Ah, sleep. It’s a wonderful thing. After an undisturbed eight hours, you feel rested, refreshed, and ready to attack the day.

Except when you’re not. Instead you find yourself crashing mid-morning…and never really rallying back. Your energy’s low—and your eyeballs weigh 100 lbs. And since no doctor has been able to diagnose the issue, you feel your zombie days will never come to an end.

Maybe It’s Adrenal Fatigue

When you’re always tired, your body enters a stressed state, gets inflamed, and tries to compensate—especially the adrenal gland system. This stress-response organ of the body is like a fulcrum, and every move you make in your life wears it down. When the wear and tear get to be too much—health issues ensue. That extreme fatigue you’re feeling day to day? It’s likely adrenal fatigue.

But it could be more than exhaustion. You could experience:

• Dry skin
• Feeling cold often
• Fluid retention and puffiness
• Inability to lose weight
• Insomnia
• Large swings in weight day to day
• Loss of sex drive
• Poor stamina
• Thyroid dysfunction

But My Doctor Said…

Conventional doctors don’t look deep enough (photo: pixabay via Pexels)

If you’re one of the unlucky undiagnosed, you already visited your conventional medical doctor about your symptoms. Perhaps they even suspected an adrenal issue (good news!), but then approached it from an adrenal disease standpoint (possibly bad news). Here’s the thing. When conventional medicine suspects an issue with the adrenal system, they test for a complete failure of the gland itself. If it’s completely “broken,” you have Addison’s Disease. If there’s an overproduction (resulting from adrenal tumors), you have Cushing’s Syndrome. What if you have neither?

Could it be that it’s not a complete failure of the glands, and instead, they’re just not working as optimally as they should? Perhaps they’re not in a diseased state, but rather, showing signs of wear and tear? Here at Twin Cities Metabolism, we approach adrenal fatigue by looking beyond the system itself.

You’re Stressed Out

Something boosted your inflammatory levels, and more often than not, it’s biochemical and/or physical stress. Sure, we all sit around worrying about our growing to-do lists and racked-up regrets, but that’s mental stress. And while it can surely affect your adrenal function, we see a much closer relationship with biochemical and physical stress. Conditions like leaky gut syndrome, blood sugar disorders, and over-exercising can put your adrenal function through the wringer. If you don’t dig deeper to see what’s damaging yours, you may be doomed to low energy and high dependence on medication for life.

Fortunately, we do dig deeper. Next week, we’ll provide a closer look at those biochemical and physical stressors that can cause adrenal fatigue to see if they’re too present in your life.