Adrenal Dysfunction
Do you have body aches, fatigue, anxiety, and/or sleep disturbances?
Do you need several cups of coffee just to feel awake and start your day?
Do you need wine to “wind down” at the end of the night?
Or maybe you just experience low energy throughout the day?
You may have even mentioned it to your doctor, only to be told “it’s just part of getting older”.
Chances are, it has nothing to do with age – but that it is actually a hormonal issue resulting from imbalanced stress hormones secreted by your adrenal glands.
When you aren’t able to handle or “snap back” from stress, both external (like your job and family pressures ) and internal (like infections, inflammation, and a heavy toxic burden) you may have high levels of stress hormones in your blood. This can create a wide range of health illnesses as well as creating a “stress feedback loop” that can be tricky to dismantle.
Imbalance adrenal health can also impact your brain. Adrenal glands produce hormones in response to signals from the pituitary gland in the brain, which reacts to signaling from the hypothalamus, also located in the brain. This is referred to as the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.
Sadly, many conventional physicians will overlook the adrenal glands, simply because they are not trained in advanced hormone testing that check stress hormone levels, like cortisol.
That’s also why a conventionally trained doctor may ignore your symptoms or chock them up to your “imagination” or just being a busy, overwhelmed person. They are trained to do standard protocols such as blood testing (that doesn’t pick up adrenal dysfunction) which is still important but very basic.
They may even offer medications for your mood like SRIs to try and help because they don’t know what to do.
How We Approach Stress
If we do discover you have adrenal imbalances, then chances are your stress hormones are not “shutting off” correctly, which could happen for a variety of reasons.
“How do I fix my adrenals?” might be your next question.
Balancing your adrenals takes more than just dealing with those glands separately.
There is a complex brain – adrenal feedback loop, that typically gets “off kilter”… called the HPA axis which also involves glands in your brain.
In my practice, we are trained to get to the root of your fatigue or any hormonal imbalance that may be creating your symptoms. Stress is one of the factors, we examine in-depth both external forms and internally because it has such an impact to create imbalances and illnesses. After we help patients balance hormonal factors, we teach our patients how to manage through our functional medicine programs that include nutrition, lifestyle and the appropriate detox techniques..
As part of our stress recovery program, we devise a full body balancing protocol that not only supports your adrenals but also brings balance back to other areas that may be causing havoc with your adrenals – including diet, gut health, lifestyle and stress factors, sleep habits and more.
If you have been experiencing symptoms that may be connected with adrenal dysfunction and are looking for answers, schedule an appointment with PrimeLife today so we can see if you may be at risk and what your options are.
