Balance Critical for Adrenal Health

Don’t Ignore the Warning Signs

Life can be very demanding, making stress a common factor in many of our lives. Thankfully our bodies are designed to weather stress through the help of our adrenal glands. But what happens when you have to cope with an inordinate amount of stress that leaves you tired, irritable, and just feeling overall depleted?

Stress has become too common and long periods of stress can create serious consequences that send an abundance of hormones to your adrenal gland. The adrenal gland helps us respond to both internal and external stressors by releasing cortisol. However, if you are releasing cortisol all day, and even for several weeks, eventually the hormone that was designed to help keep your balance will become imbalanced, leaving you feeling depleted.

Thankfully your body has many wonderful ways of letting you know that you are stressed. Exhaustion, irritability and depression, to name a few.

But too often we ignore these signs.

What Happens Next?

You feel burned out and adrenal fatigue kicks in.

I imagine many of you have been told that all you need is to get some rest. Yet when you lie down you can’t sleep. Or you feel physically rested, but emotionally drained.

These are all clear signs that you have overworked your adrenal gland and now everything feels as if it is running on empty.

Some have said that burnout or adrenal fatigue is not a real thing and that you need to just take a vacation, but truthfully it is your hormones telling you that they have had enough. Symptoms of adrenal fatigue in people who have undergone long periods of stress can include:

• Constant exhaustion
• Irritability
• Trouble falling asleep
• Difficulty waking up
• Depression
• Salt and sugar cravings
• Need for excessive amounts of stimulants like caffeine
• Brain fog

Your hormones are essential to your body functioning optimally. If you overtax your adrenal glands with stress, you’re likely to go from running on overload to be being fully exhausted.

Remember the adrenal glands are stressed the most by emotional stress. If you compound that with poor diet and underlying health issues, this can create illnesses.

The biggest way to head this off is by removing or decreasing the stressors and then correcting the hormonal imbalance.

There are ways to manage your demanding life without just going on a long vacation. The reality is that most people in our society are high performers with business or careers, plus families, and all of these many wonderful things are bound to trigger stressors. Learning how to manage your stressors, as well as creating guides for hormonal balance and balanced nutrition, is essential to fully gaining control of adrenal fatigue.

Schedule a call with Dr. Holly Donahue today. We can dive deeper into how I can help you as a high performer overcome adrenal fatigue through hormonal balance, improved nutrition, and stress alleviation tips.