TREATING ADRENAL BURNOUT BY CHANGING YOUR BRAIN

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I wrote a very successful book on adrenal burnout. But for years I thought there was a missing piece. Now I understand that it’s actually calming your big dumb pet, your brain, that’s the most important.

Before I get into calming your brain, I’d like you to understand how you got adrenally burned out. Stress hormones are secreted from your adrenal glands in response to acute and chronic physical and emotional stress. Your two adrenal glands are grape sized organs rest one above each kidney. The hormones they secrete influence nearly every bodily function and that’s why when you’re adrenally burned out you end up with health problems.

THERE FIVE STAGES OF ADRENAL BURNOUT

DRIVEN: You’re on top of your game and love the adrenaline high. You drive yourself mercilessly.

At this stage, you may not realize it, but your body is working hard to keep up with you. Look at every single president of the United States, and how gruesomely they age. External aging demonstrates what’s going on inside of their bodies. And Bill Clinton is a great example with all the health problems he’s had since his over-the-top stressful presidency.

DRIVEN is the adrenaline rush stage of adrenal burnout, which begins because some people just love this rush. But this adrenaline rush stage can also occurs in people are forced to work nights, like say in an acute medical care or police work, or people who experience frightening childhoods, or a traumatic life experiences like combat, or even a prolonged, hostile divorce, which kept your adrenals in a hyper alert state out of insecurity and fear.

The limbic system of your brain translates sensory input into emotion. When your limbic system registers a major event, your adrenals release adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone.

You get an adrenaline response from emotional or physical stress. But actually it could be a positive event like, say winning the lottery, getting a raise, getting married, or buying your dream car.

THE SENSATION OF THE ADRENALINE RUSH IS CAUSED BY THE RELEASE OF THREE FACTORS INTO YOUR SYSTEM AT THE SAME TIME:
1) Energy from sugar stored in your liver and muscles
2) The release of the feel good neurotransmitter dopamine
3) The release of the opiate neurotransmitter endorphins

These three factors suddenly make you feel energized, fully alert, and euphoric.

BEHAVIORS THAT LEAD TO ADRENAL BURNOUT

Driving yourself without let up
Remaining in a stressful situation
Skipping meals/dieting
Eating processed, junk or fake foods
Not exercising or exercising too much
Neglecting relaxation and other ways to calm your central nervous system
Blowing past your own fatigue to finish the day’s work
Not getting enough sleep
Using sugar, caffeine, nicotine, drugs, herbal stimulants to function
Breathing shallowly when tense, instead of breathing deeply
Exposure to toxins through the environment, household products and food
Worrying
Mentally replaying stressful inner dialogues
Neglecting fun and relaxing activities that allow you to clear your mind
Putting yourself last

Initially your body will be in an adrenaline rush state. But if the stress is chronic, your adrenals will then release the hormones cortisol and DHEA. These hormones initially keep you going.

HEALTHY LEVELS OF CORTISOL
Maintains blood sugar balance
Maintains energy
Maintains healthy blood pressure and fluid balance
Diminishes inflammation
Provides direction to the systems of the body
Regulates healthy immune response

HEALTHY LEVELS OF DHEA
Decreases recovery time from exercise
Decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease
Increases human growth hormone
Improves immunity
Improves mood
Increases energy
Increases fat burning
Is correlated with longevity
Speeds recovery from surgery

Just as you wouldn’t rev your car’s engine 24/7, and just as you regularly maintain your car’s engine, your body and more specifically your adrenal glands need rest so that they and the rest of your body can repair. If your adrenal glands are constantly churning out stress hormones and not given the opportunity to rest and repair they will begin to lose function. That’s when you begin to suffer from insomnia, fatigue, mood swings, low sex drive, weight gain, water retention and gastrointestinal discomforts to name just a few problems.

As you continue to drive yourself your adrenals will first decrease DHEA production. Now you have too much cortisol and not enough DHEA. This is not a good situation because DHEA buffers many of the negative effects of excess cortisol. For example, cortisol causes muscle wasting and DHEA stimulates muscle building, essentially replacing what cortisol has broken down. Increased cortisol suppresses immunity, whereas DHEA increases immunity. Increased cortisol leads to increased weight gain, whereas DHEA leads to fat burning and weight loss.

EXCESS CORTISOL RESULTS IN
Bone loss
Decreased sex drive
Emotional mood swings—depression
Increasing tendency to type II diabetes and hypertension
Gastritis
Menstrual disorders
Muscle wasting
Recurrent infections
Slower wound healing
Thinning of the skin and connective tissue
Water retention
Weight gain

Then you go into the second stage of adrenal burnout.

DRAGGING: You feel less energetic than you used to, so you have to rely on caffeine and even herbal stimulants or drugs. You’re too busy to cook, so you eat fast food. You feel terrible so you start taking pain relievers and Valium. Maybe you smoke. You’ve started having insomnia. You notice you’re getting flabby.

Your autonomic or unconscious nervous system that regulates the actions of organs such as your intestines, heart, circulation and glands, is divided into the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. During the day, when you are awake, responding to stress, eating and on the go, you are predominantly in the sympathetic state. The mistake we fall into is pushing themselves to the extreme by over-exercising or working too hard, or perhaps you have been forced into this hyper alter sympathetic dominant state by a harsh childhood or bad circumstances, people engage in behaviors that force their bodies into a constant state of sympathetic dominance. This places constant extreme demands on your adrenal glands to secrete the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol and DHEA. This constant demand ultimately depletes your adrenal reserve.

