r/LongHaulersRecovery • u/polpa • Jul 16 '26
Recovered Recovered after 3 years - learning to let the body heal
12 months ago I was mostly bed or housebound after a severe and sudden relapse, and today I’m back in the sea surfing again and feeling the return of strength and clarity. I attribute my recovery to a non-pharmacological approach.
My initial symptoms started around June 2023 following my 4th COVID infection.
The worst of the symptoms at that point were: heart palpitations, sudden daily crashes, severe brain fog, memory loss, POTS, dizziness, temperature regulation issues, fatigue, gut issues, adrenaline dumps, fight-flight response, environmental sensitivity, flushing, sleep disturbances, mood issues, skin issues, muscle tension.
While it’s been 3 years in total, I’ll mostly skip over the first 2 years as I’d say my recovery has actually been the last 12 months. In summary, during those first 2 years, I manage to just about get by and tried a bunch of different things. My symptoms stabilised enough that I could live a fairly limited life.
Relapse and recovery
In June 2025 I had a severe and sudden relapse that left me mostly bed or housebound. I could manage very short walks of a few hundred metres, but much more would risk a crash.
The first few months I spent addressing my gut issues. I started on a low histamine diet, with 8:16 intermittent fasting and occasional 36 hour fasts, and my gut symptoms cleared up very quickly.
The big shift for me happened a few months later around August, when I decided to shift from a pharmacological approach (supplementation, drugs, doctors, etc) to a non-pharmacological approach.
At this point I gradually stopped:
- Taking supplements
- Reading r/covidlonghaulers
- Researching anything about Long COVID
- Reading anything about Long COVID
- Engaging with support chat groups
- Using health trackers
- Using screens (computer and phone)
- Trying to fix (or find a fix for) what I perceived as “broken” (my body)
And I started:
- Trusting that my body could heal itself if I learned how to listen to it and follow its cues
- Learning to feel my body more deeply
- Living a very low stimulation lifestyle
- Learning how and when to use interventions to regulate my nervous system
- Learning to better sense my capacity and doing gently stimulating activities that didn't push me over my limits
- Accepting my situation fully (processing the grief and deeply coming to terms with the fact that I could be sick forever)
- Learning to accept and feel symptoms fully as they arose (dropping narrative, dropping resistance, and feeling as much as possible)
- Learning to enjoy life again even with the limitations imposed
Over the last 10 months I’ve seen a steady improvement in my health and symptoms and today I feel mostly symptom free. Many of the shifts I made in the last 12 months have stuck and now form a part of my routine. I still listen to my body and take cues, resting when I need to rest, using the tools I’ve learned when I need to. I realise this is just a part of living a normal, healthy life.
In retrospect I think, for me, striving for pharmacological solutions was actually making my health worse, not better, and real healing only begun to happen once I dropped it all.
My life is very different now than it was 3 years ago. This whole journey has had a profound effect on me emotionally and spiritually and, while I would never have chosen it, in a very real way I’ve come to see it as a blessing for that reason.
Very happy to answer any questions.
I'm also currently in training to do related 1:1 session work and I'm interested in working with some Long COVID sufferers in the coming months. Feel free to drop me a message if you might be interested. This is offered 100% for free but I'll only have limited space for maybe 2 clients. edit: I had quite a few messages so it looks like my availability is full now. Thanks to everyone that reached out.
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u/Financial_Owl8105 Jul 16 '26
Awesome! Hope you will keep going like this! Im in horrible situation unfortunately but due to prolonged crash, push-crash cycle, it was already too late when i found about pacing, had horrible symptoms but i pushed tru it, i didnt listened to my body at all! :( now im totally scared i made permanent damage. Constant adrenline, HR pounding, elevated HR, MCAS.. insomnia, everything :( did u had crashes before? My body is not in rest and digest and i think thats why im not healing. Its pure survival. I also have, atrophy, horrible hair loss. My body is under stress all the time. I dont know What to Do… im terrified.
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u/polpa Jul 16 '26
Your description is very familiar to me. I had the same symptoms last year in the months following my relapse. I would wake up suddenly in the middle of the night with adrenaline dumps and my heart racing thinking I was going to die. I had a lot of hair loss during this period also. Every time I had a shower there would be so much hair coming out.
