![]() ![]() When your adrenals begin to falter, you may notice But here again, the underlying imbalance isn’t addressed, and the problem continues until it triggers a full blown illness or disease. People may ignore these signs, thinking it’s part of stress or “getting old,” or they may go to a doctor who will prescribe them meds based on their symptoms: Ambien for insomnia, for example, or antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. ![]() These nagging issues wouldn’t send you to the hospital, maybe not even the doctor, but they are your body’s way of signaling to you that there is an imbalance. ![]() It’s a brilliant design, but the result is layers of dysfunction throughout the body, not solely in the endocrine system.Īdrenal fatigue is a constellation of symptoms, such as insomnia, anxiety, fatigue, or brain fog, that disrupts your day-to-day life. You’re not going to be firing all cylinders when energy and nutrients are scarce. Your mitochondria detect stress, inflammation, the resulting nutrient deficiencies, and danger, and begin to shut down to conserve cellular energy. This means your adrenals and thyroid slow down. When the body is chronically stressed, its survival mechanism response is to down-regulate to conserve energy and keep you alive. The mitochondria use nutrients from the food you eat, break them down, and create energy for the cell. Stress eventually makes you fatigued because your mitochondria, the cells’ powerhouse that generate energy, are faltering. This dysfunction goes beyond the HPA axis. At this point you are facing burnout and may also notice anxiety and depression, as serotonin is depleted when cortisol is chronically elevated, and now there is neuroendocrine dysfunction. Cortisol keeps blood sugar and blood pressure elevated so you’re able to fight or flee and stay alive during the stressful event. This is a normal and healthy stress response.īut when you are chronically stressed and this chain of events is continuously triggered, your cortisol stays elevated, you become eventually depleted of the hormones you need to battle the stressor. ACTH stimulates the release of cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone. CRH stimulates the production of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). Corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) is released from the hypothalamus. When you encounter stress, the body reacts with a chain of hormonal events to get you ready for battle. When everything is functioning normally, you have good and stable energy throughout the day, you sleep well, you have a good sex drive, and you maintain your weight. In many ways the HP axis and the adrenals are the command and control center for your body, and they help you manage your stress levels, hormone levels, thyroid function, sleep, sex drive, and metabolism. Your adrenals are 2 small glands that sit atop your kidneys and produce cortisol and sex hormones. When this response becomes chronic, problems arise. ![]() When you experience chronic stress, your brain thinks your body is in grave danger, so it’s sending constant fight or flight commands to the adrenals, telling them to release cortisol. Adrenal fatigue isn’t the fault of the adrenals per se it’s a dysfunction between the brain and adrenal glands. It’s not a condition of the adrenals but rather a breakdown in communication between the brain and the endocrine system and a faltering of your mitochondria to produce energy on a cellular level.Īdrenal fatigue should really be called hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysfunction, which is a fancy way of saying that the feedback loop between the brain and the adrenals is fried, so there is miscommunication and resistance about when and how to release stress hormones. ( read more about the HPA axis here). More importantly, adrenal fatigue really doesn’t mean your adrenals are tired. Adrenal fatigue isn’t acknowledged in the conventional medical model because it is not a disease for which drugs can be prescribed, and that’s how our medical system works. I’ve had clients say their doctors have told them adrenal fatigue is an outright hoax. That’s not what we’re talking about here. If you told your doctor you suspected adrenal fatigue, you’d likely be sent to an endocrinologist who may test you for Addison’s or Cushing’s diseases, relatively rare endocrine disorders that indicate very low or high cortisol (your main stress hormone) levels. It means fatigue, irritability, anxiety, and maybe even weight gain, caused by low cortisol, poor mitochondrial function, and unbalanced hormones. ![]()
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