Lifestyle is extremely important in your program for recovery from adrenal fatigue. As early as 1919, physicians pointed out that the influence of lifestyle was paramount in both the creation of and the ultimate recovery from adrenal fatigue (Harrower, 1919). These early writings reported that unless patients changed their lifestyles to reduce the sources of adrenal strain and developed new lifestyles to allow their adrenals to recover, complete healing was seldom seen. I have found the same with the patients in my practice. Elements of lifestyle are frequently the cause and the aggravating factors of adrenal fatigue that stand in the way of healing. When you understand these factors in your own lifestyle, you have the power to recover by making the necessary changes.
One of the first principles in healing is to remove the cause and the aggravating factors of the illness. For example, a wound must be cleaned and disinfected before applying the dressing otherwise the remaining debris and germs will aggravate it and prevent complete healing. The same is true in healing from adrenal fatigue. In most instances, there are lifestyle components that either caused or contributed to the adrenal fatigue and that often continue as aggravating factors. The illustration “Health Drain” shows some of the common components of our lives that make our health go down the drain. Therefore, it is essential to remove the health limiting factors if the adrenals are to recover and heal properly.
For more than seventy-five years we have known that the adrenal glands cannot heal from fatigue unless they have the opportunity to rest. Long periods of bed rest are not feasible for most people, nor are they usually necessary. The particular kind of rest you need when you have adrenal fatigue comes not so much from lying down, but from standing up for yourself, and from removing or minimizing the harmful stresses in your life.
Discovering how you can do this carries a double benefit because a sense of powerlessness or helplessness is the most debilitating and stress inducing emotion there is. Any situation, no matter how bad, is more tolerable and less stressful when you feel you can do something about it; even when doing something about it means changing yourself rather than the situation. It is important that you take yourself seriously and find out what you need to make yourself well. Use this book as a tool to help you decide what and how to change in order to de-stress your body and improve your life.
The following sections explore many of the lifestyle factors that can cause or perpetuate adrenal fatigue and ways that you can eliminate them from your life. Find out what aspects of your life are draining you but then, most importantly, take an active hand in helping yourself back to health by doing what needs to be done to shift the advantage in your direction.
It is important to be able to distinguish which things in your life are contributing to your health and which things are detracting from it. So the first step in helping yourself obtain a lifestyle you love is to make a complete and thorough list of all the things that are beneficial to your life and health, and all the detrimental things in your life.
To help you get clear on this I use the following very simple but informative exercise. Take a piece of paper, date it and draw a vertical line down the center. At the top of the left column put “good for me” and at the top of the right column put a “bad for me.” In the “good” column list all the things that you feel contribute to your health and well being. These can be physical or leisure activities, eating patterns, exercises, relationships, work, family, emotional patterns, attitudes, beliefs, dietary supplements, and any other things that make you feel good and contribute to your sense of well being.
Do not list things that “should” be good for you, or which you do not really find pleasurable or beneficial. Do not idealize and put what ought to be good for you. Reach into your heart and health and find what makes you feel good and what you love in life. List all things that bring you pleasure and add to your life, even if you haven’t done them for a while. In the “bad” column, list everything that seems detrimental to your health and well being. Again, they can be physical, emotional, attitudinal; they may be work or family related situations, relationships, eating and drinking patterns, or anything you are doing or are involved with that is not good for you.
If some aspects of a situation are good and some bad, separate them out. For example, you may have a job that you love, but the grueling hours and the fast pace are exhausting. In this case you put your job in the “good” column and the excess hours and high pressure demands in the “bad” column.
Use as many sheets of paper as you need. Take as much time as necessary. You may have to do this in 2 or 3 sessions, but really look to see what is working and what is taking away from your life, until you have a complete inventory of the good and the bad. There is no maximum or minimum number of items to put in either column. This is not a test. There is no pass or fail, no right or wrong answers. The more forthcoming you can be with information, the more you can help yourself. The following is an example of a Good For Me/Bad For Me chart.
Review each column and then circle the five most significant entries in each column. Rank each of those five from 1 to 5, with 1 being the most important and 5 being the least. Now go back to the top 5 in the “bad” column. Identify exactly what about these items is so hard on you. Look at them under a microscope until you have a clear picture of the main things in your life that are negatively affecting your health. Select the worst one from the “Bad” column (the one you ranked number 1). See clearly how much it is detracting from your life. Commit to eliminating this item from your life. Devise a plan for accomplishing this and the date by which it will be done. Write down your resolve and put it in some private place you will see often. If it is too personal or you do not want it seen by others, make a symbol to remind you of your commitment and place the symbol on your mirror or somewhere you see several times a day. Be reasonable, but be committed to your happiness.
After you have eliminated its negative influence on you, go to #2 on your “Bad” list and do the same. Continue until the first five have been eliminated or rendered powerless in your life. If you get stuck, you might want to read the section “Three Things You Can Do.”
Now go to the “Good” column. Note the five things you have circled. Review your life to see how you can do more of the five things you have circled or things like them. The idea is to have more and more good things in your life as you eliminate or render powerless the negative ones, tipping the balance in favor of a life you love to live. Write these ideas and your action plans down in detail because you will be referring back to them later in the “Three Things You Can Do” section.
The major symptom that is most disturbing for anyone suffering from adrenal fatigue is indeed fatigue. In most cases of adrenal fatigue, there are life situations that are draining, such as being around a certain person or group, in a particular building or environment, at work or at home or in some other specific situation that leaves you feeling excessively tired or stressed. Therefore, finding out what drains you and tires you out will help uncover the external factors using up your adrenal resources.
These external factors are what I call the energy robbers. Imagine your energy being like water in a barrel. If the barrel has holes in it, then more water has to be continually poured into it in order to keep the barrel full. The more holes or the larger the holes, the more difficult it is to keep the barrel full. Energy robbers are like holes in the barrel preventing you from being full of energy. It would seem silly to keep demanding more and more energy from your body instead of just plugging as many of the holes as possible. Every time you eliminate or minimize one of these energy robbers in your life, it is like plugging one of the holes in the barrel, allowing your energy reserves to begin to rebuild. As you become aware of what is robbing you of your energy and make the necessary changes, you will see significant differences in your energy levels. Freeing yourself from the energy robbers in your life is much easier once you have identified them. Over my twenty-two years of practice I have found the following simple procedure to be one of the most useful methods of helping my patients gain insight into the energy robbers and fatigue producing factors in their lives.
