D:
So what's actually not happening with the adrenals?
Let
me explain what adrenals are because a lot of people might
"What are your adrenals?" So if you take both of your hands and you put them on
your back. You have two glands called your or
your kidneys. And top of your , you have two
little gland called your adrenals which means "over ."
And these are two little glands about the size of walnuts. And these glands
pump out adrenaline and cortisol in response to stress.
So
the more stress you have, the more adrenaline and cortisol they pump out. And
remember, this could be from any type stress. It could be from eating too much
sugar. It can be from drinking alcohol. It can be from your mother-in-law
coming into town. It could be from a car accident or losing a job.
There's
a signal that gets sent from your brain to your adrenal glands that says "He's
having more stress, pump out more cortisol. Now something else stressful, pump
out more." So they keep pumping out more and pumping out more and pumping out
more. And they eventually get depleted. They don't have enough raw material to make the cortisol and they're just under too
much stress.
And
this when the immune system starts to get over zealous and produces
inflammation and you start making your skin cells more quickly than you should
and your immune system isn't there to keep them in place and keep them in
check. And then it starts to get out of hand and causes the psoriasis. So it
means that they're basically just worn out. They're tired. They're exhausted
and they don't have enough of the resources and minerals and ingredients that
they need to repair.
D:
Are they still putting out the adrenaline and the cortisol even when they're
tired?
In
my one-on-one practice I actually do adrenal testing where we can check and
find out how much cortisol you adrenal glands are producing. So you can
actually get to point where they produce almost none. And this is when you
start to get tired. If you're tired in the morning when you wake up, you hit
your alarm a couple of times and you never feel fully rested when you wake, I
guarantee you're in stage either six or seven out of seven stages of adrenal
exhaustion.
You
can actually take a saliva test and find out how low your cortisol is. And
there are seven different stages of adrenal exhaustion and you can find out
exactly what stage you're in.
At
first what happens is they produce more cortisol than they usually do. So your
numbers are high. And that's more like acute stress. You haven't had it for
very long. But once you've had stress for too long, it turns into chronic
stress and then your cortisol levels are low. And they get lower and lower and
lower until it's almost nothing.
And
remember, cortisol - it's the chemical that literally wakes you up in the morning.
It's what opens your eyes. So if you have really low cortisol in the morning,
it's hard to get out of bed. It's hard to open up your eyes in the morning. I
remember all through high school I had adrenal exhaustion. I would hit my alarm
three or four times that snooze button. It was never enough. I was always tired
in the morning.