Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. I’m not a health expert, fitness coach, or dietician. I am a regular guy who has overhauled his own health and fitness, in his 40’s, by applying everything I could find on natural ways to improve testosterone. These articles are ALL of my notes, translated to plain English, at zero cost. If you like this article series, you can follow me on Instagram for more related content — @mengredients.

PART 1: STRESS

The reason I’m starting with stress is primarily because stress hormones directly affect, and are directly affected by diet, exercise, and lifestyle at all times, but also because it’s not just the “stress” you typically think of. Most of us only think of stress on the lifestyle level, our situational stress, or “perceived stress,” but certain types and amounts of foods, exercise, and habits can also trigger our stress hormones, significantly worsening our overall stress which kills testosterone.

Stress hormones are necessary, but when chronically elevated they drive the breaking down of your muscle and organ tissue for desperately needed nutrients and storing of fat for energy. So, stress hormones play a dramatic role in how you look in the mirror. You wouldn’t take your car on a road trip without a full gas tank, topped fluids, tires and belts looking good, etc. If your body is starting from a position of high stress, you won’t get far. Even if you do everything I do, there are certain things you’ll want to dial up or down depending on your own level of stress. I’ll aim to call these out throughout this article series.

Our main stress hormone is cortisol. It literally wakes us up in the morning and helps us think and act fast in sudden or dangerous situations. We need it, but when it’s always elevated by ongoing stress, it kills testosterone, as these hormones work on “feedback loops” pushing bodily processes that build momentum toward either better or worse health — toward thriving or surviving, as Christopher Walker, author of “Master Your T,” “The THOR Program,” and “The Thermo Diet,” has said in his videos and books. Ongoing high stress will put you into survival mode, which is catabolic (degenerative), breaking down your muscle and organ tissue for nutrients, and hanging onto fat for emergency energy. I read one study about elevated cortisol in exercise with beneficial outcomes, but this study did not seem to account for people with high chronic stress, which is many of us.

Essentially, in the body, stress is stress. It’s like finances — you may think of your expenses in terms of the big ones like mortgage or rent, car payment, etc. but you could also be losing a ton of money on things you don’t consider like fees, interest, restaurants, daily coffee, and so on, that add up. We tend to think of our bigger life challenges as “how stressed” we are. But this is often the tip of the iceberg with a lot of other unknown stress hormone responses coming from things like certain foods, eating too much or not enough, exercising too much or too little, nutrient deficiencies, poor sleep, illness, allergies, toxins, etc. These unknown stressors are like your smaller day-to-day expenses that add up over time to a lot less money in the bank at the end of the year.

So, you’ll want to curb stress from as many angles as you can, as frequently as possible. The good news is, it’s not hard to do and doesn’t have to be expensive! Here are the things that I have found to help mitigate stress in most forms:

Breathing — I tend to breathe shallowly when stressed, triggering stress-induced sighs. Interestingly, exhaling is literally how fat leaves your body. So this is another way stress and improper breathing preserve fat. There are a lot of “breathwork” protocols, but here are some simple ones I use:

• Box breathing — I exhale all the way and hold for 4 seconds. Then breathe in and deep through the nose for 4 or 5 seconds, then hold for as many seconds, then take as many seconds to exhale, and hold again for as many seconds. I repeat this for 2–4 minutes and make sure to exhale all the way, unforced, through my nose. This resets a nerve involved in breathing to regulate breathing patterns both in waking hours and in sleep. I do this before bed. I learned of box breathing on a podcast interviewing Navy SEAL Mark Divine about his book “Unbeatable Mind.”

• “The physiological sigh” — I learned this from Dr. Andrew Huberman, on his podcast, The Huberman Lab. A good tool for when I physically feel stressed. I take a deep breath through the nose and, at the end, try to get even more air in for an even deeper inhale — kind of a double inhale (one big one, and then a small one just after), then immediately exhale completely (unforced) and repeat 3–5 times. Offloading carbon dioxide and expanding the chest cavity helps to slow down your heart rate and gets more oxygen to tiny pockets in your lungs that tend to be oxygen deprived when you don’t breathe deeply often enough.

• Nasal-breathing in general — I breathe through my nose as much as possible, with my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Nose breathing is connected to many health improvements, namely for circulation through opening up veins to improve blood flow. Read Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic, by Sandra Kahn & Paul R. Ehrlich.

• Wim Hof — An ancient technique (Tummo) more recently popularized by Wim Hof, known as “The Ice Man” enduring extreme cold stress of plunging in icy water, even climbing Everest in just a pair of shorts, and credits his ability to handle the stress to this protocol: I take 30–40 deep breaths in through the nose or mouth, pulling air toward my belly first, then my chest, and then exhale, unforced, through the mouth. After 30 or 40 breaths, I inhale as deeply as I can and let all that air out and hold it until I feel the urge to breathe. Last, I breathe in deeply again and hold for 15 seconds and let that air out. You’ll want to be seated as it can make you feel light-headed and that’s harmless. I just described 1 round, and I do 3–4 rounds. I only use this to buffer looming or iminent stress. I do not do this when stress is already high, as this “cyclic hyperventilating” can worsen it.

