It's not your cortisol
Welcome to the positive corner of the internet
Arnold Schwarzenegger <[email protected]>
Share
Arnold's Pump Club welcomes subscribers and introduces its positive and health-focused content. The brand discusses the concept of coherence and its potential impact on physical health, citing a research study on its relationship to chronic pain. It also touches on the misconception that cortisol is the primary cause of weight gain.
What the raw message shows
From the headers
- Sent with
-
Beehiiv See it in the headers
Across Arnold's Pump Club's email
- Sends
- About 6 a week
- DMARC
-
Not enforced
Failures are monitored but still delivered.
The copy
592 words · about 2 min to read
Is Cortisol the Reason You’re Gaining Weight? Probably Not
Cortisol gets blamed for stubborn weight, but it's not the reason the scale changes. If you're targeting cortisol with supplements and tests, odds are you're wasting time and money.
Welcome to the positive corner of the internet. We’re here to make your life healthier, happier, and less stressful. At the bottom of each email, we explain our editorial process, stance on AI, and partnership standards.
If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free daily email here.
Today’s Health Upgrade
Why coherence matters in hard times
Are nonstick pans dangerous?
Let’s talk about cortisol and weight gain
The overhyped supplement combo
Mindset
Why Life Can Feel Wrong Even When You Know What Matters
You can have people you love, work that matters, and a clear sense of what you want from life. And still, it can feel as if none of it fits together.
That feeling has a name: coherence. And new research suggests it might affect more than your state of mind.
Researchers followed about 1,500 midlife adults for nine years. No one had chronic pain at the start of the study. The researchers measured three parts of a meaningful life: purpose, mattering, and coherence.
Purpose is having direction. Mattering is believing your life counts. Coherence is the sense that your experiences and the world around you make sense.
People with a stronger sense of coherence had somewhat lower odds of developing chronic pain over the next decade. They also reported fewer headaches, backaches, and joint pain.
The pattern remained after the researchers accounted for depression, anxiety, BMI, other health conditions, and several factors that could influence pain.
Purpose and mattering showed no such relationship.
Because this was an observational study, it can’t prove that coherence protects against pain. It also doesn’t mean pain is “in your head.”
But it raises an interesting possibility: The way we process and understand our lives might be connected to how we experience physical distress.
Purpose gets the TED talks. Mattering has often looked more important in studies of meaning. In one preregistered study, mattering predicted how meaningful people later judged their lives. Coherence didn’t.
That difference helps explain why coherence is easy to overlook. It might not be the part of meaning you feel when life is going well. You notice it when life stops making sense.
Coherence is the sense that your experiences fit into an understandable story. A loss, diagnosis, divorce, layoff, or move can disrupt that story. Your values haven’t necessarily disappeared. The life around them has changed faster than your understanding.
That can create a particular kind of disorientation. You know what matters but no longer understand how the pieces fit.
The distinction also changes what might help.
A hard season doesn’t always require a new purpose or a dramatic reinvention. Sometimes you need time to process what happened and see which parts of your life still hold.
And maybe the best part is that coherence doesn’t seem fixed. In a recent study, older groups tended to report more of it. Because the researchers compared different age groups at one point in time, they couldn’t show that coherence improves as any one person ages. But the finding means that making sense of life may become easier with experience.
You don’t have to force that understanding today. If you need a place to start, write down what you know, identify what remains unresolved, and stop before reflection turns into rumination.
Together With Our Place
Are Nonstick Pans Really That Dangerous?
The words as text: what a screen reader can follow, and all there is when images don't load.
What the headers say
Read from the message's own headers, as it arrived.
- Came from
-
o52.ptr8166.schwarzenegger.com
· 159.183.134.120
Beehiiv's sending servers
- SPF
- Pass for em2589.schwarzenegger.com
- DKIM
-
- Pass signed by schwarzenegger.com
- DMARC
-
Pass for schwarzenegger.com
Policy: none, so failures would still be delivered
- Unsubscribe
-
One-click
Meets the Gmail and Yahoo rule for bulk senders.
- Complaints
-
Feedback loop set up
Mailbox providers can report spam complaints straight back to the sender.
Show all 26 headers Hide the headers
As received, minus the delivery side: the archive's own addresses show as [recipient], its mail servers as [receiver], signatures are left out and unsubscribe links trimmed to their host.
