Menopause

Wellness

The Silent Key To Menopausal Wellness: Your Adrenals

Mastering The Meno(Pause) Transition Summit 3.0

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-t8j3UyidDwG0aGgd-JGrPE0dP9thxYt/view?usp=drive_link

I'm going to talk about stress in another talk. Maybe tomorrow, but our adrenals take the brunt of it. Our adrenals also if we don't sleep at the time, if we don't eat at the time if we're exposed to too many toxins, and that could be EMFs, pesticides, or glyphosate, we're going to talk about that, too. Our adrenals can get stressed out. A lot of you have probably heard, and I love social media. Still, there's just a lot of B.S. that's spouted on there, whether it's influencers well-meaning or not well-meaning, that don't understand medicine, that hasn't spent 23 years in the trenches in clinical practice. I can tell you that a lot of things that sound good or may even make sense physiologically are not what's happening in the real world. 

A lot of you may have heard that your cortisol is elevated, and that's why you've got belly fat, and that's why you're stressed, and that's why you're tired. That may be true, but what I see in clinical practice, more than that, is that you have gone through the part where you have elevated cortisol, and cortisol is our stress hormone. When there's stress, our adrenal is putting out cortisol, which is a good thing that can be lifesaving and helps to dampen inflammation. Although chronic inflammation is not what we're looking to experience, but acute inflammation, our body needs to shut that down. That could be life-threatening. 

But what happens is, at some point, if everything has become life-threatening—the inbox, the dishes in the sink, the neighbor dog barking too loud, the boss is over-demanding—you get what I'm saying. Just life. We're all living life. We are not. I always say that it's easy to be a monk and go meditate on a mountain, but, come back to life and have a family and have a work environment and have a community and all these things, and then see how stressed you are, or, anyway, get a little off there. But so often we have secreted our cortisol, and even though I see it now, sometimes in teens I treat it, but certainly often by our 30s and our 40s, our adrenals are done. They're, we can't do this anymore. Instead of having high cortisol, we have cortisol levels that have crashed. Now the treatment is bioidentical cortisol hydrocortisone replacement instead of dampening cortisol. 

Again, what did I talk about yesterday with hormones? Test don’t guess. The same thing with the adrenals. Yesterday I said saliva was not an accurate way to test sex hormones. But it is the accurate and gold standard way to test your cortisol levels. Cortisol is most bioavailable to be picked up for measurements in the saliva. Now, it's not just about getting one reading because our adrenals and we are very cyclical creatures and we have circadian rhythms, and when we can get in tune with the circadian rhythms, everything works better. It's very important to do a four-point. You want to ask your physician for a four-point salivary cortisol test. What you want to see is that your levels are high in the morning. 

The analogy I use is that you're going skiing, you're sleeping, and you're on the ski lift, and the ski lift takes you up to the top of the mountain. When you wake up in the morning, Kabam, high cortisol levels, and you are ready to ski, you have a lot of energy to be on the slopes all day. As you go down skiing, you go down the slopes all day to when you are done and your cortisol levels are low because you just had a full day on the slopes, now it's time to go to sleep, and high cortisol levels can be a cause of why you can't fall asleep. We want to check the four points. We want to check in the morning. The cortisol awakening response. We want to check your noon levels. We want to check your afternoon levels. We want to check your midnight levels and your evening levels. Sometimes we see boom, boom, boom. We see major ski slopes. Instead of just one ski slope, sometimes we see a flatline. Never made it up the mountain. Sometimes we do see that high cortisol. 

Sometimes I see it where you're just secreting it all day long. Often I see low in the morning and high at night. That means your hypothalamic-pituitary axis—your brain talking to your adrenal glands—is off. It's a bad game of telephone. We have to, restructure, re-communicate, and reeducate the connection between the brain and the adrenals while we're also improving levels. When we test and see these four levels, we can then maybe you need hydrocortisone, adaptogenic herbs, vitamin C, or pantothenic acid. Please, if you take a B vitamin and a high dose, take a B complex with it. Because if you take just one B vitamin in a high dose and don't take the full spectrum, you can deplete the other B vitamins. Sometimes we need to raise cortisol in the morning and lower it at night. It's a different treatment. Again, by doing it's a simple test. You do it in the comfort of your own home, and you get to know what your circadian rhythm is. When do you need support? Because yes, we can feel wired and tired, and we think that means our cortisol is high, but we can feel wired and tired, and our cortisol can be low. Now again, it's not just about testing and then taking a supplement. It's also about lifestyle. 

