Have you been told that you have adrenal fatigue? Or perhaps you are working with your healthcare provider(s) to track surpluses and insufficiencies in your hormone levels.

Abnormalities in our body chemistry can be deeply alarming and can leave us feeling rather out of step with ourselves, our sense of normalcy, as well as our overall health and well-being.

Also symptoms can be agitated for people who take glucocorticoid medicines such as prednisone for a long time and then stop, are most likely to developed tertiary adrenal insufficiency. These medicines are used to treat medical conditions such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, cancer and inflammation among others.

To make matters worse, there is a lot of conflicting information out there about how to address hormone imbalances—some of it contradictory—and finding your way through the maze of information can sometimes feel overwhelming.

Fear not. Ayurveda offers an incredibly insightful framework from which to understand disturbances in our adrenal glands (and endocrine systems overall), as well as hormone imbalances.

What Are the Adrenal Glands, Anyway?

The adrenal glands are a pair of walnut-sized and roughly pyramid-shaped endocrine organs that rest atop the kidneys. They are perhaps best known for their secretion of familiar hormones (such as adrenaline and cortisol) associated with the body’s stress response.

The primary purpose of the adrenal glands is, indeed, to help us cope with stress in all its many forms. But the adrenals actually do far more than that, and are, in fact, responsible for producing and secreting a wide range of hormones.

Consider this: as we age, the adrenal glands eventually become the primary source of sex hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone in both men and women. 

Remarkably, hormones travel everywhere in the body, so the adrenal glands influence literally every organ and tissue, as well as our mental and emotional experience. 

It’s no surprise then, that when extra strain is placed on the adrenal glands, it can have a very real impact, not only on our capacity to cope with stress, but on our overall health and wellness.

Signs and Symptoms of Adrenal Fatigue

When we are overly stressed, the adrenal glands have to work extra hard in order to make enough stress hormones to sustain a stressful way of life.

But they also have to balance the increased levels of adrenaline and cortisol in the bloodstream by ramping up their production of balancing hormones with opposing energies (such as estrogen, progesterone, and DHEA). This exerts additional strain on the adrenal glands (and other endocrine organs, like the ovaries).

Eventually, as the endocrine system tires, our bodies simply can’t keep up with the demand, and we may begin to sense that something is off. The following are among the most common symptoms of adrenal imbalance:

High or Low Blood Pressure

Cravings for Sugary or Salty Foods

Weight Loss or Weight Gain

Lack of Energy

Inability to Slow Down

Overwhelm or Anxiousness

Moodiness

Brain Fog

Lack of Concentration

Compromised Immunity

Sleep Issues

Low Libido

Increased Perimenopausal or PMS Symptoms, in Women

Context Matters Most

While Ayurveda would never dismiss a hormone imbalance as insignificant, the Ayurvedic approach to balancing hormones is fundamentally different from that of modern allopathic medicine.

Unfortunately, the allopathic approach can leave us overly focused on the clinical details, so much so that we lose sight of the broader ecology within which the imbalances arose in the first place.

Ayurveda is much more skilled at allowing the overall context of our lives to illuminate a personalized path toward restored well-being.

The truth is that hormone issues of any kind are a symptom of a deeper, underlying imbalance. In other words, there is a reason that your adrenal glands or your hormone levels are off.

The Problem: The Way We’re Living

We’ve all heard it before. Stress has reached epidemic proportions in today’s fast-paced societies. And we now know that being over-extended and over-stressed is very harmful to our health.

Why? Because stress hormones activate an inherently depleting influence on bodily reserves, and chronic stress fundamentally interferes with the body’s nutritive capacities. 

Today, the stress response can be triggered by any number of everyday occurrences such as a distressing interpersonal dynamic at the office, a pressing deadline, an argument with a family member, social anxiousness, or financial strain.

What’s more, the stress response is brilliantly designed to temporarily increase our sensitivity to danger. That way, until the threat has passed, our bodies remain on high alert, ready to spring back into action at the first sign of trouble.

When it comes to cholesterol-based hormones, this often means turning what should be nourishing, buffering hormones—like progesterone—into cortisol. Let that sink in for a second.

If your body is stressed out and needs more stress hormones than your body can make, it can literally turn nutritive sex hormones like progesterone into cortisol.

Unfortunately, this reallocation of resources is not reversible. Once a progesterone hormone has been turned into cortisol, it cannot be turned back into progesterone—even after the threat has passed.

Among other things, we may experience dry skin, roughness in our joints, bone and muscle loss, infertility, sleep problems, a sharp decline in mental acuity, a myriad of digestive symptoms, as well as accelerated aging.

Thankfully, Ayurveda offers us a simple and intuitive path toward restoring the body’s built-in system of checks and balances so that we can, once again, begin to move in the direction of balance.

Because this approach addresses the root cause of the problem, it is rarely a quick fix, but it does give our bodies the best chance to fully recover.

The Solution

If stress is inherently depleting, and opposites balance, then the solution is to shower ourselves with building, nourishing, and rejuvenating foods, lifestyle practices, and herbs for adrenal support. To this end, the traditional Ayurvedic practice of rejuvenation, or rasayana, is generally very supportive.

It is also important to balance vata, which governs the nervous and endocrine systems and is invariably provoked by our fast-paced, stress-filled lives.

In essence, we’re looking for influences that are qualitatively heavy, grounding, nutritive, slow, unctuous, soft, and stabilising (while reducing their opposites).

At its core, the Ayurvedic approach to balancing adrenal fatigue is really that simple. The rest of this article focuses on how exactly to invite these qualities into our lives while releasing accumulated stress and tension from the mind and tissues in order to promote a more easeful relationship with life.

Thankfully, Ayurveda offers a rich collection of simple recommendations that support this entire process.

Because Ayurveda is such an individualised approach to health, there is no substitute for the personalised guidance of a qualified Ayurvedic practitioner—especially if you are already experiencing symptoms that impact your quality of life.