Supplements not working? Why it helps to find your starting point
Supplements not working is something I hear from people who have spent years adding one product for each symptom, with magnesium for sleep, a probiotic for the tummy and something else for energy. This article explains why the body's systems depend on each other, follows one woman's symptoms from her first poor nights to her hot flushes, and shows how to find your own starting point and what to do this week.
Supplements not working: what the pattern usually looks like
Many people arrive with the same story: a list of symptoms and a cupboard of products to match. Each product was a sensible choice for the symptom in front of them. After a year or two they are no further forward, and they start to wonder what they are doing wrong.
Usually the products are fine, and the explanation lies in how the body is built. Your systems depend on each other, a bit like the parts of an engine. A car needs its fuel supply, its spark and its timing to work in step. If the timing is out, a new air filter helps very little.
Your nervous system, your blood sugar, your digestion, your liver and your hormones influence one another all day long. A symptom in one place often has its roots in another, so a product aimed only at the symptom meets a system that is still under the same pressure as before.
Supplements have a place, and I explain later how I think about them. The point here is the order in which you work.
To show what I mean, here is a woman who came to see me this week. I have kept the details general.
The woman who came to see me this week
She was somewhere between her mid forties and early fifties. She told me she felt tired and exhausted, and that she woke up feeling tired. Between three and five in the morning she was awake. Over recent months she had noticed bloating and discomfort in her digestion, which she had never had before. Weight had started to gather around her middle and she could not shift it. She felt more anxious than usual. She had the beginnings of night sweats, her thinking felt foggy and her skin had become drier.
She had come to me as a last resort. She wanted to avoid HRT and asked what else she could use. She had read about black cohosh and red clover, and she wanted to know where to start with the hot flushes, the anxiety, the sleep and the weight.
Her symptoms were hormonal, and I took them seriously. Night sweats, brain fog and anxiety are common in the years around menopause, and my article on perimenopause and sleep explains why. I also told her that starting with the hormones is a common choice, and that it tends to miss most of the story. To work on her hormones well, she and I needed to rewind in time and look at where it began.
Link one: years of pressure and the first changes to sleep
For the best part of ten years she had been busy. She worked, she ran a busy house and she brought up teenagers. Her stress response had been running at a high level for a long time. That kind of build-up is gradual, and it is easy to miss.
Her sleep changed first. She began waking in the small hours, found it harder to get back to sleep and got up tired. Waking between three and five has many possible explanations, and a clock time alone cannot tell you which one applies to you. For her it was the first thread in a pattern, and I go through the common contributors in why do I wake up at 3am.
Like most people, she reached for magnesium and a sleepy-time tea. Neither made a lasting difference, which suggests the cause sat further upstream.
Here is the mechanism in plain terms. Under pressure your body releases adrenaline and cortisol, the hormones that prepare you to deal with a threat. Cortisol is meant to rise in the morning and fall towards the evening. When the pressure never lifts, the hormones stay higher than they should for longer, and the brain stays alert at the hour when it should be winding down. Sleep becomes lighter and shorter, and you wake less refreshed. I explain why I begin here with most people in nervous system support: why I start there with most people.
Link two: caffeine, sugar and a tired but wired evening
To keep going at work she drank more coffee, and her sugar cravings rose. This pairing is very common, because cortisol and blood sugar are closely linked. When cortisol rises, your liver releases glucose into the blood to fuel the action your body expects. When blood sugar then falls, you crave sugar or caffeine to bring it back. You get a quick lift and then a dip.
Caffeine works by blocking the signal that tells you that you are tired, so the tiredness is still waiting when the caffeine wears off. My article on why caffeine can make you more tired goes through this in detail.
By the end of the day she was exhausted. She got into bed and could not fall asleep, with her mind turning over. This is the pattern many people call tired but wired: a body that has used up its energy while its alarm is still sounding. I have already made a video on the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal axis and its link with blood sugar. You will find it in the video library. If this link sounds familiar, tired but wired and cortisol, blood sugar and sleep cover it from two angles.
Link three: digestion, the pancreas and the liver
Digestion was the next thing to show the strain. A diet that leans on sugar and refined carbohydrate keeps asking the pancreas for insulin. The same pancreas makes the enzymes that digest starch, protein and fat. The liver sits close by, makes the bile that helps digest fat, and stores and releases glucose.
