Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #23. Your Chronic Fatigue Has Nothing to Do With Your Sleep — And That's Why Nothing You've Tried Is Working
Transcript
- 0:00[SPEAKER_00]: If you have chronic fatigue or deep exhaustion and fatigue or symptoms of your chronic illness and you have tried everything, the sleep, the supplements, the rest, and nothing is working, this episode is about why.
- 0:12[SPEAKER_00]: And spoiler alert, it has nothing to do with how much you're sleeping.
- 0:17[SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
- 0:19[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Teclody Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner and certified holistic life coach.
- 0:25[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, andometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
- 0:39[SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
- 0:43[SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
- 0:47[SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
- 0:51[SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
- 0:57[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
- 0:59[SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to compliment not replace your medical care.
- 1:04[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
- 1:07[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover why the conventional approach to chronic fatigue keeps women's stuck, and what is actually missing from the conversation.
- 1:15[SPEAKER_00]: You'll also discover why your body may be generating exhaustion for a reason that has nothing to do with sleep, and what the mind-body research consistently points to as the most overlooked driver of chronic fatigue in women.
- 1:29[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about what the research and the established body of mind body work actually tells us about chronic fatigue.
- 1:35[SPEAKER_00]: From a psycho-neuro immunology standpoint, the field that studies the relationship between psychological states and immune function, the research is clear on one thing.
- 1:45[SPEAKER_00]: Emotional states and the body's immune and energy systems influence each other directly and bi-directionally.
- 1:53[SPEAKER_00]: So what does that actually mean?
- 1:54[SPEAKER_00]: What you feel consistently shapes how your body functions and how your body functions shapes what you feel.
- 2:01[SPEAKER_00]: They are not separate conversations.
- 2:04[SPEAKER_00]: What the research specifically shows in women with chronic fatigue is that suppressed emotion, poor emotional self-awareness, and the inability to process and express emotional experience, are consistently associated with higher levels of inflammatory markers and greater symptom severity.
- 2:21[SPEAKER_00]: So what does that tell us?
- 2:23[SPEAKER_00]: The body is not just tired.
- 2:25[SPEAKER_00]: It is tired and emotionally overloaded at the same time.
- 2:30[SPEAKER_00]: And those two things are not coincidental.
- 2:33[SPEAKER_00]: And then there is something that the most respected minds in mind body work have observed consistently across decades of clinical practice.
- 2:41[SPEAKER_00]: Something that the research is only beginning to catch up to now.
- 2:44[SPEAKER_00]: Chronic fatigue in women is frequently connected to a specific emotional experience that most women would never think to connect to their physical exhaustion.
- 2:54[SPEAKER_00]: It's not grief, it's not anger, it's not fear.
- 2:57[SPEAKER_00]: It's that you're bored with your own life and I know how hard that is to hear but stay with me.
- 3:03[SPEAKER_00]: You're going through the motions and deep down you have lost any real connection to what you're doing every day and why it actually matters.
- 3:11[SPEAKER_00]: It's not tiredness from doing too much.
- 3:14[SPEAKER_00]: It's something that's much harder to come to terms with than that.
- 3:18[SPEAKER_00]: It's this feeling of waking up and having nothing that genuinely calls to you and feeling like you're moving through the days just because you have to.
- 3:26[SPEAKER_00]: And that you're doing what you're supposed to do, but you're feeling seriously uninspired about it all.
- 3:32[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the physiological truth underneath that.
- 3:35[SPEAKER_00]: The body does not generate energy for a life, it has lost enthusiasm for.
- 3:40[SPEAKER_00]: When a woman has stopped caring about how she spends her days, when everything feels like obligation and nothing feels like it matters, the body has no compelling reason to produce the energy required to show up for it.
- 3:53[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a kind of fatigue that no supplement or sleep protocol or rest can fix.
- 3:59[SPEAKER_00]: because rest or store is a body that is physically depleted.
- 4:02[SPEAKER_00]: It cannot restore a body that has stopped wanting to show up.
- 4:06[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what this actually looks like in real life, because I work with many, many women that have chronic fatigue.
- 4:12[SPEAKER_00]: One specifically, her name is Lily.
- 4:14[SPEAKER_00]: She'd been living with chronic fatigue for years.