The metabolic processes that take place while you are in a sympathetic state create acids as byproducts, which make your body more acidic. When your body is in a natural, healthy rhythm the parasympathetic mode, which occurs predominantly at night, counteracts the sympathetic mode by turning on the repair processes. These processes rid your body of acid, and allows repair processes to make new cells, membranes, tissues, enzymes, hormones and neurotransmitters.

If you stay in a sympathetic dominant state too long you could end up in the third stage of adrenal burnout.

LOSING-IT: You have dark circles under your eyes. You’re too fat or too thin and looking older. You can’t sleep and lie away worrying. You are not motivated to exercise and drink coffee and eat sugar. You may smoke. You experience shortness of breath, chest pains, vertigo, palpitations, nausea, blurred vision, environmental sensitivities, and dread.

When you’re losing-it you, you’re in the danger zone, but often people keep going until they reach the fourth stage of adrenal burnout.

HITTING THE WALL: You bitch and moan about your fatigue, work, and how fat you are. You suffer from brain fog, irritability, insomnia, nightmares, gastrointestinal problems, allergies, asthma, headaches, migraines, musculoskeltal pains, back and neck pain. You use sleeping pills, antacids, antiinflamatories, cholesterol lowering medications, blood sugar lowering agents and/or blood pressure medications, way too much coffee and caffeinated drinks, and alcohol. You pee all night long. You turn to antidepressants. You have no energy for life.

WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU WHEN YOUR ADRENAL RESERVES ARE DEPLETED
Anxiety
Arthritis
Autoimmune diseases
Chronic fatigue
Colitis
Depression
Eating disorders
Escalating allergies, hives
Esophageal reflux
Fatigue
Fibromyalgia
Gastrointestinal dysfunction
Headaches, migraines
Hypoglycemia and type II diabetes
Inability to make healthy cognitive choices
Infections such as recurrent herpes, yeast, respiratory
Infertility
Insomnia, fatigue
Irrational fears
Irregular menses
Low sex drive
Metabolic problems
Mood disorders
Muscle spasms
Palpitations
Premature heart disease
Sciatica
Stiff Neck
Sweating (excessive)
Temporomandibular joint syndrome (TMJ)
Water retention
Weight gain or weight loss

If you don’t do something you’ll end up in the final state of adrenal burnout.

BURNED-OUT: Cancer, heart attack, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease such as thyroiditis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, insulin dependent diabetes, Grave’s disease, myasthenia gravis, interstitial cystitis or Sjogren’s disease.

THE PRESCRIPTION FOR ADRENAL BURNOUT (ANY STAGE)

Stop driving yourself
Remove yourself from stressful situations
Eat a balanced diet of only real food
Exercise, but not maniacally
Get enough sleep every night
Stop stimulants like too much alcohol, smoking, caffeine
Take quality supplements
Avoid toxic exposure
Learn to have fun and relax

Yes, it’s important to remove yourself from stressful situations, to sleep eight hours a night, or more if you have driven yourself into sickness. It’s crucial to address all the factors of good health like eating a balanced diet of real food and avoiding all factory foods and toxins, drinking purified water, drinking green juice, and taking quality supplements. These things will all heal your adrenals.

But when I wrote the book on adrenal burnout I didn’t know what I now know, that meditation actually changes the brain. If you think about the alert systems our government has in place now compared to prior to the 911 attacks, it’s much like your brain before and after prolonged stress. Because of the plasticity of the brain, the more you use the areas of your brain that respond to stress, the larger those areas are going to become. It’s like working a muscle.

So even if you’ve been working diligently on correcting your adrenal burnout, you still may feel exhausted all the time, and not anywhere near the way you used to be. You may still be suffering from insomnia because your adrenals are kicking in inappropriately in the middle of the night. The way to address this constant, learned state of hyper-alertness is to calm your brain by actually changing your brain.

MRI studies have shown that eight weeks of 40 minutes a day of Metta (lovingkindness) meditation actually decreases the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that perceives stress. At the same time Metta meditation also increases the size of the insula, which is the part of the brain that generates compassion and loving feelings.

Metta meditation is a simple meditation in which you assume a comfortable position, close your eyes, focus your attention for a few moments on the sounds around you, then focus for a few moments on your breath going in and out. Don’t worry one bit about losing focus. It happens after ½ to 1 second to everyone, even those who are experienced in mediation. Just bring your attention back gently without condemning yourself. Then begin to repeat these phrases to yourself, gently bringing your attention back when your mind wanders.

May I be safe.
May I be happy
May I be healthy
May I live with ease.

Metta is not a way to beg for certain things, like may I have enough money to pay my bills this month, give me a boyfriend, a bigger house, a better job. The purpose of Metta is to give yourself simple, uncomplicated compassion and lovingkindness. This is the meditation that researchers found to actually change the brain. When the part of your brain that is hyper-alert to danger decreases, your adrenals will stop being pounded, and you will find yourself being healed of adrenal burnout.

Om Shanti,
Your girlfriend in health,

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