Chronic Fatigue Was My Body's Warning About My Toxic Lifestyle

When I say ‘my toxic lifestyle’, you could be forgiven for imagining me drinking, smoking, and staying out late at night. Or maybe your imagination takes you to a toxic work environment, where I’m hustling on the stock market at all hours of the day and night.

Neither of those images would be true. You see, it wasn’t so much my outer environment that was unhealthy, but my inner world.

I am a freelance writer and content marketing trainer. It’s my dream job, and as an introvert, I’m happy to be working from home most days — even before the pandemic.

Life looked great on the outside. I had a growing freelance career, with wonderful clients and opportunities for travel.

Then there was my hobby; endurance running. On the outside, this looked like a healthy pursuit. But as you are about to learn, my inability to take a proper break has made me ill more than once.

Then… (dramatic pause) there were a couple of difficult friends. Both of them old friends that I was trying hard to hang on to, although that meant failing ‘the oxygen mask test’.

You know what I’m talking about? The old personal development rule of putting your own oxygen mask on first before you help others.

I had gotten into the habit of leaping to the rescue with both of these women — to the detriment of my mental health, and later on my physical health too.

A gradual decline

It’s late spring 2019, and I’ve recently run 2 marathons just 5 weeks apart. If I had been living an easier life in other areas, then recovering from those spring marathons might have been more achievable.

But being someone who was unable to say no to a client, or to a needy friend, I hadn’t had enough proper rest.

There were 2 more marathons planned for the autumn, and I was back on the training plan with 5 sessions per week.

Having not really recovered from the spring, those 5 weekly sessions were a terrible idea. I found that most days I couldn’t get my legs up to the speed I desired. But being unable to quit, I took that as a sign I needed to work harder.

Being unable to quit was most definitely a theme in my life, and one that led me to crash hard.

Let’s fast-forward a bit. I didn’t attend either autumn marathon. I was absolutely cooked, both physically and mentally. So I reluctantly took a break from ‘proper running’, settling for gentle jogging and gym sessions. But then there were my clients and those friends…

Learning to say no

This is the hardest thing for so many people to do. We all know the importance of boundaries and of putting on our own oxygen mask first. It sounds perfectly sensible on paper. But if you’re a doer, a fixer, a people pleaser, or any combination of those - then you know as well as I do that it’s easier said than done.

Saying the word “no” isn’t the hardest part. It’s how you feel afterwards. It’s the hours of rumination over what you ‘should’ have said or done instead. It’s feeling like a bad person.

To make a long story short, that summer’s crash and burn wasn’t the end of my descent into exhaustion.

The virus that changed everything

At Christmas (2019), I caught a virus that never really went away. I don't know if it was 'the' virus - it was too early for a test.

Many discussions with my doctor later, and after many canceled tests due to the pandemic, we have arrived at chronic fatigue as my diagnosis for now.

My treatment plan? We know that doctors don’t have a one-size-fits-all recovery plan for the idiopathic diagnosis of chronic fatigue. They, of course, do give general advice on resting, sleeping, and eating well.

But me being me, I need to have a plan. So I made my own, and it’s really been more like re-educating myself than anything else.

I’ve had to learn how to live in a healthier way. I’ve also had to accept that the over-training, flying to the rescue of others, and taking calls from clients at all hours was contributing to my toxic way of being.

The virus might have compounded things, but it was me that made me unwell.

Sometimes you really do have to hit rock bottom before you can start to recover. Personally, it was my stubbornness that made this the case. I was simply not ready to let go of my toxic need to be always doing and achieving, or involved in other people’s drama.

Today my recovery is a work in progress. My high-speed approach to life is very ingrained in my personality, so I can’t just flip a switch to slow down. I need to constantly remind myself to do one thing at a time, to be patient, and to breathe!

From doing to being

But the most critical change by far is that I’ve finally given myself permission to just ‘be’. I used to always need to be ‘doing’ in order to feel okay about myself. This really was the root of all my problems and the reason that I could never quit or take a break.

Finding that root cause took a lot of soul-searching and looking at the dark, shadowy parts of myself that I wouldn’t normally choose to look at. But of course, that was where the answers were.

Much of my drive to be busy all the time was about keeping my gaze away from those shadowy corners. I didn’t want to think about my fragile sense of self-worth, which had previously hung on my achievements.

But I have learned my lesson, and I’m sharing this in case you need a nudge to slow down and accept where you are too.

Being healthy is about so much more than being able to keep going, doing, and achieving. Healthy is perhaps more of an attitude and an awareness of where to find the right balance.

Above all, I’ve learned that health is just as much mental as it is physical, and the two cannot really be separated. When I was running marathons my body was healthy, but my mind was less so.

So now I’m aiming for a balance of the two, but without pushing for it. That balance isn’t another thing I need to ‘achieve’, but rather a place to arrive at gently and in my own time.