- 4:17[SPEAKER_00]: She tried multiple programs, multiple approaches, and nothing was shifting for her.
- 4:22[SPEAKER_00]: By the time she came to me, she told me she felt completely alone in her journey, and felt like she'd been doing everything right and still getting nowhere.
- 4:29[SPEAKER_00]: When we started working together, what emerged was this?
- 4:33[SPEAKER_00]: Her days were full, she was busy, she was getting things done.
- 4:37[SPEAKER_00]: On the surface, it looked like she was functioning.
- 4:40[SPEAKER_00]: When we actually looked at what was filling her days, the tasks and obligations and things she was taking off.
- 4:47[SPEAKER_00]: None of it meant anything to her.
- 4:49[SPEAKER_00]: None of it excited her.
- 4:51[SPEAKER_00]: None of it made her feel anything other than like she was getting through it.
- 4:55[SPEAKER_00]: She was confusing being busy with being alive, and the two are not the same thing.
- 5:01[SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing in her life that genuinely lit her up.
- 5:05[SPEAKER_00]: No anticipation, no excitement.
- 5:07[SPEAKER_00]: No moment she was actually looking forward to.
- 5:10[SPEAKER_00]: Just an endless cycle of obligation she was managing, and the body that was getting more exhausted by the day despite ticking everything off the list.
- 5:19[SPEAKER_00]: Here is what Lily's body was actually experiencing, not a productive engaged life, a life running completely on empty, dressed up as functionality.
- 5:29[SPEAKER_00]: When we started deliberately introducing things that brought her genuine joy and excitement, things she had stopped giving herself permission to want, the shifts were rapid, her sleep which had been non-existent for some weeks became the best it had ever been.
- 5:45[SPEAKER_00]: She stopped feeling so depressed about her life.
- 5:48[SPEAKER_00]: She went from feeling completely trapped inside her illness to reconnecting with who she was before it took over.
- 5:54[SPEAKER_00]: She told me months later that she listened back to a voice note she recorded during her time together and could not believe the difference between who she was then and who she is now.
- 6:03[SPEAKER_00]: That is what happens when the body finally gets something worth showing up for.
- 6:07[SPEAKER_00]: Here is what nobody is saying loudly enough.
- 6:11[SPEAKER_00]: You get one life ladies, one, and it is happening right now, not when your symptoms improve, not when the new protocol finally works, not when you have everything under control.
- 6:23[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, life is not about the laundry.
- 6:26[SPEAKER_00]: It's not about the meal prep.
- 6:28[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the perfectly optimized morning routine or the supplement schedule or the elimination diet you've been following for six months.
- 6:35[SPEAKER_00]: Those things are not life.
- 6:37[SPEAKER_00]: They are the background noise that has somehow
- 6:40[SPEAKER_00]: Life is the dinner where you loft so hard that your stomach hurt, and the spontaneous weekend you almost didn't book.
- 6:48[SPEAKER_00]: It's a conversation that went on for hours and left you feeling more like yourself than you have in the years.
- 6:54[SPEAKER_00]: It's the moment you felt so genuinely present and happy that your illness wasn't the first thing on your mind.
- 7:00[SPEAKER_00]: Those moments are not rewards for when you feel well enough.
- 7:04[SPEAKER_00]: They're not something you earn once the symptoms settle.
- 7:07[SPEAKER_00]: They are what being alive is actually about.
- 7:10[SPEAKER_00]: And most women with chronic illness have been told explicitly or implicitly that they need to put all of it on hold and till their body cooperates.
- 7:19[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to challenge that directly, because here's what I've consistently seen in my work.
- 7:25[SPEAKER_00]: The women who put life on hold and wait until they heal, who whitenuckle through the protocols and eliminate everything and optimize everything and wait, they do not heal faster.
- 7:36[SPEAKER_00]: They get more exhausted, more disconnected and more depleted, because the body is not just being deprived of nutrients or sleep or the right supplements.
- 7:44[SPEAKER_00]: It's being deprived of the very thing that makes it want to keep going.
- 7:49[SPEAKER_00]: Joy, laughter, happiness, excitement.
- 7:52[SPEAKER_00]: The feeling of having something you're looking forward to.
