Day 1 Chronic Fatigue

Welcome to The Forum and the SEP, @attemptatwellness.

I would actually recommend that you change your username ASAP, choosing something neutral or positive rather than incorporating the word "attempt". I hope you'll get my point just by pointing it out. Let me know in a response or you can DM me. I can make that change for you as an admin for the forum.

Don't worry about your doubts. The SEP is designed to reduce doubt as you educate yourself. You may also find that your symptoms get worse as you do the program, which is proof of the TMS mechanism at work.

I'm going to recommend two books for you to read as you're doing the program. One of them is Hope and Help for Your Nerves , by Claire Weekes, which was written in 1969. It's the essential little book, now more than 50 years old, which still helps thousands of people all over the world to manage their anxiety and reduce physical symptoms in the moment. The other book is brand new, and the reason it's important is that the author, Nicole Sachs LCSW, worked side by side with Dr Sarno many years ago. Her new book however, incorporates the latest science about the brain mechanism that Dr Sarno labeled as TMS. Her book is titled Mind Your Body.
It's available at many libraries but at mine there was a long wait list for all of the formats (I already had my kindle copy from pre-order but I always like to check library availability)

It doesn't matter, because CFS is TMS. Our little joke here is that any diagnosis which only describes the symptoms, followed by the word Syndrome or Disorder, is TMS. Other examples are IBS, CRPS, RSI, fibromyalgia, and many more. The words "chronic fatigue syndrome" tell you nothing you don't already know.

If you read Nicole's book you will learn that the trigger was psychological. Your TMS brain is taking advantage of your belief that you harmed yourself with this probiotic, which doesn't even make sense since our guts are rather miraculously designed to quickly eject much more harmful things than that.

What DOES make sense is that one way that the TMS brain mechanism messes with us is to get us to blame ourselves. Self-abuse is a powerful force that holds us down.

You will learn that all physical sensations and processes in our bodies are controlled by our brains, not by individual body parts. Go back to Dr Sarno's original examples of blushing, or of queasiness brought on by anxiety. These are both absolutely real physical sensations which are caused entirely by emotional responses. This is the essence behind the theory of TMS, combined with the brain's idea that it must repress stressful emotions.

Also, by the way, the placebo effect is real - as is its negative counterpart, the "nocebo" effect. You are experiencing the latter!

Your microbiome is heavily influenced by your emotional state. If your emotional state is disregulated, that will be the primary influence over how your gut feels, and it can in fact weaken your biome. Long-term stress is well known in the medical community to cause all kinds of metabolic disregulation, but patients don't want to hear that, they want a quick cure, and the medical community has given in. Ultimately, medications, supplements, and diets can only have a temporary effect, often as a result of the placebo effect.

Our experience is a complicated combination of psychological and physiological influences, which are changing minute by minute, even during sleep. Your psychological state of mind can enormously influence your physiology, and your recovery. Many medical practitioners know this is true, when they compare the more rapid recovery rates of injury patients with proactive and positive self-healing mindsets, versus injury patients with negative mindsets who expect others to "fix" them.

THIS is the good news, because it's really all about changing your mind. Which, by the way, is why I am recommending a change in your username! (PS, the shorter and more neutral the better, IMHO, but that's just my personal bias).

 

Nice new username, @wellnessBound