Adrenal Fatigue and Natural Progesterone
Adrenal fatigue is produced when our adrenal glands cannot adequately meet the demands of stress. The adrenal glands mobilize our body’s response to every kind of stress (whether it’s physical, emotional or psychological) through hormones that regulate energy production and storage, heart rate, muscle tone, and other processes that enable us to cope with the stress.
Whether we have an emotional crisis such as the death of a loved one, a physical crisis such as major surgery, or any type of severe repeated or constant stress in our life, our adrenals have to respond. If they don’t, or if their response is inadequate, we will experience some degree of adrenal fatigue.
In adrenal fatigue our adrenal glands function, but not enough to maintain our normal, healthy homeostasis. Their output of regulatory hormones has been diminished by over-stimulation. This over-stimulation can be caused either by a very intense single stress or by chronic or repeated stresses that have a cumulative effect.
Anyone can suffer from adrenal fatigue at some time in his or her life. An illness, a life crisis, or a continuing difficult situation can drain the adrenal resources of even the healthiest person. However there are factors that can make us more prone to adrenal fatigue. These include certain lifestyles (poor diet, substance abuse, too little sleep and rest, or too many pressures), a chronic illness or repeated infections such as bronchitis or pneumonia, or a mother who suffered from adrenal fatigue around the time of our birth.
The processes that take place in any chronic disease from arthritis to cancer place demands on our adrenals. Therefore, take it as a general rule that if we are suffering from a chronic disease and morning fatigue is one of our symptoms, our adrenals are likely fatigued to some degree.
Also anytime a medical treatment includes the use of corticosteroids, diminished adrenal function is most likely present.
All corticosteroids are designed to imitate the actions of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenals, and so the need for them arises primarily when the adrenals are not providing the required amounts of cortisol.
Conditions that are implicated in adrenal fatigue:
- Alcoholism and Addiction
- Allergies
- Autoimmune Disease
- Syndrome X and Burnout
- Chronic or Recurrent Infections
- Dental Problems
- Diabetes (Adult Onset)
- Fibromyalgia
- Herpes
- HIV and Hepatitis C
- Hypoglycemia
- Mild Depression
- PMS and Difficult Menopause
- Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Sleep Disorders
Dr Lee, in his publication ‘What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause‘ maintained that women, by the time they reached their mid- to late 30s or early 40s had so stressed their adrenal glands that they had nothing left to give.
He argued that when Western women stop making progesterone in their ovaries and their adrenal cortex and brain need to pick up 100 percent of that function to produce corticosteroids, there isn’t much progesterone left over for other functions, such as balancing estrogen levels.
The adrenals of many women in Western cultures are so depleted they can’t even make enough progesterone to make the corticosteroids. This may be an important factor in chronic fatigue syndrome, which is so common in women in their mid-30s and early 40s.
