A lot of times I experience what would best be described as the fight or flight response (angry/scared)
That is usually a stress indicator related to norepinephrine. Your body raises cortisol to try to handle the stress. But after a while it goes of rhythm peaking too late or start to get depleted. Virtually EVERY adrenal fatigue is first preceded by a period of excessive or upregulated cortisol production. This is the drain. The crash comes when you can't make much of anything anymore. In fall 2009 one week my morning random cortisol was a 30 (yes 30). Two weeks later a six. Then back up. Then like a 3. That was when I started passing out. Not fun.
What gets tricky is NE vs glutamate. For me the former is tell-tale by what your CV signs are like. The latter is about your sensory system and your hypothalamus.
Do you get night sweats at all? Weird temperature issues when sleeping? Problems with feeling to hot? That is usually NE. If you can hear a flea make a sound on the back of a semi six miles away while trying to sleep. That is glutamate. Sucks when a person gets both at once. Ick. Bad memories. High glutamate enhances pain perception. NE drains the body of resources since it is your last of defense energy source.
People who have high cortisol at night just mean they aren't ready to go to bed. They are too alert relative to where they should when they lay down. Their clock is moved, etc. Natural cortisol production is not the enemy. But if not following the correct exponential like production pattern then you may be showing some signs of other issues. The fact that cortisol is supposed to drop at night is what allows the body to increase innate healthy inflammation (like various prostaglandins, etc. and not to be confused with disease related inflammation) and that is HOW you sleep. Melatonin is just a signaling trigger. The immune system not being as carefully corralled is what send you off to dreamland believe it or not.
Those of us with disease inflammatory states have a different problem. The immune system is trying to suppress the adrenal chronically in order to what it perceives is its job. Eventually it wins. Once it wins the adrenal crash and even non-cortisol hormones tank. When your progesterone, DHEA, pregnenolone, aldsosterone, and sex hormones, tank then you are in real trouble. However, even before the immune system achieves victory, crack can show through ... it is when those cracks start to break out that NE comes out to play when you least want it. Think of cortisol as one of the main (but not only) chains on your sympathetic nervous system. Trust me you don't want the sympathetic nervous system / NE to break confinement, especially since it eggs on inflammation in a very vicious cycle. Adreno used to joke about my analogy as if I was discussing creature from a monster movie. Heh. Kind of not far from the truth in certain respects.
The rapid fight or flight response is not the cortisol. It is the NE generated on the fly in your ANS (not even your adrenals, reaction time too slow). In the distant past when you ran into that cave bear and your heart rate shot up and you climbed a tree in a hurry (assuming there was a tree) that response needed to be johnny on the spot. But ... you aren't supposed to live that way. The more time in your day that NE is active, the worse the signs of the immune vs adrenal struggle.
Btw the caveat to measuring catecholamines is it only tells you NE / DA in the periphery. Doesn't tell you about the ANS / CNS concentrations. But analysis of the metabolites like VMA, HVA, etc.
may show you something. I get sick of all these companies that offer neurortransmitter tests for the body. They sure seem to not want to talk about the BBB. But then again what are you going to do? Have spinal taps? I wouldn't
