Adrenal fatigue symptoms causes solutions explanations all coming right
up.
Hey I'm doctor Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you like to truly master
health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you
subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. Adrenal
fatigue you've probably heard about it you probably maybe thought you had it
but is it real and what does it do and what can you do about it so we're gonna
talk about all those things first of all what are the adrenal glands what do they
do well adrenal goes with adrenaline it's a
stress hormone so the adrenal glands help you cope with stress they're tiny
thumb sized almond sized glands that sit on top of the kidney they are
connections of the brain essentially they're neural tissue because they have
to act really really fast when they respond to stress there is no time for
delay they have to do what they do really quick they help you cope with
stress is that a good thing yes even though too much stress is not a great
thing inability to respond and cope with stress is devastating so if you can't
respond to stress then any little amount of stress will wipe you out completely
and in the extreme inability to respond to stress then you're basically a
sitting duck you're standing in the street and a bus comes at you and you
can't do anything about it you don't can't generate the resources to get out
of the way fast enough so stress responses are essential they are what
helps you cope with life so what does what else does it do it helps you
maintain blood sugar and there's this hormone called cortisol that you also
probably heard about cortisol raises blood sugar it helps your body generate
blood sugar whenever your blood sugar goes low so the more unstable your blood
sugar is the more your adrenals have to to compensate so if you have what most
people get on a high carb diet you get what's called a roller-coaster blood
sugar so your body likes the blood sugar really nice and stable in that mids
region but then it goes up and when it comes crashing down you have
hypoglycemia and as soon as you have hypoglycemia you lose focus you get
lightheaded you get tired cranky irritable and now your body has to make
cortisol so you're whipping your adrenals to work really hard and the
more unstable your blood sugar is the harder and the more often they have to
work they also handle minerals they make hormones that regulate minerals so when
they can't quite keep up when they're tired when they get fatigued then they
they can't keep the minerals in the body so you're losing minerals through the
kidneys primarily sodium potassium and calcium then they also indirectly help
regulate sleep sleep has a lot to do both as a cause and effect of adrenal
fatigue because your sleep hormone called melatonin is inversely related to
cortisol so whenever cortisol is high melatonin is low whenever cortisol is
low melatonin is high so melatonin helps you go to sleep and therefore cortisol
has to follow a certain pattern throughout the daily cycle so cortisol
is supposed to be the lowest in the evening when you're ready for sleep
if the cortisol is low your melatonin is high and you have the ability to fall
asleep again melatonin is your sleep hormone then throughout the night
because you don't eat anything the cortisol rises to maintain your blood
sugar in the absence of food and as the blood sugar and as the cortisol rises
the melatonin false and the melatonin is lowest in the morning and cortisol is
the highest in the morning when you're ready to wake up and that allows you to
wake up rested and full of energy and then the cortisol drops throughout the
day until it's the lowest when you're ready to fall asleep again so when all
that works then cortisol and melatonin work together to regulate your sleep but
when your adrenals don't work and when you have blood sugar curves and when you
have stress your cortisol levels are going to be all over the place and
consequently so is your sleep so that's what the adrenal glands do and that's a
little bit about what they cause so in the medical world they don't really
recognize adrenal fatigue because the adrenal gland has an enormous reserve
capacity so it's not going to result in a pathology until that adrenal gland is
about 80% destroyed but it's going to start creating problems and symptoms
long long long before you have a full-blown disease so the the two
extremes of adrenal disease one is called Cushing's and that's where you
have like an adrenal tumor you have something that's just over producing
cortisol all day long and now the symptoms are a huge belly it's a hanging
belly you get a big hump on your back cortisol burns off protein so you get
skinny little spindly legs you get a flat butt and you're also burning losing
protein in the skin you're losing collagen so you get stretch marks and
you bruise very very easy so those are extreme cases of overproduction and then
in the case of Cushing's but when you have a lot of stress leading to adrenal
fatigue you're also typically going to have a very high cortisol so if any of
those things that I mentioned for Cushing's apply to you then you probably
have a high cortisol level because of high stress
and if that continues year after year decade after decade in some people when
you burn out your adrenals completely so they can't keep up and do any sort of
cortisol then you have what's called Addison's and now your adrenals are
completely wiped out and that is not a fun place to be because now you have a
complete inability to deal with stress you're basically a sitting duck
any form of stress any form of activity if you try to do work more than 20
minutes it just wipes you out and you get physically ill your body breaks down
so that is not a place you want to get to so that's why it's so important to
understand these mechanisms about adrenal fatigue and understand that it
is very real and you want to deal with these symptoms before they become a
major problem the causes are stress excessive stress the body is designed to
deal with short-term stress to fight flight 2 to deal with life but we're not
designed for long term stress and when we talk about stress we remember the
chiropractic triad of health that stress can be emotional it can be chemical and
it can be structural so you could have a bad posture you can have you could sit
in a bad posture you could have subluxations you can have poor movements
in your joints in your spine and this is all a form of stress you can have
emotional stress you can have life events you could have a lot of work
stress but you can also have a mind that just won't shut up when that thoughts
are just racing Racing racing and it's like they just take you over and you
don't know how to slow them down or stop them that's emotional stress chemical
stress is stimulants and toxins and pesticides and all of the chemical stuff
that don't belong in the body allergies anything that the body reacts to and a
