How to Overcome Adrenal Fatigue with Evan H. Hirsch, MD - #115

How to Overcome Adrenal Fatigue with Evan H. Hirsch, MD

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Hey there, Evan Hirsch here. Welcome back to the EnergyMD Podcast where we help you resolve your chronic fatigue, ME-CFS, Long COVID and MCAS so you can live the life of your dreams. So, really excited about today's episode as I always am. In today's episode, I'm actually going to be talking about how to fix your adrenal fatigue, determining whether or not you have it, what is adrenal fatigue versus adrenal gland dysfunction, and a number of other things that are so important

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the context of chronic fatigue and ME-CFS. So let's start off first with the context. So adrenal gland dysfunction, which is a more appropriate name than adrenal fatigue, is a process that is part of the overall picture of the 30 plus different causes that you potentially have. So it fits into the classification of the deficiencies. These are the things that are not in your body that are supposed to be there. And as opposed to the...

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category of the toxicity. So whenever I'm talking about different causes, I'm talking about things that are deficient in the body. These are things like hormones and vitamins and minerals, other nutrients and lifestyle habits. So there's not enough of those things. And then when in the second category, it's looking at toxins or toxicities. These are things that are in the body that aren't supposed to be there. And especially the toxic five, the combination of heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, and trauma.

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or nervous system dysfunction. Okay, and those are really the most important causes. So remember as we kind of go through this process that the most important things to remove are the toxic five and the toxic five are actually causing 80% of the deficiencies. So in terms of the hormone deficiencies and the vitamin and mineral deficiencies, those are most of the time being going to be caused by the toxic five, okay.

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but we can't just go right at the toxic five and remove them, okay? Because the body has to be prepared for it. So we have to go through my four step process. First step is to figure out the causes that you have. Second step is to replace the deficiencies of which we're gonna be talking about the adrenals today. Third step is to be opening up the drainage pathways, the detoxification pathways, the exit pathways, basically the liver, the kidney, the lymph, the neurolymph that's in the brain, the gallbladder, the intestines.

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all these pathways that you need open in order to remove the toxins. And then you can go into step four and remove the toxins. OK, but these are some of the reasons why people aren't successful at removing their toxins is because they don't prepare the body appropriately. OK, so let's talk about the adrenal gland. So you can't really have chronic fatigue, ME-CFS or long COVID without having a dysfunction in your adrenal gland.

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Now your adrenal gland are there's two glands and they sit right on top of your kidneys and they produce a number of hormones. Most important one is cortisol. Cortisol is the body's main stress management hormone and it's our main anti-inflammatory hormone and it regulates insulin and consequently blood sugars. And it regulates the immune system. Right. You guys have all heard probably of cortisone or prednisone being these amazing anti-inflammatories that are used in conventional medicine. Well.

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they all come from cortisol, which gets broken down into cortisone in the body. And then if you blow it up a thousand times, it becomes prednisone. Okay, and what does that do? That suppresses inflammation by suppressing the immune system. So that's the same thing that happens here. And that's how cortisol manages the immune system. Cortisol is also our get up and go hormone. So it enables us, it starts being produced at midnight, it peaks at 6 a.m. and then it comes down throughout the day.

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And it allows us to have sustainable energy throughout the day and then allows us to sleep at night. And so one of the main ways that I help people recreate their circadian rhythm when they're having sleep issues is actually by replacing things like cortisol in the morning. OK, so let's kind of dive in. So that's what that's what the adrenals do and they produce cortisol and it manages all of these things.

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And one of the most important things that it matters, as I mentioned, is stress. Okay. Now this can be mental, emotional, or physical stressors. So by mental and emotional, you're probably very familiar with those. These are things that are kind of happening in your life and how you're responding to them. This can be trauma. This can be something that happened to your life that changed the way that you looked at life and potentially life became then more stressful.

