Cortisol Addiction in Creative Women

You’re probably reading this because you’re finally owning up to the fact that you feel a certain level of burnout and exhaustion that’s always there, but you’ve been tuning it out. You’ve been sedating and controlling it through caffeine and other stimulants (like sugar and chocolate) and highly stimulating music. You’ve been tuning out through the rush of constant stress and cortisol flow, and the subtle sense of importance it gives you . . .

I’m sharing this because it is my calling to people feel and express their hearts, allowing the heartbreaks of life to tenderize and open them, rather than shut them down. What is on the other side of chronically stressed, overfunctioning and anxious?

First of all, calm and slowness are on the other side. It often involves a process of building space into your schedule so life is not a constant mad rush with extra, unexpected shit thrown on top. What happens when you slow down like that? When you’re living at a wiser pace, your heart opens, you are in flow, and you are truly present in your life. And that open-hearted presence is the true, sensitive, absorptive membrane of creative inspiration.

When we live life in a mad rush, we are really living life in shut down, never fully present to actually feel our life with a sensitive, open heart. As artists and creators, our sensitivity is our superpower and an integral component of our great emotional range– By opening to this, we open to full aliveness, profound love and joy.

Cortisol addiction is an addiction like any other. It is used to sedate and control challenging emotional states that we don’t want to feel, and it is an unconscious strategy to numb ourselves. By slowing down, you’ll likely first realize you are exhausted. Soon after, you’ll likely notice other things too (maybe grief, anger, or fear).

As a sensitive person, of course, you may come to a point of overwhelm in your life, maybe chronic overwhelm, that you want to numb and repress. Modern life, especially as a business owner, artist or creator of any kind, is so overstimulating, and with the various humanitarian and ecological crises taking place on the planet and in our newsfeeds, we may want to numb out even more by just keeping the chaos going, keeping the cortisol pumping. This leads to further overwhelm, and an increased need for more cortisol to get the same effect, and to numb out the true exhaustion and emptiness we start to feel underneath it all.

Science only continues to corroborate that this has serious long term health consequences. The opposite of living at this frenetic clip is embracing our sensitivities and our emotions as a creative superpower, living life at a conscious, wise pace, with “fat” in the system (both literally and figuratively), tending to the parts of ourselves that want to keep the frantic pace going, and softening open to a full, erotic experience of our aliveness, i.e., fucking noticing we’re alive! This is our job as creators, and I’m willing to bet a huge reason why we got into creating in the first place: Because we wanted to use the gift of being alive to live life on our own terms, to live a life that sparkles, to not just numb out in a job we hate. But somehow, along the way, we numbed out just like everyone else, even inside the creative life we worked so diligently to create.

If you can relate to this, please reach out via my Contact page to schedule a Zoom consult to get to the bottom of why life has become so stressful for you. ❤️