‘I felt unhinged and out of control’: Jo Whiley reflects on her body's reaction to high levels of cortisol

Jo Whiley recently revealed the effects of high levels of cortisol on her body, and other women might find her symptoms quite relatable.

During the Dig It podcast the presenter hosts with friend Zoe Ball, the pair cover a huge array of topics that midlife women identify with - everything from the benefits of HRT, to the quiet pain of caring for elderly relatives gets their candid, caring take.

However, Jo's description of too much cortisol on her health that left her feeling "unhinged," could be a comfort to many women having a similar experience - she's also refreshingly honest about how difficult it is manage symptoms and the 'myth' of being able to detox from cortisol.

Describing her symptoms, Jo says, "I felt quite unhinged and out of control," adding she felt "a rising panic that the world was ending."

Feeling her "adrenaline was going crazy," she was obsessing that she had "weird lumps in my legs," alongside other physical ailments including nose bleeds, and imagining she had "all sorts of health issues."

"I got everything out of perspective," she shares. Weighing in on her own symptoms of stress, Zoe Ball says she'd never had anxiety related to cortisol until menopause.

"I'd never been that anxious until menopause, I'd never had panic attacks before my 40s," she reveals, adding that when these things began happening to her, "I began to understand this is a body raging with cortisol."

Can You Really Detox From Cortisol? - YouTube

Watch On

When she's stressed with increased cortisol, Zoe shares, "I feel like my body isn't working properly, I'm all puffy, I can't sleep, I don't eat the right foods."

The pair go on to discuss online social media fads of cortisol detoxes and diets. "I genuinely don't know how you can detox," Jo says, adding, "If you have a stressful job to do, you can't do a cortisol detox unless it's just a matter of saying no to stuff."

She continues, "We say yes, and it all piles up and we get manically busy, and that's when the cortisol starts racing through your body and you start having symptoms."

Sensibly, she continues, "A lot of the time it's impossible to have a cortisol detox - it's life, and you just have to get on with it."

Zoe agrees that finding a way to manage stress is extremely difficult, pondering whether that's why so many midlife women caught between so many responsibilities, end up having career changes.

"As we get older, we look at life and think, 'I can't carry on like this,'" she says. "I certainly noticed the change in my body when I stopped working crazy hours," she adds.

Sharing that she left her Radio 2 breakfast show role because it "was relentless" and she wasn't sleeping, Zoe concludes, "I'm now in a position where I can prioritise my sleep, take my magnesium at night, and I'm getting a lot of sleep."

This has allowed her the headspace to go for walks, "smell the roses," and find small ways to find calm and a sense of inner peace among the chaos of life.