Our adrenals are affected by our sleep, our sugar intake, our alcohol intake, how we respond to stress, by always saying yes, by learning, etc. These are some of the things that get in the way of good adrenal function. What do we want to do? We want to prioritize sleep. Every hour you get before midnight, according to traditional Chinese medicine, is worth four hours after, but that doesn't mean you get to sleep less. But being asleep and in bed by 10:30 sleeping, certainly, is crucial. Waking up and getting outside and putting your feet on the ground and looking and seeing the sunrise. Not directly, of course. Watching the sunset. Teaching your body, turning off the lights at night, putting on your blue block or glasses, or utilizing candles. But being in tune with the natural rhythms is going to help your adrenal glands. Learning that if it's a yes, it's a yes. If it's not, it's a no. Thank you. Not interested. Not for me, not today. Maybe another time, but learning to tune in to what feeds your soul. 

Speaking of feeding, Make sure you're eating the diet that's for you. Now, we talk a lot during the summit about prioritizing protein, and that is truly important. Make sure you have enough protein. If you have weak adrenals, you often need to have some protein within an hour of waking up to stabilize your blood sugar levels so your cortisol doesn't crash. Intermittent fasting may not be for you. Learning what's for you is what's most important. Because I can have a hundred patients in a room, they can all have adrenal issues, and they're all going to have different instructions. For me, there might be some overlap. Y'all might be taking an adrenal extract or one of my adrenal herbal potions that I mix up, or hydrocortisone or my Adrenal Boost Supreme, or vitamin C or B-Complex or Pantothenic acid, or all the things you may be getting some serine at night, which is Phosphatidyl Serine. If your cortisol is high and you're going to get life instructions about your sleep or your stress, and it's going to be different for everyone. We all have different reasons for why our organs are not functioning. 

It's important that you start to pay attention to your adrenal glands and that you realize it's not a quick fix; just detoxing is not a quick fix, which we're going to talk about. There is no five-day metal cleanse or five-day parasite cleanse. Detoxing is a well-thought-out approach that takes time and doesn't stress the body. It's the same with replenishing the adrenal glands. If your adrenal glands are shot, which mine was, then it is a lifelong love affair of supporting and nourishing your adrenal glands, of not staying up too late, of keeping a consistent bedtime, of taking alcohol out of your life, or mainly out of your life only on special occasions if that's important to you. On moving your body the way your body needs to be moved. If you have very low adrenal glands and you do high cardio impact, your adrenal glands are just going to go lower because they're tired. 

Starting with that for point cortisol, you can start to get to know where your adrenal glands are. then you can do the things with your physician that are going to help support you. I'm going to talk about stress. I guess I'm going to do it tomorrow because it rolls into this about what is stress. We all have stress. It's not getting rid of stress. It is just learning to dance with stress. It's learning to have a relationship with stress. It's learning to respond rather than react. The other thing we're going to talk about is your thyroid gland. You cannot go fix your thyroid without paying attention to your adrenal glands. This is very important. They sit on a seesaw. If your adrenals are shut and you start to supplement or repair your thyroid, maybe with some bioidentical thyroid hormone, but you haven't paid attention to the adrenals, the thyroid goes up and the adrenals go down. 

What do I do in my practice, and what do you want to look for a doctor to do, is I for a point cortisol test someone? I figure out what's going on with their adrenals. I look at their lifestyle; I look at the support they need. I build their adrenals back for a minimum of four weeks, sometimes eight weeks, or 12 weeks. It just depends upon the degree to which they need support. Then we put the thyroid piece in. I'm going to talk to you about thyroid and what's being overlooked. I guess tomorrow I'll be stressed the next day thyroid. Be sure to tune in and hear what I have to say about stress and your thyroid. Then we'll probably do a detox because I mentioned that. then we'll see. We'll have a surprise for the last day. Anyway, adrenal love, adrenal TLC, there's a lot more. But I'm just trying to give you some important factors. Get you thinking, get you curious, get you questioning your doctors, and get you the best medical support and advice that you can get so you can have an amazing menopause transition. Here's to happy adrenals. Here's to day three and another amazing day of conversations. Enjoy them. Learn, grow, laugh, and cry all the things. This is your menopausal transition, and I hope this is your menopausal transition. I'm just grateful to be a part of it.

