The cortisol pattern that gets missed most often
Cortisol follows a curve. It peaks sharply in the first hour after waking, this is the cortisol awakening response, then drops steadily through the day, reaching its lowest point around midnight. In a woman whose stress system is functioning normally, this rhythm holds. In cortisol dysregulation, the curve flattens, inverts, or spikes at the wrong times. The result is not a dramatic crash. It is a woman who wakes up exhausted despite eight hours of sleep, gets a second wind at 10 p.m. when she should be winding down, and feels oddly flat by mid-afternoon.
