Arielle Lorre on stress, burnout, and rising to the challenge

When Arielle Lorre, host of the health podcast The Blonde Files, started feeling off, her experience told her it was a top-down issue. Here, she talks cortisol levels, confirming suspicions, and focusing on more nourishing routines.

Who: Arielle Lorre 

Living in: Los Angeles, California

Working on: cortisol levels

My relationship with my health has definitely been a journey over the past six or seven years, and one that I’ve been documenting on my Instagram and my podcast, The Blonde Files.

It’s kind of funny that my relationship with my health eventually became my job, because it was really just born out of me trying to figure out what was going on with my body! At its start, I was dealing with so many different issues: gut issues, hormone issues, food intolerances, inflammation, anxiety, sleep disturbances, all of that.

Many years back, I was fortunate enough to work with somebody who taught me how all those health issues were interconnected. I learned that the first thing I really had to tackle in that situation was the gut, since everything stemmed from there. Even if I treated the anxiety or the hormones first, it would not truly get better until I healed my gut.

So that became my mission. I went through many different phases, some of which I was being super rigid and strict with exercise and diet. Luckily, I was able to eventually work through those issues, and I came to the place where I am now: being really attuned to what’s going on in my body and my “baseline.”

I know how I feel when everything is functioning - so I can tell immediately when something is off.

In this past year, I started having really irregular periods and more anxiety. I knew from my experience that the issue was probably top-down: I suspected that those issues were stemming from stress and that my body was being “hijacked” by this constant stressed state.

I have done some at-home testing in the past, but I hadn’t taken an at-home blood test prior to Base. It’s easy to psych yourself out when it comes to taking your own blood sample, but the anticipation was worse than the actual test itself. Once the prick actually happened, it was nothing!

When I received my results from my first test, my suspicions were confirmed: I was having some issues with cortisol, or the “stress” hormone. My cortisol levels were super low in the morning and the afternoon, which can be indicative of prolonged periods of really high cortisol.

Essentially, my results were telling me that my body was burnt out.

In addition to receiving the test results in the app, I also talked to one of Base’s health experts. It was a long, thorough conversation, in which they explained the cortisol results as well as the other biomarkers. It was very encouraging and really, the suggestions they had for me were very simple.

The first recommendation Base had for me was to start doing high-intensity workouts in the morning to get my cortisol levels up. In the past few years, I’ve been leaning more heavily towards pilates and yoga, so I  just started doing a ten-minute HIIT workout before my other workouts really consistently.

The next suggestion was that I start taking a magnesium supplement at night, which ended up being such a gamechanger. I felt like it was the missing puzzle piece my body needed for so long: I felt more relaxed before bed, had deeper and more consistent sleep, and was waking up more refreshed. My gut seems to be working well and it even helped with recovery from workouts!

In addition to the Base recommendations, I’m also very particular about my mornings and started to look more closely at those routines. When I tested initially, I had gotten way off course with my transcendental meditation practice. I would do it in the morning just to check it off of my to-do list, but in my head, I would really be distracted and thinking about what I had to do during the day. I was also picking up my phone as soon as I woke up in the morning and scrolling through the news - essentially, all of those things that we know we’re not “supposed” to do but end up falling into because that’s just life right now.

So I started tightening up those routines. I stopped letting myself get on my phone for at least the first hour of the day and focused instead on doing my meditations and journaling. I also did a similar thing at night. I started putting away the phone about an hour before bed and instead tried unwinding with a book or a bubble bath or Epsom salts, all so that I could bookend the day with more nourishing rituals instead.

A couple of months later, I took my second Base test and those results showed that my cortisol results improved 10 points, going from “fair” to “good.”

I really like a challenge, and I’m a little bit of a perfectionist. Seeing that score improvement from Base makes me think, “I can do better”. I got a taste of the improvement and am feeling like my energy is more consistent and my hormone issues are getting a little better with my irregular periods getting better.

So now I want to keep going because if I can improve ten points, I can go all the way!

I would also love to get my husband to try Base. He has some stress and sleep issues, as well as things that I suspect are related to nutrition. It would be nice to get a full workup so he can start implementing those small changes that can make a big difference, like I did.

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