Chronic fatigue, heart palpitations, anxiety, fibromyalgia

I came across this article, thanks to my fascination with long COVID and it's possible connection to TMS.

What made it even more interesting to me is that long COVID studies seem to converge on the same ideas as the neuroscience of TMS. While back and neck pain remain by far dominant on this forum, I am seeing more and more questions on heart palpitation, CFS and anxiety.

I became a huge believer in meditation from my own experience (after being a major skeptic!). Meditation techniques are often based on conscious, deliberate breathing exercises. Being a yoga practitioner, I found those breathing exercises a breath of fresh air (yes, pun intended!) and it brought it all home to me as far as learning how to meditate successfully.

I healed from my CRPS mostly thanks to meditation. This article seems to bring a lot of things together: anxiety, fatigue, pain - and breathing! If people give it a try and end up with improvements in their mental state, energy levels and pain reduction - give me a shout, I would love to collect some stats on it! Meanwhile, enjoy!

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/unlocking-the-mysteries-of-long-covid/618076/ (Unlocking the Mysteries of Long COVID)

 

This is a really fascinating article, @TG957.

So many good things in it (underlining below was added by me):

In a group of patients, they theorized, either the virus or the immune system’s reaction to it had caused dramatic dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system

Through breathwork, patients can consciously control their heart rate, she noted. In addition, modulating the nervous system’s fight-or-flight response may help regulate the immune system. (Studies have shown that elevated stress hormones can lead to chronic inflammation.) And proper breathing is crucial to circulation in the lymphatic system, often described as the body’s highway for immune cells, which plays a role in eliminating toxins and waste.​

Doing better by these patients has been challenging because 20th-century medicine was not really built to treat hard-to-measure systemic illnesses—especially those, like dysautonomia, ME/CFS, and autoimmune diseases, that can be worsened by stress.

This new paradigm holds that disease is a multipronged phenomenon—an interaction among pathogens (whether viruses or bacteria), the immune system, and “environment,” a term that can refer to one’s microbiome or one’s exposure to such things as toxic chemicals and trauma. (Both have been shown to affect the immune system.)

At the vanguard of an emerging personalized medicine, the new view of postviral illness takes into account the variety of individual immune responses to infections, which, we now know, are influenced by the social and genetic determinants of health, among them the stresses of poverty and systemic racism.​

Of course, there was also plenty of information in the article about how the medical community is looking for drug and treatment combinations to solve this mystery. But also a lot of these tantalizing hints at a different outlook - and to anyone doing TMS work, those hints speak volumes.

The thing is, whenever I see any kind of reference to stress and trauma having an effect on health, it is most often in the context of how they can make a condition worse, which to me always begs the question: if we accept that a condition can be worsened by stress, why do we not consider that it could have been caused by stress? I KNOW that my RA was caused by a combination of extreme 2020 stresses, because there is no other explanation, and the timing can not be ignored.

In any case, I have a new personal mandate. I have a really hard time sitting down to meditate even though I know it's beneficial for me (I know, this is my brain on TMS), but recently I've been better at taking just a little bit of time for a few deep calm breaths, several times a day - and I can really feel the difference. After reading about the breathwork in this article, I'm upping my game. That's doable.

~Jan