Are you tuned in to the right station when you listen to your body?

Whether you often find yourself feeling exhausted or even have full blown chronic fatigue or even Long Covid one of the things people often find themselves doing is resting.

It’s understandable isn’t it?

That’s where I found myself some years ago, while at university when I first came down with a bad flu virus which landed me in bed for a month. I was able to return to some sort of normality of going back to university, though when I did, it was an unbelievable struggle.

In time I learn’t I’d developed Chronic Fatigue which meant any ounce of energy I had, would be used on getting through a day of lectures and just surviving.

I frequently collapsed after a day and regularly refused my housemates offers to go out, choosing to rest when I felt fatigue and other symptoms. I was listening to what my body wanted and needed….wasn’t I?

I’m grateful to say that I was able to recover after 6 years of illness but one of the reasons I did recover was realising that what I thought was listening to what my body wanted was actually not what it needed.

What I found was I didn’t feel rested after rest!

The thing is, the body only wants us to rest when we experience a healthy type of tiredness that most of us get if we’re ready for bed or have a bad nights sleep.

I took everything I learnt through my years of illness, to then support clients going through similar things. What clients now frequently say to me is:

• “I’ve overdone it”
• “I’m being paid back for doing too much”
• “I’ve got post-exertion malaise“.

If we’re tuned in to the right station, what is our body actually telling us?

When it came to my own recovery, what I learnt to do was find activities that I loved to do and often had put off because of the fatigue and to start doing them anyway.

Now some of these things took time to feel good while I did them while others seemed to work quickly but here’s the biggest thing….

If I went back to resting after I did something fun, guess what would happen? Yup, I would end up exhausted and no, it’s not my body’s way of saying I’d done too much but rather “What’s next?” or more importantly “What fun is coming up next?”.

In my work at Intuitive Health, I help people using tools I’ve refined over 15 years to gain more energy consistently.

So maybe it’s time to make sure we’re not just tuned into our body but we understand what it’s saying!