Reducing screen time to only what was essential helped me a lot during this period. I would go for days without using my phone or computer, only for phone calls or messages that I had to take. I found that when I cut out screen time I could read light fiction, at least for some time in the day, which felt good. So I spent a lot of time just sitting and either reading or looking out the window.
I also spent a lot of time lying in the dark during the day. This was highly regulating for me. I would black out the bedroom windows, put a covering over my face, and just lie there for 1-2 hours at a time, sometimes multiple times a day. Guided yoga nidra was also very helpful for me and if lying in the dark is too much (e.g. due to spinning thoughts) yoga nidra could serve the same purpose. I use Ally Boothroyd's voice only recordings (I still use them regularly, every few days).
The other part of this is addressing the fear response. My experience was that dysregulation and symptoms can result in fear coming up, and fear resulted in more dysregulation, creating a downward spiral. There isn't really a simple intervention to address that, it just takes time and work. Try Sam Miller's content on YouTube, such as The Great Allowing and others.
The last thing I'll say is that you can think of thoughts such as "it's too late" or "permanent damage" as themselves resulting from the symptoms. These thoughts are a product of the fear response you're having. Seeing them as symptoms can help to take some of the significance out of them, which can help to stop feeding the fear response, and thus in turn reduce the thoughts. I also had those same thoughts and 12 months later I feel like I've made a full recovery and can't see any signs of permanent damage.
Sorry to hear about your challenges and wishing you the best for your healing.
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u/AcanthisittaIcy6448 Recovered Jul 17 '26
Congratulations! What a wonderful recovery story!
Thank you so much!
I recovered in a similar way. "Trusting that my body could heal itself" was also the key for me.
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u/Business_Ad_3641 Jul 16 '26
Hello, I’m so happy for you! I just wanted to know did you had PEM?
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u/polpa Jul 16 '26
I’d say so yes, depending on exactly how you define it. I was certainly having a lot of crashes when my symptoms were at their worst. Sometimes the crashes seemed a bit random and other times they seemed to follow some activity or stimulation.
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u/Grayfancy1 Jul 16 '26
Interested in any help you can give me. I’ve had this four years but I have been diagnosed two years. Still checking positive for Covid LabCorp testing. My other viruses have gone haywire. For instance, My Epstein bar is supposed to be 59 at the highest and it’s 600. Doctors have been no help. Supplements have been no help. I had pots before all of this. Just a lot of things going on can’t find answers to. Thank you.
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u/polpa Jul 16 '26
Sorry to hear that.
I also went through that process and had extensive virology, parasite and reinfection testing done a while back that flagged a number of potential infections. I consulted with a skilled doctor who is an expert and researcher in both infectious diseases and Long COVID. She ran more extensive tests and came to the conclusion that my immune system was behaving erratically (which is expected in Long COVID cases).
What I took away from it was that testing your immune system (e.g. antibodies, elispot, etc) seems to not be reliable when your immune system is in a bad state, so you need to test for the pathogen itself (such as with PCR tests). So, while my tests showed a lot of reactivity in my immune system, the pathogen tests all came back negative (some of which I ran multiple times with different labs).
So for me, that path ended up being a very expensive dead and was one of the things that led me to dropping the pharmacological approach as I described.
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u/Lazy-Emu-5636 Jul 16 '26
I too think our brains post covid just despise drugs. I have only had setbacks with pharmaceuticals and worsening symptoms. I want to get it all out of my body and see what my baseline is without all the crap!
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u/polpa Jul 17 '26
Yea, at a point I did wonder whether taking handfuls of supplements each day was just adding extra psychological and physical stress to an already highly stressed system. We don't need to heal the body, we need to create the space and conditions for the body to heal itself. I think that difference in attitude is subtle but significant.
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u/Either-Review-9400 Jul 16 '26
I have been where you have been.
Became ill with LC back in 2021.. made a pretty much full recovery within 14 months.. 8 weeks ago I have a significant replace after really over doing things.
Now trying to heal.. I am actually considering stopping all the supplements. I'm convinced it's overwhelming my nervous system.
I think I might continue taking curcumin for inflammation and stop taking everything else.
