Adrenaline Dysautonomia

Adrenaline dysautonomia is a little understood problem that can cause your adrenaline levels to surge and ebb out of control. This can cause very frightening symptoms and lead to long term poor health and even collapse. Here are some ideas that will help you to address and alleviate this problem.

1:15 - Adrenaline and Norepinephrine and their roles in the body
5:20 - Dysautonomia symptoms of sympathetic response
8:34 - Causes of Dysautonomia
10:15 - Triggers of adrenaline rushes
11:30 - How to help adrenals
12:30 - Steps to helping the reactive sympathoadrenal response
15:15 - Foods and Toxins to avoid

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Transcript

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 0:06

Do you feel as if your nervous system is on a roller coaster? Like your energy levels are constantly going through peaks and valleys without any apparent cause? Then you might be suffering from Adrenaline Dysautonomia. It is a little known or recognized disorder related to the imbalance of adrenaline and norepinephrine in your body. This is the Dr. Lam show. We're here to empower you to take control of your health. I'm Dr. Jeremy Lam and I'm an expert in chronic illnesses and diseases.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 0:43

And I'm Dr. Carrie Lam, board certified in family medicine, anti aging and regenerative medicine. We both have an intense interest and focus on holistic medicine, combining both conventional and alternative strategies to achieve better health. So if you enjoy this Dr. Lam show please like and share it Subscribe for notifications on both where you find your podcasts, and on YouTube. Today, we're going to talk about your adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, and how it can affect your energy and your health. So Dr. Jeremy, what is

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 1:28

Well, adrenaline is part of our fight or flight response, which the adrenals respond to in severe stress. When a stressor is recognized, the HPA or the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis is set into motion. And at the end of this stream of hormones, the adrenals releases cortisol to fight the effects of stress. The adrenal medulla and your hormonal system may be activated if stress is very severe, and the adrenal medulla is instructed to put out adrenaline or epinephrine to give your body an extra boost of energy as part of the fight or flight response. Once the stress is reduced, then the opposite system is activated. The HPA and the AHS axis systems are both returned back to normal function. And this is the rest and digest response, which is regulated by the parasympathetic nervous system. With this adrenaline and its role in your body and what happens when it system, the body relaxes and any leftover adrenaline is etabolized, and the body ecovers from stress. Now, Dr. arrie, why don't you tell us bout what happens when we have surges out of control? hronic stress in our nvironment and in our body.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 2:48

When your adrenal glands undergo continuous bombardment from stressors and chronic stress, the adrenals will eventually lose the capacity to secrete enough of these hormones, if it keeps doing it long enough. When stress continues, as it so often does in our world, and its

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 3:05

As you can tell, epinephrine is an demand for success, the autonomic, the autonomic system remains activated, and therefore the body sometimes cannot modulate the parasympathetic nervous system to recover from the effects of chronic stress. This is Adrenal Exhaustion, which is an advanced stage of adrenal fatigue syndrome. At this point, your body is in a disarray with so little resources and adrenal response capacity available. So it continues to secrete epinephrine, or adrenaline, and your brain is also secreting norepinephrine, which is a neurotransmitter that acts locally on your brain to keep you alert. Norepinephrine can also travel to your heart and make it stronger. So when people say that they feel the heart is pounding, that's normal. The epinephrine and norepinephrine are gearing your body to flee from threats. Epinephrine is more effective than norepinephrine, and epinephr ne is given in CPR, if the he rt stops. They give chest c mpressions and epinephr ne to initiate circulation to restart the heart. So a strong hormone produced b the adrenals. Importantly, chronic stress response is not what your body needs every day. If you have it chronically, th n that balance of epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortis l is not good. Cortisol is r leased by your adrenals to bat le high levels of pinephrine and norepinephrin as it is anti inflammatory. How ver adrenaline has no oppos ng hormones to neutralize it, nd it just has to burn out over time. This can eventually lead down to a downward cascade of instability and e essential hormone. But when there's too much of it, and the results can be catastrophic. These type of problems are usually ignored or not well understood by conventional medicine. That's why it's important that you seek out knowledge and help if you believe that your adrenaline or epinephrine levels are abnormal. At Dr Lam clinic we have extensive experience dealing with adrenaline surges caused by stress and adrenal malfunction. If you're struggling, call our office at 714-709-8000 for a free initial phone call with our staff to learn how we can help. So now that we've talked about adrenalin imbalances, generally, let's take a look at what happens when these imbalances become severe. One of the symptoms are dysautonomia, a nervous system disorder that

