Who’s more stressed? Reporter, 25, and boss, 58, compare cortisol levels with at-home test

Dan Greenfield has a lot on his plate. One glance at his calendar and it’s easy to see why.

As The Post’s chief of staff, he spends his days racing between meetings, settling office disputes and juggling high-level projects far above my pay grade as a wellness reporter.

“I’ve been stressed my entire adult life,” Dan, 58, admitted. “I work in a very fast-paced, hard-driving environment, and I have been doing it for a very long time.”

But as I contend with nonstop deadlines, the 24-hour news cycle and life as a young, broke New Yorker, I couldn’t help but wonder: Who’s really more stressed — the 25-year-old rookie reporter or the seasoned exec?

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To find out, we turned to Eli Health, a Montreal startup behind the world’s first at-home cortisol test, which delivers a snapshot of your body’s main stress hormone in minutes.

The science of stress

Produced by the adrenal glands, cortisol fuels the body’s fight-or-flight response and helps regulate immunity, inflammation, blood pressure and blood sugar.

It also plays a key role in the sleep-wake cycle, peaking in the morning to boost alertness and tapering off at night to help the body wind down for sleep.

“It’s often referred to as the CEO of hormones,” Marina Pavlovic Rivas, co-founder and CEO of Eli Health, told The Post. “I’ve heard doctors say that hormones are not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship, and cortisol is always the dictator.”

When cortisol levels fall out of balance, the effects ripple through the body. Chronically high levels can lead to higher risk of diabetes.

Until recently, testing meant sending blood, urine or saliva samples to a lab — a slow, cumbersome process that made getting timely insights nearly impossible.

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“By the time you get the results, it’s already been a few days, weeks or months,” Pavlovic Rivas said. “Our goal was to create real-time visibility.”

Eli Health’s at-home test, the “Hormometer,” looks like a COVID or pregnancy test but uses saliva to measure cortisol in about 20 minutes. A four-pack costs $32.

The company recommends testing every two weeks to track your “cortisol curve,” but for our experiment, Dan and I tested twice daily for three days to get a clearer picture of our stress patterns.

From saliva to stress score — and what ‘Sunday scaries’ are actually doing to you

Despite his packed schedule, Dan says he generally doesn’t “have stress over stress.”

“It’s not something I ever really worry about,” he said. “Nobody’s perfect — I certainly have my moments — but even with what I have on my plate, I don’t ever feel overwhelmed.”

I can’t relate. Just looking at the thousands of emails in my inbox makes me break out in a nervous sweat.

But Dan and I do share one thing: Neither of us can easily turn our brains off.

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“I can never completely divorce myself from the work,” he explained. “I’ve gotten better at being present, but it is a challenge and something that I have to work at.”

At night, he stays up multitasking until his body finally gives in: “I don’t have trouble sleeping once I do it, but it’s making myself go to bed that is the problem.”

“Hormones govern how we feel, function, perform and age, but they remain invisible in everyday life.”

Marina Pavlovic Rivas

I’m no better. More than once, I’ve rolled out of bed at 1 a.m. to jot down a story idea, fact-check an article or doomscroll into oblivion. And as much as I love my job, I’ve experienced the “Sunday scaries,” brimming with anticipatory anxiety over my ever-growing to-do list and a busy upcoming workweek in a fast-paced newsroom.

Our bad habits showed up in our results.

In the mornings, both of our cortisol levels were generally within the normal range. But at night, things got interesting.

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Every evening Dan tested, his cortisol levels were significantly higher than average. That’s not unusual, Pavlovic Rivas said — especially for people dealing with chronic stress. But it’s not a good thing.

“When cortisol levels peak and dip at the wrong times, or stay elevated for prolonged periods of time, the body cannot perform optimally,” she explained, noting that it can disrupt sleep, mess with energy, increase inflammation and even impair memory.

For Dan, the science hit close to home.

“The idea that my cortisol levels are high later at night doesn’t surprise me,” Dan said. “I’m going until I literally can’t stay up any longer.”

My cortisol levels stayed in the normal range — except Sunday night, when I was stressing about the week ahead.

Left unchecked, that dread can trigger a surge of adrenaline — increasing heart rate, speeding up breathing and making it tougher to fall asleep. It can also send cortisol levels climbing, trapping your body in stress mode.

Pavlovic Rivas recommends getting ahead of Sunday scaries with a relaxing activity that afternoon like yoga or even making a to-do list.

“This can prevent that spike in cortisol before it even happens,” she explained.

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Testing made simple — almost

The Hormometer is fairly easy to use, though not foolproof.

It’s meant to be taken twice a day: once in the morning and again before bed.

You place the test under your tongue for a minute to collect saliva, let it sit for 20 minutes, then scan the QR code with an app on your phone.

We made it through mostly unscathed, though the tests do need a surprising amount of saliva to work. I went through three before finally producing enough spit to get a reading on the fourth try.

“When you think there’s enough saliva, put twice as much,” Pavlovic Rivas advised.

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Dan, meanwhile, struggled to get his phone to register the QR code.

Once it worked, though, the Hormometer delivered. Third-party testing shows a 97% correlation with FDA-approved lab results, capable of detecting even small cortisol shifts.

The app also lets users track factors that influence cortisol — diet, exercise, energy levels, pain, medications and supplements — helping them identify patterns and make adjustments.

“There’s already a lot of studies that show how different lifestyle interventions can have an impact on cortisol,” Pavlovic Rivas said. “But when people actually see the data, it’s clear feedback that enables them to prioritize different actions.

Eli Health also recently launched a progesterone tracker to monitor another key hormone tied to reproductive and overall health.

“Hormones govern how we feel, function, perform and age, but they remain invisible in everyday life, and most people don’t even realize how central they are to daily health,” Pavlovic Rivas said, noting that more than 60% of adults will experience significant hormone dysregulation in their lifetime.

“When issues do get addressed, it’s often years after symptoms begin, if they’re addressed at all,” she continued. “Eli Health was born to solve this problem.”

Since Dan and I did our experiment, I’ve been keeping a close eye on my cortisol levels and found it shocking how just simple habits like late nights, alcohol and even working out too close to bedtime can send them soaring.

It’s made me stop and consider how my everyday actions can affect me in ways that aren’t immediately obvious — but have consequences that run deep.

I’ve already started making small changes to my routine, such as avoiding coffee on an empty stomach, and these tests help take the guesswork out of whether I’m succeeding at controlling my cortisol.