On a fresh sheet of paper make a heading “Energy Robbers” and list everything and everyone in your daily life that takes away your energy. Many of these will be the same as the items you listed in the “bad” column of the “Separating the Good from the Bad and the Ugly” exercise, but in this one look at your life in terms of what makes you feel more tired or worn out. What or whom do you feel drained around? It can be anything from a food to a perfume, an activity, a nagging memory, a co-worker or a spouse. It may be a building, a room or a situation. There may be many heads to this dragon but it is worth the effort. The following are areas where I often find energy robbers in a patient’s life.
Energy Robbing People: As you go about your day, notice if there are certain people in your life that seem to make you feel more tired, listless, helpless, frustrated, angry or fatigued when you are around them. It may be a casual acquaintance, a social friend, or even a relative, spouse or parent. People you feel drained by or feel worse after coming into contact with are energy suckers (robbers) in some way. These people usually do not intentionally drain your energy. In fact, they are seldom aware that they are having that effect. It is not necessary at the moment to explore the reasons why they deplete you but just to become aware of who drains your energy. Some people can be energy suckers at one time, and not at others. Try to be sensitive to when this is occurring. There are some people you have to test the water with each time you come into contact with them. Sometimes you feel okay in their presence, other times you are drained by them.
Being aware of the energy suckers in your life will allow you to change how you interact with them. Changing your social contacts is sometimes the key to tipping the scales in your favor for recovery. No matter how many right things you put into your body and your lifestyle, their positive effects can be undermined by too much contact with people who are energy suckers. Therefore, if you look at your life and you find that energy suckers are a factor, it is important to do something about it. If they are people you know casually or have little contact with, you should consider eliminating them altogether from your life. If you find that someone is robbing you of your energy during a particular interaction, end your contact as quickly as possible at that time.
It is more difficult when the energy robbers are people you are very involved with. If it is a spouse you can comfortably talk to, tell him that there are certain times he takes away your energy and that during those times you need to minimize your contact with him. You might work out a signal to let him know when he is robbing you of your energy so he can stop. Or if it is someone you cannot easily communicate with, which is in itself a sign of a probable energy sucking situation, you must do what you can on your own. If this is pervasive throughout your relationship, you should rethink this relationship. Patients often tell me that they feel guilty for minimizing their contact with friends or family members even when that person is robbing them of their energy. But it is important for you to realize that nobody has a right to your energy. Your energy is your energy to use to stay alive and healthy. The same is true for every other person.
For example, I had a patient who was suffering from severe adrenal fatigue and was finding it difficult to recover. After doing the “Energy Robbers” exercise, she discovered that she had several energy suckers in her life. She felt guilty if she did not have regular contact with these people and continued to listen to their long stories of woe and hardship on the telephone. Unfortunately, the calls occurred daily so she was continually drained by her contact with these people, including her mother. For this woman, part of her prescription was to eliminate contact with these energy suckers, at least for the time being, and to absolutely minimize contact with her mother. In order to facilitate this, she monitored her calls and picked up only those that were necessary and did not answer or respond to calls from the energy suckers. She notified them that, as part of her doctor’s orders, she had to limit her social contacts and phone calls but that, if it was all right with her doctor, she would contact them at a later date. With her mother she no longer took direct calls, but communicated with her briefly on the telephone, only when necessary. As part of my instructions to her, she was not to talk to her mother for more than three minutes at a time and only twice per week. If her mother started to drain her during those telephone conversations, she was to say that the conversation was making her feel bad and that she needed to go. In addition, this woman worked on ridding herself of her own sense of shame and guilt so that she would no longer be vulnerable to emotional manipulation and would, in the future, choose friends she felt good around. Although these energy suckers were not the major factors causing her adrenal fatigue, until they were removed, she was not able to recover.
Energy Robbing Work and Home: If you feel weakened or de-energized by home or work conditions, it is usually specific aspects of these that are the energy robbers, not the entire situation. Particular duties, tasks, hours, environmental factors or people may zap your energy. You might feel great while working with clients but exhausted while preparing reports, or full of energy outdoors but tired soon after you get to work.
Sometimes the solution needs to be rather unconventional. For example, I know of one company president who was overwhelmed with work. He identified phone calls as being one of the chief energy robbers in his life. It was not so much that each phone call was draining him, but that the calls so frequently interrupted his other tasks that it was hard to get things done. His solution, though radical, was to not answer the phone at all. Instead, he let the answering machine take all of his messages. He set aside two prescribed times during the day to return phone calls, and returned them as briefly as possible. Whenever possible, he delegated the return phone call to someone else in his office to further minimize the negative impact of the task that drained him.
Energy Robbing Environment and Food: You might think of the environment as the great outdoors but the environment that concerns us in this book is what is all around you. It includes things like the lighting in your home and workplace, cooling and heating, air quality, the fabrics, fragrances and cosmetic preparations you wear, and the many other details of your daily surroundings. These factors and the particular foods you eat can be serious energy robbers that drain your adrenal resources. If you feel groggy or tired in particular locations or clothing, or after eating certain foods, or around some odors and fragrances, then examine which foods and environmental factors are energy robbers for you. Removing or changing the offending items can do a lot to alleviate these body burdens and free up your energy.
Now that you are more aware of what and who is taking your energy, we can talk about some ways to deal with them. The most valuable thing I learned in Psychology 101 is that there are three things that you can do when you are in a difficult situation.
(1) You can change the situation.
(2) You can change yourself to fit (adapt to) the situation.
(3) You can leave the situation.
An important preliminary step to healing your adrenals is to take a close look at your life with the purpose of identifying what is draining you and to pinpoint which factors worsen the problem and which relieve it. You have already done this with the help of the exercises from the previous chapters: the questionnaire, the health history timeline, separating the good from the bad and the ugly, and locating energy robbers.
