It’s common in the earlier stages of adrenal fatigue to have high cortisol at night. And high levels of cortisol disrupt your sleep pattern, causing problems falling asleep, or staying asleep, or both…which is the very thing you don’t need! You can also have high cortisol during the daytime hours if you are in the early stages of adrenal fatigue.
But help is just around the corner at your local health food store. It’s called Phosphatidyl Serine, aka PS, and it helps lower your cortisol levels.
Phosphatidyl serine (PS) is a fatty acid found in your immune cells and muscle tissue,as well as being prevalent in your brain cells. So as a supplement, it is promoted as a benefit for brain improvement, such as enhancing your memory, concentration, alertness and mood, besides cell repair. It also helps prevent muscle breakdown due to high cortisol, and can stimulate your immune response. But we use it for something other than brain enhancement…namely, it helps lower cortisol when it’s high levels are damaging – lowering it from 30% to 70% according to different literature.
When you shop for it, you may notice that what is labeled as Phosphatidyl Serine is often a “complex” containing both PS and other Phosphatidyl’s, including Phosphatidyl Choline, aka PC. Phosphatidyl Choline comes from lecithin, and they are both used interchangeably in literature. It’s a substance that “holds things together”. In biology, it’s in our cells and plays a part in their health and repair, just as PS does. It metabolizes down into choline, and also helps our liver health. The “complexes” will often say 500 mg, of which 100 mg is the Phosphatidyl Serine.
I personally prefer just Phosphatidyl Serine with no complex, since I found the complex to give me a strange spacey feeling in the morning. Recommended doses of PS range from 300 mg to 1000 mg, and you might start around 300 mg and see if you get relief, or raise until you do.
When to take it? When your cortisol levels are the highest. If that occurs only at night, take it before bedtime. If during the day, experiment with 300 mg at breakfast, another 300 by lunch, and 300 around supper…or every few hours.
One downside of PS: it’s derived from soy. And soy is a known thyroid inhibitor. So you might want to pay careful attention to your other sources of soy, and eliminate them.
Another interesting note: PS used to be derived from bovine brain. But because of fears of viruses or infectious agents, it was discontinued in favor of soy. But we hope to see it created in the future from PORCINE brains, just as Armour and other desiccated thyroid comes from porcine! If desiccated thyroid can be safe (and it is!) so can porcine PS! And it may even be a better product since porcine PS would contain other brain components that soy-derived PS cannot.
To read more about PS on the net, go here
***I personally like the brand that’s here, where they offer us a discount, and NO shipping costs!! And it’s simply PS. Tell them that Stop the Thyroid Madness sent you! (And no, I get nothing from the company for sending you.)
Zinc can also help lower high cortisol levels! Click here. Try adding this to your PS dosage.
***The STTM book covers the high cortisol topic even more.
Want to order your own labwork?? STTM has created the right ones just for you to discuss with your doctor. Go here: https://sttm.mymedlab.com/
Need help interpreting your lab results? Go here: www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/lab-values/