Eat enough. If you’re trying to drop fat, you could be under-eating, which can signal the thyroid to react as if you’re in a famine and trigger a stress survival response. If stress is up, I eat shortly after waking, and about every 3 hours, to help my thyroid work like I’m in a state of food abundance rather than scarcity. I love “intermittent fasting” (where you only eat during a certain time window each day), but I don’t do it when stress is up. The thyroid is huge in balancing hormones — but it can act like a paranoid little bitch in your neck sometimes, despite what you consciously know about your plentiful access to food.

Prioritize sleep. Sleep is critical for testosterone and overall health. Not just how much sleep, but the depth and quality of sleep matters a lot because it’s a restorative function that is critical to drive the anabolic state (regenerative, tissue building and repairing) you want to be in. Here are the things I’ve found to help my sleep:

• I ditched the alarm clock and started going to bed earlier, so my sleep isn’t cut short.

• I start my day with a 20–30 minute walk outside, getting early daylight into my eyes (not through sunglasses or a window), ideally just after sunrise. The early sun wavelength hits certain cells in your eyes that set in motion bodily processes for the day to support wakefulness, but also kicks off a cellular countdown to trigger other processes toward sleep later on (aka “circadian rhythm”). Too much light at night, therefore, keeps me alert when I want to be winding down to rest. Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about this constantly.

• No phone/bright screens within 2 hours of bedtime, or I dim it and wear blue blocking glasses. Blue light from the screen makes your brain think it’s daytime and staves off critical sleep processes, like melatonin production, etc.

• If you wear glasses, you likely have blue-blocking lenses. I’d switch to lenses without blue-blocking, or keep a second non-blue-blocking pair, for more control over when you’re blocking blue light.

• I keep the bedroom as dark and cool as possible and wear as little as possible to sleep to help blood flow.

• I use earplugs to prevent random noises from waking me up.

• No fluids within 2 hours of bed, which helps keep from having to get up to use the bathroom.

• No food within 3 hours of bedtime as digestion will cause restlessness.

• I do a basic full-body 15-minute stretch routine nightly right before getting in bed.

• I have an Oura ring to track my sleep and understand how it’s affected by various things.

• I sit in my sauna 4 nights a week. This isn’t cheap. I recently bought an infrared sauna. I do 140°F for 20–30 min. Loads of health benefits for blood flow, immune support, muscle and joint recovery, but also when you sweat, your body gets rid of a lot of toxic crap that it otherwise must deal with via a stress response.

• I cut back on caffeine. I have one to two 12-ounce cups of black coffee, always early in the day. Coffee after 10am affects my sleep onset by elevating adrenaline (another stress hormone) when I want it to be tapering down to rest.

Cut back on cardio. Sacrilege! Right? I do walk a lot, and even work in hill sprints, but cycling, jogging, and other steady state, medium-intensity cardio can elevate cortisol. Doing this with regularity can worsen chronic stress. Guys with low-to-moderate stress can tolerate regular steady-state cardio, and focus on eating and recovering properly. But guys with high chronic stress won’t do their testosterone any favors with it. More on this in the exercise section.

Go for walks/hikes. Lots of general health and stress-reducing benefits. It’s low intensity exercise that helps with heart health, and gets lymph fluid circulating (lymph helps your body purge [stress-inducing] toxins). I aim for 10–12k steps daily, at a moderate pace, and try to walk after meals to help with digestion as well. Also, science shows that your environment passing along in your peripheral vision, and associated side-to-side eye movement, has a calming effect.

Get outside, ideally shirtless and barefoot. Lots of stress-reducing and general health benefits of being outside, from sunlight and Vitamin D production to fresh air, but there’s also literally an electrical charge from the earth’s surface that your body absorbs when barefoot. This is known as “grounding” or “earthing” and it helps fight inflammation (stress). Yes, it sounds like some Grade-A hippy bullshit, but there’s early science to this and it makes sense as your brain and entire nervous system uses electrochemical signals and electrolytes to function, and that rubber sole shoes are a relatively new invention in human history (rubber blocks electrical currents).

Lift weights! More on this in the exercise section, but resistance training even 2 days a week has a significant impact on anxiety and stress reduction. Personally, lifting weights helped me through very stressful teen years. There’s always been something cathartic about ripping a heavy barbell off the floor. Henry Rollins wrote an essay a while back on this called “Iron and the Soul,” which is worth a read.

