When a sudden bout of ME/CFS occurs for the first or perhaps a repeated time, often presenting with a sudden flu-like episode accompanied by a deep exhaustion quite unlike usual tiredness plus the symptom of post exertional malaise (PEM) after the merest exertion (either physical or mental) it’s all to easy to feel like this “crash” came out of nowhere and, often, it did…though there may have been prompts such as a recent virus or other stress provocation (yet the outcome still feels far out of proportion and longer lasting than you would normally expect).

However, there may also have been patterns of over-exertion and heightened yet sustained (rather than just acute) stress preceding the sudden demise, hard though it can sometimes be to see them until forced, by the crash, to stop absolutely everything and review what has been going on. By the time you get to that point, its like your body doesn’t have the ability to manufacture the basic energy to keep your body functioning at a proper level, such as breathing, eating, sleeping, your heart beating, let alone the surplus required for actual life. It’s far far better to avoid ever getting to that point, but how?

In my case, I now see all too clearly how I allowed myself to fall back into the pattern of boom and bust that seems to have been the long pitfall of my life at both micro and macro levels. So, bear with me for a personal story, coming up below, used to demonstrate how I got there, this time around, because its the best way I know how to paint a picture of the brewing crash that now seems to have been quite inevitable, with the beauty of hindsight…yet a risk of crashing that was all too easy to ignore when I was in the thick of the kind of regular over-exertion that led to it (so completely normalised had this become to me, yet again).

This “normalisation” of exhaustion and mental/physical stress is something I see a lot of people doing, as they go about their (to their own minds) well justified hyper-busy and highly overstretched lives and it may take hearing someone else’s account of how this can creep up on you, prior another ME/CFS tumble, to be able to see it for themselves.

It’s also been quite cathartic, and therefore quite productive, to actually sit down and acknowledge the degree to which I had been overextending for a very long time in written words. Two weeks into this crash, with precious little to do except mull over precipitating events, I suddenly found some part of myself longing to tell someone else (a neutral listening ear) this latest saga in its entirety…I even began summarising it for my physio in an email updating her about my crash, but then realised she wasn’t the one needing to hear all the itty-bitty details of how I got to this point, I was!

It was evidently a story I needed to tell myself, an account of chronic overwhelm and relentless exhaustion that deserved and needed to be told, once and for all, so that I could draw a line under it and start again on a much better footing. It’s a process I went through with my first crash and how I shared this in the very early days of my blog. So I sat down and (in a very paced way, over very much more than one session) began to write out the story of my recent three years, a compact version of which I share here, below which I talk about all the many things I have now learned from this..about how to avoid the boom bust PEM cycle in future!

By sharing it here with you (though not expressly written for you since I wrote it, above all, for me…let’s acknowledge that!), maybe I can encourage others currently going through a crash of their own to appreciate the value of telling your own account, getting your own exhausted state off your chest and gaining the overview of what happened on the way to finally educating yourself where you went wrong, by finally acknowledging and appreciating just how much you were juggling before you fell ill and all the ways things now need to change on the way to getting on a much better footing for the sake of your health. Face it, you probably weren’t just going along doing next to nothing when ME/CFS happened to you, however much you try to convince yourself you’re doing nothing out of the ordinary running a house, being a partner or a mum, making adult decisions, juggling so many balls, driving all the cogs of your life…so sing that unsung song!

So many people living with ME/CFS are chronic over-achievers, people who try so hard, strive so relentlessly, push themselves through tight spaces and towards hyperfixated goals that utterly consume them at the expense of all else. We’re often the ones who always give of our best, judge ourselves harshly or have to try that bit harder though other people may not realise just how hard our legs are always working beneath the calm water at the surface. In my case, neurdivergence has added to that quota of having to peddle that bit harder, all along the way, and it all adds up, especially when you become fixated on a particular outcome, which may “only” be the everyday objective of keeping your head above water or surviving but that can be quite enough to hyperfocus you on the goal, at the expense of basic self-care.

I have been that person, and then some, not once in my life but on a serial basis and if I am ever going to fall out of the habit of it, along with it’s detrimental effect on my health, then I need to take time to really analyse what goes wrong when that happens to me because I’ve become so utterly consumed by some objective (again) at the expense of all else. I’ve probably put that goal first, myself second, from the very moment I first fixated on a certain outcome and this is where it all goes wrong; the assumption that I am somehow superhuman and exempt from the base requirements of appropriate rest and recuperation…so I drive and drive myself both mentally and physically until I drop!

