Category: Adrenal fatigue

Adrenal fatigue, Anxiety relief, Health, Recovery, Relaxation

Of dentists, adrenaline, and stress recovery

Emily

Fun fact: standard dental anesthetic contains epinephrine. So if your heart starts to pound when you get numbed up for a filling, it’s just because you’ve been literally shot full of stress hormones. This is a great example of how emotional reactions (feeling like you’re panicking) can come after a physical/hormonal change. This happened to me today when I got numbed up for a filling.

Here’s a bizarre follow-up. I’ve been having heart palpitations since January (just a flare-up of my periodic rumbles, already cleared as “no big deal, just annoying” by a cardiologist). Now that the drug-induced tachycardia has cleared up, my heart feels the most steady, and my resting heart rate is the slowest it’s been, in months. 

I’ve long noticed that my body often doesn’t down-regulate after a stimulus (e.g., have trouble relaxing muscles after working out). In this case, the injection delivered a discrete amount of hormones, and my body responded with a strong relaxation response proportional to the amount of adrenaline in my body. But since my body wasn’t making new adrenaline, the relaxation response was able to overcome the epinephrine AND any background stress hormones that might’ve been making my heart do the wacky the last couple months.

What this is suggesting to me is that my body IS “able to create a relaxation response” BUT it is “unable to stop creating the stress response.” Like, I know how to put the brakes on, but I don’t know how to take my foot off the gas. So what happens is I hit the gas, then stomp on the brake without letting off the gas. It slows me down some, but the brake can’t overcome the gas, so I never fully get into the “off” position. I’ve always assumed that my foot came off the gas, but I didn’t know how to use the brakes, so I could only kinda-sorta coast to a stop. Maybe that’s not at all how my body’s been working.

It also stands to reason that this is incredibly draining – gas pedal is always on, AND I’m “braking” twice as hard…but not really resting. And it gives me some different ways to think of treating all this. The first things that come to mind are small doses of Sudafed or caffeine. I’ll let you know if anything works…

Dang. This is one of the most educational healthcare visits I’ve ever had.

p.s. You can totally ask your dentist for “cardiac-friendly” anesthetic that doesn’t have epinephrine. So, if you feel anxious at the dentist, go ahead and ask them to please not shoot you full of stress hormones.

UPDATE: I was back to feeling the same – or even a little worse – the next day. Which is not surprising; going through the adrenaline spike and recovery is hard on a body. So, there might not be any therapeutic breakthroughs with this info, but at least I understand why my heart rate spiked!

Adrenal fatigue, Courses, COVID-19, Health, Long Covid, Recovery, Self-care

Help! I’m a “do-er” and I don’t know how to “do” rest!

Emily

I’m guessing a lot of folks out there are having a hard time recuperating from COVID, chronic stress, burnout, and the accumulated fatigue of years of coping through a pandemic. Maybe you feel like you’ve been resting a lot, but you don’t seem to be able to recover that last bit of your energy from the “before times.” Or maybe you were already burned out then!

I’ve just released my new course Self-Care for Restoration, where I teach concrete techniques for moving from total rest into active recovery without falling into a cycle of overdoing-and-crashing. Here’s a sample video, aimed right at all you go-getters who are at a loss when people tell you to “slow down” and “just rest”!

Launch special – I’m offering the course as a name-your-price offering starting at just $5.

Register for the course
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Adrenal fatigue, COVID-19, Long Covid, Recovery, Self-care, Yoga

New Course: Self-Care for Restoration

Emily
Person doing restorative yoga
Yes! This is yoga!

I’m excited to announce that I will be sharing my new course, Self-Care for Restoration, as a name-your-price series beginning this week!

If you’ve had a viral illness or a prolonged bout of stress, it’s not unexpected to feel tired. But ongoing, crushing fatigue could be a sign of a more serious condition. We’re told to “rest a lot” and “don’t push yourself,” but figuring out how to care for yourself, and then following through, can feel like just another chore competing for your limited energy. This course will help you understand why rest is so important after illness or stress, how this bout of fatigue might be different from normal tiredness, how to measure your physical and mental energy expenditures, and how to pace yourself for complete recovery.

