You've dealt with chronic fatigue, so I'd love for you to share your story.

Yeah, absolutely.

So my story started in the late '90s.

So I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge, and I was burning the candle at both ends, so I was, uh, probably partying a little too hard and working and getting stressed by the coursework as well.

And I got some kind of virus, and I didn't know what caused the virus.

I just thought it's perfectly, perfectly normal.

And I didn't seem to recover from the virus, and I just got more and more fatigued, more and more exhausted, brain fog, difficulty thinking, physical ailments and tightness in the muscles to the point at which, you know, I almost couldn't get to the bathroom.

Is it a complement? Is it a first step before trying medical care? Where does it fit in?

From an evolutionary biology perspective, most of our modern maladies now make sense from that perspective, where the system doesn't care about your wellbeing, it cares about your survival.

So it will always err on the side of caution and can create downstream issues which don't make you feel good, but essentially are prioritizing survival.

We've been trained in a particular type of way in modern medicine to think of the body like a car.

That the...

Something goes wrong with the tires, we fix the tires.

Something goes wrong with the part of the engine, we fix the engine.

Does the brain learn the same way from a biophysical versus a, a, a, a, a, uh, emotional, uh, type stressor?

Yes.

Mm

... always nice to center, so we just take a... our eyes closed for a moment.

Uh, just having that bodily awareness and just becoming aware of our legs and our body.

We can take a slow, deep, deep breath in from the stomach.

And holding the breath, breathing out slowly through the nose in a controlled way.

Just bringing ourselves to the present moment.

Another slow, deep breath in.

I'm really curious what that, how that unfolded.