The point is not to under-value all the incredible things you’ve achieved in the past but to learn how you could now do things somewhat differently, with less dire consequences to your health. So here goes, a quick summary of my pre-crash story, some of which will be familiar to regular readers but there’s always something powerful about writing down the condensed version once you are no longer in the thick of events and I heartily encourage you to write your own account (for personal use) if you sense it will be a helpful, perhaps cathartic thing to do in your own healing process.

Having lived with ME/CFS for years, there was a brief window of time when I was noticeably enjoying more stability than usual, thus where I could have said I was well on the road towards a recovery of sorts (which discounts some of the other symptoms that were still going on, such as those relating to hypermobility or aging; but what I’m really talking about here is the matter of enjoying fairly sustainable energy without the constant phases of severe PEM that typify ME/CFS). I was certainly able to increase my physical capacity during that time, and with more reliability than I had for a while (as marked by some of the life-enhancing activities I had managed to return to doing on a fairly regular basis). I now enjoyed better functionality overall whilst generally able to be more confident of my stability lasting through some higher exertion phases than I had dared to be for a considerably long time (much more than a decade). Looking back to that period gives me real hope that I can get back there again, with the same time, patience…and the power of hindsight!

The time period in question was during 2020 – 2021 and included the phase of relative rest and recuperation, for me, that was lockdown when a lot of my stressors just ceased to exist for a while plus the year following, during which my physical exertions, and excursions in general, were all much curtailed by the fact our dog was really unwell and unable to go anywhere. This became its own kind of lockdown of sorts as we were unable to venture far from the house for a whole other year once we couldn’t even get him in the car or leave him with anyone else. That whole year felt quite boring and limited at the time but it at least it enabled me to prolong the kind of paced existence that generally suits my health better, as I now see!

After my dog sadly died, we threw ourselves back into the life we had been missing with a certain amount of gusto…with frequent trips away, concerts, you name it because, at last, we finally could. It was a frenzied few months with a fairly busy diary and I was still able to, mostly, sustain my energy in spite of this because it was just one giant endorphin high…theses exertions were all about enjoyment…plus there were frequent natural pauses in between.

This somewhat more busy phase lasted for a good year and would have been a great time for a long pause to catch our breath. However, it was towards the end of this time, fuelled by new enthusiasm and itchy feet, that we decided it was right time to relocate, a wish that had been close to our hearts for a very long time but held up by various factors that had tied us to the old location.

Again, I thew myself with great gusto and determination into the project of selling the house. This involved carrying out considerable renovations, cleaning and clearing, sorting through decades of assorted belongs and accumulation, working hard to redistribute anything useful to anyone who could use or recycle it, all of which took extra time and effort not to mention emotional stamina as I decided what to part with. It took several months of almost continuously sifting through paperwork and possessions from a lifetime of hoarding and constantly orchestrating people to come to collect things from my door or carloads of recycling to achieve all this. Overlapping it came the process of restyling every room in the house until it was utterly transformed, putting it on the market, hosting numerous viewings, dealing with estate agents (and our house wasn’t an easy one to sell because of its tricky location).

Simultaneously, I was combing estate agents’ details for our future home, researching all the possible options for general places to live, then began overnight visits to some of those places, doing all the necessary in-person research into quite a broad geographical area 180 miles from where we currently lived. We eventually made an offer on a house and invested a lot of time and emotional energy into thinking this was where we were going to end up. Then, after three months, that fell through, which came as a huge blow, so we were thrown back into the maelstrom of searching again, whilst still struggling to sell our own house.

All of this supreme effort was pretty much down to me as my husband was working full time. At the start he was really concerned that it would be way too much for me or cause me to relapse. Of course, I wanted to prove him wrong and, above all, I very much wanted to move out of the area to the new home we had always dreamed of so if it took breaking some of my own rules I was prepared to take the risk.​ However, by March of last year I was already into a longer ME/CFS flare (I even wrote a post about it What could have caused this ME flare?), though did I really need to ask, so the toll was already mounting.

Around that time, we went on a so called holiday only it was really just another excuse for a research trip, right on the emotional cusp of losing that first house and, while we were away, I ended up in hospital with chest pains, a blip of high blood pressure and really distressing patterns of arrhythmia (something that had been occurring more and more lately), though I was just sent home after eight hours with advisories about managing stress. This should have been taken as a serous warning sign that I was overdoing things and needed to slow things right down. However, whilst we literally sat in the hospital waiting room, waiting for my ECG results, we learned that my mother-in-law had just passed away quite unexpectedly so we turned our car around the next day to go to where my husband’s parents lived, miles from our own home, to be at his father’s side and help manage her affairs.

