5 emotions which turn into Chronic fatigue.

[Woolie]

5 emotions after watching that video:

indignation
disgust
frustration
confusion
contempt

I like the progression of emotions here, @Snow Leopard. Its about how it is. You start by being outraged, and then comes the mixed disguist/frustration/confusion, then at the end of all that you end up with contempt, aka the why-did-I-waste-my-energy-on-that-utter-drivel phase.

In emoticons, it would go like this: ... and if you're lucky, resolving in this: .

 

[Effi]

The average person seems almost ticked off that before onset, I ate good, wholesome food, exercised regularly, and meditated on a non-consistent basis.

I had a very clean diet, exercised, meditated. But I still got sick. Looking back now, I feel like the reason why I got into clean eating, meditating, etc. in the first place was because I was already starting to feel... off. I had no idea what was happening at the time, but knowing what I know now about ME, it was already creeping up on me (slow onset).

 

[pamojja]

I like the progression of emotions here, @Snow Leopard. Its about how it is. You start by being outraged, and then comes the mixed disguist/frustration/confusion, then at the end of all that you end up with contempt, aka the why-did-I-waste-my-energy-on-that-utter-drivel phase.

In emoticons, it would go like this: ... and if you're lucky, resolving in this: .

I have to disagree. Emotions are never static, or have to escalate, or stagnate. If one doesn't identify with them - just as with anything perceived (sight, heard, smelt, tasted or touched) - emotions on their own given attention to tend to change or cease at one point. And the the whole spectrum of emoticons is available again

 

[JaimeS]

Looking back now, I feel like the reason why I got into clean eating, meditating, etc. in the first place was because I was already starting to feel... off.

Yup. I remember thinking, "if everyone knew how much BETTER it feels to eat properly..." and "...if everyone knew how much more limber you are if you only exercise..." Meanwhile, my peers in their 20s were chowing down on McDonald's and lounging about and feeling -- it would appear -- at least 'okay'. My herbal medicine knowledge meant that if there was a symptom, I had a quick 'patch' I could slap over it to make it go away... or at least ensure that it wasn't shouting so loudly.

I think in many ways, it was -- I wonder how our colloquial expressions differ -- a thumb in the dam.

Then a health event would come along from which I never quite made it back to baseline. This happened several times...

There was eventually a 'final straw'...

....aaaand here we are.

 

[Techs]

The thing is though, that 'stress' is a very bendable concept. Some researchers say 'stress' when they mean a virus, being exposed to a toxic agent, or some physical trauma like a bad car accident. But the word stress is also a wastebasket word used for 'any life event negative or positive that some weaklings just can't handle'. I think that is the concept of 'stress' that we get annoyed at, because that is where the blame game begins.

If connotation is the problem, we should come up with a better term for "stress." How about "cursed by an evil sorcerer"?

But I might argue that the term's malleability is precisely what makes it useful -- sort of like the umbrella term "disease." If you're a believer in mind-body interconnectedness then delineating between the physiological and the psychological starts to become an awfully fuzzy pursuit. A virus can stress the immune system, but so can lack of rest, emotional instability, substance abuse, etc. Distaste of the word because some people might associate it with "weaklings" seems overly defensive if we are in pursuit of facts.

Some plants can actually turn hermaphrodite from relatively minor environmental stress! (Inconsistent light, insects, etc.)

A thought experiment based on a fascinating interview Cort had recently with a researcher of energy production at the cellular level: If one's glycolytic pathway is overstimulated in ME due to stress (the researcher posits viral stress), causing insufficient mitochondrial energy production, over-accumulation of lactate, etc -- why would others exposed to the same stress trigger (say, a virus) not get ME? We can point to genetics, but part of genetics is one's personality. So what if we discovered that a lot of patients had been Type-A personalities who "helped" overstimulate their glycolyctic pathways to reach the breaking point, while non-Type-A personalities navigated similar genetic distortions more successfully because they were content to spend their younger lives closer to the TV and sofa? The point being, I don't think "blame" is a relevant concept here. Being an over-achiever is not the "cause" of the illness, but it may be a "trigger" for some.