The next step is to use this information to decide whether you can (1) leave the situation(s), (2) adapt yourself to the situation(s), or (3) adapt the situation(s) to you in order to actively change this negative to a neutral or a positive. Leaving is often not possible or appropriate and is a decision that only you can make, but this book may help you to see what is possible and appropriate to eliminate from your life so that you can move forward to regain your health. Most of the following sections in this chapter are devoted to showing you the many possible ways you can effectively use the second and third options to recover from, and prevent further, adrenal fatigue. You can use the help of friends and family or any resource you can think of to make the necessary changes, but decide now, as you go through this book, what you are going to do about it. I cannot emphasize enough how important your decision to act is.
Remember that stresses are additive and cumulative. Removing or neutralizing your largest source of stress will make a very significant difference to your adrenal glands and to your health and well being. Most of the time, if you take care of the big ones, the smaller ones will take care of themselves. Your body has a natural ability to handle stress and remain healthy. In fact, a certain amount of stress is beneficial. It is only when the stresses are overwhelming in quantity, duration or intensity that the systems in your body start to break down.
Let me illustrate how taking action to change the energy robbers in your life works with a couple of examples from my own practice. Both involve abusive relationships as major contributors to their adrenal fatigue, but each had a different solution.
Stephanie was a patient who came to me for a myriad of complaints, including most of the symptoms of adrenal fatigue. She was in a difficult relationship. Her husband frequently abused her and she blamed herself, believing that her own inadequacies were the reason for his abusiveness. After completing the energy robbers exercise, she saw that self-blame and worrying about her husband’s reactions were taking up most of her energy. She realized then that even though she was not perfect, she did not deserve to be so badly treated. This insight allowed her to recognize that although she loved her husband, his abusiveness was destroying her. Stephanie had no idea where else she could go with her two children but her new understanding gave her the courage to search for alternatives. She found that the local police help find shelters for and protect women and children in her situation. She first tried asking her husband to quit his physical abuse but found no cooperation there. So one day while he was at work, she and the children went to a secret safe house where they were protected. She took part in re- education and self-esteem courses, changed jobs and, with the help of therapy, saw how she had picked this abusive relationship to confirm her own sense of inadequacy and guilt. Working through this, she became a happier and much less stressed woman. She was able to establish a new, non-abusive life in which she felt healthier physically as well as emotionally and psychologically. Stephanie successfully employed all three options for change: she left, she changed her situation and she changed herself once she empowered herself to act. As a result her life improved and her adrenal fatigue lessened greatly.
Another patient in a similar situation had quite a different response. Jeannie was a petite woman. She and her husband were pig farmers, but both of them also held other jobs. Jeannie would occasionally come into the office with marks on her face and body. Once when I asked her about this she confided in me that financial stress and her husband’s abusiveness were causing her adrenal fatigue. Whenever the stress became too much for him, he would get drunk and then take out his frustrations on her physically. He was never violent when he was sober, so I asked Jeannie if she would have a serious talk with him about his abusiveness. He must understand that the abuse had to end, she would not tolerate it any longer. When I saw her a few months later she was feeling much more energetic and less tired. Her face was bright and sparkly and I knew that something had happened to improve her health.
When I asked her what had changed, she innocently said, “Doctor, the last time I was here, I heard what you said about getting Tom’s attention and making him know that I was serious. One night after he came home from drinking and chased me around the table a couple times, he went in and fell asleep on the bed. It was then that I remembered your words. I knew that I had to get his attention and he had to know that I was serious or things would never change. Even though he was drunk, I knew it had to be tonight or I might never have the courage to do anything again. So I went to the bed where he was passed out on his back, and I hit him square in the face with a cast iron frying pan. He woke up with his eyes as big as saucers and I said, ‘Tom, do I have your attention?’ He nodded his head yes. I said, ‘Tom, you can’t keep on doing this to me. Do you understand?’ He nodded his head yes with big ups and downs. Then I said ‘I hope so, because Tom if you ever do this to me again I don’t know what I’m going to do next time, do you hear me?’ Again, he nodded his head up and down and then I walked back into the kitchen. I felt a lot better. We never mentioned it again and I don’t know what he told his workers the next day when he went in with his face all black and blue, but Tom’s been a different man ever since.”
Now I would never have advised anyone to do what she did and it was certainly far from what I had imagined her doing. However, in her own way, Jeannie changed herself through regaining a sense of power in her life and changed her situation by taking effective action. What she did helped her to reverse her debilitating adrenal fatigue. She loved her husband but was being brutalized by him. She was being physically and emotionally drained by her sense of helplessness and powerlessness in her situation. What is important is that she empowered herself and took action. Hopefully, some other less violent action would have been equally as effective.
Let us look at some stress reducing ways to adapt to a situation that cannot currently be changed. There are a number of popular techniques made available in books, audio programs and seminars for deflecting the negative influences around you. Many of these involve using your imagination and sense of humor. Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) offers many effective exercises for altering your perception, and thus your feelings, about a person or situation. For example, you might picture an intimidating person dressed in a diaper instead of a suit, distort his face in your mind, or make his nose lengthen, eyes widen and ears grow while singing very softly to yourself “M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e”. This is especially useful with an unpleasant boss. Or you might put up an imaginary shield between you and the other person so that his energy bounces away from you and back towards him, making him feel bad instead of you. Often when you change the way you relate to a person or situation, you undergo a process called reframing. Although the term “reframing” was coined by NLP, the technique has been used since humans developed imagination.
Leslie was a bright, energetic physician who had just completed ten years of research on a new treatment for TB, when she had her “day in hell.” On her way to Dallas to meet with a group of investors about funding her TB project, her car broke down and she had to hitchhike to the airport. Just after the plane took off she realized she had left her presentation in the stranger’s car and, as a result, she lost her bid with the investors. To top it off, when she returned home that night she discovered her car had been stolen from the roadside.
The next morning she could barely crawl out of bed. She thought she must be sick, but in the following weeks her energy continued to be so low she had to drag herself through each day. She could not seem to concentrate or focus on her work, she had trouble sleeping even though she was so tired she was ready to fall into bed by 8 PM, and she started putting on weight. Everything seemed like a chore and she felt so discouraged about her project, she considered quitting.
