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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Answering the inverse of your question: caffeine increases cortisol production.

The quicker solution to reducing cortisol may be to cut down on caffeine than to eat more cortisol inhibiting foods.

As much as that may be considered a personally offensive suggestion to a lot of people...

If anyone is trying to cut down caffeine, I noticed that as I have cut my refined sugar intake to minimal levels that my need and desire for caffeine more or less vanished. Maybe its a personal reaction but might be worth try for others. (It can be pretty difficult, sugar is feels way more addictive than caffeine to me).

My intake of refined sugar is very low (usually 0 most days), but I still crave caffeine quite a bit. I find the only way I can cut coffee is to taper it back and suffer for a few days, and even then I can't get down to zero caffeine intake. I tried quitting all forms of caffeine for about a month and I'm never trying that again as it was pretty horrible the whole time.

Note that caffeine does not increase cortisol, it reduces the time your body takes to clear/lower cortisol.

Reduces? Because then that’s the opposite of what the other guy was saying, and we should all drown our stress with caffeine.

Reduces the time to remove the cortisol.

Well, a reduction in the time it takes to remove the bad thing, is a positive, isn’t it?

I think what they means is that the amount removed per unit time remains the same, so if the body spends less time removing cortisol there will be a buildup.

this is hilarious. two comments from two different users made the same apparent mistakes with their intended meaning.

"reduces the time taken" = "speeds up"

From context, it seems like the intended meaning is that caffeine slows down the cortisol removal, but what was actually written was that it speeds up cortisol removal.

What if cortisol isn't the problem, but the production of it? Afaiu, the adrenals are like a switch: if they produce cortisol, they can't produce other hormones.

So keeping cortisol up through other means could possibly be beneficial.

Everything I've previously come across has pretty clearly stated that coffee stimulates cortisol release in the body. That's one of the ways it fundamentally works to stimulate alertness.

This study linked to below is about developing tolerance to caffeine, but the very first line says: Caffeine increases cortisol secretion in people at rest or undergoing mental stress.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2257922/

What about decaf coffee?

Has some caffeine, though less. I imagine it's an improvement?

I quit caffeine entirely and my stress lowered. Decaf produced similar results as caffeinated. Only total cold turkey seemed to let my system kick it (took two weeks).

YMMV. If you're not having major symptoms or dependency issues, then "less" will generally be less severe than "more".

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