23 Jun Root Cause of Adrenal Fatigue
If you’ve been diagnosed with adrenal fatigue, you’ll want to understand the root cause of adrenal fatigue. It’s important to peel back this layer of your journey, so you know where healing begins.
I am NOT talking about Addison’s disease, which is an autoimmune disorder that attacks your adrenal gland. This will cause low cortisol, but this is not the “adrenal fatigue” we are talking about.
Adrenal fatigue is NOT the correct scientific-term, but we’ll go with it in this article. The correct term is hypothalamus pituitary adrenal dysfunction (HPA dysfunction).
Root Cause of Adrenal Fatigue
Long-Term External Stressors
We’ve all been there with times of our life that is really stressful. This could be from a bad relationship, a strained friendship, a career mishap, taking care of a friend or family member, a death in the family, etc. You get the point. These long-term stressors eventually take it’s toll on us and after a long time of dealing with high cortisol, the brain and adrenal connection begins to get dysregulated.
Hence why you’re struggling with lower cortisol! Your brain + adrenals have a busy highway between the two and when there is a block in the road, the adrenals can’t hear the communication coming from the brain. We rely on this little feedback loop to keep things healthy, but ‘adrenal fatigue’ is when this gets desensitized.
Long term stressors aren’t just mental, but also can be emotional.
Gut Health Issues
Outside of external stressors, we also need to understand that internal stressors can be chronic. Gut health imbalances can create lipopolysaccharides (LPS) that roam around the body and trigger a cortisol (stress hormone) response.
Think of a gut health issue that never gets resolved. You might overlook your bloating or diarrhea/constipation, but it’s your body speaking to you. There could be a microbe imbalance (parasite, yeast, bacteria) that could be causing these symptoms.
Blood Sugar Imbalance
Another internal stressor on the body is blood sugar dysregulation. Do you feel like you’re on the blood sugar rollercoaster? When you’re going up and down with highs and lows, low blood sugar will stimulate cortisol response to help bring out stored glucose into the blood.
This is yet another demand on the adrenals that can overtime affect the HPA function.
Do you understand your root cause of adrenal fatigue?
Most of the time, patients don’t have just ONE of these things. There is a combination of different things and cumulatively it is a little bit of everything that tips over their adrenal health. Lack of sleep is another factor because it stresses out the body and throws off blood sugar balance + you’ll find yourself in a loop of everything feeding into one another.
If you haven’t checked out our article about what adrenal fatigue feels like, check it out here!
If you’re needing help with supporting your adrenals and getting to the root cause of adrenal fatigue, book a free call with our team! We will learn more about you on this call and set you up with a game plan of the best labs and packages we offer. We will get you feeling better in no time!