I got (caught? developed?) Chronic Fatigue 16 years ago. I was a good test case for it being real or not.
I am a skeptic and not a cry-baby. I’m not the kind of person who admits to weakness and vulnerability, and it is rare (way less than annually) for me to take simple medication like Panadol. I tough things out.
And I was super active:
- jogging
- running a marketing company
- doing volunteer work 2 hours each day (Freecycle)
- writing a book
- managing a large internet discussion board
- stay at home Dad (shopping, taking kids to school)
I was on the go and on the ball from sun up to bed time.
Then I caught glandular fever and developed chronic fatigue. Developed is not the word, it became full-blown after a couple of days. Walking the kids to school – 5 minutes each way – became arduous, and jogging was impossible. The inability was alien to me. I didn’t know why I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. The go button had been taken from me.
Over the years it has lessened somewhat. Partly because I have gotten used to it and adapted. Possibly it has also diminished on its own.
When I got a job 8 years ago, I honestly thought I would be fired after a week. I did not expect to be able to do the work. Aside from the fatigue, I was easily capable. But strangely, I didn’t feel the fatigue at work, it was a miracle!
So I hypothesised that doing things for myself (writing, family, entrepreneurial) and working for someone else somehow triggered different things in my brain. Perhaps released different hormones.
Now I see this in New Scientist and it makes more sense. Your mind actually chooses whether to spend energy on something! Out of your conscious control, it would seem.
In the brain, there are four key areas that keep track of available cellular energy and work together to predict whether the outcome of performing a task will be worth the investment need to act.
…The other two brain regions are the prefrontal cortex, which is important for self-control and future planning, and the striatum, part of the brain’s reward network, which signals the potential pay off.
…When cellular energy levels are low, the benefit must be higher to outweigh the energy cost. If the sums don’t add up, fatigue sets in.
It an experiment, when people do tedious memory and attention tasks, their performance declines after long periods, but if they are offered money as an incentive, they perform better. Your brain decides that the reward makes it worthwhile to not be fatigued.
It is important to understand that I was never consciously making such decisions. But somehow money (which equals food and shelter) was sufficient to get things working as they should. But other things no longer carried the same weight. In my experience.
Note: There seems to be different causes of chronic fatigue, so mine might just be one type. There are so many aspects to how your brain decides things – four different parts of the brain , and intra-body communications – that different maladies could have the same result.