Hey everyone. I thought I would jump in quickly and have a quick chat. I just finished a podcast interview and we talked about women in business with adrenal fatigue.
One of the jokes that I hear from women in business all the time is ‘you haven't worked hard enough unless you have some degree of adrenal fatigue'. And so we do carry it a little bit like a badge of honor, and it really shouldn't be because it's costing you and it's costing your business as well.
So one of the questions I was asked is, what's the difference between feeling tired, and you know, having adrenal fatigue? And the difference is that the fatigue in adrenal fatigue is not relieved by sleep. It's not relieved by a weekend. You can go away, have a short break, come back to work still feel tired. Still feel stressed. Still feel anxious. You know.
And so the fatigue is often accompanied with either anxiety, or overwhelm, or low moods, or depression. You get the brain fog, the insomnia, the weight issues. So if you have two or more of those symptoms then there'd be some impact of stress on your body so some of the side effects of stress. And so that needs to be addressed because essentially when we're in a stress response, our brain, we don't get a full kind of, you know use of the capacity of our brain, and so what happens is that our frontal cortex, or prefrontal cortex goes offline. And this is a part of our brain which is in charge of making decisions, and keeping us rational, and giving us creativity and vision and all of those kinds of things.
And so when we're stressed, we don't have access to that, and so we go back into the lizard brain which is the fear centre, and we operate from a place of fear and scarcity. And so we don't want to do that in business. We want to be abundant, we want to have big vision and be creative.
And so in order to come from that place, we need to be relaxed. And so adrenal fatigue, even though it is common, there are things that you can do to offset the side effects of stress.
So you know, I know for women in business that, and I'm a woman in business, and you know a lot of the times we talk about work-life balance. And I'll be very honest. I will go times when I push myself really hard in my business. And then I know when to pull back. Okay, and so I'm not saying that you need to operate at this perfect level of work-life balance. Because let's be honest we're not going to.
You know we're so driven and obsessed with our businesses that we're just not gonna do that. But I think at the end of the day what's really important is to know when that point is that you need to pull back. Because if you don't, you will head into burnout if you haven't already, and so one of the things that I see for women in business really common is that you end up cutting corners with your self care. You end up, you know if you work from home you'll end up jumping on your computer immediately when you wake up. Grab a cup of coffee, sit at your computer start working. You know?
And probably not get out of your pajamas for a few hours. And so what you're doing is you're drinking coffee, you're not having anything to eat. If you go to an office you're probably racing out the door, coffee in hand not eating for a few hours. And that's a no-no with adrenal fatigue because it's going to place a lot more stress on your body and all it will do is create a perfect environment for more anxiety, more overwhelm, more brain fog, more weight gain. So it's important to have regular meals and to eat in the morning. Don't have coffee on an empty stomach is generally my golden rule.
And so, couple of the other things that I shared in this podcast interview was, you know if you're having trouble sleeping at night, making sure that, Quite often what's going to wake us up in the middle of the night, is if we had a very stressful day. Kind of the rebound effect of our hormones at night our stress hormones and it'll wake us up randomly at two, three, four AM. And it's really frustrating because you can't get back to sleep and then if you do fall back to sleep, it's like at 5-6 AM and then you wake up feeling even worse.
And so what you want to do is make sure that your stress hormones aren't so high, all day long. So you don't have that effect at night and so you really just want to carve out like 10 minutes out of your day, to get away from your computer. To get away from your phone. To get away from any work stuff.
Get away from your desk and just decompress for 10 minutes. Just walk around the block or I don't know, if there's a park nearby even better. Just get out of your office environment and decompress. And so that way will help you to have a better sleep at night.
And the other thing is to have a snack, like I always say about an hour before bed, have just like a small handful of nuts. Whether it just be almonds or walnuts or pecans or cashews or something like that. Just a very small handful, one hour before your bed and that will help to keep your sugar levels and glucose levels nourished overnight. So that way you're not waking up and that when you do wake up in the morning that you do have more energy.
So those are a couple of the things to kick start you off but if you want to know more I've got a masterclass, Bye Bye Burnout, it's a masterclass. It's a brand new one. So jump on that.
I've got the link there, below this video and I'd love to hear from you guys. Who runs their own business and suspects or knows they have adrenal fatigue? Let me know in the comments below. Bye for now.