Stability is the first step in Chronic Fatigue Recovery. If you are someone experiencing an energy limiting chronic illness such as ME/CFS, Long Covid, Post-Viral Fatigue or Vaccine Injury, you will be all too familiar with energy crashes, symptom flares and post-exertional malaise (PEM) – all of which are symptoms of a body whose physiology has become unstable.
This instability often develops gradually, as chronic stress and accumulated life load place ongoing demands on the nervous system, without enough opportunity to settle and recalibrate. Over time, this can reduce our capacity to adapt to further stress or change — meaning that even positive, enjoyable experiences can sometimes feel like too much.
You may reflect back on how you became unwell and for some, there may have been a gradual loss of resilience over time i.e. becoming less and less stress tolerant and needing more and more self care to continue to function as the years pass (this was my experience).
For others, there may have been an acute event that happened (e.g. a viral infection) that was so significant that it threw your system completely out of balance. Often in this scenario, it can feel sudden, but there may be a trail of breadcrumbs leading up to the event.
Whether your experience was a slow burn or a sudden onset, the goal in the early stages of chronic fatigue recovery is to support the body to come back to a better sense of balance and stability.
The Pillars of Stability
The goal is to identify and support those factors that will help the individual stabilise. Working with clients with complex and chronic illness you learn pretty quickly that every case is different and each person presents with their own set of unique challenges.
That being said, from experience I have been able to identify the most common factors that will help the individual stabilise the system most effectively. These are:
- Stabilising the Nervous System
- Stabilising Blood Sugar Balance
- Stabilising Sleep and Circadian Rhythms
- Stabilising energy output i.e. pacing and movement routines
- Stabilising Inflammation
I’ll go into further details on each of these below.
Stabilising The Nervous System
A “healthy” nervous system should gently move between states of being more activated and states of being more settled throughout the day. This should be appropriate to environmental cues.
For example, this morning I slipped in the bathroom grabbing my towel after a shower and fell hard on my hip. My body leapt into a state of activation to help me react quickly to the fall but once I was on the floor and I could acknowledge that I was safe, dust myself off and continue with my day, everything settled down again and I moved on.
People who experience chronic illness may often be overly reactive to very small things and / or they get stuck in states of stress with the inability to relax and settle. They react disproportionately to environmental cues and they struggle to unwind and relax. They may become stuck in fight or flight or even in freeze states which perpetuate the imbalances which impact physiology and physical function.
For example, you might notice that a small change of plans feels surprisingly overwhelming, that you’re easily startled by noises, or that a busy supermarket, social event or difficult conversation takes far more out of you than you’d expect.
You may feel exhausted but find it difficult to truly switch off, struggle to settle after a stressful day, or notice that your body remains tense and alert even when there is nothing obvious to worry about. Sometimes, even positive experiences can leave you feeling overstimulated or depleted afterwards. These can all be signs that the nervous system has less capacity available to adapt to additional demands.
So how do we begin to create more stability in the nervous system?
Instead of trying to force ourselves to relax or eliminate every source of stress, the aim is to gradually build the nervous system’s capacity to move more flexibly between activation and rest. This can involve learning to recognise our own nervous system patterns, reducing unnecessary load where possible, working gently with the body, and creating small, repeated experiences that support a greater sense of safety and regulation.
Over time, this may help us become less reactive to everyday stressors and better able to settle again afterwards. This is something we explore much more practically inside the Nurturing Resilience Membership, where I teach you how to understand and work with your nervous system in a way that meets you where you are.
For more resources on the nervous system specifically, please refer to the following resources.
Blood Sugar Stability
When the body is already under a high physiological load, some people can become more sensitive to fluctuations within their internal environment. Changes that a more resilient system may comfortably adapt to can feel like an additional demand when there is already less capacity available.
Blood sugar is one example of this. When blood glucose falls, the body has mechanisms designed to bring it back up again. This can involve the release of counter-regulatory hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, which help mobilise stored energy and maintain an adequate supply of glucose.
