> cortisol is required to rise to the "stress" of every day living
So stress seems impossible to avoid completely right? There's going to be some amount of it. When an email comes in about some snafu in the thing I'm making I can't avoid a spike in cortisol right?
What's the smartest approach to managing it? I seem to do typical things like working out, etc. But I also love working. Should I be somehow measuring cortisol and when it gets above X level, I need to take some action to reduce it? This seems like a hard thing to do right, if I'm just going by gut instinct to check where I'm at.
There's a spring drizzle, and then there's a hurricanes, both of which you can call "rain." One makes flowers come up, the other crushes and rips the flowers out of the ground. So. "Stress" is not a good conversational word for what happens when you go from laying in bed to standing up. But it is the technical term.
I loved working, too. I'd work when I was moderately ill. I'd work long hours. I was enjoying it… mostly. That is no protection.
If I'd dropped certain responsibilities, rested when I was sick, worked fewer days, and cared less [1], I probably wouldn't have ever gotten this bad.
That's about all I got for you. I don't know all that much about that stage of the syndrome because I never had any tests at the time. I would get sick, take some of the time off, then get right back to it. Nobody was forcing me. When not sick, I would need to take several days off in a row to relax and then I'd find myself more creative again. I guess that was a sign.
If you can get the test for cheap, why not? But it'll only tell you trends compared to yourself, unless you are either very high or low. There's info on the Stop the Thyroid Madness site about reliable labs.
[1] (By "cared less" I don't mean "stopped caring about my work/life" but rather "stopped caring about stupid shit" which, believe it or not, is most of it. But that's not something you can understand until you've experienced it. It's great to know just how little what I do matters. Very freeing and not at all demotivating.)
> cortisol is required to rise to the "stress" of every day living
So stress seems impossible to avoid completely right? There's going to be some amount of it. When an email comes in about some snafu in the thing I'm making I can't avoid a spike in cortisol right?
What's the smartest approach to managing it? I seem to do typical things like working out, etc. But I also love working. Should I be somehow measuring cortisol and when it gets above X level, I need to take some action to reduce it? This seems like a hard thing to do right, if I'm just going by gut instinct to check where I'm at.