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 6:15

Dysautonomia usually refers to a number of involves the surge of adrenaline due to a variety of triggers. This surge of adrenaline or epinephrine into the body, can happen at any time, often at night. Triggers include anyth ng that sends a thrill through ut your body such as loud mu ic, getting frightened, or ev n having a dream in which y u're very active. But triggers don't always play a part in the onset of adrenaline dysautonomi.

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 6:55

Oftentimes dysautonomia can be from a number of causes, many of them linked to other health conditions that involves this regulation of the involuntary nervous system. It can involve the cardio nomic and hormonal circuits over neural and a metabolic stress response, the global system that your body uses to deal with stress. As part of the cardio anomic circuit of the neural end of metabolic stress response, the autonomic nervous system or ANS contains the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic is there to help speed up the response to distress and the parasympathetic helps you calm down. They're supposed to be in balance. However, in adrenaline, dysautonomia, you have too much sympathetic nervous system response, and an underactive parasympathetic nervous system. Therefore, you have a very dominant sympathetic, that could be due to your stress response, day in and day out, keeping you in the fight or flight, flooding adrenaline throughout your body. In this revved up state. You can have many symptoms of heart palpitations, heart pounding, feeling jittery, feeling wired and having difficulty sleeping. Some of the other symptoms include dizziness, fainting, vertigo, blood pressure eing low, especially if you st nd up too quickly. Your hear rate might be irregular or you might have some arrh thmias, and then you start get ing this GI symptoms where the e's diarrhea, and upset sto ach or anxiousness, tremors, eadaches and poor appetite. conditions. It can also come from injury or excessive stressful conditions. Some of these conditions are celiacs, rheumatoid arthritis, arthritis, Parkinson's, diabetes, MS, severe stress or trauma like loss of caregiver or child abuse, living in a warzone or experiencing violence. So any or all of these events you know, can lead to high risk of developing adrenaline dysautonomia. One of the biggest problems with adrenaline dysautonomia is the fact that it's so difficult to identify, and for help with that, talk to our staff at 714-709-8000. As we've seen a lot when it comes to problems that can occur with hormone imbalance and also adrenaline dysautonomia, but understanding what's happening in your body is only the first step. You also need to know what you can do about it. You do have choices here, and there are things that you can do to help calm your body and start reducing the adrenal overload. In fact, you have a lot of power to affect these issues, both by addressing the symptom directly and as well as viewing from the adrenal fatigue standpoint and helping yourself with adrenal recovery.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 10:08

When your body has the automatic response called the Reactive Sympathoadrenal Response, or RSR, it can really trigger those symptoms that we talked about, especially the fast heart rate, the wiredness, and tiredness. Especially in phase three of adrenal fatigue when your RSR is happening, your body becomes sensitized to nearly any stimulus that could become a stressor. Normally, you would have been able to shrug it off. But now even a simple walk, opening the fridge door, someone startling you very slightly can cause your heart to pound, bringing on the flood of symptoms. The symptoms can be triggered even now with eating a high carbohydrate meal or having a heated argument or watching an action movie, and having temperature regulation issues. With this activation, the body's usual precise balance is compromised, and can lead to wild swings in metabolic and hormone systems, causing crashes, causing you to be hungry very often, or be moody and irritable. So the time of recovery from this kind of crash can become longer and longer if you continue to let your adrenals get weaker. So how do we deal with adrenals. It's always important to seek out a healthcare professional first, who has training and skills necessary to help make an adequate assessment if this is truly what you're dealing with. You want to rule out any hard structural issues or any irregularities first. So that's why it's very important to make sure you follow what your healthcare provider says. Your doctor, might recommend medications like beta blockers to control heart rate. Though this can be beneficial in the short term, long term, it's not really getting down to the root cause. So just be advised that you should be cautioned on just starting medications that are band aids for symptoms and not addressing the root cause. So Dr. Jeremy, what is the first step in trying to get down to the root cause of this RSR?

