How to Overcome Adrenal Fatigue
Today I am speaking with Hally Brooke, Founder & CEO of Live Nourished Coaching, is a Certified Functional Medicine Nutrition Counselor, Health & Wellness Coach, and industry advocate. Overcoming personal GI issues and extensive training led her to establish a thriving nationwide practice. Hally’s mission at Live Nourished Coaching is to make health coaching accessible to all, accomplished through direct coaching and strategic partnerships. An international speaker, top-level medical practice consultant, and founder of a world-class health coaching agency, Hally’s true inspiration lies in witnessing clients transform from illness to thriving wellness, driven by their internal motivation to Live Nourished. Today she speaks with us about how to overcome adrenal fatigue.
We discussed:
-her struggle with IBS
-how she needed to heal her gut to heal her stomach issues
-what is adrenal fatigue
-how to overcome adrenal fatigue
-is mom burnout the same as adrenal fatigue
-how to decrease cortisol
-how to decrease inflammation in the body
-what to do if we are chronically exhausted
What is Adrenal Fatigue
When there is discussion of adrenal fatigue in the traditional medical model, adrenal fatigue is not recognized. If you go to a Western medicine doctor and you say I think I have adrenal fatigue, they’ll be like that doesn’t exist. Your adrenals are the little things in your lower neck near your thyroid that pump adrenaline into your body. They’re controlled by your thyroid and your pituitary gland and they are a major factor in your body’s cortisol stress response. In the traditional medical model, we have functioning adrenals and then we have what’s called Addison’s disease, which is when your adrenals have been so taxed that they have stopped producing any adrenaline at all. The Western model doesn’t recognize anything in between. You’re either functional or you have nothing, but that’s not how this system works. There’s obviously a progression between functional and not.
So, what is adrenal fatigue? Adrenal fatigue is you have been under chronic stress for such a long period of time that your adrenals have stopped functioning properly, and there’s a progression to this. What typically happens first is your adrenals will start to overproduce. That’s the wired and tired phase. They’ll drag throughout the whole day and then they get to eight o’clock at night and it’s time to go to bed and all of a sudden, they have this massive burst of energy. You’re tired but you can’t sleep. That’s wired and tired, where your adrenals are overproducing.
Then we start to see this adrenal crash, so your adrenals go down and that’s where we start to see people just have no energy at all. They cannot get it up in the morning, they cannot function. At 2 PM, they’re living off of coffee and they can barely keep their eyes open by the time they get to sleep. Then the cycle starts again the next morning, it doesn’t matter if you sleep till noon, you’re still tired. That’s where we start to move into that adrenal fatigue category.
When cortisol becomes too much:
A healthy cortisol curve is when your cortisol spikes in the morning. That’s what gets you up out of bed, you feel rested and refreshed. Your cortisol should be highest in the morning. Then it should start to slowly decrease during the day. You should have a little bit of a bump around two or three. Then it’ll again slowly start tapering off until bedtime and it’ll be lowest when you go to bed.
When people start to get into that adrenal fatigue/mom burnout space, cortisol starts to do all sorts of crazy things, including completely reversing. It becomes lowest in the morning, its highest at night, or it’ll be stagnant and steady throughout the day and then it’ll spike around 2 AM, therefore there are a few things to work on to decrease cortisol and how to overcome adrenal fatigue.
How to overcome adrenal fatigue:
This is a 3 tong approach of handling nutrition, movement, and stress.
- Nutrition-if you are struggling with adrenal fatigue you are probably also deficient in these 4 nutrients: Vitamin B12, Magnesium, Vitamin D, and Micro Minerals like zinc, copper, and selenium. You must work on eating the right foods for cellular energy, not just taking supplements.
- Exercise-exercise is a good stressor but if you are dealing with adrenal fatigue HIIT workouts are quite possibly the worst thing you can do. Instead, focus on walking, stretching, Pilates, and lifting heavy weights with big gaps of time in between. Focus on working on your cellular health and then you can add these back in.
- Stress-both mental and emotional. Taking a few deep breaths can drop cortisol and also accessing relationships to determine how you can have less stress in your everyday life.
The Importance of Magnesium for Adrenal Fatigue:
Magnesium is a magical mineral. It’s in charge of over 300 different responses in our body and everyone is deficient in it because it’s just not in our soils anymore. Things to look for if you are low in magnesium are leg cramps, racing heart, or your heart rate doesn’t drop very fast. Ideally at night, when you’re sleeping, your heart rate should drop within the first three hours of sleep and it should stay low. Headaches, migraines those are often magnesium deficiencies. Feeling like you’re drinking enough water but you still have like dry lips or you still have a scratchy throat that means that you’re flushing magnesium and potassium out of your system instead of adding it. So, you might want to add it like an electrolyte blend. Those are all symptoms of low magnesium. Low energy that’s a huge one, as well.
Type of Magnesium to take for Adrenal Fatigue:
Magnesium malate or glycinate are the best for Adrenal Fatigue. Those are the two most absorbable kinds, so those will actually increase your cellular magnesium. Magnesium altheanate is the only kind that crosses the blood-brain barrier, so that one’s really good for anxiety and sleep because it helps you sleep. It’s also a very absorbable kind. What you’re going to find at most grocery stores is either magnesium citrate or magnesium oxide. Those are great for reducing constipation. They’ll make you poop if you take enough of it, but they’re not absorbable, so you’re not going to increase your cellular magnesium by taking those.
Struggling with getting enough sleep for recovery:
Number one naps go a long way. Even if you can take a 15, 20-minute nap. most offices now are okay with that. Finding ways to take rest throughout your day, even if it’s not a nap. Doing just a five-minute meditation, finding five minutes to just go sit in your car, that can help a ton.
The other one is eating a lot of fat. Fat like good, healthy fat (avocado, extra virgin, olive oil, coconut oil). Fat helps your body produce cellular energy. When you’re in a deficit, if we can get your fat up, we see a dramatic decrease in things like postpartum depression (for new moms). We see a dramatic decrease in fatigue. Trying to get 50% of your calories to come from good quality fat will help tremendously.
Reasons we are chronically exhausted:
We talk about internal and external stress. External stress are things like your kids are teenagers and we’re running them all over the place. Job is hard, marriage is hard. Those are external stresses and those are very real. Internal stresses are things like chronic inflammation, intestinal permeability, nutritional deficiencies, those kinds of things. If you have chronic inflammation going on in your body, that is an internal stress. Inflammation is your body’s response to something being wrong.
Inflammation is your body’s attempt to heal something. When you get a cold or a flu, your body creates cytokines which are an inflammatory response to go attack that thing. If you have chronic inflammation in your body because you have food and poop and bacteria particles leaking out of your GI tract, because you’ve created leaky gut, that is a chronic inflammation symptom. If you still have that internal stress from chronic inflammation, you can absolutely end up in adrenal fatigue and then if you pair those things together, we have inflammation and we have a crazy life. Inflammation, chronic stress, nutritional deficiencies those are all things that will lead to adrenal fatigue, regardless of what your life looks like.
Things to do if you are chronically exhausted:
You change your diet, you change the way you think, you get relentless about removing hustle and hurry from your life. Align your exercise with your current goals. You start with those three pillars. You start with movement in alignment with what your body needs, nutrition to get your nutrition sufficient, and handling your life differently. None of that is rocket science.
Learn more from Hally:
Website: www.livenourishedcoaching.com
