PILLAR 1

The role of mental health, mindfulness and meditation

How did mental health play a role in CFS/ME and your recovery? 

Chris:

My mental health was definitely holding me back; not by choice, it was because anxiety seemed to be quite new to me, and I didn’t know the tools or strategies to battle it.  

Previously before I got unwell, I had been keeping myself so busy that I probably didn’t notice that I may have had some underlying anxiety.  

Naturally I’ve always been a positive person, however, in the depths of having the CFS/ME illness, I’m not going to lie that it was bloody hard to stay positive 24/7.

Part of having the illness is that your body has basically collapsed on all fronts, this included my nervous system and mind/brain (hence why sufferers experience extreme brain fog and often have trouble processing thoughts or communicating). 

M.E/CFS rattled my nervous system, and the struggles and symptoms that came with it piled onto my anxiety. 

I began telling myself statements like “just let it go”, “stay positive” or “stay present,” but as I was to work out later, in the end these are just cliches. If you’re not best mates with your mind and mindfully watching your thoughts and its triggers (inside and out), statements like these won’t work, they will just be words. 

I did chip away with improving my mindset day by day during my 4 year recovery. 

Once I was eventually able to manage my mental health, it helped unlock and improve all the physical aspects I had to endure with CFS/ME, such as migraines, body pain, fatigue and my digestion. 

What role did meditation play in your healing recovery?

Chris:

Over 4 years ago, before I got sick, I would have thought meditation was a load of crap! However, it played a massive part in my ongoing healing recovery of CFS/ME.

With the frustrations of my killer headaches and knowing their relationship with mental health, by late 2018 it was only time to join my best mate Tim and go along with him to meditation and mindfulness classes every week and sometimes weekends. 

As with learning about Ayurveda (for diet), meditation was something I could relate to and it resonated with me as something which could help heal my mental health.

Meditation essentially trains our mind to stay in the moment instead of running forward and back (or on autopilot) and helps us develops a relationship with ourselves. 

It definitely didn’t happen overnight. Currently I still have a little bit of difficulty switching off my wandering mind from day to day to calm it down (most people do!), although it’s now 10 times better than it was before. This came from lots of meditation practice! 

For me meditation and mindfulness allowed me to get to know myself better, especially my thoughts, which I now had to become best mates with. It allowed me to train my mind and to manage my anxiety, as well as see how off-course it was (and still can be at times). 

From learning about the wandering mind at meditation class, over time I was eventually able to heal my headaches.

This allowed me to have more energy and eventually go back to work, run, and socialise.

Can you describe more about the process of how you managed your thoughts?

Chris:

Understanding how to be an observer of my thoughts was a game changer for me. 

Again, it didn’t happen overnight, but it helped me understand and heal the mental health confusion I was experiencing.

These words below (takeaways from meditation class I wrote down in my journal) became my own bible for my mindset recovery. I’m happy to share them with you AND again keeping it simple, these words will be the basis of the Mindset component in 1-1 coaching.

Words Chris lives by for mental health recovery:

Most of the time we don’t choose what we think, it’s normal for our minds to have a tornado of thoughts especially about the self.

(Try meditating, and you will realise you’re not really in control of your mind!)

The mind has two components the conscious and unconscious mind.

The conscious mind thinks about an action and uses will-power to fulfill it like choosing lunch or phoning a mate.

The unconscious mind houses the default programming of your emotions and belief; up to 95% of thoughts are unconscious, they are either supporting or sabotaging your outcomes.

Unless your unconscious mind has instructions for preferable outcomes, it will be likely running negative thoughts/instructions. 

Watch your thoughts from the unconscious mind carefully. The thoughts are okay – they’re natural, it’s what you do with them. 

With an unpleasant thought, if it comes up, DONT PANIC!! ... know it’s a delusion created by our own version of events, this thought has no end.  

Recognise and accept the unpleasant feeling, sit with it and simply experience the unpleasant feeling, don’t fight or feed it, as it will spread like a wild-fire. 

By sitting with and observing the bad thought this might take time (it could take hours, or if it’s habitual, it could be days), but eventually the storm will pass once the thought has run its course. 

By staying present and letting go, you will be rewarded with the feeling of successfully being able to get through the rough period and move on clear-minded (and more importantly, with no more migraines!). That feeling is breath taking! This result will only come by lots of practice and repetition!!

^^^I read these words daily to myself until it sunk in!

I definitely haven’t perfected this practice, (no one has!! …) but it has helped me reprogram my mind and guided me out of the dark spaces of mental health and its impact on CFS/ME recovery.

NOTE:  A quick research on Google says we have over 7,000 thoughts per day (with 49 different thoughts per minute) most of the time our minds/brains are programmed to generally grasp onto negative thought patterns.  (Google says 80-95% of our thoughts are generally negative.

So as an ancient wise man once said “our minds are like a wild elephant and they need to be bound to the stake (like a stake in the ground) of positive thinking.”  So we need to train our minds to look for positivity in every moment of the day.

*** It was ultimately meditation and mindfulness which allowed me to slowly but surely move from Flight-or-Fight mode to Parasympathetic healing mode, which is about rest, digestion, reproduction, and repair.