Pressure on the body also turns digestion down. Under sustained stress your body reduces digestive secretions and changes how the gut moves, because digesting a meal is a low priority when the body believes it is dealing with a threat. My article on the gut-stress connection explains this.
What I often see next is starch and sugar being digested less completely than they should be. The carbohydrate that is left over travels on to the lower bowel, where bacteria ferment it. Fermentation produces gas, and the result is bloating, discomfort in the abdomen, and for some people reflux. My article on abdominal gas and bloating walks through the whole digestive chain.
The weight around her middle fits the same picture. Cortisol and insulin both encourage the body to store fat around the abdomen, and a body that is tired and craving sugar rarely feels like exercising. Weight gain at this stage of life has other contributors too, including changes in muscle and in hormones.
Link four: the liver, drainage and the skin
Your liver does far more than most people realise. As well as handling glucose and making bile, it processes substances that your body makes or meets every day, including used hormones, medicines and alcohol, and prepares them to leave the body through bile, urine and stool. Your bowel, kidneys, lymphatic system and skin are the other exits. They work as a team, and when one slows down the others carry more.
When this system is stretched, I commonly see headaches, a sluggish feeling in the morning and slower bowels. Skin that becomes dry and flaky when it never was is another sign, because the skin reflects how well digestion and drainage are working. Some people also notice that they catch more colds than they used to. Each has other possible explanations, so I read them as parts of a pattern.
If you would like to know how the liver handles alcohol and what that does to your nights, I cover it in alcohol, your liver and why you wake in the night.
Link five: hormones, the last chapter
This is the part I find most useful to explain, because it is where most people start. Your liver prepares used hormones, including oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone, for removal, and it makes the proteins that carry them around your body. Your gut plays a part in whether oestrogen leaves the body or is taken back in. Stress and blood sugar also affect hormone signalling directly.
In the years around menopause, hormones already rise and fall unpredictably. A woman meets those changes with a body that has been under pressure for a decade, and the changes show up as hot flushes, night sweats, anxiety and brain fog. These are real hormonal symptoms, and in her case they were the final chapter.
If I had started with the hormones, I would have skipped five earlier links. Her sleep, her energy, her digestion and her drainage would have stayed where they were, and each of those feeds back into her hormones. Once the earlier links are steadier, support for her hormones has firmer ground to work on. My article on why I look at stress, blood sugar and the gut first explains the reasoning in more detail.
HRT, herbs and the decision in front of you
She came to me wanting an alternative to HRT. HRT is a medical decision, and it belongs in a conversation between you and your GP, who can go through the benefits and risks for your own history. Many women choose it and are glad they did. What I describe in this article can be done alongside HRT or without it, and I never offer herbs as a replacement for medical care.
Black cohosh and red clover were the two herbs she had read about. Both have their own cautions. Red clover contains plant oestrogens, so anyone with a hormone-sensitive condition should speak to their GP before using it, and herbs that act on hormones need checking against any medication you take, HRT included. My article on phytoestrogens goes into this. It is one of the reasons I like to see the whole picture before I suggest any herb.
Where does the chain start for you?
Her chain started with the nervous system, although the starting point differs from person to person. For some it is blood sugar. For others it is digestion or drainage. I work through the body's systems in a six-phase clinical order of operations: a practical way of deciding where to begin and what to support next. The body works as one connected system, so the phases overlap and the right starting point depends on the person.
These are the patterns people commonly notice in each system:
Nervous system. Feeling wired but tired, racing thoughts, trouble switching off, waking in the small hours and a body that feels on alert.
Energy and blood sugar. Afternoon crashes, needing caffeine to function, sugar cravings, and shakiness or irritability when a meal is late.
Digestion. Bloating, gas, reflux, tiredness after eating and irregular bowels.
Drainage. Puffiness on waking, slower bowels, dull skin, headaches and a heavy feeling.
Hormones. Changes to your cycle, mood swings, night sweats, hot flushes and a feeling of being off without a clear reason.
Most people recognise themselves in several of these. That is normal, and it is the whole point of this article. Where your first signs appeared often shows where to begin.