Route
- Received
- from o52.ptr8166.schwarzenegger.com (159.183.134.120) by [receiver] (cloudflare) id T4grPHgsWTZG for <[recipient]>; Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:03:55 +0000
- Received
- by recvd-d7fb98f7f-gb42r with SMTP id recvd-d7fb98f7f-gb42r-1-6ACE01F9-77 2026-10-13 10:03:37.615718221 +0000 UTC m=+1184573.107600542
- Received
- from MzM1OTE2ODY (unknown) by geopod-ismtpd-65 (SG) with HTTP id 58-LJV0jQn2BqYO2zcBCWQ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:03:37.592 +0000 (UTC)
Authentication
- Received-SPF Authentication result
- pass ([receiver]: domain of [recipient]@em2589.schwarzenegger.com designates 159.183.134.120 as permitted sender) receiver=[receiver]; client-ip=159.183.134.120; envelope-from="[recipient]@em2589.schwarzenegger.com"; helo=o52.ptr8166.schwarzenegger.com;
- Authentication-Results Authentication result
- [receiver]; dkim=pass header.d=schwarzenegger.com header.s=5b7 header.b=gKGnpLu7; dmarc=pass header.from=schwarzenegger.com policy.dmarc=none; spf=none ([receiver]: no SPF records found for [email protected]) smtp.helo=o52.ptr8166.schwarzenegger.com; spf=pass ([receiver]: domain of [recipient]@em2589.schwarzenegger.com designates 159.183.134.120 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=[recipient]@em2589.schwarzenegger.com; arc=none smtp.remote-ip=159.183.134.120
Platform
- x-beehiiv-ids Identifies Beehiiv
- {"account_name":"https://arnoldspumpclub.schwarzenegger.com/","campaign_id":"bd9bdbc2-223a-4fe9-9832-893b5548a3c9","category":"newsletter","email_generated_at":1791885817,"user_id":"69cc9605-b59a-4e5a-a91e-91120246acec"}
- x-beehiiv-type Identifies Beehiiv
- newsletter
- x-list-id
- 69cc9605-b59a-4e5a-a91e-91120246acec
- x-list-owner
- <mailto:[email protected]>
- x-newsletter
- https://arnoldspumpclub.schwarzenegger.com/p/does-cortisol-cause-weight-gain
- x-newsletter-id
- https://arnoldspumpclub.schwarzenegger.com/
- x-newsletter-signup
- https://arnoldspumpclub.schwarzenegger.com/subscribe
- X-SG-EID
- u001.kVOnjYVX26cmN5P1FyRANU9qxnDjz4plGa1J/M0FL/Fs13BqdjiGaGncoCTugHsMJjhn4QeO3SXBMs6NftogIQlE7DJWKnY34usJ7ePPpfCNjxKWa5OZuP+Dser3moivmbhLBBAhKBWjfSILEC/xTdcqc2ioUjIy1F5BiPNmu+w5ZqZRKMyfFMvq+HQEpTxhfCpy5C7Orh3lVpFbE0Ymje02seRFSeUlypolWZBHRAbdFnjnbngBWXgBIXFiGpxIvD61nMI1+2GbWTIh5UyTCw==
- X-SG-ID
- u001.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
- X-Entity-ID
- u001.YYUjHoyTMCS5hdY+xrwXDg==
Unsubscribe and feedback
- Feedback-ID
- bd9bdbc2-223a-4fe9-9832-893b5548a3c9:newsletter:69cc9605-b59a-4e5a-a91e-91120246acec:c30e8088a6065bb
- List-Unsubscribe
- <mailto:…@unsub.beehiiv.com>, <https://arnoldspumpclub.schwarzenegger.com/…>
- List-Unsubscribe-Post
- List-Unsubscribe=One-Click
Message
- Content-Type
- multipart/alternative; boundary=2b7db0f2dca97c99ff2851cc9be3390fc730a316c45e068a9c1fae852405
- Date
- Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:03:45 +0000 (UTC)
- From
- Arnold Schwarzenegger <[email protected]>
- Mime-Version
- 1.0
- Message-ID
- <58-LJV0jQn2BqYO2zcBCWQ@geopod-ismtpd-65>
- Subject
- It's not your cortisol
- Reply-To
- Arnold Schwarzenegger <[email protected]>
- sId
- 69cc9605-b59a-4e5a-a91e-91120246acec
More from Arnold's Pump Club
All 36 emailsSimilar campaigns from other brands
Different brands running the same play. Compare any of them side by side.
Archived for reference and commentary. Arnold's Pump Club, its logos and content are the property of their respective owners; Inbox Archive claims no affiliation and has disabled all links. If you own this content and would like it removed, get in touch.