From Gut-Brain Secrets.
The adrenals are designed to help you get through two types of situations that make the body and mind work harder: routine daily tasks require a higher systemic stress level. And your adrenals summon extra energy and alertness from your backup supply in order to cope with emergency situations.
Normal, daily stresses: Your adrenals help regulate normal, everyday activities, including waking and getting going, staying alert when blood-sugar drops after a meal, standing after squatting, and even shifting to a more intense task. In a normal day, the adrenals are designed to help you overcome significant, but temporary, physical stressors. Everyday activities like these normally don’t put you into an energy debt.
Classic, acute stress: The classic example of acute stress is when a caveman had to fight a saber-toothed tiger in a kill-or-be-killed situation. When that happened, the incident occurred and it was over in minutes. So recovery time from stressful events like these were trivial.
Mental/emotional stress: Much harder on the body are our modern forms of acute and prolonged stress that tend to be more mental/emotional in nature, happen more often, last longer, and lack a physical outlet for expression. Examples would be repeatedly facing gunfire on the battlefield, working in a high-pressure sales job, moving to a new town, finding a new job, going through a breakup, or the death of a loved one.
Important in understanding the body’s stress response, most situations from man’s ancient past requiring adrenal intervention were employed to produce both a physical and mental response. That is, situations of-old were often both physical and mental challenges. For that reason, the adrenal system does not differentiate between physical, mental, or any other type of challenge. It treats all threats the same by releasing the same biochemicals – including stressors that fit into two newer categories: chemical and environmental stresses.
(Modern) Chemical and environmental stressors: Exposure to stressors such as bisphenol-A, artificial light, irregular sleep patterns, temperature extremes, and even high levels of fructose, create a persistent stress response from the adrenals, just like traditional kinds of stress.
Past (and future) stressors: Traumatic events such as early childhood trauma, rape, or war-related stress can permanently hyper-sensitize your stress response, unless/until you successfully process them psychologically. Obsessively worrying about future events, by itself, can chronically raise your baseline stress level.
So whether threats are physical, mental, emotional, chemical or environmental… whether they’re in the past, present or future… whether they’re real or imagined… your adrenals are constantly being tasked with the job of keeping you on top of all the challenges that your body and mind face on a daily and minute-by-minute basis. And the adrenals respond to these extra, sometimes extraordinary, demands on the body and mind by releasing more of the same stress-management chemicals that routine mental and physical challenges employ in order to activate certain mechanisms in the body, while deactivating others.
Key point: All these stressors have a cumulative effect on the adrenals and body. All these stressors “stack up,” one on top of another, to form your total stress load. The sum total of all stresses in your life(style) turn into chemical wear and tear on your body. When any stressor occurs too frequently or too intensely, the persistent presence of stress chemicals disturbs the body’s biochemical balance, which can lead to physical damage to cells, organs, and systems from the increased energy consumption (ATP) and decreased recovery (e.g., sleep).
Emergency energy consumption also tends to borrow energy and alertness from the future, which encourages you to keep borrowing from future reserves in the form of more stimulants to get you through each day, and each situation… or else suffer through an energy shortage we call a crash. Simply put, the use of your adrenals to survive emergency situations like these is increasingly stressful to sustain the longer it continues. And there’s a variety of prices to pay for unrelenting stress in its many forms.
The adrenals activate the stress response through hormones
The adrenal glands are tiny, triangle-shaped organs sitting atop the kidneys. They are the body’s pharmacy, making over fifty hormones that control virtually every endocrine-related function including the stress response, digestion, metabolism, immune system and sexual function. Specifically, the adrenal system makes hormones that help control blood sugar, blood pressure, stomach acid, electrolytes, blood pH, biorhythms such as sleep cycles, inflammation and sexual response.
Stress hormones turn on the body’s “survival mode”
The adrenal system is responsible for releasing the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline (also a neurotransmitter). Both help you cope with stressful situations by diverting resources away from bodily functions that can be postponed, toward organs and functions crucial to your immediate survival. To help you rise to an occasion, cortisol is designed to work in tandem with adrenaline to activate crisis programs. For example
- High cortisol shuts down production of stomach acid, because digesting food is less important than running or fighting for your life.
