You wake up tired everyday, almost regardless of how much sleep you got last night. Your morning coffee helps you get going, but by 1 or 2 o’clock you are crashing again. Your mood has been “off” for a couple of weeks or even months. Salty or sugary treats are like an addiction. Despite a good workout routine, you aren’t losing any fat. You are constantly getting brain fog and headaches. Any time there is a bug going around, you seem to catch it. If any combination of these sounds like your daily life, then it's possible you may be suffering from adrenal fatigue.
Adrenal fatigue has been a staple diagnosis and point of treatment in AK almost as long as the discipline has existed. It has only recently become more popular in other healthcare circles and the public health zeitgeist. With it being a trendy term, I thought a quick explainer of what it is, what causes it, and how to treat it holistically would be appropriate.
What Is Adrenal Fatigue?
First off, adrenal fatigue is not Addison’s or Cushing’s disease. While they have overlapping symptoms, they are distinctly divergent in cause. Think of them like the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. The former is caused by an autoimmune disorder and is treatable with external hormone supplementation. The latter is caused by lifestyle factors. In essence, adrenal fatigue is when your adrenal glands have been forced to create greater than normal amounts of hormones to keep your body balanced.
There are 3 stages to it, and each carries with it some distinctions in presentation. The stages are:
Alarm
Resistance
Exhaustion
Together they comprise General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). The further you progress in these stages, the longer it is going to take to return to a healthy state.
The alarm stage consists of your adrenal glands initial response to internal or external stress (more on stress later). It’s intended to be rapid and short term. Think of the great feats of strength people are able to perform when adrenaline (epinephrine), which is made in the adrenal glands, enters circulation in the body. It should sharpen the mind, heighten the senses, and increase physical output. From this description, there seems to be nothing wrong with stage 1, and in many ways that is true. The issue comes from constant and repeated ventures into the alarm state, which eventually pushes an individual to the second stage.
After a while of continual dumps of adrenal hormones, an individual's body seeks to adapt to this new consistent demand. This is when the resistance stage begins. The adrenal glands enlarge to increase production. With increase of production, other hormone organs are disrupted from their natural cycles causing chronic hormone imbalances. These imbalances manifest in many ways, such as the examples I provided in the beginning. Often individuals attempt to treat these imbalances as individual issues instead of symptoms of a greater problem. This is why holistic care is so important, addressing the root cause of the greater issue leads to a more effective treatment plan.
Eventually the adrenal glands will no longer be able to meet the hormonal demand placed on them, and will have reached exhaustion. Without significant time to recuperate and sufficient nutritional support, the glands will be continually depleted. It will take longer and longer to facilitate a response to new demands and health continues to degrade.
What Causes Adrenal Fatigue?
There are several specific vectors of adrenal fatigue, but they essentially all boil down to chronic stressors. The type of stress doesn’t particularly matter. It can be physical, emotional, chemical, or even thermal stress.
Physical and emotional stress are the ones that most people understand inherently. A physical laborer continually doing 12 hour shifts is going to burn out. Someone experiencing emotional trauma continually for months on end will feel the same way despite their physical demands being totally different.
What most people understand less is that the chemical compounds we ingest or absorb from our environment can have the same impact. Sugar, caffeine, alcohol, undiagnosed allergens, heavy metals, and a myriad of other substances will all cause cortisol to be continuously dumped into our systems. Identifying what chemicals are causing such a reaction is critical to treatment and will have to be resolved before restoration is possible.
Thermal stress is something that has become a health fad of sorts recently with all of the variations of hot and cold “therapies.” This is not to say they don't work, but just that they should be used wisely. A more common form of thermal stress many experience is going from a temperature controlled house or car to a hot summer or a cold winter day. That sudden shift of temperatures puts enormous stress on our bodies, which were built for adapting to gradual changes in temperatures throughout the days and seasons.
Most often, those experiencing adrenal fatigue have a combination of stress factors contributing, and while eliminating all stress is not necessary or even beneficial, it is important to try to eliminate or mitigate the worst offenders for a period of time to allow our adrenal glands to recover.
How Do You Fix Adrenal Fatigue?
There are several things one can do to help recover from adrenal fatigue. As stated above, finding the main stressors that are contributing to the constand demand for cortisol is the highest priority and the only way to truly start recovery. This can be done by yourself, though I have discovered that often patients think that something is their main issue, when really it is another. Seeking out professional help, I suggest someone who is experienced with Applied Kinesiology, will help you narrow down the areas in your life to target so that healing can commence. Sleep schedules may need to be fixed, caffeine or sugar may need to be temporarily eliminated, or therapy or Neuroemotional Technique pursued to help overcome life stressors.
Along with tackling the main sources of cortisol release, there are a couple other very effective ways to help. One of the best is intense exercise. Short-burst, high-intensity exercise causes the demand for cortisol to spike, but then it will crash and stay low for a couple of hours. This type of exercise is also helpful for many types of hormone issues, as cortisol is a master control hormone.
Fixing sleep and getting regular sunlight exposure are other paths to help regulate cortisol. Deep restful sleep gives your body a 6-8 hour period to rest and replenish. If you have trouble sleeping, I recommend a glass of tart cherry juice 30 minutes before bed. It has been more effective for me than melatonin and with none of the dependency drawbacks. Sufficient sunlight exposure is another thing that is talked about a lot but very few take to heart. 15 minutes a day, especially around greenery if possible, helps to reduce overall cortisol levels and increases recovery. If you already get some sun everyday, try getting out into the sun at the break of dawn for 5-10 minutes. This helps jumpstart your day and sets your circadian rhythm, making energy through the day and sleep better.
Lastly, in addition to foods and substances to avoid, there are supplements and foods you can eat. The best supplement by far is desiccated bovine adrenals. Like all organ meats, adrenals are jam packed with nutrients and specifically nutrients needed by our own adrenals to build and maintain themselves. Finding it online is possible but they are more expensive than necessary. Find a local Standard Process provider and they can get you some for around $17 a bottle. Other supplements may help such as zinc, vitamin A, and several of the B vitamins. Foods you can add or increase to help out are high cholesterol foods such as eggs (specifically the yoke but the whites have amazing protein so don't skip either) as cholesterol is the building block for sex hormones and glucocorticoid hormones. Antioxidants seem to have a beneficial effect as well as they lower the oxidative stress on your cells. Supplements like selenium are great, but blueberries and pomegranates take the cake when it comes to antioxidant ability.
Where Can I Find Help for Adrenal Fatigue?
If you are in Northern Utah, you can use this website to get in contact with me and we can schedule an appointment to get you examined and on your way to recovery.
If you are outside that area, I recommend checking out the database of certified Applied Kinesiology doctors, as they will most likely have the best knowledge base to help you.
Functional medicine MDs may be a good fit for you as well if they are better available in your area.
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