Now that we know a little more about adrenal fatigue,
let’s talk about some very common adrenal fatigue mistakes that people often make during their recovery journey.
Well, a key lesson to learn is to avoid mistakes that people make because most people try to self-navigate.
They go online,
they don’t understand the fatigue, what the reason is.
Their healthcare professional was not able to offer them solutions.
So, the natural progression is to just to try to look for answers.
I’ve studied and collated these mistakes from thousands of people that
me and my team have built and coached over the years by telephone to help them recover,
and I want to share them with you to make sure that you don’t make the same mistakes that most people make.
Adrenal fatigue recovery mistake number one: Wrong interpretation of laboratory testing.
There are so many ways to interpret lab testing and a lot of people do it differently.
Like, what’s the difference between the saliva testing versus the blood testing?
There’s a lot of variants even for normal ranges of lab results
as lab results can also differ depending on what stage of adrenal fatigue you are in.
For example, in early stages,
the cortisol, DHEA and pregnenolone levels tend to be higher as your adrenal glands are working hard
and pumping out all these hormones to give you the energy that you need when you undergo stress.
However, in later stages as your adrenals start to get burned out a little,
the pregnenolone level tends to be lower.
Your morning cortisol level blunts, and that’s where you get this flat curve on the saliva test.
These are just some very general rules as there are a lot of differences between people.
Not only that,
computerized interpretations are often more wrong than right because it’s templated.
There are so many variations.
You can have a reversed curve. You can have a yoyo curve.
You can have a nighttime that is lower than the morning which is what it’s supposed to be but sometimes it has a little blip.
There’s so many variations that without tracking and understanding what the rhythm of these cortisol curves really means,
many people are misled into thinking that they are looking at the absolute numbers.
The absolute numbers can lead you astray.
When your numbers are astray,
we see people get placed on glandulars, herbs, hormones because your labs are abnormal.
But those supplements don’t help you in the long run and could actually harm you if not given at the right time.
So, it’s important not to just rely on lab testing,
but use the body's signs and symptoms to gauge how weak your adrenals are and what you can use the lab testing specifically for.
Mistake number two in adrenal fatigue recovery is improper use of nutritional supplements and medications.
Now, many natural compounds have different, what we call 'dose-dependent behaviors'.
How they behave at one dose can be very different from how they behave at a different dose.
So, without that understanding,
for example, if you take an herb or glandular at a low dose,
it may behave positively, but at a higher dose it may behave negatively.
This kind of backlash is very common, but without the understanding of when to stop,
how to stop and what dosage to intervene, when to titrate the body,
most people who self-navigate and tend to just keep going on
because it works when they were at a low dose or in a certain stage of adrenal fatigue.
Their interpretation is that it will work better when a person gets weaker which is not true.
The RDA, for example,
which is the Recommended Daily Allowance is what the government has helped to guide us for healthy normal people.
It’s not necessarily their optimum dose.
So, for example, vitamin C,
the RDA may only be about 80 milligrams, but that’s hardly sufficient for a person who has adrenal fatigue
because in adrenal fatigue, you need the vitamin C.
For example, as a building block.
However, you cannot just scale up on vitamin C or use a lot of vitamin C.
There are, for example, 20 different forms and delivery systems.
So, which one do you use? Each one has its own characteristics,
its own ability, its own bioavailability.
So, without understanding all these forms,
people will say, “Well, I’m taking vitamin C”
but they can actually crash themselves with vitamin C.
So, without understanding the nutritional supplements, they can be misused unintentionally.
This is a very sad case because most people already come to us asking for help by telephone and they have no concept.
They think that everything’s the same, but it’s not.
In addition, excessive use of prescription drugs often also makes the adrenal fatigue condition worse.
We live in a world where symptoms are often classified as diseases and we want to control the symptoms as it’s considered a cure,
but really all you’re doing is controlling symptoms instead of going to the root cause of the problem.
All physicians have been trained to do is treat the symptoms because they aren’t able to get to truly the root cause sometimes.
