A Book by Clare Louise Mortimer
The Cortisol Reset
Evolution’s Masterpiece, Modern Life Problem
Out now“When the most exquisite thing evolution designed collides with modern life, the result is a cascade of disease.”
Are you exhausted but can’t sleep? Gaining weight despite trying everything? Losing your sharpness, your drive, your sense of who you used to be? You are not imagining it, and you are not alone. What you are living with has a name, a mechanism, and a way out.
About the book
The story your body has been trying to tell
You’re wired at night, then exhausted by morning. You need coffee, or some herbal upper, to get through the day, then reach for the wine to switch off at night. Your patience is shorter than it used to be. You forget things. You can’t concentrate. You no longer feel like yourself.
Or perhaps it wasn’t you. Perhaps it was your partner, your parent, your child, or someone you once knew. They became anxious, withdrawn, irritable or impossible to reach, and you were left wondering what happened.
People rarely change overnight. It happens gradually, so gradually that we blame stress, work, hormones, getting older or personality, never realising they may all be different chapters in the same story.
The Cortisol Reset follows that story back to one of the body’s most remarkable survival systems. Blending neuroscience, physiology and lived experience, Clare Louise Mortimer explains why a system designed to protect us can gradually lose its ability to keep us in balance, changing the way we think, feel, remember, respond and recover.
This isn’t simply a book about understanding what goes wrong. It is about understanding what helps and why. As the science unfolds, so does a practical path forward, explaining why approaches as diverse as movement, breathwork, nature, sleep, hypnosis, NLP and simple moments of curiosity can all influence the same underlying system in different ways.
This is not another stress management book, nor is it a collection of quick fixes. It is an invitation to understand why people change, to see yourself and those around you with fresh eyes, and to discover that the way back begins with understanding the story your body has been trying to tell.
From the back cover
“When the most exquisite thing evolution designed collides with modern life, the result is a cascade of disease.”
Are you exhausted but can’t sleep? Gaining weight despite trying everything? Losing your sharpness, your drive, your sense of who you used to be? You are not imagining it and you are not alone. What you are living with has a name, a mechanism, and a way out.
Cortisol is not the enemy. It is one of the most sophisticated systems in the human body, built for survival. But it was designed for a world that no longer exists, and modern life is running it into the ground. When demand outstrips capacity for long enough, everything starts to break down in ways that talking therapies cannot reach and medication cannot fix, because neither addresses the cause. The Cortisol Reset shows you what is actually happening in your body, why it started earlier than you think, and how to reset it at the level where the problem actually lives.
Recognise any of these?
If this sounds familiar, this book is for you
The same signs, explained from the inside out.
The 3am wake
Wired at midnight, exhausted by midday. Sleep that won’t come, or won’t restore you, however tired you are.
The personality you don’t recognise
Less patient, quicker to react, or flat and disinterested. Brain fog. Words you can’t find. The room you walked into for a reason you’ve forgotten.
Your body is complaining
The gut playing up. The weight around the midriff that won’t shift. Physical signs nobody has connected to the same cause.
Someone you love has changed
Anxious, withdrawn, irritable or impossible to reach. You’re left wondering what happened, and when.
Why this book is different
Not another stress management book
Most books on this subject work on the input or the output — think differently, build more resilience, top up what’s been depleted. The Cortisol Reset goes further back, to the survival system underneath all of it, and explains why it can lose its ability to switch off in the first place.
Drawing on neuroscience, physiology and Clare’s own years working as a trauma specialist in A&E, it connects the dots between symptoms that usually get treated separately, and shows why approaches as different as movement, breathwork, sleep, hypnosis, NLP and simple curiosity can all reach the same underlying system.
About the author
Clare Louise Mortimer
Clare spent years working as a trauma specialist in A&E — a senior sister and nurse practitioner working in a high-stakes, relentless environment with no room for error. She coped until the system took more than she had to give, and burnt out completely.
CBT didn’t touch it. Medication managed the symptoms. Hypnotherapy changed the actual pattern, at a level that talking had never reached. That’s why she retrained as a clinical hypnotherapist, and why The Cortisol Reset is written from both the clinical and the lived side of burnout.
She has lived this mechanism from the inside. This book is how she got out.
Read Clare’s full story →The details
Book details
Get your copy
Understand why people change — and what actually helps.
Buy now through The Great British Bookshop or Amazon.