The number one issue that corporate women and business owners say to me is: ‘I’m so tired but I just can’t stop’!
Why is it that when we are really exhausted we can’t sleep and our mind races?
Well, if you have ever felt like this you are not alone because this is exactly what happens when our adrenal glands start to run out of adrenaline.
There are actually 3 stages of adrenal dysfunction:
- Adrenal Fatigue – this is where you are tired and actually want to sleep and not do much. You get sick with colds and flu.
- Adrenal Exhaustion – this is a weird phase because you are tired but you don’t want to stop and you can’t sleep. This is because your body thinks you are being chased by lions, so of course it doesn’t want to let you stop, let alone sleep. As far as your mood goes, you are cranky and tend to fly off the handle or you use all your patience to control your frustration. Interestingly, you don’t get sick because your immune system is hyperactive, which is a problem as you will see in the last phase below.
- Adrenal Burnout – believe me, you don’t want to get to this phase. . . I have and it’s not pretty. Here, you cannot get out of bed and you are prone to chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease (where your hyperactive immune system attacks healthy tissue) and later on cancer and heart disease.
So, if you are tired and wired what do you do to make sure you don’t get to burn out?
Turn your phone onto airplane mode and put the timer on for 20 minutes. Lie down and breath in and out of your belly. Then scan your body from the top of your head to the tip of your toes and back up again.
This gives a message to your body that you are not actually being chased by a lion. I know you are going to want to jump up and do something. Stop yourself and make yourself lie still. If you were on a horse and it was about to run off a cliff wouldn’t you do everything you could to pull it up and stop it damaging itself?
Well, that’s what you need to do with your body to stop yourself from falling into burning out.
Do this every day. It might take some practice but in the end, you will be rewarded with great productivity and concentration and a much, much greater sense of well-being.
