There is No Such Thing as Adrenal Fatigue

One of the most common things, the most common symptoms or patterns that my patients come in with is they say Dr. Hein I have adrenal fatigue or I've been diagnosed with adrenal fatigue always by an alternative medicine practitioner or a functional medicine practitioner but in this video I thought I would really share why adrenal fatigue is not real and often what I see is going on here. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hein, doctor of Chinese medicine and licensed acupuncturist. So before we jump into this video here today, two very important links right below the video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine. There's a link right below to contact my private practice and office and the second is a free download which is four daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with Chinese medicine. So check it out right below here. Now what people often call adrenal fatigue is really not that. It is one of the most common self-diagnoses that my patients come in with no doubt because many of us today have absurd levels of stress and anxiety and insomnia and fatigue and exhaustion. I've been there for years but this idea of adrenal fatigue is not really a medical term. It's not a real thing in medicine because true adrenal insufficiency is a serious medical issue and it's relatively rare but when people come in they're talking about I feel stressed, my heart rate's going crazy, I'm anxious, I'm depressed, I have insomnia. What these are are not necessarily adrenal fatigue. Really what these are is typically the body and the person existing in this state of sympathetic dominance where they're always in the stress response. Rushing, not taking proper meals, little breaks are always on the phone. That's nervous system activity required to be typing and scrolling and viewing. It's all stimulation. It's this non-stop pace of life that we have that then wreaks this kind of wear and tear on the body. Now true adrenal fatigue is rare, right? So Addison's is a condition where for example this is proper adrenal insufficiency where the adrenal glands don't produce enough cortisol and there are other hormonal biomarkers that are not looking normal as well. Now that's not to discount that what you have is not serious. You may have chronic fatigue syndrome, so exhausted you can't get out of bed or can't even hold a job down. Such severe insomnia you're a non-functional human being. You just can't live. Severe anxiety or severe depression, I'm not discounting any of those conditions or that they're not medical diagnoses. But this term of adrenal fatigue is more of something that's in the zeitgeist. It's kind of a layman's way of viewing certain symptoms. We think adrenals, stress hormones, stressed, which is a logical assumption. But medically it's not necessarily a real thing for most people. One example I like to think of is this idea of feeling tired and wired. People will often say, you know, I can't sleep even when I'm tired. Now I often draw the comparison that one of my mentors said to me where he said, you know who doesn't ever have a hard time sleeping? Of course this is when I was in a state of adrenal fatigue, couldn't sleep, insomnia for months or years, etc. He said, you know who never has a problem sleeping? Physical laborers. You're digging ditches all day, you're doing physical labor, the time you get home you're tired. People who work a lot in a non-stressful manner are tired. They don't say necessarily stressed but they're just tired, they're exhausted and they sleep well. Because the physical body has not only been working but also the nervous system is discharging some of that tension as I like to view it through physical exercise, physical movement and activity, right? Through cardiovascular fitness. But the people who have problems are often the people who are firing their nervous system a hundred times a day. Like a computer worker, like a Silicon Valley programmer, deadlines at their startup, a lot of stuff to get done. They don't move their body all day. Maybe they just walk to get their burrito at Chipotle then they walk back to their desk. Probably we don't even sit down to eat the burrito, not in front of the computer. And then back to typing, yeah okay I got it boss, yep. Back to Slack, okay yep we got to get that. We have to test that by 48 hours, okay. Back on the computer, this is all nervous system activity with nothing getting discharged through the physical body, through physical activity. These are the kinds of people who often have an excessive stressed, wired and tired response. They may be tired even though the physical body is not tired. They're tired because they're in the state of effectively nervous system wear and tear, if I could conceptualize it. Because their heart rate is elevated, firing off stress hormones all day, and in general they're in a state of sympathetic dominance, right, where they're always on. But the paradox is their nervous system is on, their physiology is going boom boom boom, but the body isn't moving at all. And this is the most destructive pattern I see for modern people experiencing stress, anxiety and this kind of adrenal pattern. So this tired and wired phenomenon is to me, my opinion, you know historically humans have been laborers, right, we've had to do all the things manually. But now this is the kind of disease of civilization where people don't have to physically use their body anymore and we're overweight, but the nervous system is still going mad because we still have stress or more stress. And it doesn't get a chance to discharge itself, for example, through physical exercise. If you're in this state, my opinion is always the most effective thing is physical exercise. If you feel stressed, anxious, physical exercise. If you feel tired and wired when you go to bed, get an hour of physical exercise sometime during the day before you're going to bed. So I don't think, based on the evidence, that adrenal fatigue is a real diagnosable illness and most medical practitioners would agree with that. But I do think it overlaps with many other conditions and I think hopefully this video is worthwhile in helping you understand, conceptualize it a little bit more from a very layman's perspective, in plain English, without much biochemistry going on here. Okay, those are my two cents on adrenal fatigue. We're gonna talk about it more from a Chinese medicine perspective, but that was really in plain English what I think is going on here. That's what I have for you today guys. Before you go, make sure you check out two related videos on this topic that will help explain this fatigue and exhaustion a little bit more.