Everyone is always saying to lower cortisol to reduce stress. This is some wellness industry bullshit. Cortisol is what your body uses to cope with stress, it raises your blood sugar, it regulates your blood pressure, it helps you focus when you really need to. My body doesnt make cortisol. I take a set amount each day which is typically enough. But because life is unpredictable the adjustment of doses for certain circumstances tends to be guesswork. I still feel stress. Plenty of it. And actually I am more sensitive to stress. Because my body doesn't make the thing needed to handle it. So what happens when I get too stressed/scared/sick/injured? My body uses up the hydrocortisone (cortisol replacement) in it. What happens when I run out? My blood pressure drops. My whole body tingles. I get extremely disoriented and confused. I lose awareness of my surroundings. Often slur my speech/ am unable to speak. My limbs feel heavy and weak. And if I dont get more in my system before things get worse (which is difficult because Im disoriented and the stress of feeling like crap ends up just demanding more while my body slowly processes my meds) I collapse. I lose consciousness and I eventually start having seizures. Now hopefully this is the point where meds i took when I started feeling bad start to kick in. If i could figure out that was whats wrong. If i took enough. If im lucky, the seizure is short. If i didn't. The seizure keeps going. I need emergency medical intervention at this point or ill slip into a coma, my organs will starve of oxygen and fail. Depending on your definition of lucky, i could get lucky and manage to survive any combination of organ failure, stroke, and/or cardiac arrest and have lasting permanent damage to my organs (brain included. Brain especially) or it could kill me fast. I mean within hours.