Your adrenals aren't fatigued - YOU are.
Before the late 1960’s, the only folks in the US who had ever really heard of the plants we now label “adaptogens” were herbalists and other traditional healers (mostly Chinese but also Siberian, Scandinavian, etc). Over the next few decades, commercial health food & supplement companies got a hold of them, and the buzzword was born.
SO WHAT ARE THESE THINGS THEY CALL “ADAPTOGENS,” AND WHAT DO THEY ALLEGEDLY DO?
There’s no one definition of adaptogen, as it is an unregulated term. Which makes for excellent marketing. This umbrella term includes plants (and fungi) as different from one another as ashwagandha to shizandra to reishi. Today we’ll be talking about what most companies mean when they slap the “adaptogen” label on their products: plants with a stimulating action on the neuroendocrine systems such as Ginseng, Shizandra, Rhodiola and Eleuthro.
Ostensibly, the benefit of these adaptogens lies in the notion that they assist the body in some hopelessly non-specific way to “adapt to stress.” Sounds great, right? And it would be, if it were true. But it’s not (more below). So if they’re not helping our systems cope with the hyper-stressful maelstrom of racist, woefully incompetent presidents, a global pandemic and the fact that our world is literally burning, what DO they do?
In short: the same thing as a strong cup of coffee.
“ADAPTOGENS” IS (MOSTLY) JUST A EUPHEMISM FOR STIMULANTS.
The herbs that you see in the store labeled as adaptogens are, almost always, being used as stimulants. When taken in the large doses you see recommended (as opposed to the baby doses typically used by traditional practitioners), plants like Ginseng and Eleuthro make you feel energized and appear to banish your fatigue. It’s understandable that we confuse this newfound energy with a positive adaptation to stress. It’s understandable that we’d conclude that it helps us combat fatigue.
But alas, it isn’t real.
These “Adaptogens” are just masking our fatigue, not reducing it. And there’s a limit to how far we can push it. Which is why you often see people coming back to the practitioner/store that gave them the herbs, saying that it worked “great” at first but then stopped working. They weren’t “adapting” to their stress, they were masking their fatigue.
Let me pause here to say this: just because there’s no such thing as adrenal fatigue doesn’t mean it’s all in your head. IT’S NOT. Something real is happening to you. You are stressed out and tired all the time, and just because “adaptogens” won’t fix that problem doesn’t mean it’s unfixable or that your symptoms aren’t real. They ARE. It’s just that walking that back requires more than just layering on some herbal RedBull.
So if you’re standing in the supplement aisle, googling for guidance, and the mention of a tincture that could give you more energy and help your body adapt to the absurdity of 2020 makes your heart leap, that’s completely understandable. Me too, fam. But there are better, more thorough, more real ways to do that. (A good place to start would be my free PDF guide, 5 Crucial Steps to Nourish Yourself, Sleep Better, and Stress Less, which you can access here.)
Some companies get closer to the mark when they call plants like Holy Basil and Ashwagandha adaptogens. In the Western tradition, they’re called nervines or nerve tonics, and they don’t stimulate you outright (Some folks do find holy basil uplifting, but that’s not the same thing as stimulating). They are stress-relieving herbs, with a loooooong, established history of being safe for long-term use. The reason I say they come closer to hitting the mark is because finding safe, sustainable ways of reducing stress is one of the pillars of adapting to stress over time. Our nervous systems are hard-wired to seek safety, and stress-relieving plants like Ashwagandha and Holy Basil are really good at helping us in that search.
And now, let’s go over some of the risky myths about these plants.
WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW ABOUT “ADAPTOGENS” IS BASED ON VERY LITTLE, VERY POOR QUALITY EVIDENCE.
The effects of these plants as it relates to the stress response over time haven’t been reliably studied within the Western medical system. You know who does know a lot about them? The indigenous practitioners that have been skillfully and judiciously using them for generations. And they don’t use them ANY KIND OF WAY like we do. That in and of itself should be a red flag.
Myth #1: “Adaptogens” increase adrenal function or counteract “adrenal burnout”
Adrenal burnout isn’t real (more on that in Part II), but even if it were a real phenomenon, so-called adaptogenic plants like ginseng and rhodiola wouldn’t do you a lick of good because they have no effect on adrenal function.
Note: For the uninitiated, the (quite recent) notion of “adrenal burnout” or “adrenal fatigue” is that our adrenal glands get overworked by stress and stop producing the hormones we need, including cortisol. That’s just not how the stress response works. But again, we’ll look more closely at that in Part II.
There’s quite literally ZERO evidence that supports the use of plants like Ginseng, Eleuthro and Rhodiola to specifically increase adrenal function. The clinical trials that do exist on these plants (ginseng, for example) ONLY show an increased sense of energy and anti-fatigue effects (spoiler alert: So does coffee).
