Anyone who does not get enough rest and relaxation to enjoy life, who drives him/herself constantly, who is never satisfied or is a perfectionist, who is under constant pressure (especially with few outlets for emotional release), who feels trapped or helpless, who feels overwhelmed by repeated or continuous difficulties, or who has experienced severe or chronic emotional or physical trauma or illness is probably already suffering from some degree of adrenal fatigue. Do you recognize any of these patterns in your own life? If so, this book is going to help you. Keep reading to find out how at risk you are and what you can do to help yourself.
Anyone Can Experience Adrenal Fatigue
People from every walk of life, every culture, and every age can suffer from adrenal fatigue. The political leader, the university student, the environmentalist, the farmer, the villager in a war torn country, the Hollywood director, the factory worker on a swing shift, the medical doctor with an HMO, and the mother with more than one child and little support probably all have the factors in their lives that can lead to adrenal dysfunction, even though they lead very different lifestyles. The cost is untold in the loss of productive hours, creative ideas, sound business decisions, and other intangibles such as happiness, not to mention good health and long life.
Your Job May Be a Factor
Some professions are harder on the adrenal glands than others. If you look at insurance company actuarial tables of the mortality rates, drug abuse, and number of sick days in different professions, what you are seeing, barring physically dangerous jobs, is largely the amount of adrenal fatigue experienced in those jobs.
The medical profession is a good example of a profession prone to adrenal fatigue. Physicians, on average, die approximately 10 years younger, have higher rates of alcoholism and several times the drug addiction rates of the normal population. Typically medical students go directly to medical school from an undergraduate program. During the first two years of medical school they learn approximately 25,000 new words, staying up many late nights to do so. At the end of the four years of study, they graduate and become residents in a specialized area of study, working between 80 and 110 hours per week, sometimes under a great deal of pressure from superiors and other students. By the time they graduate and finish their residency, they are often up to one hundred thousand dollars in debt and emotionally isolated. Over two-thirds of those who are married, end up divorced by the end of their residency. Because of their experiences during their training they may feel they can trust no one. This makes work and home unsafe places to be. After residency, most new doctors move immediately into a practice. Once in practice, they frequently work long hours with little rest, sometimes resorting to amphetamines or other stimulants in order to keep going. They often have little home life because they are working most of the time, which leads to marital dissatisfaction. Although this is a generalization and is certainly not true for every doctor, it is a description that fits many of the medical students, residents and young doctors recently in practice I have worked with. In fact, I know one doctor who, after collapsing at the end of her residency, decided to make a career of teaching professionals how to deal with stress.
The police force is another profession that is very hard on the adrenals. I have counseled many policemen who are on the verge of collapse because of the stress involved in their job. You might think that it is the danger these people live with day in and day out that produces the stress, but much of their stress comes from the demands placed upon them by their commanding officers. If these people are also involved in a weekly rotating shift, the stress is magnified because their bodies never have a chance to adjust to the new circadian rhythm produced by each sleep change. People on alternating shifts with less than three weeks between shift changes are continually hammering their adrenal glands. Every time the wake/sleep cycle is altered, it takes several days to weeks to establish a normal hormonal pattern for the new wake/sleep cycle.
Middle executives, secretaries, and teachers are examples of professionals who suffer from “sandwich stress.” This is stress that comes from having to meet the demands and expectations from above and below without the power or authority to make the necessary changes or to do their job effectively. It is frequently the person in the middle who takes the blame when things go wrong but not the credit when things go right. People in this position commonly have more than their share of health problems. They often suffer from Syndrome X (a complex of signs and symptoms that includes glucose intolerance, increased triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, insulin resistance, hypertension, central obesity, and accelerated atherosclerosis). These disorders reflect the effects of stresses that produce elevated cortisol levels. However, sometimes this phase is followed in time by a drop in cortisol levels to below normal, as the adrenals fatigue and are less able to respond to the stress.
The Ability To Withstand Stress Varies
One person may withstand a stress quite easily and be ready for more, but another person, or that same person at another time, may find the same stress overwhelming and impossible to bear. It is important to understand that the onset and continuation of adrenal fatigue has great individual variation.
Below are some of the primary lifestyle factors that lead to adrenal fatigue. It is important to note that most of these are within your control.