- Cortisol floods the body with glucose and inhibits insulin production to prevent that glucose from being stashed away in muscles.
- Cortisol directs blood flow away from visceral organs (e.g., stomach, intestines), toward muscles in the extremities so you can fight or flee.
- Cortisol shuts down the immune system, because fighting infection is a longer-range priority than fighting an adversary in front of you.
- Adrenaline raises blood pressure.
- Adrenaline raises alertness and mental acuity.
Together, cortisol and adrenaline prepare the body and mind for survival situations by calling upon every coping mechanism that the body can muster. As you might expect, this causes a number of adverse effects that grow from minor to major the longer they go on. The most important of which is that heightened adrenal activation turns off ordinary operating processes that burn food and make energy. And it turns on “survival mode” processes that store food for later use.
Key point: When you’re in survival mode, the food you eat is not being converted into conventional energy to power everyday processes. Instead, it’s being converted into fat – particularly belly fat – as a way to shortcut digestion. That lack of everyday energy tends to make you feel physically drained, emotionally spent, and mentally cloudy because the body shifts fuel consumption away from regular sources such as ATP, onto cortisol and adrenaline, thereby increasing wear and tear. Cortisol and adrenaline are the biochemicals released by the adrenals that flip the internal switch to either burn food or store it.
Especially important in GAPS conditions, about half the adrenaline released goes straight into the gut, stimulating pathogen growth such as E. coli by some 10,000 times. As a result, adrenal activation and stress hormones contribute to corruption of the microbiome. Cortisol is also the body’s strongest anti-inflammatory, so elevated cortisol suppresses healing. And, as you’re probably aware, over-activation of the adrenal system contributes to heart disease, sleep problems, physical exhaustion and mental burn-out. Yet, this is all when the adrenals are working properly.
Adrenal dysfunction
Mainstream medicine is just learning how to diagnose and treat adrenal dysfunction
Western medicine sometimes calls the inability to make stress hormones “Addison’s disease.” “Adrenal insufficiency,” as it’s also called, is autoimmunity of the adrenals. Other causes and conditions tend to be discounted. Western medicine pretty much dismisses adrenal fatigue as a figment of people’s imagination because (1) doctors don’t have a way to test for adrenal function, (2) they don’t have a drug to treat it, (3) they don’t have a surgery to correct it, and (4) the adrenal glands themselves rarely suffer from disease and dysfunction. Consequently, doctors tend to ignore that which they cannot diagnose or treat.
On the other hand, many alternative healers think the condition they call adrenal fatigue or adrenal exhaustion is just a mild case of Addison’s. Disagreement is common about causes, conditions and names because the body’s stress management systems are still a relatively new science. Medical science has yet to fully understand exactly which imbalances, processes and dysfunctions, coming from which organs and biochemicals, cause which symptoms and diseases. It’s just within the last 15–20 years that leaders in the field have figured out what the body does when it’s working properly, or is trying to do when it can’t make enough energy.
Adrenals malfunction in three different ways. Think of them as
- Arrhythmia. Here, nothing is wrong with the adrenals themselves, but they appear to be malfunctioning because their timing is off, causing surpluses or deficits at inappropriate times in the day.
- Overuse. They’re working properly, but not doing what you want. This is relatively quick and easy to fix (often completely) because there’s nothing physically wrong with the thyroid and adrenals.
- Collapse. They fail to make stress hormones because the thyroid itself is broken. 95% of the time, this is due to an autoimmune attack on the thyroid gland, producing Hashimoto’s Disease.
The three categories of dysfunction have three different causes, and three distinct ways of treating them. So there is no blanket treatment to fix all adrenal or thyroid issues. You can’t just take a thyroid support supplement and hope it will fix your energy issues. You might do exactly the wrong thing for your situation and make it worse.
