WHY CAN’T I GET BETTER? Chronic Illness, Post-COVID, and More: **ADRENAL FUNCTION

you would literally be dead. Like, they're responsible for a lot of very important things your body does. Right. But because they're so resilient, that means that they have a pretty wide margin in which that they operate normally. And here's the bottom line: they're supposed to go between, uh, say, a fairly, you know, moderate-low amount of output and a high amount of output and a little bump on each end of the spectrum, but they're supposed to wax and wane or ebb and flow between those areas. The more stressed the adrenal glands get, the— usually in the beginning they will over-function because they're that good, they have that much going for them. And then as they keep being called upon to over-function, they will start to wear out and they will under-function. Now here's the thing. There is a disease of underfunction and a disease of overfunction, and almost never are those 2 diseases the reasons why your adrenal glands are acting a little bit unusual. Just like any other chronic problem though, you want to be screened to make sure that you don't have Addison's disease or Cushing's disease, and there's a few other diseases of the adrenals that are are reasonably rare. But if your adrenals are not acting correctly, those do need to be screened and looked at. And like with all the hormone things that we bring up here, we do wanna keep in mind that this would involve some laboratory testing and some assessment. So normally that's gonna be a healthcare provider helping you out with that. But the biggest thing with the adrenals is, They respond to a number of things. And your adrenal glands actually are 2 glands housed in one sort of triangular-shaped gland. On the inside, you have more of a neurological component, and it forms literally with the neurological part of your nervous system when you're an embryo. And then it gets wrapped by the hormonal part of the adrenal. So you have really 2 2 glands in one, a little bit like the pancreas that way. So the neurological part is the part that reacts usually to acute stressors. It releases adrenaline, epinephrine, and related molecules. So if you've ever, you know, been suddenly scared or someone pulled out in front of you in a parking lot and you hit the brakes and you get that jolt feeling, a lot of that is the sudden release of catecholamines, those adrenaline-related or epinephrine-related molecules. So that goes on, those you can consider like your really quick response things. Well, the other time those things kick in is if your blood sugar starts to go down, your body will release those molecules for chemical reasons to go out and help to restore your low blood sugar. Then the hormonal part makes steroid hormones, primarily cortisol and aldosterone, and then some of the reproductive hormone precursors like DHEA and some other reproductive precursors. So you really have a hormonal and a neurological group of things going on with your adrenals. Now, what you want to keep in mind is these things are called upon every day to adjust for what's happening to you in the world. So when your immune system encounters something new that it's going to go fight, a lot of times the adrenals get these signals chemically and they will adjust the levels of maybe the corticoids or maybe other things that they put out to deal with the new immune function. Or maybe you're going into a later phase of immune activity and your body wants to calm everything down. It may readjust the output of these hormones. So that's why they're so dynamic. But you can imagine if we take— and that we normally have this dynamic, uh, you know, fluctuation between, you know, 0 and 100, and we keep beating up on the adrenals by kind of over, uh, you know, overtaxing them, you go from, you know, 1 to 100 range, you know, down to 1 to 90, and then, you know, 1 to 80 and 1 to 70, and they keep getting lower. And you usually, unless you develop one of those diseases I was talking about usually don't go into a disease state and have total dysfunction, but they just don't work properly. So then you get symptoms that can overlap with a lot of other symptoms. You can get fatigued. You can get sleep disturbance, either too much or too little sleep. Your circadian rhythm can be thrown off. So, you know, you used to sleep at night and be awake during the day. Now you can't get up in the morning and you can't go to sleep at night. You know, things get turned The other thing that can happen is, is that you get inappropriate release of these neurological chemicals. So think of like epinephrine or adrenaline, depending on what country you come from. If you have that being released when you don't need it, it's like someone gave you a shot of adrenaline, well, which is very stimulating. So we have people where their adrenals are not diseased, but they're just not functioning correctly, and they'll get hyper— hyperactive. adrenaline signs and symptoms. So they may be sitting after dinner with no problems at all, and all of a sudden their heart rate goes up, or they may start sweating, or there may be other things going on. And those things are going to be a problem for you because your body doesn't need that extra adrenaline or epinephrine being released, but it's going to get it anyway. We even have people where they'll be totally asleep, sleeping really well, and their adrenals will inappropriately decide, oh, it's just— we're going to release some adrenaline, some epinephrine. And they'll wake up with their heart racing and can't sleep, and they wonder what in the world is going on. Well, that's one of the things