The following month was an odd mixture of funeral arrangements and going back and forth, then the funeral itself, house viewings of our home, our house finally selling and then dashing off to see houses in the other place, one of which we spotted on the market on the same day we scattered my mother-in-law’s ashes and sold our house, so we again dashed off in the opposite direction to going home and made an offer on the spot, which was accept so at least we suddenly knew where we were headed.

Yet still there was no let-up in the constant wall-to-wall activity and stress because, now, we had just a matter of weeks to pack up and move, plus we decided to proceed with our sale even when our purchase got badly delayed and ended up living in airbnbs for what we expected to be just a few weeks…yet it turned out to be 6 months, with all our belongings in storage, many of which we shifted by the multiple carload to be near the new place. The first move happened but then the place we were renting, which was pretty much all we could budget for, turned out to be far less than perfect, my health getting worse as a result. Throughout it all, the thread of financial stress was ever constant and the mental intensity of it all was just so relentless…after all, we’d given up our home and safe haven of over twenty years, with still no guarantees we would end up where we planned to be. In the midst of all of this, a cherished family member died so there was another bereavement and funeral.

We dashed around exploring our new locale, trying to distract ourselves from all the uncertainties of our move by keeping busy, always subtly stressed as our house purchase only got delayed more and more, plus the place we were renting became more abhorrent as colder-damper weather came along. Then I got covid, right on top of moving to another airbnb at the beginning of Christmas (in the end, we both got it, absorbing the whole festive season) and, having barely recovered from that by a handful of days, we finally got the go-ahead for our house completion and so the wheels began to turn again. With just four weeks to go, we dashed around purchasing all the bigger furniture we needed, arranging the complicated logistics of shipping the rest of our stuff 180 miles, making the most of our final weeks renting in a city within walking-distance to the kind of amenities we would always have to travel to by car to from now on and then bracing ourselves for the ultimate move.

The move day itself was far less than stress-free (the previous owners failed to move out when they were meant to, plus it snowed) and, on that very day as we stood watching the removers reverse up our new driveway, we got the call that another close family member (a brother-in-law) had died so, on top of the shock of bereavement, we were suddenly planning to be at their funeral, right at the other end of the country, having only just moved in. It took two full months to shift everything out of storage, unpack and arrange the house the way we wanted it, a task that fell almost entirely on my shoulders as J was busy working so, as per all the shifting and sorting that had consumed me a year earlier, I just told myself it had to be done and got on with it!

Right at the end of that process, now fully aware that my health had become badly destabilised since the winter months and covid (heart arrhythmia and other symptoms were back with a vengeance and I had had a very bad run of both dysautonomia and joint pain) I decided to pursue a course of physio for my hypermobility. I imagined this prompt and eager gesture towards getting myself onto a more stable footing would be enough to regain the kind of stability, thus ability to exercise myself back to health, that I had enjoyed for the all-too brief period of time at the very start of this crazy-busy saga, back in 2020-21 when I was managing to walk pretty often and well, before joint issues, pain and POTs seemed to take me over. It was a mistake to seek such an outside solution before I had taken the opportunity to just stop everything and rest for as long as my body needed but, at the time, it felt like the most proactive of ideas to get straight onto some health protocol that would “fix” me in time to properly enjoy our new life.

So it didn’t turn out to be the magic bullet I’d hoped…in fact, it only made things worse overall because the weekly treatments greatly tired and overstimulated me, not least because they are in the city (a trip there and back taking several hours, all in) and my entire nervous system just wanted to stay put where it was quiet and calm at home until it could recover from everything I had been through. (The spacing of appointments is now under review because of this and sessions will only resume once I get back some stability, only then with frequent reevaluation to make sure the physio that is meant to help me doesn’t keep trip-wiring me into PEM.) Having to shake myself up and make all this effort, exposing myself to new things once a week was the last thing my body needed at this point; I just needed to stop, to allow myself to immerse in the familiar and comforting for as long as it took to stabilise.

So, I quickly noticed, it was generally taking several days to recover after physio each week, such was my very profound PEM afterwards (generally sofa-bound for at least two to three days each time) and then we would still attempt to push on with our fairly busy weekends of trying to orient ourselves in our new locale, exhausting me even further, only to have to prepare myself to go back for my next session of physio just a couple of days later, and not having returned to anywhere near my energy baseline by the time the next appointment came around again. This is the classic mistake of dealing with PEM…which is to return to activity before the PEM has full resolved.

