Hello, I'm Evan Brand, certified functional medicine practitioner. And today we're talking about adrenal fatigue and brain fog. Something that many of my clients have dealt with and something I have personally dealt with. I don't know how frustrating it can be when you're trying to make a rational decision about something and you just can't or you're trying to stay on task, stay focused and you're just unable to do it. You just feel like literally there's a fog in your brain or that there's a cloud overhead. You just can't get out of that mental funk. So let's talk about why that happens and what you can actually do about it. So the first thing we need to discuss right here is the hippocampus. So technically there are two hippocampi. These are a memory center located very central and medial within the skull here in the brain that help you to deal with short term to long term memory conversion. Now there's also other important roles that the hippocampi play but for our talk and discussion here, mainly just know that the hippocampus is responsible for when you go through your day and you're creating memories. Your brain is going to help you determine and your hippocampi are going to help you determine what is important for converting that over and storing that into long term memory. So there's a very important research subject that was back in the early 1900s. It was a guy that they ended up naming H.M. and he was in a bicycle accident when he was a kid and he started to have seizures due to his brain injury. And so one of the surgeons made a recommendation that they should chop out the part of the brain that they believe was causing these seizures. And so what they did is they removed basically his entire hippocampi and the seizures stopped. But what happened and what they didn't find out until later is that every memory before he had the hippocampi removed, he still maintained. But he was unable to make any new memories without this hippocampus intact. So you could go up to this guy, hello H.M. nice to meet you and he would reintroduce himself over and over and over again and he would never actually learn anything new. And so what we discovered at that point back in time was that you have to have the hippocampus for memory and a healthy brain. So what happens with the adrenal fatigue picture and why I wrote down hippocampus destruction is because when you have stress, chronic stress of any kind, whether you're skipping meals, you're doing intermittent fasting, you're doing crossfit exercise, high intensity, exercise, things like that, you're staying up too late, you're binging on alcohol, you're exposing yourself to artificial light at night, you're overtraining in general. There's many reasons that we can talk about in another video about what causes the elevation of cortisol. But what happens is that cortisol, cortisol is at the root of this hippocampus destruction and when cortisol is marinating the hippocampi, it begins to destroy these cells. And one of my friends, Nora Gadgautis, has actually written about this subject in many of her books talking about the hippocampus are beginning to look like Swiss cheese when different people are doing autopsies on the deceased. They're finding that there's literally holes in the hippocampus that is destroyed from the cortisol, literally eating this stuff away because remember cortisol is a catabolic hormone and that breaks down your muscle tissue. So that's why when you are dealing with adrenal fatigue, you may begin to lose muscle mass and that can tie into that as well. Now a little bit off of the subject of brain fog, so let's get back into that. So number two here, the main issue is going to be neurotransmitter imbalance. So neurotransmitters are the brain chemicals. This is what allows you to feel emotions. They're over 100 neurotransmitters that have been identified. Now, you probably mainly hear about serotonin, dopamine, you hear about effinepranodrenaline, these other type of hormones that can be considered as neurotransmitters and then you hear about GABA, which is the breaks of the brain. So during this adrenal fatigue picture, many of your neurotransmitters are going to become unbalanced and depleted. So you could have a depletion of dopamine, which is then going to make you feel lethargy, you're going to feel tired. Maybe you're not able to focus and make decisions, you're not able to have as much pleasure because the dopamine levels are reduced during a state of adrenal fatigue and that's verified by organic acids testing. Now here's the other problem over here. So when you're stuck in this sympathetic fight-of-flight mode, this adrenal fatigue cascade or this adrenal fatigue issue, what happens is digestion and hydrochloric acid production are both going to be suppressed because the parietal cells in your stomach realize, hey, we're getting chased by a lion, we're about to get our legs ripped off by a lion. Digestions probably not a top priority right now. Why don't we focus on sending blood to the extremity so that we can run from this lion before we get eaten? And so at that point, you know, HCl production and digestion are going to slow down. Therefore, you're not going to be breaking down the amino acids. Now proteins, chicken beef, your meats, eggs, etc. Proteins are made up of a combination of