Dr. Michael Breus

Cortisol is not so great at two o'clock in the morning.

We don't want to do things that could propagate cortisol late in the evening time.

So as an example, what you don't want to do is watch Game of Thrones starting at midnight, right?

That's probably going to increase your cortisol.

It's probably going to make it difficult for you to fall asleep or something along those lines.

But generally speaking, cortisol is a good thing.

We just, when you have it in your body or when it's elevated, that's what you want to be talking about.

You got it.

Okay.

Absolutely.

So we do sometimes see a cortisol spike in the middle of the night.

That becomes problematic.

So for whatever reason, most people are waking up somewhere between 1 and 3 o'clock in the morning.

Let's talk about why and let's talk about some of the different things that everybody out there can do to fix said situation.

First of all, you have correctly identified that there is something that goes on.

There is a cortisol spike.

Let me explain the biology.

Before bed, our core body temperature rises, rises, rises until about 10, 10.30 at night.

It's a peak.

Now, to be clear, that peak changes based on your chronotype.