Suffering with Adrenal Fatigue? Read below how Functional Medicine may be able to help you.
Your adrenal glands have the job of controlling how you respond to stress. This is not an enviable task because for many people stress is a large part of life.
Some stress is useful because it’s your natural response to danger, and it helps keep you motivated and focused. Your body has developed mechanisms to deal with stress.
Adrenal fatigue refers to the situation where your adrenal glands can no longer respond appropriately to stress as they used to.
Physical or emotional stress causes changes in your body. Your adrenal glands pump out the hormones cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline to enable you to react to a crisis. These hormones allow extra blood to reach your muscles and make energy available so you can run away if you need to. At the same time, other functions like digestion take a back seat.
The problem is, that stressors are often now ongoing and happen one after another, meaning your adrenals are constantly pumping out stress hormones. Stress may be so normal for you, that you don’t realise it’s there.
Over time, if stress hormones don’t fall as they normally would once the stressful event has passed, your stress response isn’t able to turn off. If cortisol has been elevated on an ongoing basis, it can cause you to feel ‘tired but wired’, as well as contributing to weight gain, irritability, food cravings, concentration difficulties, headaches and hormone imbalances.
Over time with all the extra work your adrenal glands may struggle to effectively respond to stress. This can manifest as exhaustion or burnout, and it usually follows many years of continual stress 1. Adrenal fatigue is not simply a problem with your adrenals, it involves your brain’s communication with your stress glands, too.
Stress can come in many forms – overloading your body with poor-quality food, food intolerances, environmental pollutants, excessive exercise and getting too little sleep are all stressors in themselves.
Decreased secretion of stress hormones may cause some or all of the following symptoms, as the body’s systems for rest, repair and digestion go awry.2 3
The symptoms of adrenal fatigue could also related to an underlying medical condition so it’s important this is ruled out before looking to holistic options to support you.
Functional medicine practitioners assess adrenal function by looking at the levels of your stress hormones. Cortisol should be released in different quantities depending the time of day, so looking at the amount of cortisol in your saliva at different times, we can see how your stress glands are responding. 4
If your adrenals have been working hard for a long time they may need increased amounts of specific nutrients, such as B vitamins and Vitamin C. Certain herbs can be useful to support healthy adrenal function. 5 6 7
Lifestyle will play a large part too, with the aim of reducing stressors. Sleep hygiene is very important, and you’ll also be equipped with the tools you need to help manage your response to stress such as relaxation techniques, breathing techniques and gentle exercise. 8 9
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