I wouldn't blame someone's heart attack on stress (the cause is heart disease), but stress could certainly be the trigger that leads one to have a heart attack, while someone else who discovered pot brownies skates through.

We've even learned not to (overly) blame people with addiction, since we now know how addiction physiologically alters the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain.

The New Yorker has a very interesting piece on Sweden's "apathetic" -- specifically, hundreds of refugee children (with similar genetics) who have spent years in near-coma conditions (mirroring our worst-case ME stories) brought on solely by the fear of deportation (obviously not all children in Sweden fearing deportation become ill). The country has been coping with the disease strictly as a psychological condition, but as they recognize that when children do become better it typically takes them a half year or so to return to semi-normalcy after their deportation fear was lifted. So only recently have a few researchers begun to consider that the disease might actually be physiological, even if triggered by a very specific psychological stress shouldered by the predisposed.

It's funny, when I became full-on sick, the idea that stress might have been involved did not cross my mind. It was only later, while trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, that I started wondering about stress-as-trigger. So I'm fairly agnostic about the concept. But as a believer in the complexity of mind-body interactions I find myself advocating for the possibility that stress might play some role in some people. I think I understand the defensiveness against the idea, but I'm just not sure how productive it is.

 

[Effi]

@Techs You seem to be opposed to the idea that the concept of 'stress' as a trigger of disease leads to patient blaming. We certainly don't blame ourselves, but an important part of the medical community and government does use this concept as a reason to put the entire burden and responsibility on us patients. It turns our illness into a non issue. This directly leads to a lack of research, a lack of treatment, a lack of social support, and ultimately to overall neglect of very, very sick patients. This is real and it has been going on on a daily basis for decades. So yes, we are opposed to it. We are way past the point of wanting to cling onto something that might influence some people. We need real answers, now.

 

[JaimeS]

I wouldn't blame someone's heart attack on stress (the cause is heart disease), but stress could certainly be the trigger that leads one to have a heart attack, while someone else who discovered pot brownies skates through.

When my mother was first diagnosed, she was told to 'avoid stress'. Then the doctor winked at her and said, "so leave your husband, give your kids up for adoption, and move to a monastery." He was well-aware that stress is a fact of life: not avoidable, save a bullet to the brain. We will all encounter stress, even acute stress. Need I add that pot does not make it impossible for you to encounter stress, or ensure you respond to it in a healthy way?

So what if we discovered that a lot of patients had been Type-A personalities who "helped" overstimulate their glycolyctic pathways to reach the breaking point, while non-Type-A personalities navigated similar genetic distortions more successfully because they were content to spend their younger lives closer to the TV and sofa?

The issue here is that we HAVE been diagnosed as more likely to be Type-A overachievers, a handful of times.

We've also been diagnosed as underachievers eager to live off of benefits and have an easier life. Several times.

Now perhaps there are some over- and some underachievers, and these are subsets. Or perhaps personality-typing is like your horoscope: a description that you can push to describe anything you like.

Either way, I want to know what impact it has on treatment. Wessley et al seem to believe we are the latter. The docs and popular culture of the US in the 1990s seem to believe we are the former. I want legitimate, peer-reviewed reports showing that the former were healed by meditation and the latter by motivational speakers and I will believe personality type is more significant here than in other illnesses.

PACE, Wessley et al's attempt to prove the latter, didn't work out so well.

Either way, I suppose I don't see the POINT of stress-attribution narratives, since chilling out doesn't appear to be helpful.

-J

 

[pamojja]

We certainly don't blame ourselves, but an important part of the medical community and government does use this concept as a reason to put the entire burden and responsibility on us patients. It turns our illness into a non issue. This directly leads to a lack of research, a lack of treatment, a lack of social support, and ultimately to overall neglect of very, very sick patients. This is real and it has been going on on a daily basis for decades. So yes, we are opposed to it.

