortisol awakening response (CAR), is like a shot of espresso. Besides giving you mental energy, it also gets your body primed and ready for the day ahead by stimulating your digestive, central nervous, and cardiovascular systems , all of which power down at night, says Katarina Dedovic, a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute at McGill University in Canada. Within a half hour of your alarm going off , your cortisol level will have risen by roughly 50 per cent, and you’ll be ready to dive into your morning routine.

That is, unless your hormone response has gone haywire. Factors like chronic stress, nutritional shortfalls, bad bedtime habits, and even your body clock can mess with your CAR, explains Shawn Talbott, author of The Cortisol Connection. “Cortisol normally follows a pattern of being high in the morning and subsiding over the course of the day, with temporary spikes in response to stressful events,” Shawn explains. If you’re always stressed, though, the hormone is released more frequently, and its level remains high when it shouldn’t be. One of the ways your body compensates for excess cortisol is by suppressing your CAR, Katarina explains. As a result, you wake up feeling sluggish and exhausted.