By David Scrimgeour, LAc

It’s 10 o’clock and you don’t know where your life is. You haven’t been sleeping well, and you’ve got a major presentation at work first thing in the morning. Your mother called two hours ago and can’t find hAer hearing aid (that’s the second time today), your daughter’s got a bad cold, and your husband thinks the two of you are growing apart. And you feel like you hit the wall weeks ago.

Sounds extreme, but a patient walks into my acupuncture practice and tells me some variation on this vignette practically every day. She’s physically run-down and emotionally spent. And while she’s aware of the stress in her life, she hasn’t really connected it to the symptoms she’s experiencing—symptoms that tell me she’s suffering from adrenal depletion, what’s commonly known as burnout.

And I’m not the only one who sees this type of patient. The Women to Women Clinic in Yarmouth, Maine, has given thousands of adrenal function tests and reports that only about 1 percent of them come back normal. The other 99 percent indicate some form of adrenal dysfunction—from fatigue to collapse.

Today the rates of burnout, especially in the US and the industrialized world, are growing astronomically as more and more people experience prolonged periods of high stress, exposure to a more toxic environment, a general imbalance in lifestyle (typified by inadequate sleep, too little exercise, and lack of a nourishing diet), and frequent states of being physically exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed. Burnout develops gradually as a person’s vital energy and effectiveness erode into fatigue and, ultimately, a failure to adapt to the changes and stresses of life.

The Fire Within
Ironically, burnout stems from an exquisite system designed to save us from bodily harm when we come face to face with imminent danger. Here’s the drill: Once your brain senses some kind of menace, your heart starts to race, you can jump or run like never before, you become hypervigilant, and mentally alert—all in an instant. Why? Because your body’s central nervous system has switched to fight-or-flight mode. The adrenal glands pump out adrenalin, cortisol, and other hormones that affect your heart, lungs, circulation, metabolism, and immune system. Heart rate and blood pressure increase to bring more blood to the muscles (to flee or fight) and the brain (to make split-second decisions). Blood sugar rises to increase fuel for energy, and the blood’s clotting ability increases in case you get injured—everything, in fact, that will allow you to either run away from the impending danger or fight to protect yourself.

Obviously this is a great emergency tool kit to have, and its sole purpose is to save your life in the event of an unexpected threat to your very existence. Nature never intended humans to rely on this reserve on a daily or weekly basis, but unfortunately that’s what many of us do. Maybe not at the saber-toothed tiger level, but each time you react to stress in your daily life—an important speech, working long hours, your need (but inability) to be in two places at once, a conflict with your spouse—you trigger that fight-or-flight mechanism. And each time you do, your adrenal glands send hormones to rev up your body. Until, of course, they don’t have any more to send.

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