Who's Stressed?

Stress is everywhere, lurking around every corner, always alert for opportunities to take a swipe at us. And I hate to be the one to break it to you, but we're all kind of clueless about what stress is, what to watch for, things that alleviate stress, things that make it worse, and on, and on.

And believe you me, there's no way to avoid stress, even for a day. My aim here isn't to discourage you, but to point out a reality. Stress is a fact of life.

While we can't avoid stress, we can learn how to deal with it. As a matter of fact, we have to.

Sometimes, fixing the source of our stress is easy-peasy. Other times it's hard, but still possible.

And when situations can't be fixed, we can to learn how to walk through them, perhaps even figure out how to walk away.

According to new research, stress plays a larger role in health than anybody ever realized. And we don't always realize what's going on.

For starters, stress doesn't always come along with jittery nerves, shallow breathing, insomnia or other commonly associated symptoms. But whether we realize it or not, stress plays a role in all illnesses, all feelings of discomfort, etc.; it may be hiding, but it's there.

For instance, if you're tired all the time, stress is at least part of the problem. You may be told that fatigue is part of aging, but it ain't necessarily so. Age gets the blame for all sorts of things, but age is only a number, not a diagnosis.

Docs started talking about my aging "problem" when I was still in my twenties.

Whatever you're told, somebody has to save the day, and that somebody is you. So you have to know some stuff about how the body works. Or doesn't.

Stress always involves our adrenal glands, the part of the endocrine system that tells our body when to go-go-go and when to calm down. Sometimes, though, things can get so far out of balance that go-go-go is all that's happening. If you have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, that's almost surely what's going on--and has been for a long time.

When your adrenals get stuck in go-go-go mode, it means they're too exhausted to get balanced and happy again.

This is called adrenal fatigue, and it's estimated that 50% of us are dealing with it, at one level or another.

But here's the tricky part: Medical schools teach that there is no such thing as adrenal fatigue. So they don't test. Why would they test for something that isn't real?

Especially since, sometime in the 1980s, Congress gave health insurance companies the power to label medical tests as necessary or unnecessary, along with the power to punish doctors who order "unnecessary" tests.

The list of unnecessary tests includes the test for adrenal fatigue, which means doctors can't order it without risking punishment. And since medical schools say there's no such thing as adrenal fatigue, testing will probably never come up.

That said, you can still get the test. It may take some effort, but the test is not nearly as unavailable as it used to be.

Besides the test, I used research to build a pretty distinctive list of symptoms to compare to what your body's yelling at you.

Once you know--by test or by symptoms--that your adrenals need help, then you have to figure out what to do.

Medicine has no drugs for adrenal fatigue. And no two of us arrive at adrenal fatigue via the same route, and we won't get out of it via the same route, either. This is definitely not a one-size-fits-all situation.

Fortunately, my approach of addressing individual symptoms doesn't depend on everybody taking the same route. In fact, it specifically takes a custom-made-for-you approach.

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