Then one sleepless night as she sat in a tired stupor in front of her TV, she heard a man talking about a “near death experience” he had had after being struck by lightning. What got Leslie’s attention was how enthusiastic and grateful for his life this guy was, despite some overwhelming health problems resulting from his accident. He said that the most important thing he had learned from his experience is that each person’s life, and how he or she lives it, matters. This really struck home with Leslie. Over the next few days she began looking at her difficulties differently, as information about where she was off- track in her life rather than as an overwhelming force knocking her down. What if she said “Yes!” to whatever life threw her way instead of only to the things that went her way? Using this new attitude she saw that she had too much ego wrapped up in her project and that her work obsession had alienated her from other people and activities she enjoyed. She had become impatient, demanding, inflexible and unrealistic in her expectations of herself.
Using these insights and some others, Leslie changed her approach to her work and her personal life. She began to regain her energy, focus, and enthusiasm as she started taking better care of herself and reconnecting with coworkers and friends. She rewrote the prospectus for her project, with the thought in mind that she would consider every opportunity that came up rather than pushing for just one big venture. This eventually resulted in a very satisfactory partnership with a group of investors who shared her interest in improving healthcare in developing countries.
Several years later Leslie thought back on her “day in hell” and with amazement realized it had been one of the luckiest days in her life. She would never forget how much better she started to feel in every way once she learned to look for the opportunities in even the worst difficulties.
Have you ever looked at one of those pictures containing a hidden image? At first you look and look from every angle, but all you can see is the regular picture. Then suddenly your focus shifts, the hidden image appears and you see it so differently that it becomes impossible not to see it that way. Reframing is a similar process of changing focus in which new information and/or a new point of view alters the way you see something. When you change how you see something you also change how your body responds to it. That is why one of the most effective ways to lessen the stressful effects of an unavoidable, difficult situation is to reframe or refocus your perception of the situation. This often allows you to adapt yourself to the situation in a more positive way or gives you a key to changing the situation for the better. In the story above Leslie reframed several traumatic events that had stressed her beyond her capacity and exhausted her adrenals. This worked so well for her that she was able to completely recover from her adrenal fatigue. Leslie’s story demonstrates that it is possible to look at something that seems completely negative as something positive and have your body respond accordingly. It takes some imagination and effort but reframing can literally be a lifesaver.
Sometimes, the way circumstances unfold allows us to reframe miserable experiences into beneficial ones (like finding out that a negative lab test result was an error, giving you a new lease on life). However, it is usually up to us to “turn lemons into lemonade” by consciously altering how we see our difficulties in order to experience them as something better (just as Leslie did by using the mistakes she made as keys to unlocking the good things in her life). If we wait around hoping life will present us with a series of happy endings we will probably be disappointed. However when we choose to use reframing techniques to shift our perceptions about situations that have been wearing us out with stress, we empower ourselves to stay healthy. We change how our bodies actually experience and respond to these situations. The psychological changes produce physiological changes that directly affect our health.
Many times, changing the impact of a situation is not as difficult as you imagine it will be. If you look at a situation from a different angle or allow your attitudes or beliefs about it to change, quite often the stress and tension that the situation provokes will begin to diminish. For example, if you go to work every day and think your boss hates you, or you dread going because of the unpleasant people you work with, you are really seeing yourself as the victim in this situation. Instead, you could decide that this is really a master’s training course on how to handle difficult people that you are taking while looking for another job. This way you can benefit from studying these people and your reactions to them.
Changing your responses puts you back in control of the situation. You can then pick one reaction each week that you want to change, or somehow diffuse, and continually work at mastering yourself so you are no longer a victim. In other words, you turn it into an opportunity for getting something you want or need instead of allowing it to be an obstacle to what you want or need. Each time you lose your temper or get uptight, instead of blaming or criticizing yourself, realize that you need more practice in deflecting other people’s negativity and maintaining a positive emphasis on your own perceptions and goals.
The positive changes you make will give you more confidence that you can actually find a work situation that you would enjoy; something you might have thought was impossible a few months before. Remember we are not required to sell our souls in order to work. That is a belief that some of us hold and, as a result, we find ourselves working for companies that demand it.
It surprises many people to discover that not only is it possible to change a belief about something but that changing the belief often changes the situation. If, for example, you believe you must exhaust yourself at work in order to get ahead, then you are in a real bind. The only way you can win is to lose. If you win at your job, you lose with your health and if you are not exhausted, you must not be doing your job.
A belief is like an internal equation you live by. In this example if you can replace your equation that job success = exhaustion with an equation like job success = focus with relaxation, then new possibilities can arise for you. In the first equation you have a sense of powerlessness and your job controls you; in the second equation you are empowered to have much more control over yourself and your job experience. What you believe (your equation) about success in this case governs your freedom to choose work attitudes and behavior that either lead to health or to debilitation and possibly to actual success or failure. For example, if you have to work late some evenings, you can set a limit on how much is reasonable for you to finish and how many extra hours you are willing to put in to meet your job goals. Then while doing the work you can use techniques like deep breathing to stay focused and relaxed. In a relaxed state, you will usually work more effectively than you do when you put yourself under the gun, so you might even get the job done faster. The important result for your health is that you can do whatever you have to do with less stress.
Reframing Exercise I: Turning Lemons into Lemonade
Here is a simple set of exercises to help you decrease your internal stress load by reframing.
1) Write down negative self-talk: For two days pay attention to your self-talk (the things you say to yourself but do not speak out loud). Notice, in particular, the negative messages you give to your self and the things you tell yourself when you are upset. Jot these things down in a single column on a piece of paper. It is easier to keep track if you carry a little notebook with you. For example, Jane ate three doughnuts for breakfast and then thought of herself as fat and ugly with no willpower, so she wrote down:
fat
ugly
no will power
2) Scoring: After the two days, sit down with your list and add up how many negative messages you gave yourself. This will give you an idea of how much energy you are putting into making yourself feel bad. Anything over 2 or 3 a day is wearing a negative groove in your mind. Then count how many times you gave yourself a particular message (for example, Jane told herself she is fat 10 times) and mark that total beside each message. Using those totals, rank your messages from most frequent to least frequent. This will give you a clearer idea of what you feel the most stressed about. In our example, Jane was in a difficult relationship with food and her self-image.