that can happen. Another is either overproduction or underproduction of cortisol and some of your steroid hormones, which can really mess things up as well. So when you're thinking about this and you're looking at, um, well, why would this be part of me not getting better? Just imagine all the things that the adrenal glands are supposed to do, and then add on top of that the fact that the adrenal glands have this wide range they can operate in. They can be real chill and you know, doing very little at, you know, when your body's in good shape and at rest, and they can suddenly upregulate if you get stressed or there's some other issue going on, then they go back to normal. That's a normally functioning set of adrenals. When you get chronic illness, one of the things that happens is, uh, you start to tax the adrenals over and over and over. And as I said, they go from a 1 to 100 range, which is their normal range, down to Maybe a one to twenty, and you just don't have normal function. So, as I said earlier, your circadian rhythm can be off sleep cycles. You can have anxiety or even rage attacks or other things that go on. All sorts of problems that can ensue, and we don't want any of them. So, when we're thinking about this then, and we think about okay, so I could see if I'm chronically ill, and the adrenals one of their responses is supposed to be to. infections and stressors and all that. Well, if I'm never healthy and I'm always calling on the adrenals to, you know, react and respond and do their job, I'm gonna, uh, I'm gonna take out more resources from them than I'm gonna put back in. And so that creates a lot of problems, and your, your adrenal range of function gets, gets, uh, abnormal. Okay. Again, it's not disease, It's just not correct. Okay, so the first thing is you do want to test it and make sure you don't have one of those diseases of too little or too much or something of that nature. But to repair them, the adrenals need a number of things. Now, under all of these things that we talk about is fixing all the other problems. So the more chronically ill you are, the more— it's sort of like the more rocks we have to turn over to try and fix things, etc. But I mean, that's part and parcel of chronic illness care for people. So helping take the stress off of them. So that means if you have chronic infections that are constantly beating on your immune system, which beats on your adrenals, we've got to get a lid on those guys. And chronic infections are pretty huge things. So that's one thing to work on. If you have autoimmunity of any type, that's something that many times you can't make that go away, but you can get it more under control. If you have toxic exposure or metabolic toxicities from other problems, getting those more under control takes some stress off your adrenals. But then things that actually help them to repair include returning your body to a normal sleep and wake cycle because your adrenals are a big part of your circadian rhythm, your when do I wake up and when do I go to sleep. They're not all of it, The big part of it. So retraining them into a normal and regular sleep-wake cycle, very important. I'll usually recommend that people look up sleep hygiene. So it's sort of like dental hygiene, only it's sleep hygiene. And there's a lot of resources online that they're just really good things you can do with yourself at home to help get back on track with sleep. The next thing is getting your body moving. So especially during the day when your body's supposed to be awake, getting it to move, making your organs and your blood pump and all of that stuff very, very important. Then nutrients. So eating regularly, you don't have to eat too much, but eating regularly so you have enough protein especially and some good fats. et cetera. Those are very important for adrenal function. And then the biggest thing outside of infections and autoimmunity really is going to be keeping your insulin levels level. And if you're taking insulin, that's a whole different thing. But if you don't use insulin, your insulin bounces up and down with what you eat. So you want to eat a low glycemic diet. And the low glycemic— again, you can look up low glycemic diet. Basically what it is is you're eating gonna eat fats and proteins, but the carbohydrates that you eat need to be those that don't spike your insulin a lot. So those are gonna be low glycemic carbohydrates. And again, those websites will tell you about those and tell you what they are. But literally a lot of people where they have adrenal dysfunction, one of the biggest things that's kind of stabbing at the adrenals every day is the way they're eating. And a lot of times it's an insulin unregulated diet, even though you don't feel it. Maybe you're not diabetic, no big deal, but your adrenals feel it. All right, well, we're out of time for this section on adrenals and why I can't get better. Uh, please, whatever platform you're on, whether it's YouTube, CTR Radio, any of the pod burners, uh, Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson's on all of them. Uh, like, share, subscribe. Uh, we're growing our community. We're gonna do more of this patient education and we're gonna, uh, just keep giving you good content. So I wanna thank everybody. Uh, again, thank you for liking, sharing, subscribing. Check out the show notes. We're gonna have some links in there of some stuff stuff to help out in your own research. And always, don't take advice from people on the radio or TV, talk to your healthcare providers before you make any changes. All right, thank you very much all, and I'll see you all on the radio in one week's time.