Healing Overwhelming Fatigue

My client, Fi*, was joined one of my coaching groups for women with chronic illness. She, like others in the group, suffered severe fatigue. It was one of the things she most wanted to change in her life.

“Quality of life was low,” she said. “I was feeling very low and, though I didn’t think of it this way at the time, I was feeling victimized by my body and by life.”

“I tried for years to fix it,” she added. “All kinds of different things. There was a medical component, of course, but it wasn’t solely a medical issue. There was a big emotional element. I was stuck in fight-or-flight and really could not seem to find my way out of it.”

Fi and I, recently talked about how she, even with advanced degrees in psychiatric nursing, didn’t have the tools she needed to stop the fear-based cycle that she was in. This was exacerbating and creating her symptoms, including fatigue.

When I work with any client, I design practices specifically for their capacity and need. In Fi’s case, we had to start with small, energizing activities with maximum impact.

“I liked that the things we did were so simple and practical,” she said. “It wasn’t a lot of psychobabble, which, with my background, I know would be easy to do. It was a relief to know that there were things I could actually do. I wasn’t stuck just passively waiting for things to get better. Suddenly I had agency. It absolutely changed my life.”

One of the actions I encouraged group members to take was to buy a physical calendar and put a check mark on it each time they did something positive for themselves.

“At first I thought okaaayyyy,” said Fi. “But I’m a competitive kind of person, and I was determined to get high marks. It’s amazing how something that small can become so meaningful. I was soooo proud of myself! Which meant that I began to change my focus and move out of fight or flight. I was doing things that led to better sleep and feeling better overall.”

As we continued to work together, I had participants build on these small wins and create compounding improvement. Today, just over a year since the program started, Fi is more active and well than she ever expected to be when she first joined.

“I’ve become so very much of what I hoped and dreamed.”

*Story shared with permission. Names changed to protect privacy.