Stress & Adrenal Exhaustion

I am looking forward to being an invited guest speaker for a stress workshop next month, but I’ve got to tell you, I wrote the heading for this post and then almost burst out laughing: stress. One little word for such a BIG BIG issue. Where do we even start?

We know we are too busy these days. We need to slow down, spend more time with the family, meditate. More than that we need to do it without guilt. I heard a great quote the other day: We live in a society that judges us on what we earn and how we spend it. We are so consumed with proving ourselves (materialistically) we don’t value a simple existence – we think people who do yoga or meditate have a screw loose or are a bit “alternative”. But what if they have got it right? Then you’re scared you’re missing it, whatever IT is…just one more thing to stress about!

I heard another great quote:

We are spending our lives working at killing ourselves.

We work hard. We work a lot. Why? To accumulate stuff. Why? We are scared. If we jump out of the rat race how will we survive? How will we compete? It’s a competitive world out there and if you don’t accumulate stuff…well, then you’re poor…

Personally, I’d rather accumulate experiences, wisdom, good health…but I’m pretty sure it’s been confirmed that I’ve got a screw loose!

What are the real consequences of this madness we are living in? And it is madness – half the population is now on anti-depressants, about 70% are obese and most the rest are paying for massages, retreats and shopping sprees every other weekend to try and stay sane. Honestly – we think we have found the good life?

We are supposed to use our fight-or-flight stress response 1% of the time – we are now averaging 95-99% of our lives spent in fight-or-flight mode…umm…oops?!

What are we doing to ourselves?

The adrenals

The adrenal glands are largely responsible for our stress response – flight and flight/cortisol/etc. Stress on our body and adrenals isn’t just the worry of being eaten by a lion. These days we have the stress of toxins, junk-food, low-calorie dieting (more on that soon), too much work, not enough sleep and the regular health and lifestyle issues we overload our systems with. What you may not know is that the adrenals actually produce about 26 of our hormones, so if we run them down, over-riding the system with bad lifestyle choices, we are going to leave ourselves in a really unbalanced situation with many other hormones. We can actually use up more cortisol than we produce, and we can also take all the energy we are supposed to put into making estrogen, progesterone and testosterone and put it into cortisol. As you can imagine – the consequences can be incredibly disruptive and very far-reaching.

Symptoms can include (wait for it – it’s a looong list): allergies, exhaustion, arthritis and other joint pain, muscle pain, headaches, asthma, chronic fatigue, infertility, low blood pressure, sleep issues, ulcerative colitis and other digestive issues…and so it goes on…

You can get a saliva test and I highly recommend it if you are being told you have thyroid issues, because maybe you do, but maybe they are masking an exhausted adrenal system. (Or if you’re already being treated for thyroid issues and you aren’t feeling better – maybe look further.) There are all the usual dietary suggestions – get plenty of rest, exercise, B & C vitamins. Eat protein early in the day and keep grains a minimal part of your diet. Mostly – destress and get good at staying that way.

The stress of dieting

Your body has a lot of things it needs to do with the calories it receives – digest food, heal, warm itself, breathe, think…loads of stuff. What we tend not to realise is that if we limit our calories we are forcing our body to choose – if you’re feeling cold all the time it could just be because you aren’t offering your body enough food to do all those other things AND keep you warm.

So what to do? Well firstly, stop believing that you have to limit calories – I used to think this too! Calories are your energy source, the more you have the more energy you have to burn. And no, I don’t mean junk food – make your calories count – if you fill yourself up on really good nourishing foods you WILL feel full AND have enough energy AND you’ll get all the vitamins these rich nourishing foods can provide. Get some butter on your veggies, fry up some eggs in coconut oil and drink up your bone broth casseroles. Cut out rubbish like sugar and stock your larder with…well, lard doesn’t taste great, but you get the point!

So what else can I do differently?

Meditation, mindfulness, yoga?

Reprioritise?

There are plenty of things to do, plenty of resources around to tell you how, if you are willing. Commit even 10 minutes a day to begin with some breathing or mindfulness exercises. Go sit outside with your feet in the grass and your face in the sun and tell me you don’t feel different.

Astragalus is a great herb to try – it is promoted as the herb to reduce your care factor. Sounds brilliant right?