Stress Without Enough Recovery

The reason you haven’t been able to solve the pain and suffering you are experiencing is because the real problem is hidden. Let’s look at the physical signs that can alert you that your stress response system has gotten out of balance. After all, you can’t start supporting your body better until you know how to see and hear your body’s cry for help, right? The end result is a laundry list of symptoms and diagnoses that require you to rein in your stress exposure in order to heal. If you’re suffering from any of these illnesses, it’s worth assessing whether stress might be responsible for your symptoms, especially if you’ve tried other types of treatment without success. As a naturopathic doctor, instead of going straight to prescription medications, I’m always looking for the root cause, and yet in the case of adrenal distress, the real cause of fatigue, anxiety, brain fog, weight gain, and joint pain is so buried, most practitioners miss it. We need to understand how your body uniquely responds to stress in order to know how to support you in your optimal stress pattern. Stress, which comes in many different forms, is your body’s way of responding to any kind of demand or change. But there are also many physiological stressors that we overlook or push aside, such as not getting enough sleep, eating too much sugar, exposing our body to inflammatory foods, or even exposing it to toxins in our environment or personal care products. The bottom line is that we are all exposed to stress, including stress from our childhood. And she told me I was stressed when I came down with a sinus infection and slept for a week after finals in college. It wasn’t until years later that I really began to understand the effects of stress. Nearly all women experience fear when it comes to delivering a baby, but for women who have been through trauma, it’s amplified.

Say What You Say

However, labor also stops if there isn’t enough cortisol and adrenaline. How much we need is unique for each person. If we don’t get support to recover from stress, adrenal distress happens. What Does Adrenal Distress Look Like? You may be familiar with what it feels like to be angling toward burnout, or what I call stress mode. It looks different for each of us. After all, the project must be completed, and the house has to get cleaned, and the laundry must get done. A parent, child, friend, or loved one needs your help, right now. Your health issues may even have swept you into such a frenzy of trying to solve them that the stress of the health issue is creating more stress! Sleep, if you can get it, doesn’t help you feel better. Cooking meals and sitting down to enjoy them has fallen by the wayside. By the time you work your way through your endless list of urgent tasks each day, you are often too exhausted to think straight or enjoy a moment of calm. It’s an indicator that you’re experiencing disrupted adrenaline and cortisol levels, which means that your adrenal glands could use an assist before they crash and burn. A healthy body reacts to this perceived danger with spiking adrenaline and cortisol, which normalize when the stress trigger is gone.

A Fool No More

You encounter a major issue when the coming back down doesn’t happen. The hypothalamus stops turning off the stress signal because the receptors become desensitized. It’s like the body gets stuck in stress mode. Your body anticipates stress, constantly. You might find your heart racing or palpitating, your blood pressure rising, or your mind racing, and then think to yourself, What’s going on? I feel stressed, but there’s no stress in sight. When you are stuck in stress mode, your adrenal glands will respond by making more cortisol and/or adrenaline, or they might not be able to keep up with the demand for those stress messengers. Depending on your genetics and how your body processes cortisol and adrenaline, as well as your personal and family history of stress exposure, your hormone output may lag or plummet. At that point, even when an actual stress does happen, your adrenals might be too overtaxed to produce adequately. This is what I refer to as adrenal distress. This doesn’t mean that your adrenals have necessarily stopped working altogether and forever. Depending on whether your cortisol and/or adrenaline shift higher or lower, a potentially different set of symptoms can occur. You may experience fatigue, anxiety or a low mood, a foggy brain, and difficulty feeling motivated.

Out Of Touch

It’s important to note that this can happen at any age and isn’t based on accumulated stress over time. Whether it happens, and when, is unique for each individual based on genetics and exposure to both stress and stress recovery. Hans Selye, it’s not a diagnosis you’re likely to receive from your internist or endocrinologist, like Addison’s disease, in which the adrenals stop making cortisol altogether, or Cushing’s disease, in which the level of cortisol skyrockets and doesn’t come down, often due to medications or a tumor. Imagine a light switch that has been flipped on so many times that it has become stuck in the on position. But the switch can turn off again, I promise. After all, if it can turn on your stress response, it can turn it off, too. It’s important to know, however, that it’s not as simple as meditating on a rock. We have to approach your stress recovery from the perspective of your stress type. It’s not one size fits all. Furthermore, once you have consistently appropriate levels of cortisol and adrenaline at the ready to respond to your optimal amount of stress, you will be more resilient to stress in general. If you were to compare your body to a business, cortisol would be the supervising manager. It sends out signals to the rest of your body to say where to focus and what to do or not do.