Hi
@kisekishiawase
Have you tried mixing some potassium with the salt? Maybe from a banana, or else potassium citrate (chloride can be hard on the stomach). I asked some friends with POTS about this, and while one of them said that extra potassium wasn't helpful the other three said they needed some potassium to go with the sodium...I think the amount varied (and I'd take potassium pretty supplementation pretty slowly in any case), but one estimate was about half as much potassium as sodium.
If this is the issue, you'd probably have to experiment a bit to get it right, which would include being aware of how much potassium is in what you eat day-to-day as well.
I hadn't heard that salt could increase cortisol (but I only know so much) so I googled around. I found, if not the article you read at least an article along the same vein--"high salt intake increases cortisol."
Here is the abstract of the study. I'm having problems with sci-hub again so I've only read the abstract. But have...at least some questions about the conclusions that other people (not the original authors, it would seem) are taking from the paper.
1. The study was observational, meaning they didn't give people more salt, they just looked to see if people with higher salt intake had higher other stuff. This means we don't know whether the extra salt was driving the hormonal and pathological differences they observed, or whether those differences caused people to crave (and eat) more salt. The authors of the paper seem to know this and only mention that they have found a correlation. It's other websites that assume the high sodium diet is the cause rather than the effect.
2. Even if we assume that high salt is the
cause of everything the study found it associated with, the high cortisol levels were only in urine. While high cortisol excretion would necessarily imply that the people eating high salt diets were producing more cortisol, we don't know whether this means they had higher blood levels of cortisol--they could have been producing more cortisol because their body was excreting cortisol more quickly.
Which is all to say that you
could be right, high salt intake
could be increasing your cortisol. But since high salt intake is potentially helpful with your POTS I'd be hesitant to throw out such a simple, cheap and useful therapy without at the very least more testing.
If you're worried about high cortisol levels, there are certainly things you can do (if you aren't doing them already) like avoiding sugar or anything that would cause a blood sugar spike and taking fish oil (or eating fish). At the risk of sharing something I read in a not-entirely-trustworthy book 15 years ago, I'm curious if you just got sick because I thought high cortisol was something only the recently sick ME/CFS sufferers had (I'm open to being proven wrong!). And while we're at it, do you have ME/CFS or just low BP/POTS?
In any case I'm sorry to hear about your symptoms and I hope you find something simple that works for you. Best of luck.