This is an important and normal protective response. However, it can also increase sympathetic nervous system activity — the same branch of the nervous system involved in our fight-or-flight response. For someone whose nervous system is already working hard to maintain stability, pronounced fluctuations in blood sugar may therefore add another layer of physiological stress. Some people may notice this as feeling shaky, wired, anxious, irritable, light-headed or suddenly depleted, although experiences vary considerably from person to person.
The goal isn’t to achieve perfectly flat blood sugar or to become fearful of every fluctuation. Some variation is completely normal. Instead, we can look at supporting greater stability — reducing pronounced peaks and dips where appropriate — so the body has fewer physiological swings to continually adapt to.
You can learn more about this here.
Simple foundations such as eating regularly and enough for your individual needs and building balanced meals that contain appropriate sources of protein, carbohydrate, fat and fibre can be a useful place to start. As with everything in chronic illness, however, there isn’t one perfect way of eating for everybody. The aim is to understand what supports greater stability in your system, rather than adding another rigid set of food rules to follow.
Stabilising Energy Output in Chronic Fatigue Recovery
We’ve all been there; you have a little bit more energy one day, you over do it and the next day the Fun Police send you the invoice. Alternatively, you don’t have any more energy than usual but life happens and brings its extra demands and you end up pushing through.
When I first became unwell I was regularly in a cycle of boom and bust, mostly because no one ever sat me down and told me this…
There are no supplements, dietary changes, medications or meditations that will compensate for poor pacing.
Pacing yourself is an essential part of recovering from Chronic Fatigue. Learning to properly pace is how we build stability into our day to day.
What does this actually mean?
Very simply, each day should be made up of periods of activity and periods of rest. These should be distributed across the day. In other words not one big chunk of activity followed by one big chunk of rest (this is basically just push and crash).
Depending on where you are in your journey, your periods of activity will probably be quite small and your periods of rest will likely need to be fairly big. However, as time goes on, you may notice that you can do more for longer and that you need less rest between activities to regain your energy. See the diagram below.
Many people are not aware of how much they are doing in a day and not necessarily able to connect how certain things are making them feel. It can be helpful to keep a diary of what you are doing and how you are feeling so that you can notice patterns and trends. This overlaps with stabilising your nervous system as you want to notice how your nervous system feels throughout the day, not just the activities you are doing.
When I ask clients to do this we always notice the following:
- Continuing for too long before stopping
- Stringing too many activities together
- Not enough time to rest between activities
- Resting is not actual rest i.e. the nervous system is stuck in activation when it should be settled to allow for rest
The most helpful thing you can do is start to identify the earliest warning signs that you are starting to fatigue. It could be a subtle increase in pain, brain fog, lethargy, getting irritable, struggling to find words or concentrate. The moment you notice these signs creep in, it is time to check in with your body and rest.
Resting should be proper rest which means that your nervous system should ideally be able to access a parasympathetic state, which can be easier said than done. What this might feel like in your body is that you have a sense of connection to yourself, if you are lying down or seated you feel a sense of weight and heaviness in your body, your body might feel less tense, more open, softer, wider expanded, and there is more breath in your belly.
Being realistic, it might take a while to feel perfectly rested but you want to notice your body shift. A decrease in symptoms isn’t always a sign that you have rested properly, it can be more helpful to track for a sense of feeling more “online” again and ready to do something else.
Things that may be restful include:
- Lying in a dark room without any sensory input
- Lying down and listening to some relaxing music
- Watching a funny TV show
- Spending time outside in nature
- Listening to music
- Doing a meditation or yoga nidra
- Doing a restorative yoga practise
- Sitting in a comfortable chair with your cat
- Sometimes even a short walk outside can feel restful when you have enough capacity
The way pacing is described above is how I learnt to do it, which is based on learning to listen to my body and respond to and honour the feedback. We cover Pacing and PEM in more detail in the Nurturing Resilience Membership
What about movement or exercise?
When I was ill, all I wanted to do was exercise again. I tried repeatedly to reintroduce exercise into my routine but it just made me worse over the long term and perpetuated cycles of push and crash. Exercise is a stress on the body. In the right dosage, it can be a positive thing and there is definitely a time and place for it in the Chronic Fatigue Recovery journey. However, when the body is inherently unstable, it can be further destabilising.
