A Powerful Step By Step Plan to Overcome Chronic Pain and Fatigue
People often ask things like this: What one thing will get rid of my pain for good? Which single herb arrested your fatigue? If I only read one book, which should it be? (The tone is often urgent with CAPS and exclamation marks!)
I’ve been there, desperate for a magic elixir. As humans, we crave certainty. We’re programmed to think there must be a simple and definable cure for our physical symptoms—ideally one we can ingest this very minute. Afterall, we take antibiotics for an infection and get a cast for a fractured arm.
Chronic symptoms are different. We feel them in our body but they originate in our brain. With conditions like post-viral syndrome, back pain or insomnia, the emotional brain is on overload. There’s a backlog of stress. The nervous system is in a sustained flight, fight or freeze state. The brain misinterprets benign sensations as dangerous.
That reminds me of a time my brother Jason and I were happily walking on a nature trail. We heard an ominous buzzing sound above us and started running fervently from a swarm of killer bees! We’d read they’d been visiting Southern California so our brains assumed the buzz was life-threatening. After sprinting back to the car, we looked up breathlessly to see a toy drone! Our brains and bodies created a cascade of stress hormones so we could escape. If we hadn’t been able to run, we’d probably have felt body pain, anxiety or other symptoms.
We aren’t running from killer bees or saber-toothed cats much these days (unless you’re me and my brother!). Many of us face threats like: technology overload, relationship trauma, social isolation, job stress and political polarization. They activate the amygdala but we don’t have anywhere to run.
When the stress is chronic, the symptoms can become chronic too. We may obsess over them. Whatever we focus on creates new neural pathways in the brain. Conversely, avoiding activities, like walking or sitting, reinforces our limitations—not just in our perception but in our brain.
In EEG scans of people with persistent back pain, the emotional centers of the brain light up like a chandelier. There’s scientific proof that emotions drive chronic symptoms, particularly fear.
Unfortunately, doctors may attribute our symptoms to a torn rotator cuff, degenerative disc disease or Epstein-Barr virus—all findings that show up routinely in asymptomatic people who feel perfectly healthy. The brilliant physician John Sarno called these “normal abnormalities.” In mind-body healing, we see the cause as psychological stress.
The great news is we can calm the stress response and recover from chronic symptoms, as long as physicians have ruled out pathological causes like a broken bone, tumor or blood infection. Here’s six steps I followed to overcome Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, headaches and interstitial cystitis. I’ll be leading students through these and other essential practices in my group course starting next spring.
You can use these same steps for your own recovery:
Recognize the cause of mind-body symptoms. There's nothing wrong with the body, so it’s counterproductive to try to fix it with physical remedies. Sarno called this knowledge therapy. It’s important to learn about this new paradigm so you believe it. Learn more about the mind-body knowledge Sarno called TMS on my Resources page or Media page.
Change your relationship with the symptoms. They are not dangerous so you don’t want to fight them. Our primary goal is to lower fear. One way to do this is to appraise your safety and remind your brain that you are safe and okay in this moment.
Acknowledge and feel underlying emotions. Ask, what emotions am I feeling right now? See if you can name the emotions cognitively (i.e. I am frustrated) and feel them somatically (i.e. pulsing and burning in my stomach).
Connect to your body through a lens of safety. Somatic meditations are so helpful to calm the amygdala. Try a short somatic tracking on this blog or a longer meditation here. Also return to a felt sense of your breath throughout the day.
Re-engage in activities in small, graded steps that feel safe. Avoiding activities teaches the brain that they’re dangerous, while challenging your triggers grows capacity.
Relinquish habits that unnecessarily activate your brain and dump cortisol into your body. Some ideas: stop checking your phone before you’ve had breakfast, verbally assaulting yourself or driving your body like a bulldozer. Bring awareness to the tendencies that are triggering you.
How we are treated and how we treat ourselves affects our physical health in a very real way. Research shows that adverse childhood experiences such as emotional abuse or neglect increase our risk of chronic symptoms later in life. Mind patterns of catastrophizing and self-criticism also activate the nervous system and increase pain signals.
So I ask, what habits cause you unnecessary stress? Anything that activates the brain’s threat system can trigger everything from back pain to frozen shoulder, headaches to chronic fatigue.
Some patterns I see a lot: People push themselves into exhaustion with self-pressure and criticism. Others use worry or rumination to stuff emotions. Some put other people’s needs consistently before their own. Each one will have a different remedy. You can find your own by tuning into your emotions.
For instance, let’s say I’m eating a tray of snickerdoodles because I’m angry that someone keeps interrupting me. As I look longingly at the crumbs, I catch myself and ask: How am I feeling emotionally? I pause and tune into my body sensations. I might be angry (which feels hot in my throat) and scared (which feels jittery in my arms). Next I ask, what is my unmet need beneath this attempt at cookie comfort? The answer may be to take a long walk and then talk with this person about my request to be heard without interruption.
As I follow my guidance, I experience less anxiety, muscle tension and sleep disturbance. It’s a personalized prescription. The same one cannot be given to someone else. Drugs anesthetize us while self-awareness heals us.
Over a treacherous and debilitating 13-year bout with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), I came to see that the cause of my symptoms was also the cure. Healing is not about banishing persistent pain, fatigue or brain fog. It’s about becoming aware of the mental, emotional and behavioral patterns driving them.
I had to reclaim the power and agency I lost during a sexual assault and years of doctor’s visits where I felt dismissed. That meant I had to ignore the scary things doctors said were inside me (high levels of Epstein Barr virus, the bacteria that causes chronic Lyme, candida albicans, defective genes and inflammation to name a few). After boatloads of supplements, it became glaringly clear that these protocols were making me worse. Subsisting on approximately seven foods and 28 herbs made for a miserable culinary life, a bloated belly and a sense of hopelessness.
My tonic was to follow thoughts and actions that felt engaging and energizing, even when they ran counter to medical ideology. As I became more attentive to my inner voice, I recovered. If I’d been given a pill to cure my ailments, I’d have missed out on genuine healing. Of course, no such pill exists.
We can only ignore our unfelt emotions and maladaptive patterns for so long without physical consequences. As it’s been said, the only way through is through.
The late physician John Sarno wrote four books that chronicle how unresolved emotional stress manifests physically. Doctor Howard Schubiner explains how to diagnose and recover from a dizzying array of chronic symptoms, which he calls Mind-Body Syndrome. His phenomenal book “Unlearn Your Pain” guided my path to recovery.
Schubiner explains that the brain can mistakenly link danger with previously neutral stimuli when our nervous system is activated. After a traumatic assault, my brain feared speaking, sleeping, talking, walking, nearly everything. I had to retrain it as one might a puppy dog, with consistent and confident guidance.
Let's look at diet. Doctors told me I’d developed a gazillion food sensitivities and had labs to prove it. But Schbuiner taught me that digestive upset comes from a conditioned response, not because of the food itself. (This is barring bonafide food allergies or food poisoning, of course.) It’s akin to how Pavlov’s dogs learned to link a bell with food. With practice, I was able to retrain my brain that the 278 foods I’d been avoiding were safe to enjoy—including an occasional pizza!
In true healing, we reclaim parts of ourselves we had to leave behind in childhood. We step into authenticity. We follow our innate impulse over our culture’s dogma. We take mercy on the scared and trembling parts of ourselves by offering compassion. We meet ourselves as we are in the moment, rather than striving to be something or somewhere else.