When Fatigue Turns Chronic

If you’ve been feeling tired, exhausted and fatigued for what seems like a lifetime, chances are you’ll have exhausted what seems like every possible treatment, therapy and intervention under the sun.

The frustrating thing about fatigue is that so little is known about it, in the context of how to fix it.

In my own personal journey, fatigue was part of a wider issue but in my bid to fix it, I had spent thousands of pounds on my health, and seen countless therapists and doctors but to no avail. Then I stumbled across the Lightning Process.

It’s just efficiency in overdrive…

When it comes to chronic exhaustion, and in fact, many other health issues, it really comes down to the highly efficient way in which the brain and body operate together. The crux of it being that, through brain rewiring, the body is almost trained to produce symptoms, whilst the brain is trained to look for them.

Let me ask you a question. If you’ve been living with a chronic issue, what is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?

Chances are, you will open your eyes and immediately run a ‘quality check’ across your body. “How is my body feeling today?” “What is the level of pain or tiredness I am currently experiencing?” “Where is that symptom?”

Now of course, this is perfectly understandable (I’ve been there) – when your body starts to develop symptoms, it’s scary, and the heightened emotional response will also elevate the neurological rewiring that is going on.

But, the more fear you attach to something, the more likely it will stick around. Or should I say – the more emotionally attached to the fear you get, the more likely it is, that it will stick around. Neurological change is dependent on two things – repetition and high levels of emotion. So put the two together and you’re in for some long-lasting change – whether you like it or not.

What happens next…

Now when symptoms continue and your Dr tells you – there is nothing that can be done, or they can’t find physical evidence to validate your assertions this will, of course, amp up the fear response, which then amps up the nervous system response. All of a sudden you are left trying to figure this out on your own.

So what happens next? Hello Dr Google. Days, weeks, months spent searching the symptoms, the possible prognoses and other people’s experiences of the issues. Your brain is flooded with a world of illness and, if there is one thing the brain likes to do, it is to optimise and make our life more efficient.

So the more we flood our brain with images, stories and thoughts of illness and symptoms, the more it starts looking for that information automatically. Brain rewiring at its finest.

Taking a different approach

This is one of the reasons why meditation isn’t always the answer for people living with chronic issues. When I was ill, I meditated every day but what can actually happen here is – you are focusing your attention on the symptoms. And although body awareness is important and something that many people need more of, those who are stuck in a chronic fatigue or illness cycle will have hyper sensitised body awareness – their brain is already very focused on it.

Yes, you can create a different relationship with the symptom by taking away the fear attachment, but it’s not always enough to resolve the issue. In cases like these you need to actively retrain your brain in a more useful direction.

There are a few things you can do to retrain your brain. Curable is one app that I’d highly recommend for anyone living with chronic pain. It has an abundance of information, support and guidance provided via online resources and you can tell the founders are incredibly passionate about it and the successes their customers have had from it.

NLP therapy is also particularly effective for retraining the brain in areas where long standing psycho-neurological patterns have been in place. But if you’ve tried these already, or exhausted all other options, then it may be that the Lightning Process is the next step for you. In my experience, it is the most effective therapeutic approach I have come across for breaking the neurology of illness and fatigue, and getting us back into health.