How your adrenal fatigue symptoms are holding your energy and mood hostage and impacting your whole outlook on life

I really want to show you how it's not your day-to-day demands that are causing you to feel the way that you do; it's actually adrenal fatigue symptoms that are driving you nuts with stress and overwhelm and anxiety and insecurities and stopping you from living your best life.

The basic fact is the more you do, the more you can do when you're healthy.

So.. the more we do, the more we can do.

So you've probably noticed those days when you're busy, but super productive you actually feel really fuelled by your work. You feel like you're on fire, when you're getting stuff done and completed, and it feels really good. So you feel energized by your work, which is how it should be.

The days that you're stressed, you're anxious, you're rushing, you're overwhelmed, those are the days that you're going to feel drained. Those are the days that you're going to feel tired, and you drag yourself around.

To do stuff you have to really use your willpower to push yourself through.

And it's important to realize that it's adrenal imbalances and not your day-to-day demands because otherwise, we end up shrinking our life.

important to realize it's adrenal imbalances and not your day-to-day demands because otherwise, we end up shrinking our life and feel worse

We end up not doing the things that we love or used to love doing.

I see women who will work less, like go part-time at work, because they can't handle it. They say no to opportunities, stop seeing the people they would normally see, doing the things they would normally do.

Shrinking your life because you feel like it's coming from outside demands when it's not; it's actually an inner experience.

MYTHBUSTERS

First of all, I want to take you through some mythbusters. This is what I hear all the time, and what doctors have told women, and what I've heard from other women, etc.

You don't feel like this because you're getting older.

It's not because you need to go paleo, ketogenic, or cut out carbohydrates.

It's not because you don't exercise enough.

It's not because you have a deficiency of antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication, like Xanax, Zoloft, or Prozac.

It's definitely not all in your head.

And it's certainly not just a part of life that you need to accept.

The reason you feel this way is because your hormones are off kilter. It's impacting women in their thirties, in their forties, in their fifties. I was only 25 when I went through this. So it's a very big problem in women today. It's an epidemic in women today. It's not being diagnosed, and it's not being picked up, which means it's not being addressed. So women are feeling worse and worse and worse, and they're not getting the right support and the right help.

Are your blood tests ‘normal'?

You may have gone to the doctor and had your blood tests done, and he said, “Everything's normal. You're fine. You're healthy.” You know, “healthy,” and you feel like crap, and you know that something's not right.

The reason why the blood tests are not detecting where you're at is that standard blood tests are not picking up what is actually going on in the hormones.

When our system is at sub-optimal function we can stay in that sub-optimal level for years before we have a clinical disease. So a blood test is designed to pick up markers of disease.

We can fly just under the condition or illness radar, but we could be progressing for years before it actually shows up in the blood tests.

Women are far more likely to have their diagnosis missed or to be under-treated. It can take five or more years for women dealing with chronic symptoms of mental fatigue, fatigue, metabolic issues, anxiety, depression and brain fog before they receive a proper diagnosis. This is far too long. This is exactly what happened to me.

And I don't want you to then think that you're not doing something right, that you need to be harder on yourself and exercise more and restrict your eating. We're hard enough on ourselves as it is. We don't need that as well, okay?

So I want to show you what's actually going on and what you need to do, so you don't have to wait five years and struggle for five years. I did it the hard way so you don't have to. So I'm going to show you the easy way.

The biggest hormonal disrupter that we have today is stress. I was at a seminar the other week on women's health and they said still at number one is stress. Stress is affecting us the most.

Never underestimate the power of stress to affect our biology and affect our body and the way that we think.

Stress alters our biochemistry. It's a medical fact, okay. When we're stressed, our body goes into what's called a fight or flight or freeze response. This is basically the stress response.

This response has been with us since our hunter-gatherer days. What this response was designed for was when in our hunter-gatherer days when we were surviving war, extreme temperatures, famine, running away from wild animals. It was our fight or flight or freeze response that kept us alive.

We don't have those dangers today. We don't need that flight or fight response getting our body prepped and ready to run away from a wild animal.

Because today 80% of our stress is mental and emotional stress. We're not surviving extreme temperatures or famine or war in most countries of the world, thank goodness. We are surviving the stress of our job, mortgages, our finances, the future. We've got that non-stop mental loop going in our head. We're hard on ourselves. We feel guilty. We have insecurities. We have our high expectations on ourselves. All of that stuff is constantly tripping our flight or fight response, or our stress response.

Our body is designed to cope with physical stress, not with mental and emotional stress. When we have mental and emotional stress, it communicates to the rest of the body, to every single cell in our body, that we are under stress, and it does that by a hormone. Hormones are the communication point between mind and body, and it impacts our immune system, our digestive system, our reproductive system, our nervous system, and all of our other hormones. Over time when we have high stress, it has this spillover effect. We have way too many stress hormones being produced. Our body was actually designed to have a stress response for 30 minutes every two to three days. That's what we had in our hunter-gatherer days. That's what our bodies were designed to cope with.

