by Jodi Cohen
If you are feeling anxious overwhelmed or exhausted – possibly all at the same time – your adrenal glands might need a little support.
Your adrenal glands are two little pea-sized glands that sit on top of the kidneys and the back of the body near the bottom of your ribs. When we are in a stressful situation, the hypothalamus in your brain triggers your adrenal glands to secrete stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, to give us that extra boost of reserve energy that we need to survive the stress, like running from a wild animal.
But when you dig too deeply into the energy reserves for too long, your adrenal glands get depleted. It’s a little bit like deficit spending, at a certain point your credit runs out and you have no reserves to draw upon.
Chronic stress depletes your adrenal glands and compromises your ability to keep up with the constant demand for the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol provides quick fuel in the face of emergency. When the brain perceives a stress, it triggers the adrenal glands to pump out cortisol which raises the level of sugar in the blood – providing you with the energy to fight or flee the stressful situation. Cortisol also monitors basic body functions, including inflammation response and immune function.
Your adrenals glands are not designed to constantly pump out excessive levels cortisol. Over time, chronic and prolonged stress can over-tax and exhaust your adrenal glands, impeding their ability to produce and release sufficient levels of stress hormones, like cortisol or adrenaline that provide us with energy and support other necessary for proper body functions. This state of diminished resilience is known as adrenal fatigue. This leads to chronic fatigue, an impaired immune system, inflammation, and the other symptoms of adrenal fatigue.
Symptoms of Adrenal Fatigue
- Feeling tired for no reason
- Low energy through the day, especially in the early morning and mid-afternoon.
- Low Back Pain or Hip Pain – Your Adrenal glands directly impact some of the muscles that manage the lower back and hip, including your Sartorius muscle, which is a major pelvic stabilizer. High levels of stress can create tension in the muscles causing them to stiffen or lock up resulting in back pain.
- Trouble concentrating or easily overwhelmed
- Racing thoughts, especially when trying to fall asleep at night
- Moodiness and irritability
- Feeling rundown or overwhelmed
- Difficulty bouncing back from stress or illness.
- Cravings for salty or sweet foods – Adrenal fatigue depletes salt levels in the body because it reduces aldosterone, the salt-monitoring hormone. Sweet foods boost blood sugar
- Inability to lose weight
- Hormonal imbalances – – no libido, fertility issues, hormonal acne, low thyroid function (hypothyroid)
- Anxiety, mental exhaustion, and/or depression
- Depressed immunity or lingering colds
- Difficulty concentrating, making decisions and completing tasks in a logical order
- Difficulty falling and staying asleep even though you might feel physically exhausted
- Excessive thirst or frequent urination
- Muscle weakness or fatigue
- Frequent irritability or anger
- Scattered focus and poor memory
My Favorite Essential Oils for Adrenal Fatigue
Essential Oils with their unique ability to return different organ systems to balance can help refill our reserves and dig us out of the adrenal fatigue hole. The Adrenal™ proprietary blend was designed to relieve and support Adrenal Fatigue
Our adrenal glands help determine and regulate the body’s stress response by secreting key hormones that regulate energy production and storage. Prolonged periods of stress can deplete our reserves of these hormones. Much like adaptogenic herbs, Vibrant Blue Oils Adrenal™ blend helps increase the body’s ability to adapt to stress and maintain healthy adrenal function. Adrenal™ proprietary formulations includes very specific ratios of organic and/or wild crafted, therapeutic oils in a base of fractionated coconut oil.
How to Apply Essential Oils for Adrenal Fatigue
You can topically apply 1- 2 drops of Adrenal™ on the adrenal glands (on the lower mid-back, one fist above the 12th rib on each side). Dilute to start or if any redness occurs.
Smelling Adrenal™ though the left nostril also helps to alleviate anxiety. My friend and colleague, Dr. Titus Chiu of The Modern Brain – Root Cause Neurology explains that the over-activity of the right frontal lobe of your brain versus the left contributes to anxiety. The right brain processes the emotional aspects of the human experience, giving us empathy and compassion, but in overdrive in the right brain can contribute to heightened emotions and anxiety.
Inhaling an essential oil through the left nostril helps to stimulate the left frontal lobe and balance the over-activity of the right frontal lobe. Inhaling Adrenal™ blend through the left nostril helps to stimulate the left frontal lobe and create balance between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, which then balances the over-activity of the right frontal lobe and leads to feelings of calm.
Additional Essential Oils to Support Adrenal Fatigue:
Hypothalamus™: The hypothalamus is pearl size region of the brain that serves as control center for neural and hormonal messages received from/sent to body. It is constantly reading blood the levels of cortisol, and adjusting signals sent to the adrenal glands for optimal internal balance (homeostasis) of the body. Chronic and prolonged stress can damage the hypothalamus’s ability to receive clear messages from the body which then impacts all outgoing endocrine and neural signals. Just as you might reboot a computer, you can reset the hypothalamus with Vibrant Blue Hypothalamus™ blend to encourage the natural ability of the hypothalamus to receive clear messages from the body.
Circadian Rhythm™: A critical component to healing from adrenal fatigue is the quality of our sleep. Ideally, we should fall asleep easily and stay asleep through the night. The hormone that helps us fall asleep is melatonin, secreted by the Pineal Gland. Chronic and prolonged stress and the resulting cortisol release can undermine the body’s ability to release melatonin because melatonin has an antagonist relationship to the stress hormone, cortisol. More specifically, when cortisol levels are high, melatonin levels stay low. In theory, this makes total sense because if you need to escape a dangerous situation, it would not serve you to fall asleep. But in practice, it really throws our body’s natural sleep/wake cycle, known as the Circadian Rhythms out of balance. To return the circadian rhythm to balance, apply Vibrant Blue Oils Circadian Rhythm™ blend, which triggers the natural release of melatonin before bed.
All of these oils are included in the Vibrant Blue Oils Stress Support Kit™.
Featured Oils:
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