Stresses Add Up
Repeated stresses, no matter what their cause, make a person more prone to adrenal fatigue. The effects of stress are cumulative, even when the individual stressors are quite different. For example, you come down with a bronchial infection that has not quite cleared up when your father dies. Six months after your father’s death someone younger and newer gets the job promotion you had been expecting and, within a month, you are injured in a car accident. The doctors are concerned by how long it is taking you to recover from the accident. They are puzzled only because they do not recognize that this series of stressors, although seemingly unrelated, has gradually depleted your adrenal reserves. Each of these separate events, emotional and physical, is an insult to your body to which your adrenal glands have had to respond. By the time the accident occurs, your adrenals have nothing left to give. Had the accident been the only major stressor, you would probably recover quickly and without incident.
Physical and Emotional Stresses Interact
Physical traumas (such as infection, physical injury, malnutrition, surgery, extreme cold, extreme heat, dehydration, exhausting physical exertion, exposure to toxic chemicals, allergies, asthma, and lack of sleep) and emotional traumas (such as divorce, separation, serious arguments, loss of a job, financial problems, injury or death of a friend or family member, and significant ridicule or humiliation) cumulatively drain your adrenal reserves, particularly if you cannot or do not do what is necessary to recover between traumas.
Poor Diet Reduces Your Adrenals’ Ability to Respond to Stress
In addition to the emotional and physical traumas that can produce hypoadrenia, there are chronic conditions or lifestyles that continually drain the adrenals or prevent them from recuperating properly after a trauma. One of the most common of these chronic factors is poor diet. For example, 62 % of North Americans do not eat even one vegetable per day. Many nutrients not found in typical fast food meals are necessary to make proper hormones in the adrenal glands. If you eat primarily pre-prepared or processed foods and not many vegetables or raw fruits, you can be sure your adrenal glands are not getting the nutrients they need to function optimally and to respond well in a crisis. You will find a complete breakdown of the nutrients required by your adrenals, how to get them and what they do in Chapter 13 titled “Food.”
Respiratory Infections Commonly Precede Adrenal Fatigue
Respiratory ailments have an especially devastating effect on the adrenals. Written about in older medical literature and still seen frequently by astute physicians, adrenal fatigue is often precipitated by recurring bouts of bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma, sinusitis, or other respiratory infections. The more severe the infections, the more frequently they occur, or the longer they last, the more likely it is that the adrenals will be over-worked. Adrenal fatigue can occur after even just one single episode of a particularly nasty infection, or it can take place over time as the adrenals are gradually fatigued by prolonged or repeated infections. If there are other concurrent stresses, such as an unhappy marriage, poor dietary habits or stressful job, the downhill ride is deeper and steeper.
Your Adrenals May Be Weak From Birth
As well as these factors of lifestyle and life events, there are also congenital differences in adrenal resiliency. Children born to mothers already suffering from adrenal fatigue and children who experience severe stress in the womb (including those given above) typically have lower adrenal function. Because of this, from birth on, they have less capacity to deal with stress in their own lives and so are more prone to adrenal fatigue throughout their lives.
Some Representative Case Histories of Adrenal Fatigue
Frank was a backslapper of a salesman; a guy who always had a few jokes and a laugh. He was a middle manager in a growing company and over time he hoped to become an executive. With his goals clear, Frank was always at the office. He was the guy everyone wanted to be like. Within 6 years he had been promoted 4 times and had become Vice-president of Sales. His dreams were coming true. Unfortunately the company had expanded too fast just as the market turned against it. Covering its losses, the company began downsizing, asking more of those remaining. Frank was one of the fortunate ones whose job was secure, but he had to dramatically expand his workload. This meant late hours at the office several times per week and taking work home almost every weekend. Frank ate most of his meals in restaurants, the faster, the better because he now had more work to do. By cutting out his exercise time and getting fast food meals on the run, Frank was able to squeeze more hours out of the day. Because he often felt tired during the many evenings he stayed late, he switched from his regular 1 cup of coffee with his evening meal to alternating high caffeine soft drinks with coffee every hour or so to keep going. With all the caffeine, Frank had more trouble sleeping, so he began taking sleeping tablets to help him sleep. More cups of coffee were required to get him going in the morning, but once noon rolled around, he was as good as new. Frank then discovered that he could get even more work done if he could just get past 11:00 at night. Once he got past 11:00, he got a second burst of energy that kept him going until about 2:00. Although he began to look a little ragged around the edges, Frank was able to keep this up for 6 years. One early morning, Frank came home to find his wife’s car gone. Going inside he found her clothes gone and a note. Frank was dumbfounded. How could she leave him? The next morning Frank was still sitting in the same chair he’d sat in to read the note she’d left him. In fact he hadn’t moved from that chair. At noon he managed to pick up the phone to order some food but, except for the coffee, he just picked at it. Ignoring any phone calls, Frank just sat there, wondering what had gone wrong. Friends finally got Frank to come to the door and check himself into a hospital. He was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic depression, but the medications were only partially effective. Frank improved, but dragged himself through life. Soon after taking a leave of absence, he came into my office at the advice of a friend. With time and treatment, Frank made a full recovery. Frank is a good example of someone who has driven himself to adrenal exhaustion through blind ambition, overwork, poor food and no relaxation.
