How would someone control their cortisol levels? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, medical/pharma interventions, and/or something else?
"11 Natural Ways to Lower Your Cortisol Levels"
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/ways-to-lower-cortisol
Additionally:
1)
My naturopath prescribed supplements. Lots of stuff for night time, going to bed. Like chamomile tea, melatonin, magnesium ortate (for muscle pain), ashwagandha, and L-theanine. And some stuff to perk up in the morning, like DHEA drops. The general idea is to over time nudge the daily cortisol and adrenaline cycle back to "normal".
I'm not recommending this stuff. Just relating what I did, experimented with. For all I know, all the benefits were due to placebo effect. And being very motivated to fix my sleep.
I had first read up on each supplement. I figured none were harmful (to me). So the worst that'd happen is I'd waste some money.
2)
I'm skeptical of naturopathy and against homeopathy. In the future, I believe we'll call the good (useful) bits "nutrition", which will just be rolled up into wellness and eating right.
Probably the biggest benefit of having a naturopath (that I liked) was life coach stuff, being accountable to someone. In that way, I got lucky with the 3rd practitioner. The first two I consulted were total quacks.
3)
I did test my daily cortisol level cycle. Spit tests. At the time, the support for the accuracy of these tests was pretty thin. Even so, my tests before, during, after adopting my sleep hygiene regiment seemed to indicate that my cycle became "normal".
These tests seemed to correlation with my lived experience. Which means almost nothing. Self reporting is notoriously unreliable, which I've experienced many, many times.
YMMV.
If OTC magnesium citrate upsets your stomach, maybe try the other variations. I settled on magnesium glycinate lysinate. (Cheaper than magnesium orotate, which also worked for me.)
Unrelated, out of curiosity, when you say 80% of your training: is it in mileage/time? Or some effort metric like TRIMP, calories, avg. HR, or so? Or something else?
Interesting that you mention sleep HRV. I use the Oura ring and have observed that my sleep HRV is super super low at the moment, like 15/20ms but when I check it in the morning with my polar H10 strap then it will usually come out between 60-80ms. Tried to figure out what causes it but not had any luck so far. I don't think I'm over-training or have any other issues.
I follow Phil Maffetone's training methodology [1], which has worked quite well for me. So currently, 80% of my training by distance/time is between 135bpm and 145bpm. The training is mostly steady runs between 7km to 25km. The remaining 20% is a mixture of progression runs, speed training, and intervals.
Initially, for the first 6 months of training, all my training was below 145 bpm and was quite slow at 6min/km but now I can do 4.30min/km at 140bpm and I'm still getting faster!
Cheers
What an amazing improvement to 4:30 pace at 140 bpm btw! I've had a similar relative improvement over the first year when I think about it, from around 7:00 to 5:20-5:30 at 140 bpm. But my training was mostly 1km intervals at high end of zone 3 (still quite below threshold), translating to a lot of tempo running on average, plus one session of 200s or 400s faster intervals per week. Been stuck with little progress for a while though, and was thinking to try a more polarized approach like yours with higher volume; thanks for explaining it!