- 7:54[SPEAKER_00]: The memories you are making right now are not making because you are too focused on managing your illness to actually live your life.
- 8:02[SPEAKER_00]: When those things disappear, when every single day looks the same and feels the same and nothing in it excites you.
- 8:09[SPEAKER_00]: The body registers that absence.
- 8:11[SPEAKER_00]: It feels deeply in your heart and soul.
- 8:14[SPEAKER_00]: And chronic fatigue is very often what that registration looks like.
- 8:18[SPEAKER_00]: This is the why this is why we care about this.
- 8:21[SPEAKER_00]: Because healing does not happen in a life that has forgotten what it is healing for.
- 8:26[SPEAKER_00]: So what is the shift?
- 8:28[SPEAKER_00]: Think about something you've been putting off.
- 8:30[SPEAKER_00]: Something that would actually make you feel good.
- 8:33[SPEAKER_00]: The dinner with a friend you keep meaning to organize but never quite get around to booking.
- 8:38[SPEAKER_00]: The trip you've been talking about for two years that somehow never gets planned.
- 8:42[SPEAKER_00]: The class, the experience, the moment you keep telling yourself, you will have when you feel better.
- 8:47[SPEAKER_00]: When you have more energy when everything settles down.
- 8:50[SPEAKER_00]: That moment is not coming on its own.
- 8:53[SPEAKER_00]: And every week you spend waiting for it is a week your body spends in a life it has nothing to look forward to.
- 8:59[SPEAKER_00]: So stop waiting.
- 9:01[SPEAKER_00]: Please know if the thought of a trip terrifies you, I am absolutely not saying get on a plane and fly internationally if that feels completely out of reach right now.
- 9:10[SPEAKER_00]: What I'm saying is you need to find your version of it.
- 9:13[SPEAKER_00]: an overnight stay somewhere you've been wanting to go, a day trip to somewhere that excites you, something local that breaks the cycle of the same four walls and the same routine.
- 9:23[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever feels achievable without pushing yourself beyond what your body can genuinely manage right now.
- 9:29[SPEAKER_00]: Do that.
- 9:29[SPEAKER_00]: Plan it.
- 9:30[SPEAKER_00]: Put a date on it.
- 9:31[SPEAKER_00]: Make it real.
- 9:32[SPEAKER_00]: Say yes to the thing you have been talking yourself out of because your body does not generate energy in advance and then let you spend it on living.
- 9:40[SPEAKER_00]: It generates energy in response to a life that feels worth showing up for.
- 9:45[SPEAKER_00]: Right now you're asking it to produce energy for a life that has been stripped of everything that makes it feel that way.
- 9:52[SPEAKER_00]: The women I work with who make this shift, who stop waiting and start living, even in small ways, are consistently the ones who start to see their energy return.
- 10:01[SPEAKER_00]: Because the body response to the signal that life is happening again, that there are moments ahead that are worth getting out of bed for.
- 10:09[SPEAKER_00]: So what is the one thing you've been putting off that you're going to do this week?
- 10:14[SPEAKER_00]: Go and do it, book it, get it on the calendar.
- 10:17[SPEAKER_00]: Let's wrap up what we covered today.
- 10:19[SPEAKER_00]: Conic fatigue is not always just a physical problem.
- 10:23[SPEAKER_00]: Suppressed emotion and disconnection from your own life are two of the most overlooked drivers of exhaustion that doctors cannot test for.
- 10:30[SPEAKER_00]: Most women with chronic illness have stopped living while they wait to heal, but the body generates energy in response to a life worth showing up for, not the other way around.
- 10:40[SPEAKER_00]: And lastly, joy is not the reward you get when you finally feel better.
- 10:43[SPEAKER_00]: It's part of what gets you there.
- 10:46[SPEAKER_00]: If this episode landed somewhere specific for you and you recognize yourself in Lily's story or in the life that has become all about obligation, that recognition is your starting point.
- 10:56[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to understand what emotional patterns your specific symptoms may be responding to, I developed a free chat GPT prompt that identifies that connection for you in under 30 seconds.
- 11:08[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, it's completely free, but that will not always be the case.
- 11:11[SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the show notes.
- 11:13[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you in the next episode.
- 11:14[SPEAKER_00]: Goodbye for now.