Adrenal Fatigue: Causes, Symptoms, and Recovery

If you feel tired no matter how much you rest, struggle with brain fog, or find it hard to manage stress, you are not alone. Many people call this adrenal fatigue. The name can be debated, but the symptoms are real and deserve to be understood.

After more than 30 years of helping patients with hormone and energy concerns, I have seen how often these issues trace back to changes in the body’s stress-response system. In this article, I will walk you through what may be happening with your adrenals, what can cause these changes, and what you can do to start feeling better.

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Table of Contents

Adrenal Fatigue Versus Adrenal Dysfunction
What is Happening During Adrenal Fatigue?
Further Misconceptions Around Adrenal Fatigue
Additional Factors Driving Adrenal Dysfunction
How Do We Know We Have Adrenal Dysfunction?
Best Practices: Treatment for Adrenal Fatigue
How Do You Know If Adrenal Treatment is Working?
Take the Adrenal Quiz Today

Adrenal Fatigue Versus Adrenal Dysfunction

While it might be more of a semantic argument, I think it’s important because the term “adrenal fatigue” alone implies a set of misconceptions that can lead people to make the wrong decisions around their health. I don’t like the term “fatigue,” and here’s why…

The term adrenal fatigue has been around for a few decades now, and many think of it as being a cause behind fatigue, anxiety, weight gain, sleep issues, and more. While there’s a lot of truth to that, the difficulty is that your adrenals are not fatigued at all.

This is a misconception built on the idea that stress causes your adrenals to make stress hormones, and that a lot of stress causes them to make a lot of hormones. Leading them to a state of fatigue where they can no longer make enough to keep up.

Frankly, that’s completely wrong.

The importance of making that point is that, if it were true, the solution would be to simply make more stress hormones. And that has happened. Some folks have gone as far as to partner with their physicians to take hydrocortisone (a stress hormone).

What is Happening During Adrenal Fatigue?

The regulation of the stress response changes under chronic stressors. This is because we have something called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

Under chronic stressors, this HPA axis works differently. We know this as adrenal dysfunction or adrenal dysregulation. Or, more commonly, HPA dysfunction.

This is what we’re talking about when we discuss adrenal fatigue. And it can come on after chronic stressors – chronic stressors that are legitimate and could include:

• A boss who’s a jerk
• A difficult schedule
• A strained relationship

These are more or less obvious stressors, but there are others that can be a little bit less intuitive. Things like:

• Not enough time for sleep
• Not having steady blood sugar levels

Collectively, it’s the total amount, intensity, and duration of these stressors that lead to things like adrenal fatigue or adrenal dysfunction.

When we have that, it can cause major symptoms like:

• Fatigue
• Brain fog
• Weight gain
• Anxiety
• Dizziness
• And many more…

But it’s not just these short-term symptoms. It can also have a meaningful effect on our long-term health, as proven by several studies. Things like cortisol can have a more determinant effect than things like smoking status or cholesterol levels.

Ultimately, while there are times that the adrenal glands cannot make enough hormone, these instances are few and far between and exceedingly rare. Even when cortisol is low, it is usually not that the body cannot make it — it’s choosing not to make as much.

Further Misconceptions Around Adrenal Fatigue

Another big myth is that recovery is all about taking more supplements. While they can have a place, simple lifestyle changes can be far greater needle movers than supplements alone.

Additionally, if adrenal fatigue or stress is the cause of a lot of symptoms, then you’re stuck with that. It’s not true – it can even go away in quite a short amount of time.

Additional Factors Driving Adrenal Dysfunction

As I mentioned, chronic stressors are a big factor driving adrenal dysfunction. But dietary factors can play a big role here, including:

• Not eating regularly enough
• Not getting good amounts of glucose
• Too much highly-processed carbohydrate
• Too much caffeine

There are also environmental toxicants that we need to keep top of mind, like training way past one’s normal levels. This can all have an effect and lead to various symptoms.

This can then correlate with changes to cortisol output. When cortisol levels are not regulated well, we can be more vulnerable to infections and more apt to develop chronic fatigue.