1. Adrenal arrhythmia
Adrenal arrhythmia occurs when your daily rhythms are out of sync with your local light cycles. It’s caused by a lack of natural sunlight on your eyes and skin, combined with excessive exposure to an altered light spectrum through most glass, glasses, sunglasses or contact lenses – as well as light from screens and artificial light sources. These sources modify or make light that is then unnatural.
When exposed to an altered light spectrum, your biorhythms fall out of sync with your environment due to too much blue light at night, and not enough ultraviolet and infrared exposure during the day. This dysregulates your circadian rhythms by releasing excessive hormones and neurotransmitters at the wrong times of day, thus depleting your stores. At the same time, your system isn’t making biochemicals at full capacity due to lack of natural light. Full spectrum sunlight on the eyes makes biochemicals.
Conclusion: Adrenal arrhythmia is mostly a timing issue of your biochemistry that can be reversed by changing your daily routines.
- Correct your daily cycles of sleep, light, diet, stress level and stimulant intake. Read this book’s sequel, The Mitochondriac Manifesto, for more information about light and seasonal eating.
- Watch the sunrise by looking in the general direction of the sun without glass, glasses or contacts for 30–45 min/day if you’re unwell, 3–4 min/day done regularly. And watch the sunset, if possible. This sets your hormonal and neurotransmitter rhythms for the day.
- Avoid blue-spectrum light emitted by smartphones, computer screens, and LED lights after sundown. They expose you to colors unnatural for that time of day, which de-synchronize your circadian rhythms. The body releases dopamine, cortisol, and adrenaline in response.
- Get apps for your gadgets that shift color balance from blue to red.
- Button shirts to the top or wear a turtleneck to block blue light from hitting your throat area (blue light penetrates the skin 5–8cm, dysregulating the thyroid, which sits just below the surface).
To make it simple, follow Nature’s rules, do what Nature does, and avoid man-made technologies.
Note: when wellness coaches say “blue light” we mean bright white light with a bluish tint.
2. Adrenal overuse
The adrenal system is designed to help you survive the occasional intense situation that doesn’t last very long. However, if you’re like many modern humans, you can’t help but exhaust your adrenals day after day by (1) living in a perpetual state of stress – emotionally, mentally, physically and chemically; (2) not replacing nutrients after your adrenal system uses them up; (3) not getting enough quality sleep with which to renew; and (4) obsessing over social media, drama, smoking, risky behaviors, or worse to make up the deficit. To complicate matters, many people raise their alertness with chemical stimulants such as Ritalin, Adderall or caffeine.
Unfortunately, you have to repay some portion of tomorrow’s energy that you expend today. There’s a price to pay for energy debts and deferred maintenance, because even when stress hormones are being made and used properly, adrenal overuse creates problems such as nutrient depletion, sleep disturbances, weight gain, immune deficiency, and poor regeneration of cells and mitochondria.
“Adrenal fatigue” is a misnomer. For perspective, a leading expert in thyroid and adrenal health, Dr. Alan Christianson, believes “adrenal fatigue” is mis-labeled, or at least misleading because the adrenals are seldom exhausted to the point of incompetence, as the term “adrenal fatigue” suggests. Meaning, the literal description of adrenal fatigue is inaccurate. The adrenals are not fatigued in most cases, just you. The adrenals are still responding the way they should, in most people.
Thus, he and other experts now think the body is designed to debilitate you with cortisol and energy shortages to force you to slow down, recuperate and repair. The body does this by sending (or failing to send) hormonal signals along the “hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis” (HPA axis) that tell the adrenals to cut cortisol production on purpose.
This condition, sometimes described as “HPA axis dysregulation or dysfunction,” is a huge deal because it now affects a majority of people in the Western world to some extent, causing tiredness, “the blahs,” and brain fog. HPA dysfunction is a more accurate term to describe what most people call adrenal fatigue. I’m calling it adrenal overuse.