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This can be the way that your thoughts are. If you don't have positive thoughts or you're not seeing, if you're not living in gratitude and you're not, and you have limiting beliefs and you're asking yourself questions that are not serving you, like, why do I feel like crap? That's not really a great question to ask yourself. You should ask yourself, how can I love myself more every day? Or how can I take another step in this process every single day in order to be able to find a solution to this, right? So, and then,

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Yeah, so those are all if you're not thinking correctly and you don't have the correct mindset, that is going to stress you out mentally. And if you are thinking bad thoughts about your partner or your work or whatever, that is going to stress you out mentally and emotionally, right? And then there's the trauma component that's under that. In terms of physical stress, this can be something like not having the correct posture.

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but it can also be the toxic five. It can be the accumulation of the heavy metals and the chemicals and the molds and the infections that have built up in your body over time ever since you came out of the womb. Cause we know that over 300 different chemicals have been found in baby's core blood in multiple studies. And we've accumulated these things over time. And consequently, these are all physical stressors, everything except the trauma, which is number five. So the toxic four without the trauma.

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These are all physical stressors that end up compromising the adrenals. Okay. And then you end up with symptoms such as feeling unusually tired in the morning. And then you have certain crashes throughout the day. The most common crash is around two to 4 PM, usually at around 3 PM. And generally if you're crashing at around 3 PM, oftentimes you're awake at 3 AM. There's issues with falling asleep and staying asleep.

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There are issues with getting a lightheadedness or a dizziness when you go from a sitting or a lying down to a standing position too quick. That's called orthostatic hypotension. Your blood pressure is too low. It's not able to compensate. And this is directly related to the adrenal gland's ability to manage the salt balance in the body by its production of what's called aldosterone. So that is a major symptom caused by dysfunction in the adrenal glands and cortisol.

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There's a craving for salty foods and sweet foods because of what I just spoke about in terms of the aldosterone and then what I spoke about with the insulin and the blood sugars. There can be low libido. So when your body's undergoing times of stress, consequently it's going to have an effect on all of the hormones. And this is the body's way of saying, okay, you're going through stress right now is not a time to reproduce.

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And so consequently lowers libido by decreasing testosterone. Oftentimes women who are kind of perimenopausal or they're on the border of being menopausal, it throws them into menopause because their estrogen and their progesterone levels come down and then thyroid can also be affected negatively.

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So additionally, there can be poor memory issues, brain fog, and as I mentioned, increases in inflammation.

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So those are many of the adrenal symptoms or cortisol dysfunction symptoms. So some people are curious about whether or not they have adrenal fatigue. And so this has been kind of debated back and forth about whether or not people actually have adrenal fatigue, but the reality is that if you have fatigue, you're going to, a component of that is going to be.

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caused by a dysfunction in the adrenal gland. Now we're not talking about acute fatigue, we're talking about chronic fatigue. We're talking about a persistent exhaustion that persists every day or every other day, but it is chronic and it does not go away with rest, right? So if you slept for 20 hours a day for multiple days, you would still have this issue, okay? That's the chronic fatigue that we're talking about. Many people can qualify as having

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ME-CFS, which is myalgic encephalitis, which is what they call it in Europe, or CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome. And we do have a quiz on our website at energymdmethod.com if you want to see if you have ME-CFS. Okay, great. So let's kind of jump into the causes of adrenal dysfunction. So we kind of talked a little bit about this. It is the the mental and emotional and the physical stressors. Okay.

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Um, and so then let's talk then a little bit about how to determine whether or not you have it. So most of the time you can determine it just by the symptoms that we've talked about, you know, there's very few other things that directly cause orthostatic hypotension or POTS, which is postural orthostatics and tachycardia syndrome. Okay.

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So basically this means that you have low blood pressure, you have these symptoms and your heart rate increases when that happens, okay? That's the tachycardia part of it, okay? So those things, now other people may say, well, no, but those things can be caused by the toxic five. And that's true, they definitely can be, but it's because of the effect of the toxic five on the adrenal glands and their effect on cortisol, okay? So there are some tests though that can be helpful.