So it’s important that we respect the body’s signs and symptoms, especially in adrenal fatigue,
as they are valuable sensitive indicators to help guide us in the recovery process.
Just as pain is a warning signal from our body that says something is wrong,
suppressing pain with a painkiller might not be the same as finding the cure of the condition
or the root cause of what is actually causing the pain.
Pain suppression is therefore masking and is not really helping.
In the case of adrenal fatigue, this will not work long-term to just mask the symptoms
as the body will continue to punish you by coming up with more worse symptoms.
The logical approach is to give the body the tools to heal itself
while monitoring the symptoms and using them as a barometer of the body’s healing efficacy.
The following common prescription drugs for example are used to relieve adrenal fatigue:
They can include antidepressants,
antianxiety, sleep medications,
blood pressure medications,
hormones including bioidentical hormones or synthetic hormones,
steroids of one form or another.
There are many medications that are useful at certain times, but if you don’t understand when to use and how to use,
then you can be problematic.
In particular because prescription medications oftentimes have multiple side effects so you have to be able to deal with it,
and not everybody does well.
For example, the one common thought process is that
“Well, if you have adrenal fatigue, steroids should be prescribed”
but not everybody can tolerate steroids.
Some people in fact do worse.
It’s not a standard rule that one must go by, but it has to be individualized.
Also, the more medication is given, the more side effects will be expected.
The more metabolites will build up after the inert medication.
Metabolites are generated by the body after the biological effect has been effective.
So, the whole medication process itself is a simple kind of a quick fix system.
Yes, it puts you to sleep,
but it doesn’t last long and oftentimes, you will have to have more medications.
Yes, it will control the heart palpitations, but oftentimes you may need more as time goes on,
and of course, you have side effects.
Now, we’re not saying here that medication’s not important
because it is very important depending on the state and exactly what’s going on,
but it should not be indiscriminately used.
Unfortunately, because many professionals in this field lack the true understanding of what the signal is,
so their kneejerk reaction is to prescribe medication.
This is one of the very common recovery mistakes.
Mistake number three is failure to recognize paradoxical and unusual reactions.
So, what is a paradoxical reaction?
It usually happens to either medical treatment or a drug or has the opposite effect to that which you normally would expect.
An example would be when you give a pain relief medication, but it actually causes an increase in pain.
This can happen actually with medications and supplements too.
Some sedatives prescribed for adults actually cause hyper activeness in children.
Experienced clinicians know this and are on high alert for these abnormalities.
Paradoxical reactions are generally more prevalent in natural compounds.
The reason for this is not known.
The more decompensated the body is, as in the case of advanced adrenal fatigue,
the more frequent such paradoxical reactions will occur.
So, nutrients that are suitable for one body may not necessarily be good for another person.
In fact, it can actually be toxic to another body.
It becomes toxic and paradoxical reactions can happen and surface after a period of time of ingestion.
So unless the clinician is really on the alert and understands the ramification,
it’s so easy to just pass over as if this is something that’s one-off,
but actually, it’s not.
So, the failure to recognize paradoxical and unusual reactions is a very common mistake because basically,
you are ignoring the body’s whispers.
They can include, for example,
a sense of fatigue or malaise in a state of anxiety when you take steroids.
Which is opposite because steroids are supposed to calm the system down.
So, it’s paradoxical.
You can have sudden onset of anxiety from taking just magnesium which is supposed to be calming for example.
You can have heart palpitations even though your heart workup can be totally 100% normal.
You can have dizziness or some kind of lightheadedness when you arise even though your blood pressure can be normal,
and your heart workup is, again, normal.
You can have fluctuating blood pressure for no reason.
You can have a sense of being kind of beaten up or slumpy that can last for hours or days after excessive exercise.
Now, these are hard to interpret because they affect multiple systems.
Basically, it’s generated from the body to warn us of what’s going on,
but seldom do we understand what they really mean.
These are just some of the three common adrenal fatigue mistakes we see.
There are many other ones,
so, if you want to check to check them out,
you can click on the link in the comment section to find the article for common adrenal fatigue mistakes.