I encountered a couple of articles this week on the hormone cortisol. Completely unrelated – one was a link from an article about stress on Lime.com, the other was a news link out of my GMail window.

And yet, they interrelate.

6 Lessons for Handling Stress — Friday, Jan. 19, 2007 — Page 3 — TIME

Researchers figured something similar had to be happening in burnout victims. But rather than finding a prominent cortisol peak, investigators discovered a shallow bump in the morning followed by a low, flattened level throughout the day. Intriguingly, such blunted cortisol responses are also common among Holocaust survivors, rape victims and soldiers suffering from PTSD.

For women, nothing’s like the smell of men’s sweat | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

Cortisol is secreted by the body to help maintain proper arousal and sense of well-being, respond to stress and other functions.

Cortisol levels in the women who smelled androstadienone shot up within roughly 15 minutes and stayed elevated for up to an hour. Consistent with previous research, the women also reported improved mood, higher sexual arousal, and had increased blood pressure, heart rate and breathing.

So the first, most obvious conclusion is that if elevated cortisol levels correlate with higher arousal and chronic stress/burnout correlates with extremely low levels of cortisol, then people suffering from chronic stress logically would be less likely to be aroused. Likewise with response to new stressors – flattened levels of cortisol would make it more difficult to respond to new or additional stressors.

And since the first article also indicates that the low, flattened cortisol levels tend to be long-term – even after the burnout situation is over, they can persist for years, it’s entirely possible that after dealing with chronic stress, these behavioral side effects could persist for years as well.

Yikes. What are we doing to ourselves?