Meditate. I’m bad about this but feel like I’ve always been an introspective, self-aware person. I don’t harbor any guilt or regrets in life, but I have my own routine of closing my eyes and focusing on my breathing, well wishes for others, retrospect, acknowledging things I could’ve done better, gratitude, and so on. But meditation, prayer, whatever it is for you, is a powerful and science-backed tool to calm the mind and lower stress.

Massage. Again, not cheap, do what you can afford. I aim for one quarterly deep tissue massage to break up muscular tension which is caused by stress and helps with drainage and flow of lymph fluid to offload toxins.

Foam rolling. Similar to massage, but this is a cheaper way to break up tension in muscles. I foam roll my back and legs a few times per week. Rolling the upper spine (arching backwards over the roller) also helps align the spine.

Turn off the news! Saying the news keeps you informed is like saying cake is healthy because it has protein. The tiny bit of protein is wrapped in a lot of other unhealthy crap. There’s nothing on the news that will help you get on in life, at least not enough to offset the stress it causes by sensationalizing only the world’s doom and gloom. When I stopped watching and listening to the news, I noticeably felt less anxious and with more control of my own emotions. I’m not saying to not care about current events, but when you’re constantly blasted with negative information, on things over which you alone have little or no control, conveyed with drama and conviction, it can take a toll on your stress.

Avoid shitty people. We all know people who, through some sequence of life events or choices, have ended up in situations they’d rather not be in, and constantly moan about it. Or, maybe they don’t whine about their own life, but instead talk shit and stir the drama pot as it relates to others to feel better about themselves. This textbook self-loathing, likely exacerbated if not caused by hormone imbalances. In either case, I’ll fulfill my obligation to them as a decent human, but limit my time and energy spent with such people.

Finances. My wife has her MBA in Finance, which helps tremendously, but a lot of guys aren’t so lucky and can be terrible at managing money, which can become a huge source of stress. There are tons of better resources than me on this, but highly recommend you: Live as though you make less than you do. Map out a plan to pay down your debt and stick to it, refinance your house (if you can get a good rate) to help your cash flow. Get rid of expensive crap — trade the car you can’t afford for one you can, etc. Cut back on restaurants — aim for once a week, invest in a cooking basics class. Drop expensive, unhealthy habits and hobbies — smoking / vaping, drinking, video games, etc. Pounce on great deals — buy otherwise expensive food on sale and freeze it, etc.

Laugh more. Lots of health benefits from laughing. I like comedy podcasts, joking with my family, etc. Personally, I used to take life so seriously and I loved (still do) angry punk music, but a lot of it is emotionally and politically charged. One of my favorite bands, Descendents, released a song in 2016 called “Testosterone,” just as I was starting on this journey. I love Descendents, but the song perpetuates a negative testosterone stereotype, as there’s always been an alpha-male-loathing aspect to punk music. But we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater with all the “toxic masculinity” talk. Many aspects of masculinity are directly tied to men’s health.

Don’t over commit — cut back on non-essential obligations. A lot of guys take on too much outside of work and family, which might be okay if these things are rewarding and don’t spread you too thin. But things like coaching, social events, volunteering, etc. If you’re over stressed, commit to just your family and/or your work and drop all other schedules, looming deadlines and timelines, deliverables, etc. until you can afford them in terms of any additional stress they bring. Take the time and energy back and invest it into your health. Like they say on the plane — put your own mask on first so that you can help others.

Ingest antioxidants, and cut out foods that cause oxidative stress and inflammation. More on this in the eating section, but antioxidants like Vitamins E and C and various compounds from things like pomegranates, dark berries, etc. help battle oxidative stress, which happens when free radicals run amok in your body. You get free radicals in a number of ways, but especially by eating foods containing oils made from nuts, seeds, and vegetables. They’re in almost every processed food and fried food, so I avoid processed and fried foods to minimize oxidative stress.

Take Magnesium. More on this in the eating & supplements section, but magnesium is involved in hundreds of bodily processes. Lots of science out there supports the role of magnesium in brain health and reduction of stress and anxiety.

Take Ashwagandha (KSM-66). More on this as well in the eating & supplements section. About 600mg per day, in the afternoon/evening. This is an herb that has a potent effect at reducing circulating cortisol.

Stress is insidious and breaks us down. It’s directly linked to every health malady — heart disease, auto-immune disease, cancer, depression, insomnia, etc. and will significantly impede progress toward any health or fitness-oriented improvement as chronic stress triggers hormones that push you toward a survival state — breaking down your muscle and organ tissue and storing fat! Sorry to harp on that, but it took me a while to really get it. Most men are dealing with far more chronic stress than they realize and it clobbers testosterone. So stress mitigation is a top health and fitness priority to level the playing field.