Chronic Fatigue

See also Pain/Fibromyalgia

Chronic fatigue is usually a really wound up ANS (long-term Tone issues), so it can be related to any of the various strategies for dealing with Tone. Look for them in the order you normally would follow and try training each in that order.

Remember with this kind of client you will want to address possible secondary gain issues by helping the client find a way to take some control of her own life, reducing incoming stress by 10% is what I aim for. Use technologies (breathing or heart-rate variability) to begin impacting the parasympathetic tone. And test the hypotheses for which cortical strategy she is using to protect against/lock in the subcortical drive issues.

One thing I would look for is potentially very high alpha, either with eyes open or closed, which often goes along with chronic fatigue or chronic pain syndromes.

If you don’t resolve the underlying stress issues, it will be like trying to bail the water out of a boat with a large hole in the bottom. Her brain has developed a way of controlling the stress situation–perhaps long ago–and now cannot let go of that. You must identify that pattern and teach her brain to release it first. Then she can begin to improve.

Alpha and Fatigue

Many of the chronic pain and chronic fatigue clients I’ve seen/worked with had problems with alpha.  There is often a lot of it, but it is often slow and doesn’t block well with eyes open or at task.   Often you will find a scooped out area around 6-8 Hz, which is a hint that there is blocked emotional material.

These are usually people who have shown highly stressed or traumatic patterns.  What differentiates them is in the strategy their brains adopt to deal with that state.  Often when you speak to them, they are more than happy to talk about the pain or fatigue but rarely have anything to say about anxiety or depression, etc.  They “wrap” the subconscious emotional pain in alpha as a way of anesthetizing themselves, and this, in fact, works quite well for a while.  Eventually, though, the emotional drive which is not being expressed or dealt with becomes somaticized and appears as a physical problem (easier to talk about and perhaps more acceptable).  Getting the alpha down and/or speeding up its peak frequency are often useful starting points. Of course, training up SMR might be effective in this process (though you have to be careful, as SMR training tends to make a person more aware of the body, which is not necessarily a good thing when your body is primarily tired or painful).