Adrenal health

Are You Tired & Wired? Why I wrote this book on adrenal dysfunction

by Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP

Here are the topics covered in this article:

• What made me write Tired & Wired
• The three types of adrenal dysfunction
• Tips for healing adrenals naturally

In more than 25 years of practice, I’ve watched an epidemic unfold — of overworked, overstressed, just plain exhausted women. So many of these women are doing “all the right things” by juggling careers, children, family finances, and household chores, day after day with few breaks. Their symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, fuzzy thinking, and unexplained weight gain are becoming more and more common every day in my practice — and I think it’s about time we do something about it.

Chronic stress (and the load it places on women’s adrenal glands) is one of the key factors underlying these symptoms and a host of women’s health problems. Yet, subclinical adrenal dysfunction isn’t recognized in conventional medicine here in the US. The position taken by the Endocrine Society is that there’s no such thing as “adrenal fatigue” (which is a popular term for adrenal dysfunction) and that unless the patient is severely ill with Cushing’s syndrome or Addison’s disease, their adrenal glands are healthy.

But there’s no sharp line dividing “sick” from “well,” and if your test results show your adrenal function to be just barely on the “well” side of the cutoff, you’re probably feeling pretty sick! I’ve heard from women who’ve been dismissed by their practitioners and told that their symptoms are just part of aging or that they simply need an antidepressant. It can be incredibly discouraging.

My book Are You Tired and Wired? was written for these women, and its message is simple: You don’t have to just live with your symptoms. There are many ways — natural ways — that you can reconfigure your stress response, bring your adrenals back to a state of health, and relieve the symptoms you’ve been experiencing.

What prompted me to start writing

I think most women “get it” that stress has lasting effects on their health. But from what I’ve seen in the clinic, many don’t recognize that these effects are widespread and deeply rooted — affecting sleep, mood, metabolism, energy, and sometimes even triggering serious health disorders, including heart palpitations, gastrointestinal issues, hormonal imbalance, thyroid dysfunction, systemic inflammation, and autoimmune disorders. This oftentimes means they don’t realize just how important it is to prioritize their health and make long-term changes. I’ve had lots of patients who began taking steps to heal adrenal imbalance, but as soon as they felt a bit better return to the patterns of living they started with — winding up in my office six months later, just as sick and tired (if not worse) than they felt when we began!

Are You Tired & Wired? came to be in part because there was nothing out there to help women change the path that brought them to the problem in the first place. When it comes to adrenal dysfunction, a woman has to examine the way she lives her life and make key changes — to her diet, to her exercise habits, to her work and rest balance, and most of all to the way she responds to stress and long-term emotional burdens — if she’s going to heal completely.

As a woman with three children and a busy medical practice, I’ve had to constantly reevaluate my responsibilities and commitments to find the right balance in my life, and I know it isn’t easy. But women need to know that they can do it. I’ve done it myself, and so have hundreds of my patients. And that’s another reason Tired & Wired came to be: I really want to get the word out that there’s a lot women can do to repair any adrenal dysfunction naturally, if they’re willing to make their personal health a priority.

What have I learned about healing adrenal dysfunction?

A few years ago, I began noticing that certain patterns were emerging among the many patients I saw in my practice who suffered from adrenal dysfunction. While it’s true that adrenal imbalance manifests uniquely in each and every woman, in my experience the patterns I see can be grouped into three general categories. Keep in mind that these are observations based on what I see in my clinic, not diagnoses! There are variations, exceptions, and combinations in these groupings — a woman may progress from one to the other over time, and even back again. The body will always seek balance, and with that in mind, we also know that she can heal.

Type 1: The “Racehorse.” I think we all know who these women are: women who are “driven” and “always on the go,” but who cannot seem to unwind or unplug. More important, they can’t sleep! With this group, the adrenals are stuck on “high alert,” pumping out adrenaline and cortisol, making them unable rest or relax. Often, the constant flow of stress hormones can lead to thyroid problems, digestive issues, and significant fluctuations in blood sugar. A “racehorse” is likely to experience severe PMS or perimenopausal symptoms, too.

Type 2: The “Workhorse.” These are women whose adrenals are out of balance in more ways than one — sometimes they’re producing too much cortisol, and other times too little, and usually the timing of cortisol production is way off. They usually feel tired when they first wake up, often relying on caffeine and sugar to get through the first part of the day. But then, as afternoon winds down into evening — the time when our normal circadian rhythm signals the body to prepare for sleep — the “workhorse” will often feel too wired to fall asleep, or fall asleep only to wake in the wee hours with her mind racing. Like the “racehorse” type, these women are both tired and wired … just not at the same time or in the same way.

Type 3: The “Flatliner.” I really thought about using the name “flatliner” to describe this group because it seems like a depressing term. And yet it fits, because women who’ve reached this level of adrenal imbalance have literally been pressed flat by stress. There’s rarely if ever a “wired” sensation in these women because their adrenals are chronically underperforming — and they usually feel exhausted in every sense of the word. A “flatliner” may need to stop and rest while doing a simple task like making dinner. She may have low blood pressure, experience dizziness upon waking, or crave salt and sugar. She may even have some sort of thyroid disorder or another autoimmune condition — anything from asthma to lupus — or possibly digestive issues, pain syndrome, insulin resistance, or a combination of health problems. And most troubling of all, she’s likely lost any joy she once had in life.

Now, you may recognize yourself in one of these three types, or you may feel as though you’ve taken a little piece of each one at different times in your life — and it’s not all that unusual for women to say “That’s how I felt five years ago, but this is how I feel now.” What I’ve seen in the clinic is that specific herbs and remedies I recommend to provide short-term adrenal support differ depending upon which category a woman falls into, but in the long term, all three types benefit from a fairly similar plan — tweaked a little to address the specific problems of adrenal hyperfunction or hypofunction that have led her to where she is today.

Natural healing for tired & wired women

As I explain in Tired & Wired, the path back to health for all three types rests on supporting the body’s overall well-being and above all, reducing the effects of stress — that is, making sure that there are fewer calls for the adrenals to produce stress hormones. There are so many different ways to do this, but here’s what’s most important:

• Eat meals and snacks that are made with fresh whole foods, preferably organic or locally grown, without colors, dyes, chemicals, preservatives, or added hormones, and be mindful of including some form of protein each time you eat. (For more, read my article on eating for adrenal health.)
• Address long-term emotional sources of stress (especially those brought with us from childhood), and learn new coping strategies so that we have less perceived stress.
• Find ways to improve sleep and get more rest.

At the same time, because each type is different, there are natural approaches unique to each group that can help to address the issues that brought her to where she is — in addition to individualized emotional “homework” intended to help her unravel the knot of stress in her life. I explain the specifics in Tired & Wired, or you can read my earlier article on natural therapy for adrenal imbalance if you want to know more.

Tired & wired transformed into wellness

What I’ve described in this article is the very most basic of the in-depth information I’ve presented in Tired & Wired — so I hope you’ll read it if you feel that adrenal imbalance is compromising your health and happiness. But the most important information I can give you is that you don’t have to live this way. No matter what your “type” might be, adrenal health — and feeling well — is within reach for you!

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Last Modified Date: 04/15/2011