My big mistake here was to begin a brand new healing protocol before I had allowed myself enough time to even remotely recover from our monumental move and all the crazy months we had just been through and now, to make things worse, I wasn’t allowing myself the time to recover from each session before the next one came along, nor from one weekend activity to the next. There were, once again, multiple overlapping circles of boom and bust happening concurrently, just as had been occurring all through the stress of the house moving process, so my body was left stuck in a state of fight and flight, still feeling like I was caught in the old cycles of overexertion even when I was supposed to have arrived on safe ground. I was telling myself that I was resting a lot on the days in between activities but it wasn’t nearly enough because I wasn’t getting back to my baseline before I pushed myself on again…and this is the perennial problem in ME/CFS, especially when you don’t even recognise the pushing or the overlapping patterns.

Nonetheless, this continued for several weeks before I realised how much it was setting me back. Then, coinciding with a spell of better weather (after a protracted period of unseasonal temperatures that had made it much harder for me to attempt to go out on regular walks) I made myself walk every day, even when it was fatiguing me way out of proportion to the distance (which should have been a clue to pull back or stop, but I told myself it was just because I was out of condition). Also, the endorphin rush of experiencing warm sunshine at long last helped me to ignore some of the symptoms!

The combined effect was to do too much too soon and then one of these walks was a case of seriously “overdoing things”, besides being in very strong windy weather which often triggers me, because I misjudged the distance and the temperature. So then I crashed much harder than I would have expected, with a significant period of PEM the following week lasting several days where it felt like I had flu though I knew it wasn’t. Even before I had the chance to recover from that, I had a four-day musical festival to attend (out of which I managed just three, the whole thing being a case of severely struggling to manage and pushing through, including the fact we had such bad weather). I crashed very severely again around 72 hours after all the exertion stopped, including all the fluey effects, the return of post-viral symptoms, the leaden body pains and the feeling of having smashed into a wall…this time not recovering for weeks, so here I am, in the deepest ME/CFS flare-up I can recall for a very long time, if not since the original one.

So what have I learned? Well, I’ve learned that I kept making the cardinal mistake of not pacing my energy, which is to fail to recover from each bout of exertion before starting again. In the most intense phases of this account, I was pushing through so much I wasn’t allowing any rest days at all but just keeping going with even more intensity than if I was doing a full-time job (something I hadn’t managed to do for years…) yet I somehow overlooked the fact I was way out of my capabilities because my sights were so firmly locked onto the objective of moving house.

At my best, I was resting up a bit, factoring maybe a few days or hours off to get back some energy in between busier times (or because I had had a small crash…) but still very far from recovered by the time the next piece of exertion came along. In effect, all my periods of exertion (both mental and physical) were now overlapping each other because not only had the busy days started to bump up against each other without respite but busy weeks and even whole years of this kind of overexertion were occurring one after another, again without the necessary respite to make them tolerable or allow energy to be replenished, let alone accumulated in advance of requirement (more on that below). So even when I paused from engagement with one source of over exertion you can be sure I was still deep into PEM hung-over from something else!

It has taken me using the Visible app for a while now and noticing this trend occurring in the micro for me to then fully recognise, and acknowledge, the same trend happening in the macro because, having run the app for a few weeks, I could clearly see one busy day or week roll on into another, usually right before experiencing a period of worsened PEM. This then helped me to realise that my years had also been forming a pattern like this since the end of 2021, with this year’s severe PEM happening as a consequence of the incredible fatiguing years 2022-2023 butting up against each other with hardly a month of respite between them; the overexertion has been pretty much continuous. It’s made me wonder whether the bigger crashes of ME/CFS are generally to do with having overexerted for years rather than “just” months or days and that, by seeing the bigger patterns, ideally before they take root, we could start to avoid them being provoked that way. How many times have I said words to the effect of “this year is going to be tough but next year will be better?” It’s made me realise I can no longer afford to speak that way…a year is far too long a time period to be under stress or overexerting continuously without serious amounts of compensatory respite built in for rest and recuperation (though how often does our work culture allow for this). We need to somehow make the appropriate pauses happen.

