Screens Raise Your Cortisol. Fire Lowers It. Here's What That Actually Means.

Kellie Varlet
5 days ago
3 min read

And why one night around a campfire might be doing more for your health than you realise

I've been thinking about something since the weekend.

We sat around a campfire for hours. No plan, no agenda, just food and good company and a fire doing what fires do. And somewhere in the middle of it I realised I hadn't checked my phone in hours. Hadn't thought about work. Hadn't felt that low hum of things waiting for my attention.

Just quiet. Real quiet.

And I came home feeling different. Reset in a way that a good night's sleep doesn't always produce. It got me thinking about why that happens. Because it's not just a feeling. There's actually something measurable going on.

What Screens Are Actually Doing to Your Nervous System

Most of us spend a significant portion of our day connected to a screen. Work, social media, news, messages. Often all of them at once, switching between them constantly.

Research published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that people using screens for more than four hours a day showed significantly elevated cortisol levels compared to lighter users. Not because of anything stressful happening on the screen specifically. Just from the sustained stimulation of constant connectivity itself.

And cortisol doesn't stay neatly in its lane. Elevated cortisol disrupts sleep. Poor sleep affects mood, energy, immune function and hormones. For anyone over 40 already navigating hormonal changes, adding chronic screen fatigue into that mix makes everything harder without you ever identifying it as the source.

Most people don't notice how chronically elevated their baseline stress response has become. It just becomes normal. How life feels. Until something interrupts it long enough for you to feel the difference.

What a Campfire Does Instead

Here's where it gets interesting.

A study published in Evolutionary Psychology tracked blood pressure in 226 adults across multiple conditions involving fire. Watching a campfire with sound produced an average five percent drop in blood pressure. And the longer participants sat with the fire, the greater the relaxation effect became.

The researchers believe this response is hardwired. For hundreds of thousands of years fire signalled warmth, food, safety and community. That association is still running quietly in your nervous system every time you sit near a flame. Your brain recognises fire as safe. And it responds accordingly.

The flickering, unpredictable movement of flames puts the brain into a state of relaxed alertness similar to meditation, without requiring any technique or practice. The crackling sound reinforces this. The warmth adds to it. Together they activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the part responsible for rest and recovery. Heart rate slows. Muscle tension drops. Cortisol decreases.

Interestingly the researchers also found that fire without sound actually increased stress in some participants. The sound matters. The full sensory experience is what produces the biological reset.

Full study here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10429110/

Two Very Different Signals

Screens stimulate your stress response and keep cortisol elevated even when nothing is actually wrong.

Fire does the opposite. It activates the part of your nervous system designed for rest, lowers your blood pressure, quiets mental rumination and brings people into genuine presence with each other.

One raises the hormone most associated with disrupted sleep, hormonal imbalance and compromised immune function. The other lowers it. Reliably. Without any technique required.

Worth thinking about.

You Don't Need to Go Camping

A fire pit in the backyard. A wood burning fireplace. Even a quality candle in a quiet room creates some of the same effect. The principle is the same. Your nervous system needs regular breaks from stimulation and it responds well to the ancient sensory cues it was designed to find calming.

What the campfire represents more than anything is permission. Permission to stop being available. To sit without an agenda. To let the conversation go where it goes without checking anything in between.

That night away reminded me that switching off isn't a luxury or a reward for getting everything done first. It's part of how you stay well. Your nervous system needs the rest. Your relationships need the presence. And your body responds in measurable ways when you give it both.

We spend so much time thinking about what we put into our bodies. We don't always give the same thought to what we're constantly feeding our nervous systems.

One night around a fire is a good place to start changing that.