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How Your Thoughts Might Be Keeping You Stuck with Fatigue

If you’ve been hit by the F word you’ll know it can be a tricky one to shift. In fact, much like chronic pain, it’s one of the things that modern medicine hasn’t yet managed to suss out.

Whilst a lot of people will spend their time trying to figure out what it is that triggered the fatigue in the first place, the trigger is not really the issue. Chronic and long-lasting fatigue can be triggered by a whole host of different factors, from glandular fever, to post viral fatigue, trauma, chronic stress – the list goes on.

Around 250,000 live with chronic fatigue syndrome in the UK today, and around 1.5 to 2million are living with fibromyalgia – another condition that features fatigue as a prominent symptom. Adrenal fatigue is another phenomenon that is most likely largely underdiagnosed.

I imagine a lot of people will have experienced some form of fatigue at some point in their lives. But why is it that some people recover and move on from it, whilst others seem to stay stuck with it?

Introducing psycho-neuro-immunology…

There are a number of tools, treatments and approaches to address fatigue issues that just won’t budge, yet a lot of people find themselves exhausting all of these options to no avail. I certainly tried them all.

If, like me, you feel like you tried everything then it might be time to start looking into the area of psycho-neuro-immunology. Psycho-neuro-immunology, looks at how our psychology (i.e. our thoughts) influence our neurology (nervous system) which then has an impact on our immune response.

Just think about this for a moment; when you are thinking lots of stressful thoughts, this will trigger a neurological release of stress chemicals like adrenalin and cortisol (known as the fight or flight response). This chemical response will have a very physical impact on the body, triggering not only a bunch of uncomfortable feelings but also suppressing the immune response (sometimes it can go the other way, and the immune system will go into overdrive).

So the role of our thoughts and how we use our mindset is incredibly significant in how easily we bounce back from fatigue and other issues.

 

Another way of looking at it…

The other way to look at it is by thinking about how an iPhone works (bear with me on this one)…

When you first buy an iphone, it comes clear of apps and runs pretty efficiently. But, as time goes on you build up your apps and, over time, they end up running constantly in the background. What then happens, is the battery depletes more quickly than normal, and the phone’s performance slows right down.

The brain and the body are the same. When you load your brain capacity with thoughts that are not serving you (this is a whole other article on it’s own), it slows your system down and inhibits your body’s capacity to do what it needs to do, to bounce back to full health.

The good news is, that just like a phone, there are things you can do to clear your mind of all those unwanted apps. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not about ridding yourself of troubles. But it’s about changing the way you think about the challenges in your life, and most importantly, the way you think about yourself.

 

it’s not simply about being positive or negative…

In the Lightning Process, this is something we focus on a lot, along with ways of addressing it. It’s interesting because a lot of the time, people who come onto the Lightning Process will tell me, “I’m a really positive person.” And they are. However, the area of health is not quite so black and white. It’s not necessarily about positive and negative thoughts, but more about useful and not so useful thoughts.

The ultimate question you need to ask yourself is, “Is this thought serving me?” When you consider your future, is the thought you are thinking likely to help you achieve your goals or stifle them? Does the thought you are thinking make you feel good, or crap? If it’s the latter, what would be a more useful thought to think instead?

Now this is of course, a rather basic introduction to the things you need to be considering when it comes to your thoughts and how these influence you health, and in this case, energy – there is a lot more to be said on the subject. But if you can start by being aware of this, you are paving the way to making a change that, once upon a time, may have seemed like an impossible feat.

 

 

Further resources