What I have done so far...

So, as the Occupational Therapist told me at the CFS clinic ‘we don’t have a medicine we can give you to make you better so what you do is your medicine instead’.

In CFS it seems to be all about removing as much physical, emotional or any other type of stress possible, so your body can grow stronger and become well again.  

I love reading recovery stories of people who have got better from this condition and it seems like there are some common themes: mindfulness/meditation, minimally processed diet, a healthy balance of rest and gently nudging up activity a teeny bit at a time, dealing with patterns that may have overstressed your body.

So this is what I’ve tried so far: 

• Graded Exercise Therapy (aka ‘GET’).
• Activity management (like GET but broader).
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy by CFS specialist (CBT).
• Hypnotherapy.
• The Lightning Process.
• The Gupta Amygdala Retraining Programme.
• Mindfulness/meditation.
• Psychotherapy.
• Massage.
• Nutritionist.
• Dietician.
• Plus about a million doctors who found me very mystifying and didn’t know what to suggest!!

I’d say most of these approaches helped me a bit, though CBT and the nutritionist didn’t help me personally.  I’m actually scheduled for an appointment with a much more specialist CFS nutritionist tomorrow morning, so fingers crossed - I’ll let you know!

Feel free to fire questions at me about any of the above if you’d like; some of it will be fairly mysterious to those who are unfamiliar with CFS.  I definitely didn’t do all of these at once, but perhaps when people wonder what I do all day when I’m not able to go to work - this might shed some light 😁