structural emotional chemical level whether it's excess or lack can create
stress in your body that results in adrenaline and cortisol and starts
wearing your adrenals down so work and thoughts will definitely do it
sugar is another thing because we talked about that here so sugar and unstable
blood sugar as a result of sugar and carbohydrate consumption such as
starches and breads and cookies and waffles and pasta they will create this
rollercoaster and as long as your adrenals are working you may not notice
this hypoglycemia too much but you're still stressing your adrenals so more
reasons to lower your carbohydrates another thing people don't realize is
exercise people think oh exercise that's always good not necessarily if you have
adrenal fatigue then you don't want to exercise hard you don't want to get your
heart rate over 110 120 you don't want to start panting because now you're
putting more cortisol demands on the body and you could actually be
relatively healthy and exercise too much and develop adrenal fatigue because
you're just working your body so hard anytime that your heart rates is up in
above 130 130 and up you are depending on cortisol for energy production so
most people who go to boot camp they go to the gym and they think they're doing
themselves a good thing may not necessarily be so if you sustain a heart
rate over 130 for 45 minutes you just put a major stress load on your
body so while exercise is good we want to understand how to exercise properly
and you can check out our video on exercise and anaerobic and aerobic
exercise right here and another major reason is if your thyroid isn't working
because if your thyroids slows down now everything in your body slows down your
digestion your metabolism but also your healing ability the the speed and the
ability to heal slows down so the recovery of the adrenals are lessened if
your thyroid is low so this these two things together can ex start explaining
why adrenal fatigue is so widespread in our office we find that a majority of
people have some level of thyroid impairment and of course we know that
most people eat a lot of carbohydrates and they have a lot of work stress and
they have racing minds so some level of adrenal fatigue is probably affecting
the vast majority of our population and even though it's not going to result in
Addison's in most cases it is creating a lot of health problems some of the
symptoms sleep problems fatigue lightheadedness fatigue in the morning
and salt cravings so most of those are self-explanatory the salt cravings is
because you're losing minerals tired in the morning is because you're not
getting your deep sleep and you're waking up with too much if your cortisol
is all over the place then you're not waking up rested because you never got
the full rest and you don't have the right blood sugar to get your day
jump-started and here's an interesting one lightheadedness especially if you
bend down and stand up quickly this is like one of the cardinal signs that
people can can tell if they have this so if you lay down or you sit down and you
stand up quickly or you bend down and you stand up quickly and all of a sudden
is like you have to hold on for a little bit that is adrenal fatigue because when
you lay down then you don't need so much blood pressure to get the blood to the
brain because blood flows horizontally without so much effort and then if you
quickly stand up then gravity is going to pull all the
blood to your feet and it's going to rush out of your brain and in order for
you to not go unconscious your adrenals have to make adrenaline which is a
vasoconstrictor to raise blood pressure so that the brain can maintain its blood
supply and this has to happen in a fraction of a second and if it doesn't
happen that fast because the adrenals are tired then it takes a few seconds
before you can get enough adrenaline going to that use that your blood sugar
your blood sorry your blood pressure is stabilized so let's talk about solutions
then there's sort of self-explanatory now that we have talked about the causes
and the mechanisms and all about how this works so this is going to be real
simple solutions if you have stress if you have racing thoughts is meditation
you got to find a way to take a break from your day and empty your head and
this can be such a relief if you can slow down your thoughts if you can empty
your mind for just a few minutes a day this can be a lifesaver so check out
some more videos on guided meditations we have one we're gonna make several
more create stable blood sugar so again start eating whole food eat something
like a paleo diet or a keto diet so that you don't get all these blood sugar
swings get regular sleep in the beginning this is going to be tough
because you have trouble sleeping in the first place but create a regular habit
for yourself and stick to it and if you do these other things before long you
will be able to sleep and that's going to be an absolute necessity in order to
create the stability that you're looking for so pick a time sleep from from 10 to
6 or from 11 to 7 or however much sleep you need but try to get it regular and
stick to it supplements in our office we have
certain supplements standard process makes something called dren Amin there's
another one called dren atrophic that helps the body sort of support the
adrenals and recover they do love minerals they do love real vitamin C so
get it from whole food don't rely on ascorbic acid that's not
the type that it's looking for and long-term though what we find is most
adrenal problems are secondary so if you fix the thyroid if you fix the other
stuff and the blood sugar and the sleep then rarely do the adrenals become the
primary problem they sort of resolved by the time that we've handled the other
stuff that's our clinical experience in in our office and another thing you want
to do is stop whipping the adrenal glands every moment of every day with
caffeine and stimulants so some people think that caffeine is bad but there's
all these other stimulants and energy drinks that they say oh well this gives
you energy no it doesn't it whips your adrenals they they whip them further
into oblivion so you've got to cut back on all caffeine and stimulants to give
the adrenals a little bit of rest so there you have it in a nutshell and
realize that there is no substitute for restoring the body to health there is no
quick fix you've got to undo the things that
caused it you have to develop a healthy lifestyle and you have to give the body
what it needs so please share this video with as many people as you can because a
majority of their health issues could be related to the things that we have
talked about and if you're new to this channel and you enjoy the sort of
contents make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that
we can keep this content coming your way and save more lives and get better
health thanks for listening
you