But today we have, science has predicted, between 50 to 100 stress responses per day. We are stressed for eight hours of the day, or 12 hours of the day, or 24 hours of the day. Even when we're sleeping we're stressed. It's unrelenting stress on our body that it's not designed to cope with. When those stress hormones get to a certain level, it has a spillover effect. And it has this domino effect on other hormones and systems within the body, eventually causing your symptoms.

The easiest way I can show this, and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail because people don't really find hormones that exciting, but this is my hormone tug of war diagram. 

Cortisol is our main stress, our long-term stress hormone. Now, cortisol is kind of like the bully on the block. It's a really tough hormone. It's really strong and has this ability to take these other hormones offline. These other hormones are our natural anti-anxiety, our natural antidepressant. They naturally regulate our weight. So when we've got excess body fat, it'll increase our metabolism and burn more body fat. Hormones to keep us looking young, feeling young, keep us agile. Hormones to keep us happy, naturally happy.

Cortisol takes those offline.

So you can imagine when they're not there, of course, we're going to feel anxious and stressed, gaining weight and unhappy, and looking older or feeling older than we should be. Over time when the stress is high and unrelenting and unmanaged, over time it leads to what we know as burnout. It's also known as Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome, or HPA Axis Dysfunction. These are all common names that you would have heard, maybe not HPA Axis Dysfunction, that's a new one, that's a more correct way of talking about adrenal fatigue today. Basically what it means is that those glands that produce most of our stress hormones, the adrenal glands, become exhausted. They're basically they have reduced function, which means we have reduced hormones, and therefore we start to feel all the symptoms that you're feeling today.

Eventually, that starts to really change our personality as well.

You may have gone from being a positive person with a really good outlook on life to being kind of withdrawn, not positive anymore but anticipate how things can and might go wrong, feel more overwhelmed, you become more irritable, you feel you have more insecurities pop up, more self-doubts and lacking the confidence you once had.

When this happens over the long term you end up operating from a place of fear and restriction because your body's under so much stress. You operate from fear and restriction, not from freedom, and not from choice . We want to reverse that. Like I said, it is an epidemic in women today. It's one that's not being addressed properly. It's not being treated, and women are going undetected and really struggling on their own; keeping to themselves because they don't know what else to do.

AFS STATISTICS

If you're not sure whether you have adrenal fatigue symptoms, according to Dr. James Wilson who wrote one of the first books on adrenal fatigue said 80% of people in the world have adrenal fatigue syndrome. The WHO (World Health Organisation) has recently recognised burnout as a medical condition, resulting from chronic stress that has not been successfully managed.  It's very common because of our lifestyles today, and we're not correcting our imbalances. To give you one example, one of my clients, Claire, she came in and she is basically superwoman. She was running her own business. She has one child. She is six months pregnant with her second child.

Exhausted. Waking up overwhelmed. Waking up with that mental to-do list. She was just waking up really stressed from the get-go, and it kind of set her scene for the day. She knew she could have been more productive at work, but she was very, very tired. She'd come home and she was so tired, and she still had things to do; had to cook, and get the kids ready  but was really dragging herself around and was really unhappy with how her life was. She also had Hashimoto's. So she was seeing a doctor. She was taking the right medicine for Hashimoto's, but she wasn't feeling any better. The reason being is because she also had adrenal fatigue.

Adrenals and our thyroid are linked. They have a direct relationship. Whatever the adrenals are doing, the thyroid is doing the same thing. So if the adrenal system has kind of broken down, or burnt out, so is the thyroid. So it's not enough to just treat one.

Hormones are like an orchestra. If one instrument is out of tune, or if one instrument isn't there, it affects the entire symphony. Our hormones are all linked. We can't have something happen to one hormone that doesn't happen to the others, and this is a really good example.

I put her on an adrenal reset plan to treat her adrenal fatigue symptoms. We reduced her stress, and she found that she was able to return to work two weeks after having her child because she just felt so good. She had tons more energy. She said she had more energy than she's had in decades. She was able to enjoy her kids more, spend more time playing with her son, and was obviously able to get back to work, and didn't feel overwhelmed with her life anymore. So it was a big result.

The important thing that I want you to take away from this first key secret is to deal with your adrenal fatigue symptoms, not reschedule your life.

Here's some extra reading that will help you understand more about your adrenal fatigue symptoms.

Do You Feel Sleepy Around 2 to 3 pm?

Meltdowns – Why Little Things Set You Off 

Feeling Tired All The Time?