3) Discovering what you want: Across from the negative message, write it’s opposite in positive terms. For example, Jane wrote slim next to fat, beautiful next to ugly and strong will power next to no will power. Now look at the top 5 messages in your positive list and think about what would be different about your life if all, or most, of the things in this positive list were true. This will help you to understand what it is that you want in your life that you currently do not feel you have. For example, when Jane thought about being slim, beautiful and having lots of will power, she realized it would make her feel more in control of her own life (more powerful), respected by other people and more lovable. What she really wanted was empowerment, respect and love but she had been focusing instead on her appearance and eating habits. In a way this gave her some sense of control in her life because these were more tangible things to deal with. Now write down what your lists reveal that you really want in your life that you currently do not have.
4) Reframing: The next step is to look at how you can reframe the troublesome areas of your life so that they can start giving you what you want, instead of what you do not want. For example, after writing down what she wanted, Jane decided that the best place to start was to find a way to get respect and love through her relationship with food. This was the most difficult and frustrating area of her life at the moment. She began to see that her body was like a child depending on her care, rather than an out of control tyrant. When she felt cravings for fattening, unhealthy foods she recognized that her body was sending her a signal that she should listen to, just as she would respond to a child crying.
5) Act according to your reframed perception: Once you have reframed that difficult situation, begin interpreting everything that happens in that situation according to your new positive framework and then act accordingly. In the example of Jane, instead of trying to either suppress or give in to her cravings, she used cravings as opportunities to discover what she needed at that moment so she could take the appropriate action. She may have needed food, or she may have needed exercise, or rest, or a deep breath, or to speak her mind at home or work. By using food cravings as an aid rather than an obstacle to getting what she wanted, Jane found her relationship with food improved tremendously. She began by reframing her perception of her body from tyrant to dependent child. This transformed her eating habits into an opportunity to learn how to give herself what she really wanted rather than a reason for not getting what she wanted. By treating her body with love and respect she ended up empowered to find the things she wanted in other areas of her life as well. Reframing shifts your focus from the wall to the doorway.
Reframing Exercise II: Act As If
This is a much shorter exercise and should be done in the spirit of play. It will help you to loosen up your perceptions about your life. Imagine that you have a magic wand that can change one, and only one, thing about any situation. For example, when you go in to work tomorrow, you will think of yourself as a millionaire who does not have to work but chooses to; or the next time you find yourself getting enraged behind a slow driver during rush hour, you will transform her in your mind into your beloved aunt who told you wonderful stories when you were little. Sometimes even the most outrageous and ridiculous images can help begin to dissolve the negative associations you have with problem areas in your life. Have fun with this exercise and do it every day.
Reframing Exercise III: Up in Smoke
The purpose of this exercise is to help you let go of whatever it is you are holding on to too tightly so that a new perspective has a chance to emerge. You will need a pencil, three small pieces of paper, a candle and/or matches and a small fire proof container or surface.
Light the candle if you have it. On the first piece of paper write down in a few words one source of unhappiness, a problem or a regret that you have in your life right now. Take a moment to just hold that thought in your mind and become aware of all the feelings you have about it. Then hold the end of the paper in the candle or match flame and drop it into the container. Watch and make sure it burns up completely. Then take a deep inhalation and as you exhale slowly, exhale that problem out of your body, let it go.
On the next piece of paper write down in a few words one change that you believe has to happen before you can be happy right now. Take a moment to just hold that thought in your mind and become aware of all the feelings you have about making the change and where your belief about it comes from. Then hold the end of the paper in the candle or match flame and drop it into the container. Watch and make sure it burns up completely. Then take a deep inhalation and as you exhale slowly, exhale that belief out of your body, let it go.
On the third piece of paper write down in a few words one thing that would be different about your life if you were happy. Take a moment to just hold that thought in your mind and become aware of how you feel about it. Then hold the end of the paper in the candle or match flame and drop it into the container. Watch and make sure it burns up completely. Then take a deep inhalation and as you exhale slowly, exhale that expectation out of your body, let it go. Just spend a few moments quietly listening to your breath and enjoying the peace. You may find that you will see things differently after this exercise.
The following exercises open the door for you to make use of another very important aid to healing from adrenal fatigue, relaxation.
The Relaxation Response: Learning to relax is another way to adapt yourself to difficult situations with less stress and debilitation. People tend to think of leisure activities as relaxation. However, physiological relaxation is a set of specific internal changes that occur when your mind and body are calm. It is not the same as sleep, rest or having fun. Physiological relaxation is the one internal state that can protect your body from the harmful effects of too much stress. Without a doubt it is extremely important to your health. Although it can occur in a wide variety of circumstances (ranging from athletic competitions to meditation), it rarely occurs spontaneously in modern life.
In the late 1960’s a Harvard cardiologist named Herbert Benson, MD began a series of studies investigating the physiological changes that take place in meditators while they are meditating. He called these changes collectively the relaxation response. From these studies he discovered that no matter how the relaxation response is elicited, the resultant internal changes are quite consistent. The body shifts from sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system dominance; breathing, heart rate, and oxygen consumption slow down; muscles relax; the brain predominantly generates the slower alpha waves; and blood pressure may drop. These changes occur within a few minutes of beginning an activity that produces the relaxation response, whereas they happen very gradually over hours while sleeping and often not at all while engaging in a leisure activity. Of particular relevance to adrenal fatigue recovery is that during the relaxation response, stimulation of your adrenal glands diminishes so they can rest and, in addition, all the tissues in your body become less sensitive to stress hormones secreted by your adrenal glands. This means that every part of your body has a chance to return to normal and recuperate instead of being constantly on red alert.
