History of a health burnout; what the past can teach me now

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Such as we are experts in anything, those of us with long term health issues also possess a rich hoard of hard-won experience and insight into what made us chronic in the first place. So, what can we take from all the years of navigating our way through the experience of chronic illness as a means to averting a delayed recovery from covid or other trigger virus, especially when we notice any similarities with what we have been through before? Can we now take the overview in order to notice and better understand the patterns, weak spots and trip-wires of chronicness before they become ingrained this time?

Covid’s effect on the vagus nerve (especially if you are susceptible)

~ Helen White ~ 4 Comments

Exploring a known link between covid-19 and certain issues relating to the vagus nerve (amongst others); how does this relate to some of the more scattered seeming symptoms of long covid and what can be done about it in the hopes of making a speedy and full recovery?

Rediscovering your life-force through movement

~ Helen White ~ 1 Comment

Apart from being essential for wellbeing and general health, movement can help remind me where all my muscles are in space (given my proprioceptive equipment can be a bit compromised...), can also help me to be upright without my autonomic system always spinning off into a panic at the idea of gravity. Otherwise, when I forget I have a body (I'm autistic so "out of sight, out of mind" is pretty much my modus operandi) I very quickly lose the joy of it! Exploring the importance of having enough space to move about in when you have chronic conditions and are neurodivergent.

Can silence and loneliness cause pain and other interesting observations

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I'm noticing an effect...where too much quiet or lack of human connection can trigger massively increased rigidity in my body, poor breathing habits, temperature disregulation and other dysautonomic effects and massively increased pain, especially small fibre neuropathy. So what do people have to say about this; how might it be connected with chronic pain conditions, autism, social isolation, old age and more?

Are you becoming more aligned with yourself than you realised?

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Has your year been really challenging in lots of ways….but….when you allow yourself to pull back and gain the overview, you can sense just how positively impactful and on track it has all really been? Can you sense how you have actually been getting much more in alignment with who you really are all along the way, if not always by the most predictable or tidy means? Can you sense that it has all been part of a new level of alignment taking shape, as though something is being orchestrated, however chaotic it may sometimes seem to be at the ground level? If you can even mildly glean that this applies to you then take pause for a moment in order to fully allow the realisation of this to swell in your consciousness. Take some time out at the end of the year to appreciate just how far you have come, no matter how messy or symptomatic your life still seems from within, and maybe jot down some of those things that have improved for you. Because its just so important, for your ongoing sense of progression, to notice how much nearer you now are to some aspiration you hold dear, unfinished business though it may all seem in this moment, or to notice all those many pieces of self-knowledge you wouldn't want to give back in exchange for easier circumstances, as have been picked up along the way. This is how we give ourselves the ongoing momentum to continue moving forwards, not to mention how we come to see the bigger picture of the way our lives are truly playing out so that we aren't always bogged down in the small stuff.

The positives of finding out you are autistic (if you are)

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

Before you realise you are autistic (if you are), all you tend to know is the outline of your autistic self, as in, the shape that is left where you don’t fit in with other people’s experiences. It’s a bit like drawing a portrait of someone by filling in the background and leaving a space where the person is standing; what they call a negative space composition, in art terms. You get to know what you aren’t…but not what you are. Such an approach tells you a lot about all the misfitting bits but nothing much about yourself and that, in itself, can be a source of ongoing trauma because it can leave you feeling like a blank. Finding out you are autistic begins a process of filling in all the blanks and getting to know who you actually are.

The effect of chronic stress and early-life trauma responses on long term health

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Looking at what we already know about the effect of chronic unaddressed toxic stress and early life trauma-responses, specifically from the perspective of neurodivergence, and its possible link to chronic health issues.

The sustained traumatising effect of trying to lead a “normal” sensory life with a neurodivergent nervous system

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I do believe that constantly drip-fed overstimulation traumatises those of us without appropriate filters and barriers to cope with sensory experiences that are not designed to accommodate neurodivergence and in such a way that compounds with time, affecting us in ways that other people can’t even begin to imagine as they’re simply not having the same experience as us. Quite literally, the only thing we have in common with the majority of people who are apparently dealing with the exact same situations as us is that we’re physically in the same space…because the way we experience that space is a whole other matter. We can try to explain (with variable degrees of success) but we can never take them there with us so they understand! Until we give this effect the most appropriate name, trauma, we don’t deal with it appropriately either…because we just keep on sucking it up and wondering why we struggle and burn out so often and in so many apparently unusual or creative ways. Yet in the case of any other trauma we would work much harder to notice when it was happening, to put a stop to it and heal from it…but how do you heal from something that is relentless and ongoing, which you have to expose yourself to in order to be part of anything in life that has something to do with being around other people or in the world as it has been made to be, which is highly overstimulating and often too much for our differently wired systems?

Hypermobility is a spectrum disorder: its not all about subluxations!

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News flash: hypermobility is not all about joint subluxations and is not as rare as they say, especially for women, but is actually a spectrum condition, meaning your most bewildering symptoms might be on that spectrum. You need to cease feeling like such an imposter in order to start looking hypermobility right in the eye because only then can you start to tackle it as a possible source of chronic pain, dysautonomia, GI issues and a whole host of other health mysteries.