If you’ve been feeling tired, foggy and unmotivated, it’s possible that your adrenal glands are underperforming. Adrenal issues may also be responsible for weight gain or loss, blood pressure trouble and insulin resistance, both of which are obviously best avoided as well. If you want to stay your healthiest, it's important to avoid adrenal issues, which starts with understanding what causes them and then addressing the problem through four useful steps.
What are Adrenal Glands? Adrenals or Adrenal Glands are located above and connected to your kidneys, these little glands are responsible for producing the stress hormone cortisol. While cortisol is necessary for small amounts and developed as a natural addition to our survival toolkit – helpful when, say, a sabre-toothed tiger is bearing down on you – high amounts over time can be damaging. Your glands get exhausted and therefore don’t produce enough cortisol or related hormones.
It’s important to recognize that the buzz phrase “adrenal fatigue” is not actually a recognized medical condition. According to the Mayo Clinic, the only recognized condition is adrenal insufficiency (Addison’s disease).
However, proponents of adrenal fatigue claim that while the medical condition is not yet recognized because we lack instruments sensitive enough to catch it, it is possible to experience similarly unpleasant symptoms due to lower function in response to stress. If you have simple adrenal depletion from chronic stress, the following steps may help remediate the issue naturally.
When you sleep more, you’re less stressed out. When you experience less stress, you can sleep better. It’s a virtuous cycle, and can become a vicious one as well: Too little sleep leads to stress, memory impairment, poor decision making and bad moods. Luckily, by changing up your sleep routine just a bit, to include a regular bedtime and good sleep hygiene, you can do much to lengthen and enrich your sleep.
Diet is so crucial to the healthy functioning of your adrenal glandsthat there’s a whole diet to help you reset them. Try that, and if you don’t have the patience, at least avoid:
Green tea is okay, given that it may actually help you sleep as long as you don’t drink it right before bed.
An overload of stress causes you to overproduce hormones and tax the adrenal glands, so an obvious solution is to experience less stress. You may need to change your lifestyle to reduce your commute, your hours at the office or your extracurricular responsibilities. As Mind Body Green points out, your definition of material success may not end up meaning much if you destroy your health and can’t enjoy it. It’s also important to stay away from stressful people and situations, and only keep those in your life that deserve you.
Simply changing your lifestyle may not be enough. You may need to give your body the nutrients it needs to keep adrenals happy. Try magnesium, the lack of which has been linked to adrenal insufficiency, as well as fish oil. The latter contains DHEA, needed for the proper production of cortisol, so it can reduce the load on your glands. A good natural supplement geared toward supporting your adrenal glands can also help alleviate symptoms and return you to your old self.
Again, the above steps are very natural. Happily, that means that even if you do not actually have adrenal fatigue but rather another undiagnosed condition that causes similar symptoms, you’ll likely experience significant relief of symptoms nevertheless. If you’re tired, foggy or having trouble regulating your metabolism, try the above and see how it goes. It may be you simply needed a reset and will feel much better soon.
Lastly, another best option to help support the above tips is to add supplementation to your day-to-day routine. It is important that you get Adrenal Support supplements from one of the trusted US brands in the market for health supplements.
