Working with your hormones, particularly with cortisol, has become the hottest new thing among people with a passing—but crucially, shallow—interest in health and wellness (which, to be clear, includes me). Struggling to lose weight? You need to balance your hormones. Have a hard time sleeping through the night? Hormones. Stubborn acne? Hormones! Bad posture? Poor digestion? Irritable mood? All allegedly symptoms of hormone imbalances—more specifically, of high cortisol levels.
For as many side effects as you are meant to believe high cortisol has, there are just as many potential cures: no coffee on an empty stomach, meditation, avoiding blue light after sunset, switching out high-intensity workouts for walking and pilates, and drinking this little magnesium glycinate drink mix that you can conveniently buy for $28.77 right on 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 lead to a bunch of bad side effects. From what I understand, cortisol is known as the “stress hormone,” and your body releases it to help you execute out of fight-or-flight mode, like lighter fluid you’d throw on the fire that is adrenaline.
For the last decade, I have dealt with various uterine issues ranging from inconvenient to debilitating. Once I crossed into my thirties, those issues began spreading to other parts of my body. It feels like I am constantly discovering new ways to be unwell, and late-night googling indicates that my constellation of symptoms could be related.
Of course this is nothing a conversation with a particularly attentive doctor couldn’t clear up; it's the "attentive" part that is the problem. I fit squarely within the cohort of people whose experiences with the American medical system amount to gaslighting at best and neglectful at worst. Last summer, as an example, I spent six hours in the emergency room for unbelievable uterine pain, only to be told to consider taking ibuprofen and acetaminophen at the same time.
This is how I, a college-educated, generally skeptical DINKy coastal elite, become a prime target for medical misinformation, which my feeds are all too willing to deliver. My social algorithms serve me videos about all the ways I can relieve what ails me—balancing my hormones, controlling my cortisol levels—by just drinking a special mocktail every night, made from a powder allegedly combining magnesium glycinate, vitamin D, L-theanine, and ashwagandha. This stuff isn’t regulated by the FDA, so I have no idea how much of any of the listed ingredients is actually in it. I might be ingesting these substances in therapeutic amounts and thereby lowering my cortisol, or I might be drinking sugar water and experiencing a placebo effect. It tastes like lemonade and it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm, so I keep drinking it.
I know how this looks. But after a decade of compounding chronic illnesses and little help from my actual doctors, it’s comforting to see a young woman online describing the exact symptoms I have in the past tense and crediting her recovery to something so simple. That one weird trick doctors don’t want you to know becomes alluring: What do I have to lose at this point?
Anxiety about hormones generally and cortisol specifically has claimed a primacy in the online discourse about women’s health and fitness. Influencers who don’t even primarily post health and fitness content open up about their hormone “journeys,” and the rhetoric trickles down from there. This anxiety represents a clear snapshot of where online women's culture is politically at this moment, sandwiched between a post–body positivity internet and the ever-present thin/white supremacist beauty ideals that still very much govern mainstream aesthetics. Not to be all Barbie monologue, but the experience of performing gender to an acceptable level is a mindfuck.
Language about hormones is a more palatable way to talk about ongoing efforts toward conventional beauty ideals (especially thinness) on an internet now steeped in the rhetoric of the body positivity movement. Now that the Doves and Nikes of the world have successfully co-opted what was originally a social movement for fat liberation, the vernacular of body positivity is aggressively mainstream. Diets aren’t cool, and neither is the pursuit of weight loss, at least not when you put it that way. What we are doing is hot girl walks. We’re aiming for 10,000, 15,000, sometimes even 20,000 steps a day. We’re prioritizing protein and trying to get lean. We’re eating clean. They’re all euphemistic means to the same end—loving your body is the new hating your body—and linking that pursuit to “balancing hormones” makes explicit the gendered performance of it all.
“To tell someone they may have a hormone imbalance is to telegraph that they are not cutting it in terms of how they are conforming to their gender,” Casey Johnston writes in her column about the scam of hormone balancing workouts. “A woman with a hormone imbalance isn’t feminine enough, and maybe even worse, doesn’t care enough about being feminine.” This pursuit of “fixing your hormones” launders the pedestrian desire for thinness and conformity with vaguely science-y words that sound legit if you’re not paying close enough attention.
The human body contains over 50 hormones that affect everything from mood and sexual function to metabolism and homeostasis. For people with female reproductive systems, hormone imbalances can lead to chronic pain, infertility, and conditions like endometriosis. While it’s not an illness affecting exclusively childfree people, endometriosis was referred to for years as “the career woman’s disease”; as recently as the 1960s, pregnancy was prescribed as a cure. It’s not a cure, but many people do experience a decrease in their symptoms after giving birth. According to the National Cancer Institute, pregnancy and childbirth also yield a slightly lower risk of breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancers.
My generation has held off on childbearing longer than our parents, and we’re also encountering new associated health risks. As with most health concerns, family history is a useful tool for predicting what’s coming down the line. When you look at the data, it appears most people of childbearing age don’t 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 to not have 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 illnesses, the picture isn’t quite perfect because they all experienced this major physical and hormonal event earlier in their lives, and I haven't. This creates a blind spot in family history data and leaves people like me casting about on the internet for explanations for mysterious conditions that are ruining our lives.
To be sure, misinformation—medical and otherwise—has defined this era of media, and if the women hawking essential oil MLMs on my Facebook feed are any indication, having children in your twenties is no inoculation against it. Between a bureaucratic and user-hostile medical system that prioritizes treatment over prevention and an information economy that allows snake-oil lies to spread mostly unchecked, we're left stuck between misinformation and a hard place, and it’s how these miraculous cures like my little magnesium drink catch on. The social media platforms, the companies manufacturing these products, and the influencers who sell them all reap the profit when we press “add to cart,” and what do we get? Something sweet with the power of suggestion. It feels better than nothing.
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