Top 10 strategies for living well with fatigue

Several of our team members have ME/CFS and associated pain, and as part of our 10-year anniversary, we gathered together their top strategies for learning to live well with fatigue:

1. Be realistic about what you can manage day by day

2. Find ways to make visible what’s invisible to others, to improve their awareness, eg sharing the impact of activity and how symptoms can flare up

3. Learn to say no and to accept the grief that arises with limitations and frustrated desire

4. Find 4 things that were pleasurable or had beauty in them at the end of each day, despite the debilitation of fatigue

5. Build an awareness of what the likely triggers for symptoms routinely are, eg Zoom calls that last more than an hour, or social occasions in noisy places

6. Practice ways that allow the nervous system to switch from a high state of threat (adrenal fatigue) to a soothed, rest and digest state of the parasympathetic system (eg listen to body scans, practice yoga nidra)

7. Be mindful of increased sensitivity to external, sensory stimulation and learn to guard the gates of the senses (ear plugs, electromagnetic waves, others’ physic energy)

8. Sit in nature

9. Focus on the things that you can do, rather than getting hung up on the things that you can’t

10. Enjoy the ‘new normal’ and the added balance it gives to your life