I'm new to the forum and this is one thing I probably wont become accustomed to here. Just have overcome a kind of CVD, the physical disease most of us will die from (second is cancer). And to that end participated in a health forum (TrackYourPlaque) where not one stone has been left unturned, or considered a tabu, as emotional contributors are here. Because despite a century and having invested billions of research, it's many biochemical contributing factors basically understood. - There still isn't any tteatment with much more an effect than a 1% reduction in 5 year mortality rate!!!

My experience in remission of a by medicine standards non-reversible and mercilessly progressing disease - without anything pharmaceutical industry was able to come up with - with in comparison almost endless funding and a century of research - leaves me flabbergasted why almost everyone here puts every hope into it.

I understand the political unfortunate implications. But that happens to every patients of non-reversible major diseases, who isn't satisfied with the best treatment conventional medicine came up with: a mere 1-3% reduction of 5 year mortality. Each of them will be on their own without better treatment available - just as it is with ME/CFS too.

There is an immense peer-pressure here not to look under every possible contribution to the disease with this irrational hope medical science would solve it one day, as I never have experienced in communities of other non-treatable diseases. It's so unfortunate, because if I wouldn't have looked under every possible contribution to my form of CVD, how likely could it have gone into remission?

 

[me/cfs 27931]

I now understand why overachiever Chuck Norris remains free of ME/CFS.

 

[pamojja]

I now understand why overachiever Chuck Norris remains free of ME/CFS.

Preconceptions do turn everything into gray. Then there is no new discovery.

There isn't certainty.

 

[Forbin]

And these are the five emotions that turn into $857,611,174.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=pixar2014.htm

 

[Snow Leopard]

The problem with "stress" is that it is used in such a non-specific/catch-all way as to be meaningless. We shouldn't start talking about stress unless we use highly specific definitions and actually have a model that connects the bio-psycho-social in a deep way. (on that note, studies run by psychs that measure cortisol once or twice and find small associations between that and questionnaire results are weak at best and trash at worst).

The issue here is that we HAVE been diagnosed as more likely to be Type-A overachievers, a handful of times.
We've also been diagnosed as underachievers eager to live off of benefits and have an easier life. Several times.

I hope to win a Nobel Prize, then retire and live off benefits.

 

[pamojja]

The problem with "stress" is that it is used in such a non-specific/catch-all way as to be meaningless. We shouldn't start talking about stress unless we use highly specific definitions and actually have a model that connects the bio-psycho-social in a deep way.

I don't know, but for me not-well handled stress is an experience. As my own truth-finder into what could be cause or effect in disease (where it is my experience again, usually an effect becomes the cause of a further effect. And so on..) I take each symptom first of all phenomenologically, and only secondarily look at - more often than not - conflicting scientific definitions.

I hope we are still allowed to talk about symptoms how they are experienced. Just as one could describe a fever how it is experienced along with its circumstances, one likewise can describe and talk about stress experientially. And take scientific research, were usually further research is asked for - for further funding - for what it has become nowadays. Income and status generator.

I hope to win a Nobel Prize, then retire and live off benefits.

Exactly that.

 

[pamojja]

For example, I could phenomenological differentiate between the 2 years of a stressful job due to time constraints at work, with the stress now caused by ME/CFS. The former made me intentionally withdraw privately. ME/CFS stresses now, because I'm involuntarily unable to keep up any social-life whatsoever (and much more..). In both cases it clearly presents itself as effect of circumstances. But if I measure heart-rate-variability, it also shows stress - however differentiated - will itself again become the cause of biologic chronic sympathetic dominance (aka fight/flight response) with all their biological down-stream effects, which again become causes in furthering the chain of causality.

