Episode 8 – Possible Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue

Shownotes Although knowing your root cause may not be essential to moving forward on your journey, it can make all the difference when it comes to a full recovery. In this episode Anna discusses possible root causes that you may want to have on your radar. She also shares her own personal journey and how, when she discovered this root cause, it was the final nail in her CFS coffin.  Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Possible Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue Hello, and welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. In this podcast, I’m going to be talking about the possible root causes of chronic fatigue. Suppose you have tuned into some of the recent previous episodes, specifically the cell danger response episode and the episode I released last week on the big picture of fatigue recovery. In that case, you may already have a sense of what the possible root causes could be. Feel free to go back and listen to those episodes if you haven’t already, but in this episode. I will touch on them a little bit more, not in huge detail, but just enough to give you a sense of what could be happening for you.  So when I first became unwell with chronic fatigue, I guess there were certain biochemical imbalances that I was addressing in my body. For example, when I started working with a practitioner, I already had many self-care practices. I was meditating, I was practising yoga, I was spending time in nature, I was journaling, and there were a lot of things that I was already doing to look after my body.  Therefore we jumped straight ahead, and we jumped into rebalancing some of those secondary biochemical imbalances. I worked a lot on my blood sugar in the beginning, I worked on my digestive health, I worked on oxygenation, a lot of those pieces of the puzzle that I mentioned in the previous episode, and then when I spoke with other people about what was going on in my body, a lot of the chronic fatigue, literature or resources or people posting things online, it’s all very much nervous system focused. There’s this assumption almost that chronic fatigue is just burnout. It’s just a dysfunction of the nervous system.  I would say yes; we need to factor the nervous system, nourishment, or nervous system care into a chronic fatigue and burnout recovery plan. But sometimes, other things are going on. Ultimately, chronic fatigue develops when something has worn down the system over time.  And yes, that could be chronic stress or big traumas which have happened in the past, changing the window of tolerance. Therefore, everyday stress is very stressful to an individual. But where I went so incredibly wrong in my journey was stopping there, thinking that I just needed some supplements for my mitochondria and needed to work on my blood sugar balance and support my nervous system, and that would be e...