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 12:28

The first step is to reduce stress. It is the overriding factor in AFS and so the adrenal response is going to be ongoing as long as you have continued stress. This can e any kind of stress that can ring these symptoms. If you can dentify the source of your tress, then try to reduce it nd if you can't, then make sure ou take steps to relax and ecrease any inflammation. learly, you can't keep all tressors out of your life. hile making the changes is ecessary to remove as many as ossible. One change you can ake today is to put as much ositivity in your life, like ositive thoughts, positive hings, positive people can all educe some of the negative actors that exacerbate stress.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 13:38

Yeah, I like to recommend for my clients and patients sometimes to just write a gratefulness journal, as studies have shown that when you're grateful, you actually can increase your happiness and reduce your stress. And part of reducing stress is also being able to breathe, and that changes the way you are affecting the vagal nerve, especially in your diaphragm. If you're doing some abdominal breathing, the adrenal breathing is very important in reducing your sympathetic response and helping that parasympathetic response. So that would be the number one thing to reduce

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 14:15

The second one is to make changes in your stress. diet. Foods can make a difference not only in your physical body, but also in your emotions. So eliminate foods that lead to inflammation and toxins in the body. Researchers implicating that inflammation cause many physical issues that people are experiencing. Most people aren't aware of the toxins they bring into their bodies through food and the environment in which they live and work. So in both PFS and RSR liver function may be compromised. The liver is one of your main detox organs of your body, so making sure you have a working detox pathway and your ody's not congested is also ver important in helping AFS as wel dysautonomia.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 15:08

One major toxin that you should be trying to cut out is caffeine. Cutting down on coffee, tea, chocolate can lower the amount of caffeine in your system because caffeine can make it harder for you to sleep. It can ramp up your sympathetic response, making it difficult to sleep at night, and sleep is very necessary for recovering from stress. So you don't want to artificially stimulate your adrenals by taking caffeine or energy drinks that are stimulating. Also processed sugars like high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners are especially toxic. These substances can produce an adrenal response by increasing inflammation in your body, leading to worsening of type two diabetes, high cholesterol, and weight gain. And so staying away from processed sugars is very, important in reducing inflammation. Another thing to avoid would be microwaving, and processing foods, as it may be producing carcinogens. Having a lot of preservatives or foods which are not whole foods can affect your gut and cause inflammation as you are trying to digest good nutrients and absorb them. So avoiding processed foods is one of the most important things to that you can do in your diet.

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 16:40

You can also add supplements that can make a difference. Supplements and herbs such as holy basil, magnesium, vitamin B12, B5, vitamin D, vitamin C, ashwagandha, zinc, and fish oil. These are all beneficial and help with your nutrition. Unfortunately, they can also be too stimulating when your body's already in a state of overdrive. You may need to be especially careful with herbs and adaptogen, such as ashwagandha rhodiola. Symptoms can worsen in some cases, and if you get these substances from food that is the best source. If not, then they can be taken as supplements.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 17:23

Yeah, I have had patients who complain that even vitamin B's start to make them feel ramped up. If you start to feel like a B12 supplement or a B complex or even vitamin C causes heart rate issues that really points to reactive sympathetic response and you need to calm your system down. And you need to find the right support in order to know what could be causing this. So if you have any questions, definitely call our office at 714-709-8000 You're probably at a point where it's too stimulating, any little thing can set you off. So self navigation can be very dangerous if you continue taking supplements blindly and not know what they're for, and they could backfire. So we're here to help you if you ever have any questions about that.

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 18:17

That's all we have today on the Dr Lam show. Thank you for listening and we hope that you found this show useful. You know you deserve to live a healthy life without troubling and frightening symptoms. So subscribe to our channel and press like if you really enjoyed this show. Then we can continue to bring you valuable content on adrenal fatigue, as well as holistic and Integrative Health. Goodbye for now and remember that we're always here to empower you to take control of your health.

Unknown: 18:48

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