Adrenal Health: The Missing Link in Energy, Stress, and Hormone Balance
- marcandmerwebsites
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
The adrenal glands play a critical role in regulating your body’s stress response, energy levels, and hormonal balance. When under chronic stress, the communication between your brain and adrenals becomes dysregulated, leading to fatigue, hormone imbalance, and inflammation. Functional medicine focuses on restoring this balance through targeted testing, lifestyle optimization, and addressing root causes.
Your Adrenals: Small Glands with a Big Job
Perched like little caps above your kidneys, your adrenal glands are responsible for helping your body respond to stress, maintain blood pressure, regulate metabolism, and keep energy steady throughout the day.
They release key hormones including cortisol, adrenaline, and DHEA, that work in sync with your thyroid and sex hormones to help you feel alert, calm, and capable.
When stress becomes chronic, however, these powerful glands can fall out of rhythm. And when that happens, energy, sleep, mood, and hormones can start to shift.
Understanding the HPA Axis: Your Body’s Stress Command Center
Your adrenals don’t work alone. They’re part of an intricate feedback loop known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA axis, that regulates your body’s stress response, energy, and hormone production.
When your brain senses stress (physical, emotional, and even physiologic stress like infections and toxic burden), it signals your adrenals to produce cortisol. In short bursts, cortisol is incredibly helpful. It helps you wake up in the morning, stabilize blood sugar, and stay alert.
But when stress is constant, cortisol stays elevated or becomes erratic. Over time, the HPA axis loses its normal rhythm, leading to dysregulation. The result? You may feel exhausted, wired at night, anxious, or dependent on caffeine to function. Each of these experiences points to the same truth: your stress physiology is overextended and ready to be rebalanced.
Adrenal Health and Hormones: The Domino Effect
When your brain (the hypothalamus and pituitary) senses stress, it signals your adrenal glands to release cortisol and DHEA.
Cortisol helps you respond to stress, stabilize blood sugar, and reduce inflammation.
DHEA acts as a counterbalance, buffering the effects of cortisol, supporting mood, and serving as a building block for testosterone and estrogen.
In a healthy system, these hormones rise and fall in a daily rhythm, keeping you energized during the day and calm at night. But under chronic stress (emotional, physical, or physiologic) the entire communication system starts to falter.
This is what we call HPA axis dysregulation.
Cortisol may spike at the wrong times (wired at night, tired in the morning).
DHEA production can decline, leading to reduced resilience and recovery.
This can have a downstream effect on thyroid conversion and sex hormone balance.
The result?
Symptoms like fatigue, irritability, irregular cycles, low libido, stubborn weight gain, anxiety, or that familiar “tired but wired” feeling.
So rather than blaming your adrenals alone, functional medicine focuses on restoring balance and communication across the entire HPA axis, supporting your body’s ability to adapt, recover, and regulate hormones naturally.
How Functional Medicine Tests Adrenal Function
In conventional medicine, adrenal health often gets overlooked unless it’s a full-blown disease like Addison’s or Cushing’s. Functional medicine takes a more nuanced approach. We look at patterns in symptoms and labs to reveal how your stress response and hormones shift long before disease develops.
Through tools like the ZRT Salivary Cortisol Test and DUTCH Complete, we measure cortisol throughout the day to identify signs of HPA axis dysregulation.
A healthy pattern looks like:
High cortisol in the morning (to help you wake up)
Gradual decline through the day
Low cortisol at night (to help you sleep)
Disrupted patterns like flat lines, reversed rhythms, or inappropriate spikes tell us where your stress physiology needs support.
Restoring Adrenal Balance: The Functional Medicine Way
Healing your adrenals is about restoring rhythm, resilience, and communication between your brain and body.
Here’s how we approach adrenal recovery at Ritual Functional Medicine:
1. Support the Circadian Rhythm
Your cortisol follows the sun, so your lifestyle should too.
Morning sunlight exposure
Consistent wake and sleep times
Limiting blue light at night
2. Stabilize Blood Sugar
The adrenals respond directly to blood sugar swings.
Start your day with protein
Eat nutrient-dense meals and snacks in regular intervals throughout the day
Avoid skipping meals when under stress
3. Rebuild Nutrient Stores
Stress uses up key nutrients and minerals, especially: magnesium, B vitamins ,vitamin C, sodium, and potassium.
Repletion through food and targeted supplements supports adrenal enzyme pathways.
4. Train the Parasympathetic Nervous System
Chronic stress keeps the body in fight-or-flight mode. We focus on supporting the nervous system through:
Breathwork or meditation
Gentle movement
Going on walks
Time in nature
Downtime
Restful sleep