It simply doesn’t follow that increased *perceived* energy = increased adrenal function. Not that there was anything wrong with your adrenals in the first place (unless you have Addison’s, which is VERY rare).
Myth #2: Adaptogens are safe to take every day over the long term
Nope. We can’t say this for sure, not even a little bit. In some ways, I would argue that they are worse than just drinking a crap-ton of coffee to get you through the day. Either way, their safety has only been established for short-term use (the longest-term evidence we have is 30 days). Which, by the way, is baked into how they have been historically used by traditional practitioners.
And there are definitely some caveats to even their short-term safety: Eleuthro, for example, isn’t safe for folks with any of the following (at the large doses recommended by many adaptogen products):
all heart conditions (heart disease, history of heart attack, congenital, etc)
high blood pressure
bipolar disorder (1 or 2) or schizophrenia
diabetes
hormone-sensitive conditions such as breast cancer
Even without any of those conditions, we should be aware of the risk of the same sort of side effects we would expect from too much coffee: insomnia, headache, racing heartbeat (tachycardia) and changes in heart rhythm, anxiety, muscle spasms, etc.
Which brings me to our next myth.
Myth #3: Adaptogens give you energy “for free” with no crash, consequences or rebounds
Daily, long-term use of these plants ABSOLUTELY has a well-established risk of side-effects. Again, we need look no further than the traditions these plants came from: there are many well-documented side effects in the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) literature. For example, too much Ginseng (Panax ginseng) may cause dry mouth, irritability, palpitations, tremor, headache, blurred vision, insomnia, increased blood pressure, edema, itching, dizziness, and diarrhea.
And, just like any other stimulant, there’s a limit to how far and how hard you can push your body before it runs out of gas.
“ADAPTOGENS” (AS USED IN THE WEST TODAY) CAUSE MORE HARM THAN HELP
Look, I get it. You’re tired, you’re stressed out, you’re searching for something that will make that feeling go away so you can try to enjoy your evenings and weekends with your friends and loved ones.
The idea that a plant could be “anti-stress” without you having to slow down, sleep more, eat better or make any other lifestyle changes is extremely tempting. Free energy - who wouldn’t want that?! But it’s just not real, and it’s going to leave you in a worse place than you started in once your body runs out of reserves.
It’s similarly tempting to buy into the diagnosis of “adrenal burnout” as the cause of your fatigue. But fatigue is really complicated and multi-factorial, and clinicians often miss important factors when attempting to decipher its true cause. There are TONS of diseases with fatigue as a primary symptom: liver disease, heart disease, diabetes, hypothyroidism, and anemia. Not only that, but there are quite a few other factors that could be driving fatigue, like sleep debt, poor sleep quality, under-eating or overtraining. “Treating” your fatigue by using stimulating plants to mask the symptoms of an illness or nutrient deficiency is irresponsible and dangerous - please please please, if your practitioner hasn’t ruled out each and every one of the above causes of fatigue but is offering you “adaptogens,” FIND A NEW CLINICIAN.
Because, unfortunately:
There are no short cuts to robust energy levels.
Again: these plants don’t give you “free” energy. Adaptogens are like credit cards - they give the illusion of having more “money in the bank.” But they come with a credit limit, and with interest. There is a cost, and those stimulating adaptogens are enabling burnout by making you feel less tired than you really are, allowing you to overexert yourself by making a “withdrawal” from your body’s reserves.
Adaptogens are like credit cards - they give the illusion of having more “money in the bank.”
But they come with a credit limit, and with interest.
Daily ginseng or eleuthro use will make you feel GREAT…for a little while. So will a bucket of coffee every day, but you would think twice about the wisdom of that (Okay, okay that’s the last caffeine comparison, I promise). Do the same with “adaptogens.” If you wouldn’t down a pot of coffee (oops, I lied), don’t down that “energy tonic” formula to get through your day.
Instead, change your day. Sleep more, manage your stressors, and smash the white supremacist patriarchy.
If you’re struggling to make it through, the question you should be asking yourself is WHY. Why isn’t your body adapting as it once was? WHY does our society glorify “the grind” and encourage us to think nothing of ruining our health at the altar of capitalism?
If you’re struggling with fatigue, come see me. I’ll help you rule out serious underlying causes, and we’ll create an individualized, comprehensive plan to improve your energy levels by addressing their root cause.
To be clear: There is absolutely a place in the world for herbs like ginseng, rhodiola, shizandra, etc and a way to use them correctly. They have been skillfully and judiciously dispensed by healers for a very long time. But, here in the US (specifically within the commercial herb market/alternative health sphere), we’re grossly misunderstanding and abusing them, using them in massive doses in a manner that’s FAR outside their historical context.
Tune in next month for Part II, where we’ll learn about the proper and SAFE use of these powerful plants we’ve labelled “adaptogenic,” as well as more about the false diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue.”