The One Habit You Need to Master to Achieve Control Over Your Fibromyalgia Pain, Exhaustion & Brain Fog
- Flourishing With Fibromyalgia
- Aug 31, 2024
- 7 min read
Are you hitting a wall in reducing your fibromyalgia pain, improving your energy, and clearing your fibrofog?
Finding something challenging doesn't mean that you give up.
Perhaps you haven't found that one habit you need to master to achieve a pain-free, energetic life.
Lucky for you, I'm here to teach you all about re-training the dysfunctional stress response that comes with fibromyalgia.
Grab your coffee or tea and dive on in with me, fibro warrior.
First, What Is The Dysfunctional Stress Response?
Have you heard of the dysfunctional stress response before? It's no problem if you haven't.
In most simple terms, the dysfunctional stress response in fibromyalgia means that your body is stuck in an active stress response that does not shut off when it should. This means you’re stuck in the fight-flight-freeze-fawn state.
The stress response requires a lot of energy, nutrients, and resources to maintain, and over time, your body may have trouble mounting an appropriate stress response when it needs to.
Depending on how long your body has been stuck in this active stress response, your cortisol levels can be affected differently. Cortisol is your body’s stress hormone. Cortisol may be high when it shouldn’t be and may not rise as high as it should when a stressful event occurs.
For those of us who have been in the chronic pain world for a while, you know this leaves you feeling depleted, exhausted, foggy, and achy, like you’ve worked out even when you haven’t.
If you live a very stressful life and have for a long time, your cortisol levels may always be low. This is a sign of burnout or complete exhaustion of your stress response system.
As you can see, the dysfunctional stress response is a major factor contributing to fibromyalgia symptoms. Re-training your body how to relax and shut off the stress response is a key factor in getting your pain, exhaustion, and brain fog under control. It allows you to break the cycle and heal the damage that has been done to your body.
It's also good to know that:
You don’t necessarily have to feel “stressed” for this to be true for you. There are several physical abnormalities in fibromyalgia that activate the stress response. Additionally, experiencing trauma throughout your lifetime can trigger the stress response to get stuck on.
Cortisol (your stress hormone) and melatonin (your sleep hormone) exist in a delicate balance. If cortisol is too high or high at the wrong times, your body won’t produce enough melatonin. This means you’re not getting restful deep sleep.
The dysfunctional stress response contributes to damage to other parts of your body, such as your digestive system and gut microbiome, your mitochondria, your muscles, and it messes with how your body responds to other hormones, such as insulin and reproductive hormones.
The dysfunctional stress response is very inflammatory. Research in fibromyalgia has shown that there is inflammation within the brain, contributing to the feeling of brain fog and poor memory.
The good news: You can re-train your stress response to shut off when it’s no longer needed, making healing your body much easier.
How I Started Re-Training My Stress Response To Live Pain-Free With Abundant Energy
Not to humblebrag, but you may look at me, and my pain-free life and think, "She's one to talk about struggling with chronic pain and debilitating exhaustion."
Years ago, I was just like you. I was struggling with pain all over my body and exhaustion that no could seem to explain.
I was trying everything I could think of to feel better and getting nowhere. I slept more than anyone my age should need to, but still woke up feeling like I hadn’t slept in a week. I flaked on plans because I couldn’t bring myself to push through the pain and pretend I wasn’t so tired. I was overwhelmed and embarrassed and I’d lost all hope that I’d ever feel better.
Then, I learned about the stress response, and it changed me and my life by:
Freeing up my time. Learning about the dysfunctional stress response gave me a direction to focus my efforts on. No more random health experiments with fingers-crossed hoping and praying something would work. No more spending hours and hundreds of dollars on appointments each week.
Allowing me to gain control over my life again. Once I figured out that the stress response was the root cause of why my symptoms were occurring, everything else fell into place. I understood why I was in pain and exhausted all the time, how that was affecting every other part of my body, and how to prevent my symptoms from happening, rather than trying to relieve them. I was no longer at the mercy of how I felt physically each day.
Giving my work a purpose. I am a total health nerd and I love teaching others. What better topic to teach than how to get rid of fibromyalgia symptoms so you can live your healthiest, happiest life on your own terms? I can’t think of anything more rewarding!
Side Note: This may seem pretty magical, but it's still hard work. I’ve been testing and refining this strategy personally and with my clients for years. Others in my field approach it differently. I imagine if you’re here, you haven’t had much success with other approaches. If you want to hear even more about my story and my approach, check out my masterclass, The 3 Secrets To Beating Pain, Exhaustion, & Fibrofog.
5 Actionable Steps to Start Re-Training Your Dysfunctional Stress Response To Control Fibromyalgia Pain, Exhaustion & Brainfog
You know how the dysfunctional stress response in fibromyalgia works now, but maybe you're struggling to see how you can re-train your own stress response.