Frank’s case is a common story of adrenal fatigue brought on by overwork, poor food, poor lifestyle, over-ambition and lack of perspective. The emotional trauma of his wife leaving him flattened an already depleted man. By the time he read her note he was already running on empty and had no reserve to fall back on.
Jim worked in a full service gas station. He was good at his job and very good with customers. After 2 years, the company representative for one of the major oil companies noticed Jim and offered him a chance to have his own service station. Jim was delighted to be given this opportunity, as he was well aware that his present position was a dead-end job. The company built a new station, outfitted with the latest equipment, and gave him easy terms on its purchase. Jim soon had the business of his dreams. With the combination of his personality and the excellent service he offered, it wasn’t long before he had to hire more help to meet the increasing customer volume. Jim loved his work and took pride in running his own successful business. However the demands of building and maintaining a business were taking their toll. His wife was very unhappy about the 70+ hours a week he put in at the station and complained bitterly about how little time he spent with her and their 2 children. So when the oil company offered Jim an additional service station based on his success with the first one, he reluctantly turned them down. Disheartened by his wife’s constant dissatisfaction and the long work hours, he began feeling trapped and helpless to change his situation. In order to relieve the stress of these frustrations, Jim began drinking at night. This quickly turned into a daily habit and all too soon his business began to drop off. His drinking problem reached a peak one Tuesday morning when a customer shouted, “Get your drunken hands off my car.” An employee called Jim’s wife and took him home. Soon after, Jim developed a bleeding ulcer and had to be hospitalized. Having time to reflect and recover in the hospital and at home, Jim saw how he was suffering from too much stress. As a result he gave up drinking, sold the service station and took a job with much less pressure and greater job security. With good nutrition and dietary supplements for adrenal support he was able to recover and find a balance that allowed him to lead a happy, fulfilling life.
Jim is a good example of how continual internal emotional stress and work demands can combine to lead to adrenal fatigue.
Brianna was a mother of 4. She had always wanted children, but also wanted a career. Being self-employed, she had little time to spare, especially when the children became older and had different social activities and sports to attend. Although she had never really had time to recover between the birth of her third child and her fourth, she continued to push herself with constant pep talks, chiding herself for not having the energy she used to, she kept herself going with more coffee, strong tea and constant sweets, especially chocolate. In fact, she was known to her friends as the “chocolate queen.” Most of her family’s activities still revolved around Brianna, leaving her with almost no free time. What little free time she had was not very relaxing as most of it was spent with the family and there was almost palpable tension between her husband and her. Brianna felt chronically tired and stressed. On the way to work one morning, she was hit from behind while sitting in her car waiting for the light to change. The constant pain she had in her neck tired her even more. At the end of her rope and unable to really function at work or at home due to her constant neck pain, she finally heeded the advice of a friend and sought the help of a chiropractor. Luckily, in addition to being able to get her out of pain, the doctor recognized that she was suffering from adrenal fatigue. He put her on the right nutritional supplements and had her shift more family responsibilities onto her husband, as well as hire 2 people to do much of the work she had been struggling with. Eventually she recovered her long lost energy and was once again a happy woman.
Brianna’s case illustrates how an already over-burdened person with unrealistic expectations combined with lack of rest and marital discord produced adrenal fatigue. When a physical trauma was the straw that broke the camel’s back, she could no longer compensate and felt the full extent of her adrenal fatigue.