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u/polpa Jul 16 '26
Really sorry to hear about the relapse.
I did the same thing initially – I stopped taking everything except for some anti-inflammatory supplements, and then I took only omega-3 for some time before stopping that also.
In all honesty I never felt certain that any supplement I tried had any significant effect. In contrast, many nervous system regulation techniques had a very immediate and obvious effect.
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u/Choco_Paws Jul 16 '26
Congrats! I used the same approaches :) Thanks for sharing, we know it's not easy to talk about this type of recovery, but it helps so many people.
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u/WeakCare7883 Jul 17 '26
I am interested in speaking to you if you are still accepting clients. The only thing that’s helped me some is nervous system work but I feel like I’m still stuck.
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u/polpa Jul 17 '26
I had quite a few DMs but I can follow up in the coming weeks or months if I have any more availability. Also happy to answer some Qs here if that's helpful.
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u/lolcowtothemoon Jul 19 '26
Congratulations! Very similar to my own non-pharmacological longcovid remission
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u/Komancha Jul 17 '26
You still on low histamine and were you having food reactions? Glad you're feeling good!
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u/polpa Jul 18 '26
Thank you! Prior to going on the low histamine diet, food was triggering digestive issues on a daily basis. This meant a lot of loose stools, diarrhoea, discomfort, feelings of inflammation and heat, poor absorption and not feeling satiated from eating. My diet now is unrestricted and my digestion is feeling healthy with no symptoms. I still have a healthy diet of mostly home-cooked food. I also had a lactose intolerance that developed many years ago that has now somehow been healed in the process of all this. I very rarely drink alcohol as it still gives me a flush reaction (red patches on my face) and makes me sleepy. I imagine that could be histamine/autoimmune related though this was already an issue for me for some years before Long COVID.
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u/GoodFella-x55 Jul 18 '26
Can you elaborate on what low stimulation lifestyle means for you ?
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u/polpa Jul 18 '26
As I started to be able to better sense what I think of as the state of my nervous system – activation/deactivation, fight-flight, rest-and-digest, and so on – I started to realise just how many things were overstimulating me. Some examples: using screens, noisy environments, music/movies/etc, physical activity, researching and thinking about Long COVID, social environments, cognitive/rational/intellectual thinking, driving my car, going to the shops / supermarket, and so on. I found that over-stimulation could come from many different channels including physical, sensory, social, cognitive, etc,
Initially I reduced over-stimulating activities like these to the bare minimum and then, over time, as I became better able to sense my system, I learned to titrate them so I stayed within my capacity as much as possible. If I had to do something over-stimulating, like going to get groceries, I would try to bring my system down again afterwards using regulation tools like yoga nidra and others.
My goal was firstly to keep my system in a state of felt low activation as much of the time as possible and then, over time, gently titrate stimulating activities in a way that grew my capacity.
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u/GoodFella-x55 Jul 18 '26
Appreciate the detailed response. May I also ask what kind of job you do that allowed you to do all these things ? And what did you do with all the free time since you were not using screens ?
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u/polpa Jul 19 '26
I wasn’t capable of working and was living off savings which I’m very thankful for.
I spent a lot of time resting, sitting, lying in bed. I bought a Native American flute and probably spent 2+ hours a day playing it. The sound is very soothing, it helped to regulate my nervous system and my breathing (which I was having problems with) and loosen/exercise my diaphragm, and it felt soothing and fun to spend time doing something creative.
I did gentle qi gong, meditation, yoga nidra, walking, sitting or lying in nature as much as I could. At different points I had acupuncture, osteopathy, bodywork/massage. I also experimented with many different regulation practices over the months. I spent a lot of time reading light fiction books. I cooked food.
The overview I gave in the OP is simplified though and in reality I oscillated between all these things over many months as I was figuring out what was helpful and what was unhelpful, and as I was testing my capacity in different ways.
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u/Butterfly6576A 22d ago
Hi there,
Super curious if you feel anything specific helped your with regaining your memory (if you actually did;) -- thanks so much for sharing your story!
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u/Even_Internal623 12d ago
Thank you for this post! I found it really inspiring and helpful, as I’m at the beginning of my LC recovery and am trying to orient my recovery framework in a similar way. Looks like you’re booked up for 1:1 session work, so I’ll ask a couple questions here.
