The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross
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DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT LIFE WAS LIKE PRE-BURNOUT?
Before we get into stress-liberation strategies, I’d like you to pause for a moment and try to recall the time before you started having these symptoms, when you could really handle, or even enjoy, stress. Do you remember when you could still face deadlines, confrontations, and long commutes with gusto and a sense of humor? Do you remember when you used to see difficulty as an exciting challenge: all-nighters in college, running marathons, your first job, your first diet? Do you remember making jokes about setbacks instead of becoming short-tempered and edgy? When was the last time your neck and shoulders didn’t feel tight and achy? When was the last time you regularly enjoyed an hour of peaceful daydreaming, a warm fire with no TV on, a whole weekend of lounging around with your family or friends, or a quiet stroll through the neighborhood at twilight?
This is an important exercise because it can help you gauge how long you’ve been burning out and give you a concrete sense of your goal: How you’ll experience life when the feeling of being overwhelmed is a rare, instead of a constant, sensation. How I hope you’ll soon feel after you’ve followed the recommendation that I’m going to make later in the chapter about how to use effective nutritional peacemakers. But first, let’s look into the root causes of your adrenal burnout.
GETTING CLEAR ABOUT YOUR STRESS-COPING CAPACITY OR LACK OF IT
It’s easy for stress overload to creep up on us. Our society rewards the busy, high-flying multitasker. We can get so caught up in the challenges of juggling all the complex demands in our lives that we don’t recognize the very real risk of burnout. Looking at all the factors that are affecting your personal stress-coping capacity will help you identify exactly what you’ll need to change in order to meet life’s challenges with eagerness and strength once again.
How Much Genetic Fortitude Got Passed On to You?
We’re all built to handle stress, but each of us has a unique, partly inborn stress-coping capacity. Some of us are born with a fragile sensitivity to stress and wear out early in life. Others can muscle through quite a bit of adversity before they wear thin. Then there are those remarkable people who really seem to thrive on constant challenge and action, powerhouses of energy and stamina into old age.
To get a better idea of what kind of person you were born to become, consider your parents and other close relatives. How have they handled stress? Have they needed tobacco, alcohol, or chocolate to cope with it? Have they gotten weepy, testy, or even explosive under fire? Our clients often describe parents or grandparents who couldn’t tolerate stress without a drink or a scapegoat.
How Many External Stressors Do You Currently Face, and How Do You Cope with Them?
Among all the various factors contributing to adrenal burnout, the most obvious ones are the external stressors: the overwork, illness, injury, pain, cruelty, privation, fear, and loss that life so often presents us with. Relationships at home and at work are our primary sources of this kind of stress, and this has probably always been the case, but some new factors, unique to the twenty-first century, explain why up to 90 percent of all visits to primary care physicians are now prompted by stress-related problems:7
It all adds up to an extraordinary new, specifically Western, style of stress.
The nutritional suggestions I’ll make in this chapter can help you cope with these external stressors. However, they cannot take the place of an honest assessment of your life, of the draining realities that you may need to eliminate or learn how to handle more constructively, or of the counsel and prayer that you may require in the process. Sometimes changing your job or getting counseling with your spouse can miraculously return you to your old self. Other times something as simple as learning to cry can help tremendously. In an early study on stress, the parents of children dying of leukemia had their stress levels tested. The parents who did not cry had much higher levels than those who were able to cry. We now know that crying serves a very specific biological purpose. Human tears, unlike the tears of any other animal, contain a substance called ACTH, the hormone that actually sets off the stress response and is literally washed away by a good cry.12
In counseling you can learn to cry and to breathe deeply, to assert yourself, to express anger appropriately, and to simplify your life. But if your stress has gone on for too long, you may recover only part of your natural vitality by changing your circumstances. If that’s the case, you can find the rest of it by following