Kevin was a bright chemical engineer who loved his job and his family. A few years ago he was promoted to manage a small chemical plant in the Midwest. Almost as soon as Kevin came on the scene, he saw the need for increased safety at the aging plant. But the plant was not generating the projected profits it should have, so improvements had to be delayed until there was room in the budget to make them. Within the first year of his new job assignment, Kevin’s wife noticed that he was changing. He developed allergies for the first time. He began wanting to sleep in instead of rising at 4:00 AM as he used to. He became more short-tempered and intolerant of her and the children. In fact he began having uncharacteristic sudden temper outbursts for which he was always remorseful. Thinking it was probably the pressure of his new job, Kevin asked for and was given an assistant, as he had already increased production considerably. But even with working fewer hours and taking less active responsibility, Kevin continued to deteriorate. His energy dropped lower and lower and he became almost despondent as he just tried to make it through each day. The company doctor diagnosed Kevin as being too tense and prescribed tranquilizers and some “stomach pills” for his constantly upset stomach. When Kevin showed no improvement, his wife demanded a vacation, thinking what he needed was a rest. Not knowing what else to do, Kevin agreed. Within a few days of their vacation Kevin felt like a new man. His old energy returned and he once again became loving and affectionate. He looked forward to returning to his job. Once back, however, it was only a matter of a day before Kevin felt the same old tiredness and cloudy headedness descend on him again. They had only been back for 2 weeks when their family got notice that Kevin’s father had died. The family left immediately on the 1000 mile drive to his home. Although Kevin dreaded the stress of the funeral, to his surprise, as they approached his old home, he felt better and better. Even having to drive most of the night to return to work by the following Monday morning didn’t bother him. However, by the first evening of work, Kevin was back to his same old symptoms. He struggled on for a few more weeks until one day the previous manager made a brief stop to the plant. As they talked, Kevin learned that the former manager had taken an early retirement for health reasons. The man told him that as soon as he left the plant he felt 20 years younger. Telling the previous manager of his growing problems with handling the job, Kevin described some of his symptoms. The retired manager revealed that he had left because of chemical sensitivities and that while in the plant he had experienced many of the same symptoms as Kevin. He was good enough to meet Kevin at a place outside the plant to discuss what might be done about the situation. Together they approached the company to make the needed safety improvements, including a drastic reduction in chemical fumes collecting in several of the plant buildings. Kevin was transferred to a part of the company away from the fumes, read a book by a clinical ecologist on chemical sensitivities and one of my articles on adrenal fatigue, and slowly recovered his full health.
Kevin’s case is an example of adrenal fatigue caused by chemical sensitivity. Any number of ‘body burdens’ can continually zap your adrenals, often without you being aware of what is happening.
Sandra was never a high-energy person. Frequently sick as a child, she chose to work as a librarian because it made little physical demand on her. However, her first job was not what she expected it to be. Taking a position in a university medical library, she was given a rotating shift that changed weekly. As the library was open 24 hours a day, she hardly had a chance to get used to one schedule before it was time to change. This schedule interrupted her sleeping pattern, which interfered with her concentration at work. Her boss became more and more demanding until one day Sandra simply broke down and started crying for no reason while re-shelving books. Afterwards, she poured out her tortured soul about how she couldn’t sleep anymore, how she was constantly fatigued, that her boss expected too much, and how she hated being a librarian, something she thought she would love. She also complained that she felt mildly ill most of the time, her memory and patience were shot, and that she had become even more socially withdrawn. All she wanted to do was get away from everyone, pull the covers up over her head and sleep until she was darn good and ready to get up. Being already somewhat fragile, it didn’t take much to push Sandra beyond her limits. After her outbreak she was referred to a staff psychiatrist who diagnosed her as being depressed. Several antidepressants later, when she showed only slight improvement, she was given a series of shock treatments that only made her fragile constitution more vulnerable. After several years on disability, she finally discovered a doctor who understood adrenal fatigue. Slowly she was able to find her way back to health and found a job in a library much more suited to her personality and needs. For Sandra, it was a long, hard journey back to recovery, because no one understood her limited capacity for stress.
Sandra’s case is an example of people who have marginal adrenal reserve to begin with. Not much is needed for her to be overwhelmed. Looking at it from the outside, people are often quick to judge these people as weaklings or quitters, when they just do not have the reserve capacity to take on the stresses inherent in many work and social events.
The next chapter contains some of the more common symptoms of adrenal fatigue. If more than 2 or 3 of these sound strangely familiar, complete the questionnaire in Part II of this book to see if you have adrenal fatigue. If the cartoons in the next chapter are simply amusing, but do not strike home at all, pass this book on to someone the cartoons remind you of.