Elevated cortisol in the morning is desirable for mood, focus, alertness, and facilitating sleep at night, while lower cortisol in the afternoon and evening is preferred.

“You now understand the global rhythm in cortisol. higher in the morning and you want to amplify that lower in the afternoon and evening, you know, dropping in the early afternoon, later afternoon and evening and then ideally staying low at night time so that they can come back up again in the morning.”

“The point here is that we're focused now on the portion of your indogenous naturally generated cortisol rhythm that occurs in the hours before bedtime when your goal is to get to sleep and get terrific sleep. And what that requires is that your cortisol is low and continuing to go lower.”

“you see this you know this nice rise during the day where cortisol is helping you stay awake it's keeping you alert it's doing all of the things that it needs to do and then as you start to come towards the nighttime period cortisol should drop and needs to drop for you to be able to initiate sleep and in fact it usually hits it's sort of almost it's an idea at the point where most people will say that's my typical bedtime and it then goes through this awesome sort of downstroke in terms of concentration and then a few hours before you wake up cortisol will start to rise in other words it's a preparatory hormone that's to get you ready for weight fulness”

“you want to wake up at a low level and you want to go to bed at a low level and what should be happening is in about the first two hours you should have a huge surge in cortisol”