A timeline to try this week
This is the exercise I ask people to do, and it costs nothing.
Take a sheet of paper and draw a line from about ten years ago to today.
Mark when each symptom first appeared, as best you remember. Add big life events too.
Circle the earliest one or two symptoms.
Take the page to your GP or practitioner. It tells them more than a list of today's symptoms can.
The EarthWise health quiz does a similar job in a few minutes. It points to the area giving you the most trouble and gives you free information on small daily steps for that area, and you can read about the other systems too.
Habits that help whatever your starting point
Eat regularly, with protein. A breakfast with eggs, yoghurt or fish and a lunch that is not left until three o'clock give your blood sugar a steadier day. My article on eating regularly when life is busy shows how.
Move your first coffee to after breakfast. Drinking caffeine on an empty stomach gives the dip a sharper edge.
Pause before you eat. Sit with both feet supported and put your phone aside. Take three soft breaths, making the exhale slightly longer than the inhale. Notice your hunger and your pace, start with a smaller first portion and chew until the food is easy to swallow. This is the Calm Eating Pause, and it gives digestion a calmer start.
Keep the last hour of the day quiet. Screens away, lights lower, and no difficult conversations. Your stress response needs a signal that the day is over.
Where tonics fit
Supplements and tonics are most useful when they support the system that sits at your starting point, alongside the habits above. For the woman in this story, the first two links were the stress response and the energy supply. I formulated Calm Nerve and Adrenal Guard for those two systems, and they are available together as the Calm & Rebuild duo.
The four herbs in Calm Nerve are:
Passionflower (Passiflora incarnata). Traditionally used to support relaxation and a quieter mind.
Skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora). Traditionally used in North American herbal practice as a nervine to support the nervous system.
Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis). Traditionally used as a calming herb for restlessness.
Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera). Traditionally used in Ayurveda to support the body's resilience to stress.
The four herbs in Adrenal Guard are:
Holy Basil, or Tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum). Traditionally used in Ayurveda to support the body's response to everyday stress.
Siberian Ginseng (Eleutherococcus senticosus). Traditionally used in Russian and Chinese herbal medicine to support stamina and resilience under strain.
Cinnamon (Cinnamomum spp.). A warming herb with a long history of use alongside food, in both kitchen and herbal practice.
Gymnema (Gymnema sylvestre). Known in Ayurvedic tradition for its distinctive effect on the perception of sweet taste.
Each tonic also contains three Australian Bush Flower Essences. I formulated Calm Nerve to support the nervous system and emotional steadiness, and Adrenal Guard to support daytime energy and the body's response to everyday stress. A tonic works best as one ally alongside regular meals and a calmer evening, taken consistently over weeks.
The product pages carry the full safety information. Please read it before you start. If you take prescribed medication, including sedatives, antidepressants, thyroid medication or medication for blood sugar or blood pressure, speak to your GP or practitioner first.
When to see your GP
Tiredness, poor sleep and digestive changes are common, and each deserves a proper look when it persists. Please see your GP if:
you have felt exhausted for several weeks without an obvious reason, particularly with breathlessness, palpitations or looking pale. A blood test can check for common contributors such as thyroid function, iron and vitamin B12
you have bloating that does not settle, a change in your bowel habit lasting more than a few weeks, blood in your stools or black stools, difficulty swallowing, or severe or persistent abdominal pain
your weight changes without explanation
your periods become very heavy or irregular, or you bleed between periods, after sex or after menopause
your skin or the whites of your eyes look yellow, your urine is dark or your stools are pale
your mood is low or anxious most of the time, or you feel overwhelmed. If you feel unsafe, call NHS 111, or 999 in an emergency
you are thinking about HRT, or you take prescribed medication and want to add a herbal product
Where this fits
The woman in this story had hormonal symptoms, and the road to them ran through her sleep, her energy, her digestion and her drainage. Your own chain will look different, and the useful question is the same: where did it start? If you would like help finding your starting point, the EarthWise health quiz is a good place to begin.
Sarah Burt is a registered naturopath, medical herbalist and iridologist with 25+ years of clinical experience. All EarthWise tonics are formulated by Sarah based on her clinical protocols.
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This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any health condition. Always consult a qualified health practitioner before making changes to your health regimen.
