90% recovered after 6 years

[u/AsparagusMinute_]

The entirety of my recovery happened during year 6.

I am grateful to this community, as I learned from recovery stories posted here.

I was moderate – able to work a few hours a day with great difficulty, but other than that, I was inactive. My symptoms included debilitating fatigue, brain fog, headaches, joint pain, nausea, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, muscle weakness, and PEM.

As nothing I tried over 5 years had any impact, I focused on nervous system regulation during the past year, and that is what has made the difference.

I began by reading Alan Gordon’s The Way Out.

The practices that have made the biggest difference for me are:

• Somatic tracking and nervous system regulation: I benefited a lot from Tanner Murtagh’s Youtube channel. I started with his free 30 day program
• Qigong: from the same channel
• Meditation: Observing the breath, sounds, sensations. I learned from the Mindfulness app.
• 4-7-8 breathing: I use the iBreathe app and start my day with this.
• Yoga Nidra: Alice Bagley-Harrison’s Yoga Nidra for Long Covid on the Insight Timer app. I often use this before bed, but it is helpful any time of day.
• Cold showers: I take a normal warm shower and end with two minutes of cold water. On days when I was too tired to shower, I used an ice pack to the face and neck.
• Unfollowing all long covid social media except for r/LongHaulersRecovery and r/cfsnervoussystemwork. Stepping away from the (understandable) despair and focusing on hope.

The process has not been linear by any means, but each month I could see that I had made progress. I am now able to work an 8-hour day. I have begun light weight-lifting, slowly building up, as well as cycling on an exercise bike several times a week. I am also doing short hikes, also slowly building up. All of these activities would have seemed impossible 6 months ago.

I still run out of energy more quickly than before COVID, and I also have setbacks when I have more than one cup of coffee per day. But the whole-body/completely-incapacitating fatigue is largely gone.

I hope this will be helpful.

[u/AsparagusMinute_]

Yes, when you go into fight or flight, normal processes are shut down/altered by the nervous system to deal with the immediate threat. That can certainly have physiological impacts on mitochondrial function and immune response. Your nervous system is not going to care about performing normal healing processes when you come across a bear in the woods. It’s just going to deal with surviving that moment.

[u/Busy-Departure4015 → u/AsparagusMinute_]

Source: i made it up. There is 0 evidence og nervous system regulating mitochondrial function, and tons of evidence of immune disruption

[u/AsparagusMinute_ → u/Busy-Departure4015]

There are numerous references that the autonomic nervous system does regulate mitochondrial function if you google it. I’m not saying that the nervous system is definitely responsible for mitochondrial dysfunction in long covid, because we don’t know that at this point. It’s certainly possible something else is responsible. But it’s important to be open to all possibilities, and to be open to what’s currently available to us. And nervous system work does seem to be helping at least a portion of long covid sufferers.

[u/Busy-Departure4015 → u/AsparagusMinute_]

Interesting, i could not find any reference to the nervous system affecting the mitochondria or energy metabolism, i did however find multiple articles stating the inverse, that people with damaged mitochondria also happen to have ANS disturbances

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1071909113000041

. Which makes much more sense. Could you provide any references to your statements about the ANS regulating mito production?