Fatigue, Insomnia, Stress … Why is it happening to me?

So many times we believe that some one thing is causing the above syndromes to happen to us. Our age, our life or some depletion in some kind of hormone. In fact, it can be a combination of all three. A simple saliva test can be the telltale answer that we need to start to give us some direction.

For years we have always blamed it on depleting sex hormones or imbalance of those hormones as we age. We are correct but far too often we look a sex hormone as the culprit. Now recent studies show that sex hormones cannot truly be balanced until we fix first the adrenal glands, then the thyroid, then balance the sex hormone. Today we will focus on the adrenals in a three part series.

The adrenal glands sit just atop the kidneys and help us cope with day to day stress. They secrete cortisol which is a powerful hormone that helps us deal with day to day life. It is a hormone that is supposed to rise in the early a.m. and slowly decrease thru-out the day to the point where it measures less than “1” by 9 pm so that we may get into sleep mode. If cortisol does not start high and stay on a continuous downhill slide then our adrenals probably aren’t working at maximum efficiency. We hear the term “adrenal fatigue”, probably overused because adrenal rarely quit they just become insufficient. They can either secrete lower levels of cortisol than they should thru-out the days or worst-case scenario put out the wrong amount of cortisol at the wrong times of day which often occurs with people that have shift-work jobs, certain stressors, bad diets and most of all poor sleep habits. Again, a simple saliva test that is done four times thru-out the day, after awaking to just before bedtime can give us all the info we need to decide how your adrenals are working. We look at that curve and try and decide why your cortisol numbers are where they are and why there may be blips of up and down values when they don’t follow the natural cortisol pattern. Getting adrenals back to normal can sometimes be as simple as taking the correct vitamins and minerals such as adrenal extracts or a certain combination of B vitamins. But most importantly it gives you the energy you need to get through an entire day without “tanking” by mid-afternoon which I commonly hear during our consultations. Cortisol testing runs about $120.00 dollars. Monthly nutraceuticals cost about $40.00.

This is money well spent in the first steps to wellness and getting our energy levels back to take on day to day life!