Methods for producing the relaxation response are described in detail in many widely available books and courses. Effective techniques include most forms of meditation, yoga, ta’i chi, qi gong, guided imagery, biofeedback and deep breathing, among others. I suggest you find a class nearby because nothing can replace a good teacher. However the following simple exercises are known to reliably elicit the relaxation response with practice and will get you started. All of them are centered on your own breathing for two reasons: you always have your breathing available to focus on, and slow, deep breathing turns off the alarm signal that drives your adrenal glands to overwork. The more you practice these exercises, the quicker and easier it will be to experience physiological relaxation with all its mental and physical benefits. If you are suffering from adrenal fatigue it is essential that you learn at least one of these methods and incorporate it into your life.
Relaxation Response Exercises
1) Belly-breathing: This is the most natural kind of breathing, although it may feel unfamiliar initially. If you have ever watched a baby or an animal breathing you have seen belly-breathing; the belly rather than the chest expands and contracts. This allows the air to reach the lower part of your lungs where there is a rich blood supply and it triggers the relaxation response within a few minutes. It is just about impossible to be tense and belly-breathe at the same time.
Take 10 minutes when you will not be interrupted. Either lie or sit on a comfortable surface that fully supports your body. Place your hand palms down on your abdomen, just below your navel. Close your eyes and, at first, just pay attention to your breathing without trying to change it; listen to the sound of it, feel it moving in and out of your nose and throat, notice how far down into your body it seems to go. Then imagine that you have a balloon inside your lower belly, under where your hands are. As you inhale, try to inflate that balloon; as you exhale, let the balloon deflate. Do not expand your chest as you inhale, just your belly. It is best to breathe through your nose for this exercise but if for some reason you cannot, then it is okay to breathe through your mouth. Continue inflating and deflating the balloon for at least 5 minutes. Bellybreathing may feel awkward or forced the first few times you try it but pretty soon it will feel quite natural. After all, this is the way you used to breathe when you were little.
2) Slowing down your breath: This is a very simple method that you can use even when you are in the midst of doing something else. Whenever you notice you are feeling tense and uptight, check and see how you are breathing. Most people under stress either alternate holding their breath with taking barely perceptible short breaths, or take rapid shallow breaths. After you become aware of your own breathing, consciously relax your belly and slow down your breathing. It works best if you focus on slowing down your exhalation rather than your inhalation. With each exhalation you can say to yourself, “slow down.” That is all there is to it – simple but surprisingly effective!
3) Counting your exhalations: This is a variation on slowing down your breath that should be done when you can set aside 10 minutes of time to focus on it. Get comfortable in a relatively quiet place and begin bellybreathing. This time count slowly from 5 down to 1 with each exhalation. Your mind will probably wander many times, but each time you catch your attention drifting, just calmly bring it back to counting from 5 to 1 during each exhalation. Do this for at least 5 minutes. When you can keep your attention on your breathing for 5 minutes, you can move on to deeper meditation methods.
4) Repeating a mantra or affirmation: Spiritual disciplines have traditionally used repeated phrases or sounds for prayer and meditation. Gregorian chants and the rosary are examples from the western tradition. The mantra, a specially chosen sound/phrase used in meditation, is an example from the eastern tradition that has become popular in the west through Transcendental Meditation (TM). It seems that the repetition of particular kinds of sounds, words or phrases is a very effective way to clear your mind and trigger the relaxation response when practiced daily. You can get many of the benefits of physical and mental relaxation from this method yourself, even just using a sound, word or phrase you choose yourself.
First you need to choose a word, phrase or sound that is calming to you. Some examples that other people have chosen are, “relax,” “peace,” “I am still,” “I release the past,” “I open my heart,” “Om,” and so on. Take 15-20 minutes in a quiet place where you will not be disturbed. Sit or lie down with your back straight and close your eyes. Focus your attention either between your eyebrows (mind center) or in the middle of your chest (heart center). Allow your breathing to slow down and deepen. When you feel settled, begin repeating your word/phrase/sound out loud or silently. You can repeat it on each inhalation and on each exhalation. Your mind will wander many times, but each time it does just gently bring it back to your phrase. You may find yourself frequently falling asleep at first, but keep coming back to the exercise. Do this for at least 15 minutes once or twice a day and you will be amazed at the change in how you feel.
5) Progressive relaxation: This is a particularly good exercise for you if you have a lot of stress related aches and pains or if you think you cannot relax. With practice it trains your body to release tension and relax more easily.
This exercise takes about 10-20 minutes and is best done lying down. Some people use it to help themselves fall asleep. Take a few slow breaths to get settled and then, starting with your toes, first tighten the muscles in your toes as tight as you can, hold for about 10 seconds and then relax your toes. Next tighten up the muscles in your feet, hold for 10 seconds, and then relax. Continue repeating this procedure all the way up your body until one by one every part of your body has been tensed and then relaxed: calves, knees, thighs, buttocks, hips, abdomen, back, chest, hands, arms, shoulders, upper back, neck, face, scalp. After you have completed this, imagine a wave of relaxation rolling up your body each time you inhale and imagine this wave washing all tension out of your body each time you exhale. Do this for a few minutes and then just rest, breathing slowly. You will find that the relaxation you experience with this exercise will get deeper with practice.
6) The Quiet Pond: Have you ever stood beside a quiet pond away from buildings and people. If you have, you know how spending some time by the pond, letting everything else fade as you take in the full experience of the pond, just seems to cause all your cares and burdens to slide down off your shoulders and slip away. It is amazing how refreshing a few minutes beside a pond can be. If you have not had that experience, maybe you have had one of your own; a place you can go that is so peaceful, comforting and renewing, it is hard to leave.
I believe everyone has the capacity to carry their own peaceful pond around inside them and, with practice, access it at will. If you have such a place, take time to recall it in your mind daily. Find your quiet pond every day, even if it is for only a few minutes or even for a few breaths. Take time for relaxation every day. When you associate the feelings you have about your quiet place and bring those feelings of quiet peacefulness into your consciousness, you are doing more than feeling good. You are helping establish balance in your nervous system. You are activating the part of the nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system that is responsible for healing and repair. Calling forth those images and feelings, even briefly, helps offset the stress building up inside.
