Chronic Fatigue can be a frustrating issue, especially when you don’t know what to do. Sadly doctors don’t have much of an answer to this, and alot of the time it seems to mean “I have no idea, go away and rest so I don’t have to deal with this.”
At the surface level there’s the general things like eating healthy, exercising, getting enough sleep. But what if you’re doing all of these and still fatigued?
There are deeper issues, and generally other causes and this depends on the person.
The above will work alot better if you haven’t exercised in years and order macdonalds for every meal, then if you start eating healthily, after an adjustment period you’ll definately notice an improvement. But alot of people, including me had those things in order and still have issues with fatigue.
It’s important to look at the actual causes. There is a couple of things that generally will come up in different layers when you start exploring why somebody is fatigued all the time.
The first is toxins. If your body is overwhelmed with toxins, plus your organs and detox system are suppresed and can’t detox effectively, then the toxins will keep building up and can cause things like fatigue, cloudy headedness, getting light headed, finding it hard to think (Infections can also cause all of the above, but i’ll talk about that next.)
The internet is full of people saying “Eh you don’t need to do any detoxing, it doesn’t exist, your liver and kidneys do that, just drink some water”. Ignore them, with no experience they don’t know the reality that sometimes your body DOES need extra assistance. This doesn’t mean those expensive detox kits being sold for way too much, there is some easy and cost effective ways to start with this that i’ve written about in The Importance Of Detoxing While Healing.
The second thing is chronic infections, which can even be dormant. I was in the best shape of my life, would do these intense workouts but somehow i’d go out and walk around for an hour or two and be really tired, it didn’t make sense especially with how healthily I was eating and how fit I was.. my energy levels just didn’t match how I felt they should be.
This got much worse when my lyme awakened from having antibiotics (which I avoid now as they messed me up badly).
When you have a chronic infection your body is spending it’s resources trying to fight it which uses up alot of energy, and also impacts your other organs which can cause further issues. When you start to free this up by using anti-infectous treatments your body will be able to free up more resources and more energy.
The third is trauma. This might sound strange if you’ve never researched anything about trauma, but it’s a very important part of it.
Your body is designed to go up into fight and flight when a stressful event happens and is meant to naturally go back down after the event. But what happens with chronic, early trauma is your body can be stuck in fight and flight over the long term. You might not even be aware of this because it’s something you’ve become so used to.
This causes all kinds of problems, too much cortisol in the body which leads to low energy, getting burnt out, your organs and systems of the body being impacted, trouble dealing with stress or stressful situations and makes the body more susceptible to infections, but also toxins.
Irene Lyon explains it well in this video (I highly recommend her work around trauma).
As part of this healing you’ll be learning to work with and heal your trauma, the good news is you can do this a bit at a time. For anyone interested have a look at something called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study which tells us that the more ‘points’ you have in different traumatic events as a child, the more likely you are to develop illness later in life.
This goes into detail about the ACE Score.
https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/
Your healing will go in layers of toxins, trauma, infections and dealing with each one can uncover layers of the same and it takes time. There’s always deeper levels to reach and i’m still on this journey myself but i’ve found an awesome tool that’s helped me more than anything else called Autonomic Response Testing (ART) – Your Body Knows How To Heal!.