Day 1 Acceptance of the MindBody approach

Hi all,

I'm 35 years old and I've been in recovery from long COVID and chronic migraine for three years. I've had three years of daily continuous headache with no improvement, except a higher tolerance for pain. In the beginning, I also had neurological symptoms and physical fatigue, but those have gotten better with time. I still deal with brain fog/cognitive fatigue and a limited ability to interact with people. I've tried so many medications for my headache and nothing has worked. I've been into yoga and meditation my whole adult life, and the MindBody approach simply makes sense to me. I'm at a point in my recovery where I'm embracing it wholeheartedly. I'm not a big researcher, so I haven't looked up long COVID stories over the years, but I've listened to a couple on The Cure for Chronic Pain podcast the last few days and one of them had daily continuous headache like me. That's the first person in three years that I've known shares my experience. It's incredibly validating, and makes me think I could really benefit from hearing other people's stories. I don't have any doubts about TMS, except that it seems very focused on the back. Are there other long COVID and headache folks out there? Can I hope that my cognition will also recover?

I'm following Nicole Sachs and doing her JournalSpeak practice along with meditation and mindfulness exercises throughout the day. I'm thinking that even if my chronic pain doesn't get better, this is going to benefit my mind, body, and my relationships because it addresses my worry and anxiety. I have a lot of past trauma, including adverse childhood experiences and a mental health history. When I had my COVID infection, I was entering my first episode of mania with psychosis and it was absolutely terrifying and traumatizing. I had another episode a year later and both resulted in suicide attempts. My physical symptoms started along with my first episode and I always thought (and told my doctors) that it had something to do with the stress of my episode. Discovering TMS and MindBody medicine makes me think I may have been right.

Anyway, this was supposed to be short, so thanks for reading and I look forward to what I'll learn here!

 

I've never had a migraine in my life but I've read stories of people who had daily migraines for 30 years and got better. I think I read them on Nicole Sachs old Journalspeak group. Not sure if you can get into it anymore because she created a new one. I've seen a bunch of long covid and migraine recovery stories. It's also a red flag you've had long covid and migraines for the same amount of time. Physical fatigue sounds like ME/CFS and brain fog is seen in people who are diagnosed with fibromyalgia. And all 4 of these things I consider to be the most common TMS ailments along with food intolerances and feeling like you have to pee all the time. I'd bet all the money I have all of your symptoms are TMS.

 

Thanks, John!! It's very helpful to hear your perspective. It's validation that I'm on the right track.

 

Hi, @houseplants29
Welcome to the forum! I’ve had TMS more than once. This particular round came following Covid for me. I have seen and read a lot of long Covid stories— and the consensus is that it’s TMS. You can use the search engine on this forum to look up any topic. It’s really useful! Use the magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner. Here’s a search I did on long Covid:
https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/search/9118829/?q=Long+covid&o=date&c[node]=16

We have success stories here on the wiki. Also, Dan Buglio (painfreeyou.com) has a lot of success story interviews on YouTube. I’m pretty sure he has some long Covid stories in there.

That’s great you’re doing journalspeak! Thats a powerful program.

 

Thanks so much, Diana!!