If you are able to do this at a specific time each day, your body will soon know when it is time and will begin to bring forth the image and the feelings without any conscious effort on your part. I used to meditate at one time during the day but then switched to another time. It took my body a few days to switch, but during the transition time I could feel it preparing to meditate a few minutes before the old time was near. If you can return to your quiet inner pond at approximately the same time every day, you will soon receive help in relaxing from your unconscious. Find your quiet pond deep inside where you can refresh yourself daily regardless of where you are, what you are doing or what is going on around you.
Unstructured Time
In addition to learning to produce the relaxation response, it is important to schedule some unstructured time into every week (every day if you can). The idea of resting one day a week has long been part of our Western culture, but in modern life it seldom happens. What I mean by unstructured time is a period of a few hours or more during which you do not have any planned activities or goals to accomplish. You can spend this time doing whatever you feel like without worrying about being productive or about what other people think. You can putter around the house, take a leisurely stroll or do anything that you enjoy, although it is best not to spend it watching TV or sleeping. This unstructured time gives you an emotional and mental break from the constant striving and measuring of productivity that is driving your adrenals to exhaustion.
Vacations
Taking some time off every year to rest, renew and enjoy yourself pays big dividends to your health and well-being, if not to your finances. Vacationing one to two weeks twice a year and traveling to somewhere new at least once a year can refresh your body as well as your mind and spirit.
Relaxation leads to improvement of another important element in the healing process, adequate deep sleep.
Sleep is very important to full adrenal recovery but the twist is that sleeplessness is sometimes one of the signs of adrenal fatigue. In any case, how and when you sleep will affect your level of adrenal fatigue or replenishment.
When to Sleep
For people with adrenal fatigue (most people), it is important to be in bed and asleep before your second wind hits at about 11:00 PM. Riding your second wind and staying up until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning will further exhaust your adrenals, even though you may feel more energetic during that time than you have felt all day. In order to avoid this pitfall, make sure that you are in bed and on your way to sleep before10:30 PM, so that your adrenal glands do not have a chance to kick into overdrive for that second wind.
Although most people’s schedules do not allow it, it also helps to sleep in until 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning. There is something magical about the restorative power of sleep between 7:00-9:00 in the morning for people with adrenal fatigue. Even when your night has been restless or your sleep fitfull, catching those couple of hours of sleep between 7:00-9:00 AM can be remarkably refreshing.
The reason for this is that while you are sleeping during those morning hours your adrenals have a chance to rest, allowing your cortisol levels to rise. Normally cortisol levels rise rapidly from 6:00 AM to approximately 8:00 AM, but quite often in adrenal fatigue these levels do not rise as high and/or drop faster than normal. Also when your cortisol levels are lower, as in adrenal fatigue, it takes longer to feel fully awake in the morning. Sleeping in, therefore, is not only restorative for your adrenals but also helps you feel much better when you wake up and during the rest of the day. Some of my patients have told me that they can even get up between 2:00 and 4:00 AM, do some work, return to bed, and still feel fine during the day as long as they go back to sleep before 7:00 in the morning and remain asleep until 9:00 AM. I do not recommend doing this, but it does illustrate the important fact that when you sleep is significant as well as how long you sleep. Unfortunately many of us cannot sleep in during the weekdays so if this is the case for you, sleep in on the weekends if at all possible. It is not self indulgent, it is essential. Knowing when to sleep can make all the difference to how you feel.
What If I Can’t Sleep?
There can be several reasons for sleeplessness with adrenal fatigue. If you are waking between 1:00 and 3:00 AM, your liver may be lacking the glycogen reserves needed for conversion by the adrenals to keep the blood glucose levels high enough during the night. Blood sugar is normally low during the early morning hours but, if you are hypoadrenic, your blood glucose levels may sometimes fall so low that hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) symptoms wake you during the night. This is often the case if you have panic or anxiety attacks, nightmares, or sleep fitfully between 1:00 and 4:00 AM. To help counteract this have one or two bites of a snack that contains protein, unrefined carbohydrate, and high quality fat before going to bed, such as half a slice of whole grain toast with peanut butter or a slice of cheese on a whole grain cracker. See the “Food” chapter in this book for more suggestions and specific information.
Both too high and too low nighttime cortisol levels can cause sleep disturbances. To determine if this is a problem for you, simply do a saliva cortisol test at night and compare your night sample levels with your own daytime levels and with the test standards for those times. To do the night test, take a saliva sample at bedtime, another if you wake up during the night and a third when you wake up in the morning. Write the time each sample was taken on the vial and in your notebook on a separate sheet of paper. If cortisol is the culprit, your cortisol levels will be significantly higher or lower than normal for those times. If your night time cortisol levels are too low, you may sleep better when you exercise in the evening, before going to bed because exercise tends to raise cortisol levels. If your nighttime cortisol levels are too high, try doing one of the relaxation or meditation exercises to calm you down before going to bed. The specific yoga posture called the alternate leg pull can be quite helpful in getting to sleep or returning to sleep. This is a basic yoga posture that almost any yoga book or video will describe but an instructor is preferable because there is some subtlety to doing this posture.
Here is a list of some additional things you can do to improve your sleep.
If none of these help and your life is being deleteriously affected by lack of or interrupted sleep, check your local area or the website for the location of the nearest sleep center. Several cities around the country have these centers that specialize in helping individuals determine the cause of their sleep disturbances.
During the day, you will probably notice that you have particular times when you feel more lethargic, cloudy headed, tired or have other symptoms of adrenal fatigue. Try to schedule your breaks so that when these occur, you can physically lie down for 15-30 minutes. Lying down is much more restorative than sitting, for the person with adrenal fatigue.
You have heard it said, “Laughter is the best medicine.” Nothing could be truer for the adrenal glands. When you laugh, stress decreases and all the mechanisms in your body relax. When the body is relatively free of stress, even during those brief moments of levity, the adrenals are much freer to recover and rebuild.
