Wired But Tired - Could You Have Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome?

Sandy came to the Healing Arts office at 41 years old complaining of trouble sleeping, fatigue that was not helped with a good night's sleep when she did sleep well, brain fog with difficulty focusing, and constant bloat no matter what she ate. She was in a high-stress job and would work 60 hours a week for the last four years and was gaining weight the previous two years even though she ate and exercised the same. 

Upon muscle testing Sandy, her nervous system and adrenals went weak. They needed nutritional support. Sandy was a perfect picture of adrenal fatigue syndrome. It's a prevalent condition, especially in our NYC patients, that goes largely unrecognized by the medical community. The adrenal glands produce adrenaline during times of stress. 

When a person is stressed for long periods, like Sandy was, their adrenal glands become depleted and under function. For an MD doctor, adrenal fatigue syndrome is only significant when it arrives at full-blown Addison's disease. For a muscle tester practitioner, adrenal fatigue syndrome has relative stages.

Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome

• In the early stages of adrenal fatigue syndrome, a person may feel tired, find it hard to wake up in the morning, or hit that 2-4 pm slump in the afternoon. 

• The second stage is when it turns into being tired all the time. 

• If nothing is done about it, the third stage is what I like to call "wired but tired." In this stage, you are so tired that when it's time to sleep, your body can't calm down enough to relax. So restless nights start to happen and can turn into insomnia. 

• The fourth stage is when it starts to affect other parts of the body. A person can suddenly have low back or knee pain or tired feet and ankles halfway through the day. They can also experience depression, low immune system, hair loss, weight gain, dark circles around the eyes, digestive problems, or lightheadedness due to the adrenals being burnt out. 

While the root causes of these symptoms are depleted adrenal glands, a traditional medical doctor would never recognize this because they are not looking for it. As long as there is no diagnosis of Addison's disease, there's no problem with the adrenal glands. Compounding the problem, the patient will usually get treatment for the areas causing pain, such as the knee, the lower back, or the digestive symptoms. All the while, the underlying cause is burned-out adrenal glands that haven't been addressed yet and are bound to cause even more significant problems later on unless addressed.

Using muscle testing, I see adrenal fatigue syndrome in the early stages, maybe even before the patient notices any fatigue, because the examination process is thorough. Caught early on, a patient will be on the road to recovery before more serious stages set in. How do the adrenal glands burn out in the first place? It is a lifestyle. An on-the-go lifestyle burns the adrenals out without giving the body enough rest. Also, a lifestyle of emotional stress can burn out the adrenals. When you live in a stressful state, the adrenal glands produce adrenaline, but they can't for too long, so when you are under stress for too long a period, the adrenals will burn out. So besides giving the adrenals the proper nutrition, stress management is vital. Otherwise, the adrenals will heal much slower if they have to keep responding to stress. 

Sandy's job was high stress; she was going to have to continue working those 60-hour weeks, but if we could do better time management so she could add in meditation with breath work for 20 minutes twice a day, that would calm her mind and nervous system down to give the adrenal glands a break and the ability to sleep better at night. She already had exercise in her routine, and she ate well for the most part. I had to tweak her diet and get her to stop drinking caffeine and coffee. Both things we test for in the office separately because the body responds differently to them. Sometimes, people can have coffee but are sensitive to caffeine. Other times, the coffee is just too acidic, but the caffeine is okay.

It's essential to get that specific when building nutritional programs because many people have eaten themselves into their current state of ill health to one degree or another. The deficiencies or imbalances may not lead to a breakdown in the adrenal glands but somewhere else in the body, lowering the body's resistance, lowering immunity, and a loss of the body's ability to cope with environmental toxins. 

Wherever the breakdown is in the body, know that with muscle testing, we can identify what organs go weak and which organs are strong. Then, from there, we can identify what toxins need to be detoxed from the body and which foods to avoid as a personal cleanse while we rebuild the body using organic food supplements from a farm called Standard Process. This is how we help people get well and stay well!

If you can describe yourself as "wired but tired," please contact us for an evaluation to see if we can make some adjustments and get you back to feeling yourself.