Episode 9 – The Nervous System and Chronic Fatigue

Shownotes

In this episode Anna explains how the nervous system works and how nervous system dysregulation can contribute to chronic fatigue and other health conditions. She offers an overview of how to begin to find more regulation day to day.

Useful links:

Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/

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Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz

The Nervous System and Chronic Fatigue

Welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I will discuss the nervous system and chronic fatigue in this episode today. This is a really popular topic, and I think I always get asked on my Instagram stories on my Instagram account, how do I regulate the nervous system? I get lots of questions about the nervous system.

Over the past few years, as I’ve been recovering, more and more nervous system programs have popped up specifically for people with chronic fatigue and illness. So this episode today is to give you a little bit of an overview of the nervous system and why it is so important in chronic fatigue and fatigue recovery. Finally, I’ll just be talking about some things you can do to support your nervous system as you work on your fatigue recovery journey.

I’d like first to give an overview of how the nervous system is mapped out. This is something that I would normally teach my clients when we start working together when we’re doing nervous system-specific work because I think having the understanding and the awareness is helpful for people to understand what’s happening in their bodies. Usually, when people have chronic fatigue or chronic illness, especially where they feel a little bit abandoned, let down, or maybe even gaslighted by the medical system, there is this real need and want to understand, “What’s going on? What’s happening to me? What’s going on inside of my body?”

So I would like to do more of the, shall we call, head-based explanations. I want to talk a little bit about the important cognitive aspects that need and desire to understand. But I will also say that much of the nervous system’s work is not based on understanding. You don’t have to understand the ins and outs of how the nervous system works to have a resourceful nervous system. A lot of the magic of the nervous system work comes in practice and the self-regulating exercises, which I’ll touch on towards the end of the episode.

Starting with the nervous system breakdown, I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the person I won’t mention was the one whose podcast I was listening to keep on talking about the central nervous system. “This is your central nervous system going into a freed state.” It’s important to start and distinguish that we have the central nervous system, the brain, and the spinal column.

Then we have the