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These are not required. But if you are going to look at cortisol, you can look at the salivary cortisol levels, and you should have a nice curve of where it's high in the morning, kind of comes down throughout the day. If that's not happening, then that can be a sign that there's an issue. If you're doing a blood test, a cortisol level of less than 15 can be an issue. If you're looking at DHEA sulfate, which is another marker, this can be...

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If it's less than 150 in women or less than 300 in men, it can indicate that your adrenal reserves are compromised. Just by checking DHEA is not enough, you have to check DHEA sulfate-S, which is actually going to give you a better measurement because it's found more readily in blood. All that to say, symptoms really are the best way of determining whether you have this.

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So then when that happens, what should you do? Well, there are certain things that you can do from a lifestyle perspective. Stress management is going to be very important here. Working on your trauma, joining a trauma or a brain retraining program is one of the things that I really recommend. Working on your mindset, and we do have our mindset worksheet on our website, which you can find at energymdmethod.com slash learn.

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along with a number of other of our free things. But working on the mental and the emotional is gonna be very important. And then also supporting the adrenal gland by giving it some replacement items. So this sometimes can be some different adaptogenic herbs. It can be some ground up adrenal gland, whether it's whole adrenal or whether it's just the cortisol or the cortex or the outside part of the adrenal.

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A Luthero route can be very helpful. Rhodiola, sometimes licorice route, though you do have to be care about care with that care of that of utilizing licorice route because it can cause some side effects like headaches and swelling. But it's one of the best things for raising blood pressure. And if your blood pressure is lower than 110 as the top number, oftentimes that's one of the reasons why you're having the orthostatic issues or the low blood pressure issues.

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then taking something like licorice root can be very helpful. But unless you're under the care of a practitioner, I wouldn't recommend more than 500 milligrams per day and in the morning. And when you're taking some of these herbs, you can take them first thing in the morning, or you can take them every three hours until about 3 p.m. If you take them after 3 p.m., they can interfere with your sleep, so that's not something I recommend. If taking them every three hours in the first part of the day is challenging for you,

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You can just take them first thing in the morning and then right before lunch.

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So this is really a two-step process. So in terms of boosting the adrenals, that can be helpful. But generally when I see people, this isn't going to make that big of a difference, okay? There is something called the big three that I talk about, which is the adrenals, the mitochondria, and the thyroid. And boosting all of those initially in step two can make a little bit of a difference. But when your body is overwhelmed by the toxic five, by these toxins and the trauma, oftentimes,

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you're not going to get to where you want to go by replacing the big three. And this is very important because a lot of people are seeing practitioners that are replacing their adrenals and they're wondering why it's not working. They're saying, okay, we're trying to fix your adrenals. We've been trying to do this for years and it's not working. The reality is, is that you have to boost the adrenals, but you also have to remove what is insulting the adrenals, what is causing the adrenals to be dysfunctional. So this, these are the toxic five. So you have to remove the heavy metals, the chemicals, the molds, the infections and the trauma.

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but you have to do it by going through my four step process. Okay, so replacing in step two, then making sure you're opening up the drainage pathways in step three, and then removing the toxins in step four. And removing the toxins really takes the most amount of time. So you can replace the items in step two, the hormones, the deficiencies, et cetera. I like to say you can replace them until the cows come home, but until you remove the toxins in step four,

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You're not going to get to where you want to go. And step four generally is going to take somewhere between nine and 18 or 24 months, depending on the number of toxins you have, the severity of each of those, how long you've been ill. But just know that when you start down a process like this where you're going to be removing all those, they're going to be successful. And as humans, we overestimate the amount that we can get done in a day and underestimate the amount we can get done in a year. And when you actually

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complete that year and you've taken a step every single day, just a baby step every single day and you've gone through the four-step process, you look back and you are amazed at all you can accomplish. So hopefully this was helpful for you. Hopefully you learned a little bit more about the adrenal glands, about adrenal gland dysfunction. If you are interested in seeing what we have to offer, you can check us out at www.

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So if you have chronic fatigue, long COVID or mass cell activation syndrome, and you're looking for help, check us out at energymdmethod.com. We have a program for almost every single budget and we're here to help.

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