Has Your Get - Up - And - Go got up and left?

If you’re as tired when you wake up as you were when you went to bed, or you’re more than usually down or out of sorts, you may need to check your adrenal glands.

- Anna Rich

For Adele Hosken, 2015 started at a cracking pace. ‘By 6am, I was checking emails. At 8pm, I was still at my desk. I’d get to the end of the day and think, “I don’t know what I ate. Was it this morning that I nibbled at some scrambled eggs?”’

Before, Adele had followed a balanced lifestyle: eating her quota of veggies, exercising, making time to relax. But with the workload she had to contend with, her good habits fell apart, and she resorted to eating what she could grab in a hurry. ‘It was absolutely manic.’

Adele is an urban specialist – a regional advisor for a UN-affiliated organisation. Her job entails helping cities to manage urbanisation so that the urban poor aren’t sidelined. ‘Globally, new sustainable development goals were being crafted, and we held major conferences here in South Africa. It was a time of heightened activity in development,’ she explains.

We all experience periods of ‘peak stress’, says Adele. ‘It could be work-related; it could be divorce or a death in the family; it could be down to juggling a lot of things – being a mother, or studying while you’reworking… Our bodies are designed to deal with that; after peak stress, you revert to a relaxed state.’ Trouble is, many of us stay in a heightened state. And that certainly was the case for Adele.

But come December, she started to ‘fall apart’. ‘It was as if I thought, “Okay, I can take my foot off the accelerator now,” but then I couldn’t get going again.’ Adele found that she couldn’t sleep – ‘for days, weeks on end’ – even though she was beyond tired.