Working with your hormones, particularly with cortisolhas become the hottest fad among people with a passing — but mostly superficial — interest in health and wellness (which, to be clear, includes me). Struggling to lose weight? You need to balance your hormones. Have a Difficulty sleeping through the night? Hormones. Persistent acne?Hormones! Bad posture? Poor digestion? Irritable mood? All of these are suspected symptoms of hormonal imbalances, more specifically, elevated cortisol levels.
As many side effects as high cortisol is believed to have, there are just as many potential cures: Do not drink coffee on an empty stomachmeditation, avoiding blue light after sunset, swapping high-intensity workouts for walks and pilates, and drinking this little magnesium glycinate drink mix that you can conveniently purchase for $28.77 directly from the TikTok Shop.
Pseudoscience, like conspiracy theories, is so sticky because it contains just enough truth to be plausible. Cortisol is real, and chronically high cortisol can cause a lot of negative side effectsFrom what I understand, cortisol is known as the “stress hormone” and is released by the body to help you get out of fight or flight mode, much like the lighter fluid you would throw on a fire is adrenaline.
Over the past decade, I’ve had to deal with a variety of uterine issues, from annoying to debilitating. Once I hit my thirties, those issues began to spread to other parts of my body. I feel like I’m constantly discovering new ways to feel bad, and late-night Google searches indicate that my constellation of symptoms might be related.
Of course, this is nothing that a conversation with a particularly caring doctor can’t clear up; it’s the “caring” part that’s the problem. I fit squarely into the group of people whose experiences with the American medical system are at best psychological manipulation and at worst neglect. Last summer, for example, I spent six hours in the emergency room for incredible uterine pain, and was told to consider taking ibuprofen and acetaminophen. at the same time.
This is how I, a college-educated and generally skeptical coastal elite, become a prime target for medical misinformation, which my channels are more than willing to spread. My social algorithms show me videos about all the ways I can alleviate my ailments (balance my hormones, control my cortisol levels) simply by drinking a special non-alcoholic cocktail every night, made from a powder that supposedly combines magnesium glycinate, vitamin D, L-theanine, and ashwagandha. This substance is not regulated by the FDA, so I have no idea how much of any of the listed ingredients it actually contains. I may be ingesting these substances in therapeutic amounts and thus lowering my cortisol, or I may be drinking sugar water and experiencing a placebo effect. It tastes like lemonade and doesn’t seem to do any harm, so I keep drinking it.
I know what this looks like, but after a decade of increasingly severe chronic illness and little help from my doctors, it’s comforting to see a young woman on the internet describing the exact symptoms I have in the past tense and attributing her recovery to something so simple. That Weird Trick Doctors Don’t Want You To Know It becomes attractive: What do I have to lose at this point?
Anxiety about hormones in general and cortisol in particular has taken center stage in the online discourse about women’s health and fitness. Influencers who don’t even primarily post health and fitness content They talk openly about their hormonal “journeys.” and the rhetoric seeps out from there. This anxiety represents a clear snapshot of where women’s online culture is politically at the moment, sandwiched between a post-body-positive internet and the omnipresent thin, white supremacist beauty ideals that still largely govern mainstream aesthetics. Barbie monologue, But the experience of representing gender at an acceptable level is a mental disaster.
Language about hormones is a more acceptable way to talk about ongoing efforts to achieve conventional beauty ideals (especially thinness) on an internet now permeated with the rhetoric of the body positivity movement. Pigeons and Nike As the world has successfully appropriated what was originally a fat liberation social movement, body positivity jargon has become aggressively mainstream. Diets are not cooland neither is the quest for weight loss, at least not when you frame it that way. What we’re doing is hot girl walksOur goal is to reach 10,000, 15,000, sometimes. Even 20,000 steps Daily. We prioritize protein and try to lose weight. We eat healthily. They are all euphemistic means to the same end (loving your body is the new hating it) and linking that quest to “hormonal balance” makes explicit the gendered performance of it all.
“Telling someone they may have a hormonal imbalance is to convey to them that they are not living up to their gender,” writes Casey Johnston in her column on The hormone balancing workout scam. “A woman with a hormonal imbalance is not feminine enough, and perhaps even worse, He doesn’t care enough about being feminine.” This quest to “fix your hormones” cloaks the pedestrian desire for thinness and conformity in vaguely scientific words that sound legitimate if you don’t pay close enough attention.
The human body contains more than 50 hormones that affect everything from mood and sexual function to metabolism and homeostasis. For people with female reproductive systems, hormonal imbalances can lead to chronic pain, infertility, and conditions like endometriosis. While it’s not a disease that exclusively affects people who don’t have children, for years it was referred to as “The professional woman’s disease”; as recently as the 1960s, pregnancy was prescribed as a cureIt is not a cure, but many people experience a decrease in their symptoms after giving birth. According to the National Cancer InstitutePregnancy and childbirth also carry a slightly lower risk of breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancer.
My generation has postponed motherhood We have lived longer than our parents and we also face new health risks associated with it. As with most health issues, family history is a useful tool for predicting what lies ahead for us in the future. When you look at the data, it seems that most people of childbearing age do not have a parent who waited as long as they did to give birth for the first time. At 32, I am the oldest woman in my immediate family who has not been pregnant or given birth, so while I can look to my mother, grandmothers, and aunt for clues about my body’s predilections for certain conditions and diseases, the picture is not entirely perfect because they all experienced this major physical and hormonal event earlier in their lives, and I did not. This creates a blind spot in family history data and leaves people like me searching the internet for explanations for mysterious illnesses that are ruining our lives.
Misinformation (medical and otherwise) has certainly defined this media era, and if the women promoting multi-level essential oil products on my Facebook wall are any indication, having kids in your twenties is no vaccine against it. Between a bureaucratic, user-hostile medical system that prioritizes treatment over prevention and an information economy that allows misleading lies to spread unchecked, we’re caught between misinformation and a tough place, and that’s how these miracle cures like my little magnesium drink become trendy. Social media platforms, the companies that make these products, and the influencers who sell them all reap the benefits when we hit “add to cart,” and what do we get? Something sweet with the power of suggestion. It feels better than nothing.
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