amino acids. And when you have this depletion of HCl and digestive enzymes, you're not going to be breaking down the amino acids. Now why is that important to the discussion of adrenal fatigue and brain fog? Well, that's because your aminos are actually converted in to neurotransmitters. So you can take something like triptophan. So dietary triptophan that you would get from Turkey, obviously a lot of people talk about Turkey is triptophan. That's one source. There's many others. Triptophan eventually gets converted over to serotonin, which I'm running out of room here, which gets converted over to melatonin. So this is why with adrenal fatigue, you can be tired and wired at the same time. You're exhausted, but you can't seem to sleep. You may have insomnia with your brain fog. So what do we do? So that's what we talk about here. So we have to balance out this go-go-go lifestyle. So many people are high-charging with their business, their entrepreneurs, their athletes. Maybe you're a busy mom watching and you're just trying to hustle and keep up with the fast pace of the modern world. Trust me, I totally understand. But we have to have a balance. So here are a couple strategies that I like to use with some of my clients and what I use personally. So number one is going to be sensory deprivation, also known as float tanks. So essentially these are giant bathtubs, about 10 inches of water, with about a thousand pounds of Epsom salt dissolved into them, magnesium sulfate. And now you're going to get a transdermal absorption. So you're going to be absorbing this magnesium through your skin while you're floating in this tank of water. It's warm water. It's very relaxing. It's a dark room. You feel so good after you get through with it. There's actually a lot of research being done now on float tanks, what they call rest therapy when you're looking in the research journals. And they're finding that a reduction of cortisol is found when you go through a float tank. Because what happens is you are balancing out that parasympathetic and sympathetic mode. So you're taking the fight or flight mode, which so many people are up here and you're taking the rest and digest and you're really cranking this mode up and you're turning down that sympathetic fight or flight mode that causes adrenal fatigue in the first place. Number two is going to be smart nutrition and supplementation. So I alluded to intermittent fasting and how that's problematic in several of my videos. You don't want to skip meals and you don't want to do intermittent fasting if you have adrenal fatigue. Now, yes, there are benefits to intermittent fasting, but with adrenal issues, you can't bear to put more stress on your body by skipping a meal. So you want to make sure you're getting a good quality breakfast, lunch, and dinner in. Don't skip meals. Get your good fats and proteins in, your good organic butter, your coconut oil, whether you like to tolerate eggs or you like to eat eggs, go for it. If you want to do some good quality meats, that's going to be helpful to good quality protein, your nuts, your seeds, things like that. Just mainly smart nutrition. Supplementation, I'm a huge fan of Adaptogenic Herbs. I've created a product myself that you can view on my store that is a combination of Adaptogenic Herbs. I personally take them every single day because Adaptogens help you. So we can't evolve to this modern stress that causes all of this issue. We can't evolve. It's too slow. But what we can do is we can adapt to the situation, which is where Adaptogenic Herbs come into play. So I use them and really enjoy them. There's plenty of them out there. You have Gen-Sing, you have Agilagondo, you have Rhodiola. There's tons of them. There's more info in my free book called Stress Solutions, which you can get by click on on the screen right here. Lastly, get tested. So if you have brain fog, you can't just keep living with it. So you need to identify, do you have adrenal fatigue? Is that the root of your issues? It's causing the brain fog. 99 out of 100 times that I've seen? That's definitely a factor. Now obviously we have neurotransmitter imbalance that can be identified with further testing as well, such as organic acids testing. And then lastly, we want to make sure that there's no type of GI pathogens. So parasites and other gut bugs that you can find in your GI tract with a stool test. If you have a gut bug, say, blastocystis hominists, that's a very common one that many people will show up with, that is going to sap your energy and you're going to feel exhausted. And until you address that, you're not likely going to have optimal brain function. So you see that there's the three-body system approach here. You have the adrenal hormone system. You have secondly, the neurotransmitter brain system. And then you have the GI system, not in that order particularly, but most of the time it's typically adrenals, gut, and then the brain, neurotransmitters. So I know this was a lot of information. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to figure out yourself, figure out your brain fog or suspect you have adrenal issues, you can schedule a free consult with me. You can click on screen here or the link below. I'll talk with you for 15 minutes at no charge. This is Evan Brand signing out. Take care. Bye-bye.