<h6>Sharon Stills, NMD</h6>
Hi, ladies. Welcome back, Dr. Sharon Stills here. Your host. T3, all ready. My God, are you blown away? Are you excited for today? I'm excited for today. I want to talk to you today about your adrenal glands. As you can see, every morning I'm coming on just for a 15-minute chat just to say hi and point out some highlights that I think are important for you to know the things that have served me to help me serve my patients over the last 23 years. We often hear, that we don't need to worry about replacing hormones, because when we go through menopause. Our adrenals will take over and start producing for us. 

The adrenals are these little, tiny glands that sit on top of our renal glands, our kidneys. They have a lot to do with our stress levels. By the time you get to menopause, there's a good chance your adrenals are, hasta la vista. They've checked out already, and they are not producing any hormones for you. It's important we go in and look at our adrenals, love our adrenals, and start to replenish and refuel our adrenals. I burned my adrenals out. I was in my late 20s. I used to think it was super cool that I could stay up all night and only sleep four hours, but my adrenals didn't think that was super cool. Of course, we all have our levels of stress, whether it's a job loss a death in the family, a breakup, or dealing with what's going on in the world. I mean, there are so many different ways to let stress come into your life.

https://d1tnc8rqovg0h0.cloudfront.net/2024+Summits/Meno(pause)+Summit+3.0/Transcripts/2024_MTMTS3_Mini+Talk+Day+3+Transcript+File.pdf

Dr. Sharon Stills, a licensed Naturopathic Medical Doctor with over two decades of dedicated service in transforming women’s health has been a guiding light for perimenopausal and menopausal women, empowering them to reinvent, explore, and rediscover their vitality and zest for life. Her pioneering RED Hot Sexy Meno(pause) Program encapsulates her philosophy: to Reinvent your Health, Explore your Spirit, and Discover YOUR Sexy. This unique approach has revolutionized the way women experience their transformative years, making her a sought-after expert in the field.
A proud graduate of The Sonoran University, class of 2001 with a rich background in European Biological Medicine, pro-aging therapies, and Bio-identical Hormone Replacement, Dr. Stills has successfully guided thousands of women through gentle transitions using all-natural methods. Her expertise is recognized globally, evidenced by her invitation to take part as the Co-Lead North American lecturer for the Paracelsus Academy in Switzerland when the Academy was up and running. She also is a long time contributor as a physician expert at Women’s Health Network. Her influence is also felt in academia and professional circles, sitting on the boards of the Bio-Regulatory Medicine Institute and the Archive of Healing at UCLA. Dr. Stills continues to share her knowledge through the annual Mastering your Meno(pause) transition summit and as the former host of The Science Of Self Healing podcast.
The opening of Stills Health Clinic, her new 7,000 sq. ft. clinic in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona, in late fall 2024, marks another milestone in her mission to provide unparalleled naturopathic care. There along with her son, Dr Ben Stills, they will be providing unique diagnostic and therapeutic options addressing all forms of chronic illness including but not limited to cancer, autoimmunity, covid-20 and of course Meno(pause) concerns. This venture follows her previous success in founding and running one of the largest naturopathic clinics in the country.
Dr. Stills’ personal journey of overcoming her own serious health challenges underscores her commitment to the wellness path she advocates for her patients. Her life is a testament to the principles she teaches: from embracing a healthy Paleo diet and a rigorous vitamin regimen to prioritizing restorative sleep and physical movement through yoga, hiking, and dancing.
Whether meditating in solitude, cheering for the NY Jets, baking paleo cookies, or exploring the world collecting passport stamps with her family and adorable granddaughters, she embodies the RED-Hot life she champions for others.

The Silent Key To Menopausal Wellness: Your Adrenals

Sharon Stills, NMD

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Sharon Stills, NMD