More information

This self-paced online course may be right for you if you:

  • Are exhausted from months or years of chronic stress
  • Have mostly recovered from Covid and still don’t feel back to your usual levels of energy
  • Have a pattern of overdoing it, then crashing
  • Are trying to “take it easy” but can’t seem to get fully rested
  • Aren’t really sick anymore…but haven’t really gotten well

This course has practical advice for giving your body the space it needs to recover and will guide you to build a recuperation program that suits your unique needs. The program has three phases:

  • Radical rest
  • Active recovery
  • Reconditioning

In each phase, I quickly sum up the physiology of what’s happening in your body during that phase, the #1 thing to focus on in each phase, and practical tips for helping yourself progress to the next phase of restoration. Then I share activity recommendations and a physical practice video and go into more detail on the how-and-why behind my recommendations, if you have the interest and energy to explore deeper. I’ve even developed a week of deeply nourishing menus to reduce the work of feeding yourself well at this time!

There is no timeline for recovery – instead, I help you learn to follow your body’s cues for what it needs. Chances are, if you are experiencing the symptoms above, the old rules about what your body needs don’t apply right now. I’ll teach you what body signals you need to pay attention to, how to track them qualitatively and quantitatively, and how to know when it’s safe to increase your activity.

Because I feel strongly that this course material needs to be out in the world and accessible to as many people as possible, I am offering it on a pay-what-you-will basis – including “free.”

Take the Course

Adrenal fatigue, Long Covid, Recovery

Are Intermittent Fasting and Keto Diets Safe During Post-Viral Recovery?

Emily

Ok – I’ll start off with the old standby: it depends. So let’s refine the question further: Is intermittent fasting and/or keto safe for people with adrenal fatigue, long Covid, thyroid malfunction, and other forms of autonomic dysregulation?

I’m going to argue “no, it is not.” I have both personal experience and science to back me up on this.

When I was recovering from post-viral fatigue, I made (very brief) attempts at both of these approaches to eating. It was a disaster. Both left me in a crashed-out, shaky, weak, fumbling pile within 24 hours. I know it can be hard to adjust to these programs, but this wasn’t simple discomfort. This was my body screaming toward physical collapse in a very obvious and profound way – and it all righted itself immediately on getting some carbs in my body.

So I started looking into why this might be. I dug through scads of pages, and it boils down to:

  • When your body is having a hard time self-regulating adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress-related hormones, low blood sugar is perceived as another stressor.
  • In addition, the particular kind of stress it exerts demands more of exactly the parts of your endocrine system that are most fried just now. Specifically, cortisol is released to increase blood sugar – and producing cortisol is super hard on your body when you have these conditions.

The first step to recovering from stress or illnesses that have thrown your endocrine system out of whack is to stop stressing out your endocrine system. Seemingly innocent things – like missing a meal – can have an outsized impact on your system. So I suggest:

  • Eat regularly, and avoid getting too hungry between meals. For many months, I had to get up in the middle of the night to eat. (Meatballs were great for this.)
  • Eat foods that will keep your blood sugar stable – lots of protein, fat, and fiber and a moderate amount of complex carbs. You don’t want a ton of sugar and refined flour, but you also don’t want to avoid carbs completely.
  • Add a pinch of salt to your water, and drink lots of it. Salty broth is another great option.
  • Keep your exercise below your aerobic threshold as much as possible – a maximum heart rate of about 120 is a good rule of thumb for most middle-aged adults. More on this in a future post.

More reading

Adrenal fatigue, COVID-19, Self-care, Yoga

How to Stretch When You Don’t Want to Get Out of Bed

Emily

Weather got you down? Dreading your day at work? Recovering from COVID or another part of the 2022 “tripledemic”? Depressed? Just enjoying your warm, cozy bed too much to haul your hindquarters out into the cold Michigan winter? (Not that I’d have any experience with that…ahem…)

Here’s a five-minute stretch to ease you into some movement. By the time you’re done, you may well find that extracting yourself from the covers has lost some of its horror. And if not…well, you’ll have moved your body a bit and gotten the blood and oxygen moving.

I’m demonstrating this on my massage table, but I promise you, you can start this routine in bed under the covers!

I sequenced these movements to move you in gentle stages from “hiding under a blanket” through “de-creakifying your body” to “emerging to start your day.” Only takes 5 minutes!