Stress, the Workplace, and Adrenal Fatigue
by James L. Wilson DC, ND, Ph.D.
#2 in the series
Two men on camels are trying to cross the Sahara as quickly as possible. One relentlessly drives his animal without wasting precious time to stop for adequate rest, food or water. The other works his animal to its capacity but stops to let it drink, eat and rest at regular intervals. Which man is likely to get the best performance from his camel? Which one is more likely to reach his goal? Which one are you when it comes to your body and to your employees?
The strategy of the first camel driver might work for a time, but fails miserably when sustained effort over a long haul is required. This same shortsighted strategy is one of the reasons that stress in the workplace costs businesses over $300 billion per year. Nearly all businesses require sustained effort over the long haul from their executives and employees, yet few create attitudes and work environments that consciously minimize stress.
How many companies do you know give an employee award for a balanced life? In reality, most businesses unknowingly encourage stress in the workplace. Many operate on a crisis to crisis basis, going from one urgent short term goal to the next. They reward and encourage the person who stays late and comes in early day after day. Missing lunches, pushing through fatigue, living for work, and adding extra responsibilities to an already full workload often earn applause rather than words of caution from superiors. We have created a culture in which many individuals take pride in how much stress they are under.
However, the physiological effects of stress often go unnoticed and build insidiously over time until they become too disruptive to ignore. Some people experience total burnout, but most just experience a gradual decline in their productivity, powers of concentration, ability to handle stress, energy and enthusiasm. They find themselves missing deadlines, getting sick, quarreling with coworkers, and playing catch-up more and more frequently. Understanding the changes that occur in your body as a result of stress may give you some insights that can help you design your workplace and your life to minimize these problems.
Stress affects everyone from the CEO to the entry level clerk in similar physiological ways. Your adrenal glands respond to every stress you experience by secreting hormones that mediate the many physiological accommodations your body must make to adapt to the stressor and maintain homeostasis. In physiology, these walnut-sized glands situated over your kidneys (hence their Latin name, ad-renal) are known as the “glands of stress” because their primary function is to produce adequate responses to all the stresses your body experiences. Stress elicits the same physiological reaction whether it is from a physical, psychological or emotional source.
At first your adrenal glands can adapt and increase their production of hormones to enable your body to handle more stress. However, these higher levels of circulating stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, can have detrimental effects on your body when they are repeatedly or chronically elevated. The damage they do then becomes an additional stressor. With continued stress and too little rest and replenishment to allow recovery between stressful times, your adrenal capacity to respond to stress gradually diminishes. I coined the term "adrenal fatigue" in 1998 to describe this state of low adrenal function.
Adrenal fatigue is a decrease in your body's ability to respond to stress because your adrenal glands are no longer able to function optimally under stressful conditions. This dysfunction can range all the way from being mild enough to only slightly interfere with daily life, to being so severe that you become nearly incapacitated. In its more moderate forms adrenal fatigue has become a common occurrence in the workplace, affecting all occupations, work levels, body types and ages. Burnout and “breakdown” are severe types of adrenal fatigue caused by stress. People vary in their ability to withstand stress; some have congenitally low adrenal function due to maternal or inherited factors, and some lose hardiness through poor environment, lifestyle choices or illness. When chronic or severe, adrenal fatigue accelerates aging, and can have a negative impact on many aspects of health, including immune function, allergies, libido (lack of sex drive or function), blood sugar metabolism, hormone balance, sleep patterns and mental acuity.
Because the hormones secreted by your adrenal glands affect almost every gland, tissue and organ in your body, decreased adrenal function can manifest itself in a variety of ways. 85% of patient complaints to their medical doctor involve some sort of fatigue, but only adrenal fatigue produces this unique daily fluctuation in energy. The cardinal signs of this episodic daily fatigue pattern are:
- Unexplained tiredness upon rising - even after 8-9 hours of sleep
- Difficulty getting going or feeling awake in the morning without the help of caffeinated drinks such as coffee and cola beverages
- Low energy in the mid to late afternoon lasting from 15 minutes to 2 hours that may be so slight you just want to sit for awhile or so severe you need to lay down
- Renewed energy at around 6:00 PM that lasts until 9:30 or 10:00 PM (like a switch is turned on making you feel better than you have during most of the day)
- New burst of energy around 11:00 PM that can last until 1-2 AM
- Best, most refreshing sleep between 7-9 AM in the morning
What is unique about the typical adrenal fatigue energy pattern is its episodic waxing and waning throughout the day at specific time periods. No other fatigue pattern has this unique characteristic. If you recognize this energy pattern in yourself and you answered yes to the questions listed in my previous article, you are probably experiencing some level of adrenal fatigue.
Although the body is not just a mechanical device, using a car as a metaphor provides a good conceptual, albeit not entirely accurate, analogy to the body and its response to stress. When a car is maintained properly and not driven beyond what it is designed to do, it usually holds up well, meets performance expectations and lasts for a long time. However, if the car gets irregular maintenance, poor quality oil, the wrong kind of fuel, is loaded beyond capacity, or driven hard on rough roads, it starts to break down and wears out more quickly. One car may blow a gasket, a second burst a water hose, a third bend a valve, and a fourth break a spring as a result of mistreatment. This analogy holds true for any person exposed to amounts of stress the body was not evolutionarily designed to handle. Each body may have its own particular pattern of decline, but in most instances it starts breaking down in the ways we have learned to recognize as the symptoms and signs of stressed adrenals. The more you ignore the maintenance schedule and the warning lights on the dashboard, the more serious the problems once adrenal fatigue sets in and that day of reckoning arrives - the day when your body no longer does what you want it to do when you push it like you are used to doing.
Much of the stress at work is actually unnecessary and can be eliminated or minimized. Many people are not aware that the typical work-related behaviors listed below actually stress their adrenals and can lead to preventable health
problems that will eventually interfere with their ability to work. The following are warning signs that you are mistreating your body and are risking some aspect of your health breaking down on you: using caffeinated beverages to keep going instead of taking proper nourishment or getting enough sleep, missing meals, eating non-nourishing foods, continually working through lunch hours and past the hours of a normal work day, coming to work sick, not exercising regularly, and not taking time to relax and enjoy life.
In addition, there are many common workplace situations that increase stress. These fall into two categories: the physical environment (poor lighting, air quality, noise, inadequate tools for the job, lack of access to facilities, etc.) and the work culture (insufficient job training, office conflicts, inadequate access to resources, low compensation, responsibility without commensurate power (common with middle management), unrealistic expectations and deadlines, absence of positive feedback, etc.). Consciously redesigning your lifestyle and business with the goal of decreasing these stress factors can profoundly affect your long term business success as well as your health.
Your body and the bodies of the people who work in your business are a very valuable but often ignored aspect of success and the bottom line. A meta-study on the cost of stress to business revealed that 75 to 80% of the stress in a person’s life is work-related. The good news is that as a leader you can consciously influence company policies, operations, environment and key personnel to implement changes that minimize unnecessary stress and establish a positive, healthy work environment. Happy, healthy employees usually produce better bottom lines because they are capable of greater productivity, a higher level of cooperation, more enthusiasm for work, and commitment to their jobs.
Overall, when people are healthy and have manageable levels of stress they spend more time getting work done instead of trying to cope with stress fallout. Discovering how to minimize stress in your life and your business to avoid or recover from adrenal fatigue could turn out to be one of the most valuable lessons learned. Which camel driver do you choose to be?
In my next article I will discuss some of the changes stress creates in your body and what you can do to ameliorate its effects and begin your road to regaining full vitality.