In the book Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins describes his struggle with ankylosis spondylitis, a disease that causes eventual fusing of the bones of the spine. Unwilling to believe his doctors’ prognosis that he would be immobilized for life, frozen into either a sitting or standing position, he did some research on his own. What he discovered was that the anti-inflammatory properties of cortisol, secreted by the adrenal glands, are extremely important in overcoming the deleterious effects of ankylosising spondylitis. Through his own investigations, he found two important keys to helping rebuild the adrenals: laughter and vitamin C. After unearthing this information, Cousins prescribed laughter for himself daily, in addition to taking vitamin C. He did everything possible to make himself laugh, including watching funny movies, reading humorous books, cartoons, jokes, comic strips, and anything else that would cause him to laugh. As a matter of fact, he laughed so much he was disruptive to the rest of the patients in the hospital ward and had to be moved to a private room where he could laugh his way back to health. His therapy was successful. He made a full recovery based only on his prescription of daily laughter and humor, vitamin C, and a change of lifestyle that included rest, away from his hectic life.
Each one of these elements is important, but never underestimate the tremendous value of laughter and enjoyment as a recuperative tool. So prescribe laughter for your life. Do not take yourself and others so seriously and look on the lighter side. Make it a point to laugh several times every single day, especially when you don’t feel well. Laughter not only makes your day better, but it is good therapy.
There is a simple but effective eastern meditation practice that relates to this. It consists of arranging your face in a half-smile while you are alone. You do not have to feel like smiling or even think of anything that makes you smile; the facial expression itself is enough to allow you to feel more peaceful inside and less stressed.
Exercise is probably the last thing you feel like doing if you are hypoadrenic. But before you skip this section, listen to all the good things it will do for you. And remember that dancing and making love are exercise too!
Benefits of exercise: Rapid breathing expels volatile gases out of your body that become harmful if they build up. The increased blood flow helps keep plaque from building up in your arteries while stimulating your liver to perform its 3,000+ functions more efficiently. Cell function improves with the accompanying acceleration of carbon dioxide, oxygen and nutrient exchange. Exercise normalizes levels of cortisol, insulin, blood glucose, growth hormone, thyroid, and several other hormones and puts more oxygen into your brain. These are only some of the benefits of exercise. One of the greatest advantages of exercise is how much better it makes you feel in every way!
Exercise also decreases depression. An acquaintance of mine used to run a residential psychiatric institution in Jackson County, Illinois. The two most significant changes that Jay made when he took over its directorship were to eliminate sugar, which composed up to 70% of some of the inmates diets, and to have a daily exercise program for all residents. He found that these two things alone decreased depression dramatically among the patients at the mental hospital. Depression is a common finding in adrenal fatigue. There are studies that show that exercise can be as effective in treating depression as are some pharmaceutical agents. It is empowering as well as rejuvenating.
Lee was an ambitious 25-year-old undergraduate student in psychology, who also owned part interest in a nightclub. Managing the nightclub from 6:00PM to 3:00AM and attending classes from 7:00AM to noon was a challenge but he enjoyed both. Eventually, Lee worked out a schedule that enabled him to work, attend classes and complete his studies. The only thing he had to leave out was sleep. With his new schedule, he slept only on Sundays and Wednesdays, except for occasional catnaps. He kept himself going with a combination of coffee, Coca-Cola and alcohol. This lasted for a little more than a semester. Although he consistently fell asleep in classes, he was able to finish his undergraduate degree and graduate, and even made the honor roll. After graduation all he seemed to want to do was rest. Of course for him, just running the nightclub without having to attend school was as good as a rest.
However about the time he was starting to get his old energy back, his girlfriend wrote to him from Colorado and asked him to move out there so that they could be together. In eager anticipation of getting married, he sold his nightclub and drove to Colorado. Unfortunately, within a week of arriving in Colorado, his fiancé ended their engagement. Emotionally devastated and now running low on money, he got a job working construction. The physical activity was good for his body and over the next few months he felt better working outside in the open air and having virtually no responsibilities other than to show up in the morning at work. When he was ready he left Colorado and went on to new endeavors and relationships with his vitality restored.
Lee is an example of someone who had adrenal fatigue, but who adjusted his lifestyle in a way that allowed him to recover, even though he remained very active. He rested emotionally and mentally while engaging in vigorous physical exercise. Although Lee obviously had relatively strong adrenal glands and good energy reserves, his story reflects the healing power of physical exercise.
What kind of exercise is best? Exercise that is beneficial for adrenal fatigue recovery should be enjoyable. It should not be highly competitive, grueling or debilitating. What you need is something that increases lung capacity, muscle tone and flexibility while having fun. (See illustration “Exercises – combine aerobics, anaerobics and flexibility”).
Yoga with breathing exercises, ta’i chi, kick boxing, swimming, fast walking, dancing, and any number of team sports and exercise programs are all good ways to get your body moving. Pick something that is enjoyable to you. Remember you are not working out to run a marathon or set new records, but to bring your body back to life and take pleasure in it again. There will be days, especially when you first begin exercising, that you do not feel like doing anything physical. When this happens, instead of forcing yourself to exercise, start slow and gently work into it. In other words, do not let the exercise become another stressor in your life. When part of you resists, simply treat that part with kind understanding, acknowledge its resistance, but do not let it undermine your commitment to your health. People with adrenal fatigue often feel too tired to exercise. However, if you set a routine time to exercise, no matter how you feel, you will soon experience the rewards of your self-discipline.
How do I know if I am exercising correctly? Exercise at your own pace and not the pace of the person next to you or your friends. If you get tired, rest or quit for a while or for the day. If you are tired the next morning, take it easier the next time. As your stamina increases, gradually increase your exercise. The purpose of exercising in this program is not necessarily to become stronger, but to increase your body’s tone, flexibility and aerobic capacity. Two weeks after you start exercising daily you should notice that you are beginning to feel better. You should feel good after a workout and should only be slightly or mildly sore the day after. If you feel worse after a workout or the next morning, you probably exercised too hard and need to step it down a notch. Type A personalities who are out of shape are particularly prone to doing this. In their minds, they are in much better condition than they actually are and so make more demands on their bodies than they should. Exercise done properly makes you feel better physically and mentally. If you are not experiencing this within a few weeks of starting a regular program, either cut back a little or try a different kind of exercise. The most important requirement is that exercise becomes enjoyable for you.