Try this:
# 1: Incorporate meditation into your daily routine. This can be a deep breathing exercise, guided meditation, or movement-based meditation, such as yoga. Calm and Yoga With Adriene are two of my favourite resources in this area.
# 2: Be careful with taking on new stressors. Taking on too much and worrying about things that are out of your control are not helpful here. Minimize your stress as much as possible.
# 3: Read my other blog posts on the physical aspects of fibromyalgia that trigger the stress response. That’s right, stress isn’t just mental or emotional. There are physical abnormalities triggering that exact same stress response. Check out all my other posts here.
# 4: Join the Flourishing With Fibromyalgia Academy. All of the courses in the Academy are designed to help you re-train your body’s stress response and heal the damage done by the dysfunctional stress response, in the quickest and more streamlined way possible.
# 5: Do not do this once or twice, then stop. It’s important that you are consistent in re-training your stress response. Remember, it took time for you to get to this place and it takes time to fix the underlying issues.
I dare you to pick out even just one of the above steps and do it before you get into bed tonight.
Do you see the comment section below? Let me know which step you plan on doing first. Join the convo and share your own successes or struggles with the community!
Case Study: Julia
Please Note: Privacy is important. Names have been changed out of respect to the client.
Julia was fed up with living in pain and dragging herself out of bed every morning, despite doing “everything right”. She was great at practicing sleep hygiene and she ate healthy. She couldn’t figure out why she still felt awful every day.
Thankfully, she came across the dysfunctional stress response through my book, Flourishing With Fibromyalgia: Your Natural Guide To Taking Back The Life Fibromyalgia Stole From You.
In her own words, “Once I started paying attention, I could tell additional stress threw me into a serious fibro flare. What Melyssa wrote about made sense. The problem I had though was that the stress I have is unavoidable. I can’t quit my job or quit being a mother.”
Since she had tried dozens of other strategies with minimal success and many side effects, so she thought, “What do I have to lose? I can’t keep living like this and something has to change.”
To her surprise, she was able to change how she responded to and coped with the unavoidable stress to prevent it from flaring her fibromyalgia symptoms. We worked to reduce any physical triggers of her stress response, decreasing the overall level of stress her body was under. Although the unavoidable stress didn’t go away, she re-trained her stress response allowing periods of relaxation and healing between the inevitable life stress. (And by the way, she is still working and parenting 😉).
I am proud to share Julia’s success story and I’m still in touch with her to this day.
Wrapping Up
People like you and Julia are precisely why I wrote my book, Flourishing With Fibromyalgia.
I knew there was a need for research-based, affordable guidance on how to get fibromyalgia under control, without giving up everything you love. Any steps you take to change your health should make your life bigger and happier, not smaller and harder.
From there, I launched the Flourishing With Fibromyalgia Academy, which allows me to personally connect with people all over the world and dial in that guidance into step-by-step instructions that are easy to follow. The community and connection between members in our live calls and community group helps to keep our fibro warriors on track and is something I look forward to every week.
Good job on making it to the end of this post! That type of perseverance shows that you have what it takes to stop letting fibromyalgia control your life. You can do this and I can’t wait to see what you do with your newfound pain-free life!
References
Bote ME, García JJ, Hinchado MD, Ortega E. Inflammatory/stress feedback dysregulation in women with fibromyalgia. Neuroimmunomodulation. 2012;19(6):343–351. doi:10.1159/000341664
Martinez-Lavin M. Biology and therapy of fibromyalgia. Stress, the stress response system, and fibromyalgia. Arthritis Res Ther. 2007;9(4):216. doi:10.1186/ar2146
Pardo JV, Larson RC, Spencer RJ, et al. Exposure to Cold Unmasks Potential Biomarkers of Fibromyalgia Syndrome Reflecting Insufficient Sympathetic Responses to Stress. Clin J Pain. 2019;35(5):407–419. doi:10.1097/AJP.0000000000000695
Heim C, Ehlert U, Hellhammer DH. The potential role of hypocortisolism in the pathophysiology of stress-related bodily disorders. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2000;25(1):1–35. doi:10.1016/s0306-4530(99)00035-9
Andrés-Rodríguez L, Borràs X, Feliu-Soler A, et al. Immune-inflammatory pathways and clinical changes in fibromyalgia patients treated with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR): A randomized, controlled clinical trial. Brain Behav Immun. 2019;80:109–119. doi:10.1016/j.bbi.2019.02.030
Lauche R, Cramer H, Dobos G, Langhorst J, Schmidt S. A systematic review and meta-analysis of mindfulness-based stress reduction for the fibromyalgia syndrome. J Psychosom Res. 2013;75(6):500–510. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychores.2013.10.010
Haugmark T, Hagen KB, Smedslund G, Zangi HA. Mindfulness- and acceptance-based interventions for patients with fibromyalgia - A systematic review and meta-analyses. PLoS One. 2019;14(9):e0221897. Published 2019 Sep 3. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0221897
Comments