Style: January 08, 2020

22 STYLE | feature
Kayo Gill pushed herself to the brink, thinking she had to work
harder to be a better person.
By the numbers
• 68 per cent of greater Christchurch residents have
experienced stress in the past year that has had a
negative effect on them
• Nearly 1 in 4 New Zealand adults experienced ‘poor’
mental wellbeing on the World Health Organization’s
WHO-5 scale
• 81.1 per cent of New Zealanders rated their overall life
satisfaction as 7 or above on a 0–10 scale
*
Stats NZ and The Canterbury
Wellbeing Survey 2018
Kayo Gill was collapsed on her bed, unable to
move, with tears streaming down her face.
A simple walk around the block had broken her,
and it made no sense to her. Kayo pushed herself
at the gym and thought she was a healthy woman.
But she felt like she had just run a marathon.
There was nothing left in her tank. But then
there hadn’t been for years.
Like so many, the February 22, 2011,
Christchurch earthquake shook Kayo, 41, to her
core. The constant aftershocks left her in a state of
fight or flight, ripping away her sense of safety. Her
job as a special education teacher was challenging
and filled not just her waking moments.
“I would wake up tired because I was dreaming
about work at 3 or 4am in the morning. [I would]
go back to sleep, then dream of work again and
then roll out of bed finally,” she says.
Her breaks at work consisted of a quick drink
of water and a bite of food while managing
incidents and paperwork. Then, at 6pm, she
would drag her aching body to the gym.
“The body was saying, ‘I’m tired’, but I was like,
‘I’m just being lazy,’” she says.
“I got more tired, but I kept punishing myself by
working out harder. Because I wouldn’t feel good
about myself, I would go to the gym because
I thought I would then feel good about myself
physically,” she says.
But she didn’t. In 2012, her body could no
longer sustain the beating she was putting it
through.
“I couldn’t lie to my body anymore. I couldn’t
mask it,” she says.
Kayo quit her job and moved to Australia
thinking it would give her a fresh start. Instead,
her body crashed.
“I became really sick. Like I had the flu, but it
got worse,” she says.
She slept for 30 hours straight after that walk
around the block. Moving between the bedroom
and bathroom left her breathless.
Kayo went to a doctor, but he sent her away
with a prescription for antidepressants and the
advice to “get off the couch and get moving”.
But that is what she had been mercilessly doing
to herself and it hadn’t worked. So, she went with
her gut and saw a naturopath.
She was asked to collect her saliva for a week
for testing. The test showed Kayo had adrenal
fatigue.
“It is where the adrenal glands are overworked
for a long time, producing too much cortisol.
Cortisol is produced when we go into fightor-flight
mode. But due to longer-term chronic
stress, the cortisol was out of balance.