So, in effect, my current crash is the massive crash into PEM that has resulted from years of no respite, from no allowance being made for ensuring appropriate pacing or recovery meaning that I have failed to pause the overexertion behaviours for such a long time now that my body hardly knows any different. If my ADHD brain lacks brakes then is it any wonder I had fallen into this terrible habit yet, still, I’m left wondering, how did I not see this happening? Because I had normalised the exertion, averted my eyes from the worst habits, ingrained the excuses such as “what choice do I have?” or “just this one last time!” and then forgotten completely how to be any other way.

In other words, I had been running along like this for almost three years continuously by the time my latest crash occurred. That’s more than long enough to create a “new normal” and perhaps justify away the quieter times I vaguely remember from before being “just” because of lockdown and, after all, who remembers the time before that (I sometimes think the whole world has speeded up since then). The human brain is made to be adaptive: we acclimatise to situations so immersively that we hardly know we are in them any more, including an immersive states of stress!

What does this remind me of? Of course, the phase preceding my original crash back in 2005/6 when I went from having a baby to moving house to getting a divorce to starting a whole new highly pressurised job as well as freelancing to facing considerable financial strife to beginning a new relationship, all in very quick succession and, in essence, overlapping each other as there was never any respite to be had from certain aspects of it, such as the candle-burning-at-both-ends way I was having to work to pay for my mortgage, my financial fears or the relentless demands of single-parenthood. That time around, I crashed quite monumentally and this time around, with good reason, reminds me quite a bit of those times and those symptoms…only, this time, I have far better oversight and understanding of the patterns…even if it did take the crash happening for me to stop long enough to see it all clearly.

Other symptoms…the very frequent IBS and gastro distress (my stomach has seldom been worse than its been lately), the frequently hypertonic muscles all over my body causing such intense pain and restriction, the mast cell breakouts, the regular bouts of sleeping issues, the dysautonomia, the trigeminal headaches and other migrating nerve pains, the ever more present heart symptoms…were literally shouting it out to me but I was being distracted by them and, meanwhile, my attention wasn’t really on the constant, core fatigue that was steadily undermining my life.

Now, it seems ludicrous that I allowed my life to get like that again, taking that huge risk after what had happened the first time I went through much the same thing, all those years ago; how could I miss the signs and even dare to go there again after all I had been through, struggling to scale the glass wall back to health ever since that original burnout?

However, the thing is, when I feel even moderately well and able, often jet-propelled by determination to get things done, with not a small amount of ADHD fuelling the amount of thrill I get out of being busy and productive, even at times when the stimulation I am getting comes from having a big juicy problem solve, I tend to ignore all the warning signs (“what warning signs?”) that my body is really struggling, or, I override them because I refuse to see that there is any other way other than to push through whatever it is that I’m dealing with. Endorphins and dopamine have no small part to play in all this and another factor of my ADHD is the life hack I’ve taught myself (one I’ve heard other ADHD-ers frequently use) of always doing whatever occurs to me in the very moment I think of it so that I don’t forget it in the long run…a sort of executive function backup strategy I have…only this one has only driven me to even more extremes of multitasking and overexertion.

So, I’m so busy fixating on the objective I have in my sights that I forget to stop long enough to hear what my body has to say about the matter. I tell myself “I simply have no choice” and that “I’ll only push this hard until…” (whatever milestone is up there, in my sights ahead). The big lie I told myself this time was that I would only push so hard until we landed in the new house and then I would stop for a very thorough rest but here we are, five months in, and it took a proper crash into severe ME/CFS, (the kind where I can’t even walk more than a few hundred yards at the moment, or do more than ten minutes of household tasks, before tumbling into severe PEM, with my functionality now at a lower score than it was when I first got my Visible app), for me to stop and listen!

So I wanted to share this highly autobiographical account of the long-running buildup to an ME/CFS crash (or, really, two for the price of one) in the hopes it might flag up, to anyone reading it, any of the ways they may be often, or even currently, risking their health because of not factoring in those long-enough pauses to allow true respite and recovery to happen.

What I finally realise (because this is how my daily life now goes…and if I don’t listen I literally cant function at all as there is simply no more override button or “give” in my energy margin at all) is that you have to recover fully from the first exertion before you can even think about beginning on the next one. And I really mean that quite literally…as in, thinking about having to do something can be pretty exerting in and of itself and therefore way too much for someone in an ME/CFS crash (stress markers such as blood pressure, heart rate and heart rate variability tend to alter as soon as we imagine ourselves doing something) which is why it’s so important to stop everything, even the overthinking, by removing all avoidable obligations and expectations up ahead and just refraining from everything you can for now.

