HEALTH & WELLNESS · PERSONAL ESSAY
How I lowered my sky-high cortisol working in one of the most stressful corners of digital marketing - and what actually made the difference.
Client budgets, live campaigns, endless optimisation. My body eventually sent me a bill I couldn’t ignore - and the thing that finally helped wasn’t what I expected.
Artjoms Koposovs
Google Ads specialist · April 2026 · 6 min read
Cortisol - Burnout - Stress - Mental health
The warning I couldn’t ignore
Working in Google Ads means living inside a dashboard that never sleeps. Campaigns go live at midnight. Budgets spike without warning. A client calls on a Friday afternoon because their cost-per-click just doubled and they want answers now. For most of my career, I accepted that kind of pressure as just part of the job. What I didn’t realise was how much it was quietly doing to my body.
After a long stretch of pushing too hard, I started noticing things I couldn’t explain away. Terrible sleep. A constant low hum of anxiety that never really switched off. A body that felt permanently braced for something. I did some reading, looked into the symptoms, and everything pointed to the same thing: consistently high cortisol levels. My body had been running on stress hormones for so long it had forgotten any other way to operate.
“Your nervous system is stuck in emergency mode. It doesn’t know the campaign has been paused. It just keeps producing cortisol as if the danger is still there.”
Once I understood that, it made perfect sense. My brain had simply been running at full speed for so long, it didn’t know how to slow down.
Everything I tried that didn’t work
I started with the simple stuff. Earlier mornings, proper walks, cutting back on caffeine, getting to bed at a reasonable hour. All sensible, all mildly helpful, none of it enough to move the dial in any meaningful way.
I tried journalling. I tried meditation. I tried unplugging at weekends and leaving my phone in another room. The problem with meditation, for a brain that never really stops, is that sitting quietly tends to just give the noise more space to get louder.
I tried cold showers. A breathing app. Switching off Slack notifications after 8pm. I earnestly tried all of it. After eighteen months, my cortisol levels - and how I felt day to day - had barely budged.
The discovery I didn’t see coming
I was at a friend’s kitchen table after dinner. She had a colouring book open in front of her - a street scene, London terraces and familiar red front doors and bay windows. When I trailed off mid-sentence, she slid it across the table without a word, the way you pass someone a biscuit. I picked up a pencil.
What happened over the next ninety minutes is hard to describe. The part of my brain that usually runs the to-do list, monitors campaign performance, and braces for the next client message went quiet. Not silent — but quiet. I was choosing between two shades of brick red. Tiny, inconsequential decisions. And something that had been tightly coiled for months slowly started to loosen.
I finished the page. Did another. Went home. Slept properly - the kind of sleep I’d almost forgotten was possible.
“It sounds ridiculous. A Google Ads specialist lowering his cortisol with
a colouring book. But I’m telling you - it worked.”
Why colouring actually lowers cortisol - the 6 reasons that worked for me
I read about it afterwards, as someone who spends too much time on the internet will. The
science is reasonably solid - and once I understood the mechanisms, it stopped feeling like a fluke and started feeling like the most logical thing I could have done.
1. It gives your brain a genuine focus anchor
Colouring requires just enough concentration to keep your mind occupied - choosing colours, staying within lines, deciding light from dark - without demanding the kind of high-alert focus that managing live campaigns requires. Your brain finally has somewhere to go that isn’t threat-scanning.
2. It creates a clean break from daily stres
There are no campaign alerts inside a colouring book. No client emails, no dashboards, no consequences. For the first time in years I had an activity completely sealed off from the pressures of the day. My brain couldn’t multitask its way back to the to-do list - it was genuinely elsewhere.
3. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system
Repetitive, low-stakes creative tasks signal to the body that no threat is present. Breathing slows naturally. Heart rate drops. And because cortisol production is driven by perceived danger, once the brain genuinely believes the emergency is over, levels begin to fall - without you having to force it.
4. It gets you off screens
My entire working life is mediated through a screen - Google Ads, Analytics, client decks, email. Screens are designed to keep you alert and reactive. Replacing even one hour of evening screen time
with something slow and analogue was, for my nervous system, genuinely transformative.
5. It produces a mild flow state without effort
Researchers describe the effect as flow state lite - deep enough that the anxious, planning part of the brain steps back, but accessible enough that you don’t need training or skill to get there. You just pick up a pencil. No app, no course, no retreat required.
6. It gives you a consistent daily ritual of rest
Most of what I’d tried before worked occasionally or sporadically. Colouring became a nightly habit precisely because it was easy, portable, and genuinely enjoyable. Consistency is what moves cortisol over time - not one good weekend, but a daily signal to your body that it is allowed to stand down.
The book that made the difference
Subject matter turned out to matter. Abstract patterns kept part of my attention restless. What worked was illustration with a sense of place - streets, architecture, real scenes I could imagine walking through. The book I was colouring that evening at my friend’s table was Colour in United Kingdom - and it was exactly the right fit for a brain like mine.
Good paper, clean lines, binding that lies flat. Highly detailed street-scene illustrations drawn with real care - familiar British terraces, London side streets, the kind of scenes you walk past every day but never really stop to look at. I’ve since bought several more, including a few as gifts for family members.
Eight months on, my cortisol is within the normal range for the first time since I started paying
attention to it. These books were the missing piece - the first thing that gave my nervous system a daily window of genuine rest rather than asking it to perform calm.
“Sometimes the simplest thing is the thing your body actually needed all along. It doesn’t have to be complicated to work.”
A London terrace that needs a warm red brick. A familiar side street off somewhere in Notting Hill that wants a pale cream window frame. Tiny, beautiful, low-stakes decisions - made with a pencil, in the evening, away from a screen. It sounds too small to matter. It turned out to matter more than anything else I tried.
Colour Your Streets
The books I use and recommend. If you’re also trying to bring your cortisol down and want somewhere calm to start each evening, here’s where I get mine.