Symptoms can also be quite specific, such as dizziness or feeling light headed after standing up, especially when these symptoms are recurrent or show up at certain times of day.

How Do We Know We Have Adrenal Dysfunction?

If you want to get to the bottom of determining whether you’re struggling with adrenal fatigue or dysfunction, there are a couple of clear-cut steps you can take.

The first step is to become aware of your symptoms, know when they happen, and if they’re suspicious or if they’re following a rhythm, you can begin to self-assess.

From there, you may also want to consider medical testing. There are two facets here:

1. Tests that show if the adrenals are diseased
2. Tests that show if they are dysfunctional

The tests for adrenal disease are primarily blood tests. They look at things like cortisol, ACTH, and can show if the glands are making way too much or too little cortisol.

What they cannot show is how cortisol is timed throughout the day. For that, this is one case where salivary tests are truly helpful. They can show you how the morning free fraction of cortisol compares against the nighttime free fraction.

That is the real defining characteristic of the HPA imbalance or dysfunction that I mentioned previously.

Best Practices: Treatment for Adrenal Fatigue

If your test results show that you might be struggling with adrenal dysfunction, what can you do to treat the issue? Let me walk you through the latest data…

What we’ve learned is that the timing of carbohydrates can make a huge difference. And it’s not so much that you need to avoid carbs at certain times, but that you need to include or enjoy carbs at certain times — especially with your evening meal.

But why would this matter? That’s because cortisol, the main adrenal hormone, is a glucocorticoid – a blood sugar-regulating hormone – which means we need to facilitate a normal nighttime wind-down of cortisol rather than a spike.

The trick here is enjoying healthy, slow-burning carbs that are rich in glucose. This includes things like:

• Starchy vegetables (sweet potatoes, plantains, lentils, brown rice, quinoa)
• Potatoes
• Squash

These are all dense sources of glucose. As such, they can give us gentle increases of glucose into our bloodstream that don’t require a lot of insulin to process. This allows our cortisol to stay lower.

This can be done in conjunction with adding in healthy foods that keep blood sugar steady, and make us not need to rely on cortisol as much for regulating blood sugar. Some great ones here include:

• Resistant starch
• High-fiber vegetables

From there, we need to focus on balancing out the amounts of protein and healthy fats in the meals.

Other steps that can play a big role here include:

• Sleep hygiene
• Bright light exposure
• Minimizing light exposure at night
• Stress-reducing exercises (mindfulness, yoga, etc.)
• Having regular downtime
• Not relying on stimulants for energy

Exercise is also critical when it comes to our adrenal health, especially the right amounts and the right kinds. But none is the most common wrong amount!

It is easier to get too little exercise rather than too much. While you can train hard, and that’s not a problem, you simply want to do it over a longer period of time.

Other Things That Can Help

Beyond diet, lifestyle changes, and exercise, there are a couple of things that we might want to consider when it comes to overall adrenal health.

Adaptogens are one of them. Things like holy basil, rhodiola, and ashwagandha are nice things used in combination to help the body better balance cortisol.

Things like magnesium, B vitamins, vitamin C, and essential fats. These are good things that help control inflammation and benefit the body’s stress response.

How Do You Know If Adrenal Treatment is Working?

Long story short, things should change quickly.

You should expect no more than a few weeks to see a clear, measurable change in things like mood, energy levels, and food cravings. They should go up and down super fast.

Measurable change, in terms of blood or salivary levels, should not take more than several months. If it’s not, you may want to revisit some of those strategies.

No matter how bad your adrenal dysfunction becomes, if you do the right things with the right partners and resources, you should be back on track within six months.

Take the Adrenal Quiz Today

If you need that push in the right direction to determine if you’re struggling with adrenal dysfunction, and what you can do about it, please consider taking the Adrenal Quiz today.

It can help quickly determine which state you’re in, and what you can do about it, alongside a collection of resources that offer tangible ways to deal with dysfunction.

Please feel free to take it today and let me know what you think. Being aware of your adrenal health can be the perfect first step to feeling better than ever before.