Therefore, when it comes to achieving stability, we only want to move (or exercise) at the dosage which does not make us feel worse than we already do. If you are struggling to add exercise or movement to your routine, it might be best to optimise some of the other stabilising factors first, before you work on increasing your movement.
That being said, if there is a level of movement that you do tolerate. You want to do this consistently, ideally at the same time each day, to maintain momentum on which you can build at a later date.
Sleep & Circadian Rhythms
Many people who experience energy limiting health conditions wake unrefreshed – even after hours of sleep – or they struggle to fall asleep, stay asleep or both. Sleep is crucial for recovery and repair and therefore it can see like a cruel paradox that the thing we need the most is one of the things we struggle with.
My experience is that most people struggle with sleep because they haven’t mastered the previous 3 foundations, they may experience:
- A nervous system which is over-stimulated or “stuck on” which can make falling asleep challenging or sleep can feel unrefreshing even when we think we’ve had enough.
- Blood sugar imbalances can cause disturbed sleep, waking in the night or waking too early and struggling to get back to sleep because the body doesn’t have enough fuel to make it through the night
- Poorly paced days which mean they are exhausted but wired by the end of the day but cannot switch off and fall asleep at a reasonable hour.
When we pace well, are better able to access relaxation states with the nervous system and we have a good balance of blood sugar so night time fuelling is optimal, sleep often improves naturally.
More specifically it also important to have good morning and evening routines. Your morning routine should ideally include access to sunlight on your eyes – ideally not through a window but work within your capacity to begin with – and your evening routine should allow you eat, relax and unwind for 2-3 hours before bedtime. A cool sleeping environment, black out curtains or an eye mask and ear plugs, if needed, can also be supportive.
Certain supplements such as L-theanine, Lemon Balm, Glycine, Magnesium Glycinate and Inositol can be supportive. Medicated sleep is not as good as non-medicated sleep but medicated sleep is still better than no sleep at all. When the goal is stability, medicated sleep can sometimes help you to feel “rested enough” and therefore able to work on other stabilising factors like your diet, sunlight exposure and your nervous system. When these aspects of health are in a good routine you can then discuss with your doctor about weaning off your sleep medication.
Stabilising Inflammation
As with sleep, inflammatory load may sometimes be supported indirectly as we address the other foundations of stability. Supporting nervous system regulation, pacing appropriately, eating well and prioritising good-quality sleep and rest can all help create a more supportive physiological environment for the body.
Nutrition is another useful foundation here. Rather than becoming overly focused on restrictive “anti-inflammatory” diets, I generally encourage a varied, wholefoods-based approach wherever this is appropriate and accessible. Plenty of colourful plant foods, adequate protein, healthy fats and nutrient-dense carbohydrates can provide the nutrients the body needs to support normal immune and inflammatory processes. The aim is not dietary perfection, but a nourishing and sustainable way of eating that works for the individual.
Of course, there may be times when it is appropriate to look more closely at what could be contributing to ongoing inflammation. Depending on the individual, this might include exploring areas such as persistent infections, gut health, environmental exposures or other physiological stressors alongside appropriate medical assessment. This is where personalised investigation can become helpful, rather than assuming that everyone with chronic fatigue needs the same tests or interventions.
These are the kinds of deeper questions I explore on a 1:1 basis, where we can look at your history, symptoms and wider clinical picture and decide what, if anything, warrants further investigation. The foundations still matter — but sometimes they also give us a more stable platform from which to explore the next layer.
Ready to start building your foundations?
When you’re living with chronic fatigue, it can be incredibly tempting to keep searching for the next test, treatment or missing piece. But sometimes, the most helpful place to begin is by creating more stability in the foundations first.
Inside the Nurturing Resilience Membership, you can put these foundations into practice in a way that feels manageable — with education and practical tools to support your nervous system, pacing, nutrition, sleep and overall resilience. Rather than trying to change everything at once, you can begin to understand what your body needs and take small, sustainable steps from there.
If you’re ready to move away from information overload and start building a clearer, more supportive foundation, I’d love to welcome you into the Nurturing Resilience Membership.
