15. The fun way to heal from fatigue

Do your thoughts constantly go to how tired you are? Do you constantly feel how hard life is? Do you constantly try to feel if you are getting worse? If you are getting more tired, more brain fog, more dizzy, more nauseated, more palpitations? There is a risk that you are making yourself worse, and your life and your exhaustion even harder.

Today I'm going to talk about how to make your exhaustion easier to live with, and maybe even enjoyable at times. I'm going to talk about how your thoughts can help you heal. And no, I'm not going to talk about thinking positively or lying to yourself. Being exhausted is a pain, there's a lot of sadness, anxiety, fear and frustration. But that doesn't have to mean it's always like that. It can actually be wonderful, fun and relaxing.

Key takeaways

When you get sick and start thinking more about how sick you are, which is completely natural and something we all do, we strengthen the neural pathways that sense the bad. We become super good at feeling bad, so-called sensitization. Which stresses our brain and our nervous system, which makes us more tired, more nauseous, dizzy, gives us more pain or whatever symptoms we have.

But just as we can build neural pathways to feel bad, we can build neural pathways to feel good. We can train ourselves to feel good by focusing more on what we actually enjoy. It needs to be what you really enjoy, not what I enjoy or what you pretend to enjoy. When you leaning into positive sensations, you create safety for the brain, the stress level drops and the nervous system can leave its survival mode for a while.

You can reinforce this reaction by writing down what you experience and by photographing it.