u/Saladthief

Does anyone/everyone else get this? It seems to be a feature of my PEM. It isn't just a sort of low mood as a result of the situation. It's more like my system saying "Turn everything off - energy, health, motivation, mood, the lot. Keep him in bed. Make sure he doesn't try to go out enjoying himself."

It tends to last the duration of the PEM crash, which is generally around 2-4 days for me, and then I bounce back. Everything comes back online at once, including good mood.

I replied to a post in another thread about my experience of the effects of mind-body and nervous system work on physical symptoms. I ended up writing a lot so I thought I'd also post here and see what other people think about this.

CFS, fibromyalgia and POTS all seem to involve nervous system dysfunction and are commonly seen together. To be clear, the symptoms of these conditions are real and physical. But it seems from my experience, and the hypothesis I'm using on my program, that they are caused by the initial dysfunction in the nervous system. So if we address that initial dysfunction we see improvements in the symptoms.

In my understanding, to begin with, the system thinks it has detected a major threat to survival (virus, trauma, overwhelm, allergic reaction etc.) and starts shutting us down using the nervous and immune systems to do so. This causes all kinds of problems and symptoms downstream as nothing is now functioning as it should. I had POTS, fibromyalgia, tinnitus, all sorts of things.

So we have to go to the beginning of the process and show the system that the threat to survival has now passed. If we can do that successfully, it stops trying to shut us down and so the symptoms improve. We can do that with nervous system work.

A secondary issue is that if we worry or become stressed about the symptoms themselves, the system picks up on that worry and takes it as evidence that - yes, there really is a danger, the threat to survival has not passed. This keeps it trying to protect us by continuing to shut us down, and the symptoms persist. So it's helpful to view the symptoms, although very real and physical, as 'just symptoms' - things that simply represent the fact that there is nervous system dysfunction - and learn to manage our stress levels about them.

In my case the fatigue would get very strong at a certain point each day and I would collapse into sleep. If I tried to fight this it would get worse. But if I simply succumbed to this fatigue pressure and collapsed and slept, nothing improved. My symptoms would always be worse after sleeping. The process just continued for years. So I had to do nervous system and mind-body work to gently show my system that it was now safe to not collapse, to not fall asleep. It was not easy at first but, bit by bit, I have been able to use breathing, meditation and somatic exercises to show my system that there is a safe alternative to just shutting down.

Now that I have interrupted the system's pattern of shutting down, many of my symptoms have improved drastically. The POTS is essentially gone and the fibromyalgia is vastly better. For the symptoms that remain, I'm not worried about them and don't feel any need to treat them individually. The symptoms are real and physical but I am now addressing the cause of them.

I'll try to give an analogy (although it may not be perfect so bear with me..). When you have flu you aren't actually feeling the virus itself, you are feeling your own immune system fighting it. The symptoms are side effects of your body trying to protect you. Now imagine if the system became dysfunctional and continued to fight the virus after it had been dealt with and was no longer a threat. You would still have the symptoms - very real and physical - even though there was no threat. You could treat the symptoms but the system's own immune response would just keep causing them until you were able to convince it that the danger of the virus had passed.

So this is the way i'm looking at it now and I have seen great improvements. I suppose it's also possible that there are underlying genetic issues that increase the likelihood of certain conditions and symptoms occurring, but the way my program frames it is that if we address the initial issue then the symptoms will lessen, and that has been my experience.

Anyone relate to this?

Keith Richards told him straight

"A Rolling Stone gathers no moths."

I've been doing the Gupta Program for about 3 months with some really remarkable progress in the last 1 month specifically. However, I got caught in a sudden downpour a few nights ago and had to run home. I don't usually exert in the evenings at all.

PEM hit a couple of days after this and I've now been in it for 3 days, going on 4. The advice from the Gupta program seems to be to do absolutely nothing - total rest. No meditation. Not even yoga nidra. Just total rest. This is surprising to me.

What do other people recommend for PEM?