In other words, if you get up and walk around or whatever it is that tires you but then stop and rest for an hour or so when you’re done, after which you feel recovered back to how you were before the exertion then, great, you can think about doing more exertion again later but if you rest afterwards yet still feel extra fatigued later, this isn’t the time to start doing that next thing on your list.

When rest is no longer restful and you are finding you still need more and more of it to get back to your baseline, this is a clue that you are generally overexerting and/or overstimulating and not allowing the healthy rests that you need throughout the course of your day.

Rest shouldn’t all be about recovery (or, in other words, patching up the damage) from what you just did….some of it should be pre-emptive, as in, you are tanking up reserves for the future, building-up your body reserve before the next thing comes along. This is a stabilising kind of rest and is just as important, if not more so, than a recovery rest…and given so many of us don’t get enough recovery rest, stabilising rest can fall into a permanent state of deficit, for years. Before you can get back any stability, you need to make lots of time for these kinds of rests or they will never happen!

When you’ve got into the habit of thinking such times are wasteful and best spent ticking more tasks off your endless list, you are on a road to nowhere and in ever increasing danger of going into the kind of energy overdraft that can go on for years until, one day, the debt collector comes a-calling at the most inconvenient time, meaning you completely burnout of energy, as I have just done, and there is simply no negotiating with it.

The way out of it (once you have accumulated enough stabilising rest to refind any kind of footing in your life…which you will know because you will no longer crash after the merest exertion) is to go back to doing just the right amount, minuscule as that may be, so that you stop before you feel so fatigued that an appropriate period of respite doesn’t enable you to get back to feeling rested again. You only do what can be reliably recovered from in a reasonable time and only after a while of that do you contemplate increasing a little.

If you are still feeling as though you are in energy deficit and/or experiencing other symptoms, in spite of taking a normal length break appropriate to your exertion, then you know you did too much and need to pare it right back to do only as little as you can cope with again, which might be next to nothing or even nothing at all for the time being. Whether it’s physical fatigue or mental fatigue, the process is the same and you need to become aware of which it is (perhaps both) affecting you, then pare back accordingly.

Learning how to get out of mental exhaustion can be the hardest of all; I fail at it repeatedly because my mind longs to be active, even when I am “resting” physically, but the same applies as with physical exertion…only allow just as much as you can manage to do and then recover from with a short rest afterwards. If still exhausted after resting, you know you need to cut it back into smaller portions or even cease all mental overstimulation altogether and that might even mean you can’t read, write, listen to audios or watch tv for entertainment, at least until you can do it without setting yourself back. Apps like Calm or Curable can offer some mental engagement set at an extremely soothing level or, otherwise, I know I can sometimes get away with listening to (the right kind of) music for a while…whilst just watching the birds in my garden. I’m finding more mental energy for myself this week but still have to be so careful and am mindful that too long in this post could prove to be too much!

Once…and I mean only once…you have got to the point of regularly bouncing back from a bit of energy expenditure, such as gentle movement or stimulation, followed by a rest (which is what pacing is!) then you can start to carefully increase by micro doses, until you level out again with rest, and so on. It’s a process of titrating exertion until you get just the right dose at each stage of the process.

If this seems so tedious and limiting and hardly to be borne that you could scream with frustration then remember that it can only be avoided, next time around, by listening closely to your body and not living your life the way you did before the burnout happened, which takes seeing the patterns and noticing all the things that trip you into this kind of boom and bust. Whether your boom and busts happen every day, week, month or year, the trend is still the same and the antidote pretty much the same too; being serious, proactive, prioritised pacing and rest. This is where I have been going so so very wrong for years, by frequently living in a busy state that is beyond my capacity and thereby leaving absolutely no margin of energy for resilience and recovery.

I’m not saying, by any means, that the kind of over-exerting behaviour I describe is the only way you may ever come to find yourself living with ME/CFS as there is so much more to the provenance of the condition than that (as is so very true of my scenario too); a whole complex of circumstances seem to contribute to this highly perplexing condition, including a post-viral component and potential cross-overs with traits such as hypermobility, so there is no one definitive cause as such. However, at least by learning how patterns of overexertion can significantly contribute to the way these flare-ups tend to occur, you can start to do something about it and then start to get a much better handle on your life…as I once did, for a while, before and sincerely hope to do again.

Disclaimer: This blog, it’s content and any material linked to it are presented for autobiographical, general interest and anecdotal purposes only. They are not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, treatment or prescribing. Opinions are my own based on personal experience. Please seek medical advice from a professional if you are experiencing any mental or physical symptoms that concern you.