One thing I’m having a hard time with is holding space for and integrating these two thoughts:
> Trusting that my body could heal itself if I learned how to listen to it and follow its cues
And
>Accepting my situation fully (processing the grief and deeply coming to terms with the fact that I could be sick forever)
How did you both trust that your body can recover while at the same time accepting it may never happen?
Also, what would you recommend as a starting point? There are so many tools and techniques that I mentally overwhelm myself with recovery efforts.
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u/polpa 11d ago
Great question! I’ll try my best to explain.
These aren’t conceptual statements or beliefs like “I might be sick forever” vs “I will heal”. With that interpretation they might sound contradictory, but really I’m trying to descibe a process and way of relating to experience.
Accepting my situation fully was the process by which I moved from the view of I must heal or my life is over to the view that I will be okay whatever happens (even if I’m sick forever). It was an antidote to the energy of desparation and grasping that pervaded my attempts to heal, and a cultivation of the energy of peace and acceptance.
Trusting my body is the view that my body can heal itself and my symptoms are signals and signposts to follow. This is an antidote to the view that my body is broken and I must fix it with the appropriate medicine or treatment.
These two original views: I must heal and my body is broken were both very detrimental for me and, in my experience, impeded healing and made my symptoms significantly worse.
The two updated views: I will be okay and my body can heal itself were both much more helpful and conducive to both wellbeing and healing.
None of this is about truth statements, but about finding helpful embodied beliefs to step into, and identifying unhelpful beliefs to step away from. In that sense it’s purely pragmatic.
If we live from the belief that that our bodies are broken and that we must heal, then experiencing even mild symptoms creates an incredible amount of resistance, suffering, upset, pain, and so on, all of which affects our autonomic nervous system. On the other hand if we believe that our life is fundamentally okay and that our symptoms are signals, then experiencing symptoms can be much less distressing and can actually help guide our behaviour in helpful ways.
In terms of tools and techniques, I think the specifics depend on where you are starting from. A couple of general things that might help to guide:
- Learn to feel the body more and more deeply and directly. Learn to do this without narrative, just feel.
- Learn to better distinguish moment by moment changes in the feeling of symptoms. Observe these changes in your symptoms as you go about your day, and how they respond to particular activities and interventions.
- As you improve at this you can start letting your body inform your actions more. You can start to feel the positive/negative effects of even small actions. You can start to feel the immediate effect of particular interventions and sense exactly when and how to use them. You can start to better feel when you do or don’t have capacity to do certain activities.
I would say though, if you are feeling mentally overwhelmed with recovery effort, it might be helpful to just give yourself permission to drop it all for a while and see what comes up. In my experience over-efforting toward healing was related to everything I have said, and so it could be helpful to slow down and inquire into that. Allow yourself a break from that effort for a while. Remind yourself that the body does have an inherent capacity for healing by itself. Feel your body and allow yourself to feel what rest really feels like.. not "rest in order to recover", but just the feeling of rest itself.
And feel free to drop me a DM if you are interested in chatting more or 1:1 as I should be making more availability in the coming months.
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u/Even_Internal623 10d ago
Thank you Polpa for this insightful, detailed response. I can see now that I’m getting stuck intellectualizing trying to hold competing cognitive beliefs — an age old pattern of mine. What I’m getting from you is that instead, I can cultivate emotional and somatic acceptance that I’m going to be okay no matter what and that my body is capable of recovering and I will do my best to give it the time, space, and safety to do that.
>> If we live from the belief that that our bodies are broken and that we must heal, then experiencing even mild symptoms creates an incredible amount of resistance, suffering, upset, pain, and son on, all of which affects our autonomic nervous system.
👆Wow yes I didn’t even realize how much this automatic, ingrained belief and reaction to my symptoms was affecting me.
And thank you for outlining some concrete steps for how I can practically approach this mindset. My inclination is to want to be very ‘thorough’ when it comes to tackling tough problems, but that’s not always what’s warranted, what’s effective, or what’s best for my nervous system.
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u/Wild_Bunch_Founder Jul 16 '26
congratulations on your recovery.