Recovering from adrenal overuse
Most adrenal dysfunction is caused by poor signaling between the hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid and adrenal glands. In most cases, the adrenals still respond to instructions from the hypothalamus and thyroid. They’re just not getting the right messages to the right organ at the right times because of hormonal disturbances resulting from chronic inflammation, nutrient deficiencies and toxins – on top of complications with sleep cycles, light exposure and circadian rhythm.
Unfortunately for those hooked on modern medicine, there’s no pill or powder you can take to reset your adrenals. Treatment usually involves lifestyle changes such as reducing your stress level at home and work, getting out into nature, sleeping better, reducing your dependence on coffee and stimulants, exercising regularly, and eating better to replenish nutrients that the adrenals need, such as vitamins C, B5, B6 and B12. You need to stop doing the things that exhaust your adrenals, and start doing the things that support them.
Glycogen. Glycogen is the body’s most efficient form of energy. However, it takes 8–14 hours to make it – mostly from carbs. Therefore, you want to concentrate your protein consumption to earlier in the day to minimize blood-sugar spikes. And you want to concentrate your carbohydrate consumption to later in the day to make glycogen while you sleep. This means when you don’t sleep enough, you don’t make as much glycogen, and your body has to run on stress hormones, instead of regular fuels. You can also eat more fiber and green, leafy (alkalizing) vegetables throughout the day to moderate blood-sugar level.
The good news is, adrenal overuse problems are relatively straightforward to solve, considering how debilitating the symptoms can be. Most cases are fixed in under three months using standard treatment protocols. However, be aware of speed bumps such as…
Visceral fat increases cortisol. Belly fat (created by adrenal activation) increases cortisol. Visceral fat, as it’s called, stores cortisone (a weaker version of cortisol). Every day, some of this cortisone is converted into cortisol, and back again, so that extra stress is built into each daily cycle. To put that another way, belly fat adds a certain amount of stress hormone (and timing) to your intrinsic circadian rhythm.
Visceral fat increases stress hormone in circulation, which promotes fat storage. Therefore, fat does more than just store calories. It’s actually a pseudo-endocrine organ that influences hormone levels – just like the thyroid, adrenals and pancreas. The end result being, belly fat itself creates a stress response, in addition to more belly fat.
3. Adrenal collapse (aka “adrenal exhaustion” or “adrenal insufficiency,” which is true dysfunction)
An even bigger problem than the first two conditions is when your adrenal system is completely unable to respond to daily ebbs and flows, no matter how much coffee you drink. In this situation, the adrenals truly don’t work anymore. When this happens, the adrenals can’t make enough cortisol (and sometimes aldosterone) to control essential body functions such as blood pressure, blood sugar and wakefulness. Lack of stress hormones is a far more serious problem to have than adrenal overuse, because a severe shortage of stress hormones causes systemic problems such as chronic fatigue or blood pressure so low that you can blackout just from standing up.
At the heart of this serious condition, the adrenals make most of the hormones that run the body. But when cortisol is not being made, for example, your adrenals also can’t make the other cholesterol-based hormones, including estrogen, progesterone, aldosterone and testosterone. Lack of sex hormones testosterone or estrogen can make it hard for you to feel a sense of vitality.
Equally troubling, one of cortisol’s most important functions is that it shuttles a wide variety of hormones into cells. So if you’re deficient in cortisol, your system may be producing enough hormones, but they can’t get where they need to go, which can impair endocrine-hormone function all over the body. In more serious cases of adrenal collapse, you can’t even respond to daily demands like getting out of bed in the morning or showering. That’s when adrenal collapse can cause physical and mental effects ranging from debilitating to life-threatening.
Adrenal collapse is caused most often by an autoimmune attack on the physiology of the adrenal glands. So it’s treated with autoimmune protocols, such as a healing and sealing the gut lining, gluten and casein elimination diets, and anti-inflammatory efforts.
So adrenal fatigue is not just one thing
It’s usually caused by some combination of mis-timing, overuse and true dysfunction. Therefore, successfully treating adrenal dysfunction may take a bit more understanding and effort to untangle the three forms of impairment that produce similar symptoms. It all starts with knowing what’s really happening in the body when you’re given the blanket diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue.”