Anxiety & Exhaustion

It's coming up to two years now since a former colleague changed her life around and began to return to health. Although the details will vary, her story will probably resonate with others.

The working day started just like any other in that she got up for work, went through her usual routines and then a few moments before leaving something changed. "It was as though someone flicked a switch. In an instant I became lightheaded, anxious and unsettled". She went on to say that during the drive to work she could feel her heart racing and that she became aware of a curious sense of detachment as though she could see herself driving. It was, of course, scary and very unsettling. It was the start of something that, in varying degrees of intensity, went on for many months and something she kept hoping would pass but didn't.

It turns out these symptoms were actually part of a more general set that she hadn't originally recognized as being associated. There were the endless coughs and colds that seemed to drag on for weeks at a time. Her back ached, her head ached and she was indifferent to the things that had previously occupied a lot of her time. Her pattern of sleep was "reasonable", she said, but she'd wake up feeling drained, anxious and "panicky". The most routine tasks had become a challenge. She became anxious in her dealings with people, found meetings stressful and was overwhelmed with a sense of just wanting to get away from it all.

Eventually she saw a specialist who diagnosed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Chronic fatigue is something of an enigma. Nobody really understands where it comes from or what causes it so there are no measures in place to prevent it. There are some vague theories about viral infections, gene susceptibility and stress as possible triggers, but this is really as far as it goes. Yet Chronic Fatigue appears to be a huge issue that involves hundreds of thousands of people.

There has always been a level of cynicism about issues of fatigue based largely around whether it even exists. When I was young it was loosely referred to as ‘burn-out' but this included people who just didn't give a stuff about what they did anymore as much as it did to those who'd had a ‘nervous breakdown', whatever that meant. Today the symptoms are at least recognized as a medical condition although there is some debate around whether Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) are one and the same thing or not.

Dr. Frank Lipman rather neatly calls the condition ‘spent'. He has written a book by the same name based on 20 years experience of seeing people with symptoms of physical and emotional depletion coming to see him for help. Dr. Lipman's theory is blissfully simple and intuitively sensible. He argues that whilst our society has evolved rapidly our physiology hasn't changed in any significant way since the time we lived in caves and foraged for berries. Our bodies are still attuned to the seasons, day/night cycles, rhythms of activity and fairly simple diets. The total amount of physical, psychological and environmental stress on our body has quadrupled in just the past 30 years, says Dr. Lipman, and this increases the extent to which our bodies are out of sync.