By the definition at wikipedia:

Physiological or biological stress is an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition. Stress is the body's method of reacting to a challenge. Stimuli that alter an organism's environment are responded to by multiple systems in the body. The autonomic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis are two major systems that respond to stress. The sympathoadrenal medullary (SAM) axis may activate the fight or flight response through the sympathetic nervous system, which dedicates energy to more relevant bodily systems to acute adaption to stress, while the parasympathetic nervous system returns the body to homeostasis. The second major physiological stress , the HPA axis regulates the release of cortisol, which influences many bodily functions such as metabolic, psychological and immunological functions. The SAM and HPA axes are regulated by a wide variety of brain regions, including the limbic system, prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hypothalamus, and stria terminalis.[1] Through these mechanisms, stress can alter memory functions, reward, immune function, metabolism and susceptibility to diseases.[2]

It's not only in my head.

 

[Woolie]

If connotation is the problem, we should come up with a better term for "stress." How about "cursed by an evil sorcerer"?

Actually, those two terms are pretty close to the same thing in my view. They are just as untestable and just as vague. And they both have the same magical appeal, in that they appear to make sense of things we don't have an explanation for.

When we say "stress" we usually mean one of two things. We either mean unpleasant stuff happening in our lives (which could be anything from having a demanding job to worrying about our mortgage or even losing a loved one), or we mean our failure to respond to that unpleasant stuff in the way we are told is most "healthy". Or we mean both.

I don't understand this modern obsession with avoiding "stress". Like we are all some sort of delicate flowers that will collapse the moment anything unpleasant happens, if we don't react to it in the ideal way. Seems to me if that were the case, our ancestors would never have survived.

A stress-free life seems to boil down to either avoiding the bad stuff (good luck with that!), or else trying to somehow react to the bad stuff with perfect serenity (good luck with that too!). If either of those is what a stress-free life is supposed to be, then I'd say its not really much of a life at all.

 

[pamojja]

I don't understand this modern obsession with avoiding "stress". Like we are all some sort of delicate flowers that will collapse the moment anything unpleasant happens, if we don't react to it in the ideal way. Seems to me if that were the case, our ancestors would never have survived.

And I don't understand this PR obsession in denying stress. Be it physical (viral, bacterial, etc.) or situational. Of our ancestors none has survived yet. We all will come down sooner or later to this combined onslaught of stressors. Birth and death will continue. The question is rather, can sympathetic dominance be corrected to avoid its biologic down-stream effects, and for extending health-span?

We don't know the definitive answer to that question. And we don't know how that would influence disease progression with ME/CFS. But again, I hope we are allowed to ask such questions.

 

[Woolie]

Of our ancestors none has survived yet.

Haha!

Actually, come to think of it, my grandma's still alive, and she's 95. Or do you have to be dead before you count as an ancestor? I'm not sure.

 

[Snow Leopard]

And I don't understand this PR obsession in denying stress. Be it physical (viral, bacterial, etc.) or situational.

Each of those is quite different in terms of potential causation.
We are not denying stress, we are asking for precise (and therefore useful) statements to be made, not meaningless catch all statements that doesn't predict anything in particular (in terms of low specificity and sensitivity of the predictor)

Lumping all forms of stress, or even all forms of what our society lumps into the psychological stress category is not useful because it is a nonspecific predictor - whether the intent is to predict specific behaviour, emotions or other impacts on health.

 

[TiredSam]

Of our ancestors none has survived yet.

Every single one of my ancestors for the last million years has survived stress and everything else life had to throw at them at least until they managed to reproduce, otherwise I wouldn't be here.

 

[Woolie]

@pamojja, in all seriousness, your wikipedia definition of stress is referring to physiological/biological stressors (such as viral infections, malnutrition or injury) and the way the body reacts to them. It has nothing at all to do with the kind of psychological or emotional "stress" you describe, so you are incorrectly extending the concept there. This is the very problem with the concept of stress, the two very different things get morphed together.

I kind of like the shudder quotes around "stress", can I keep doing that?