Fibromyalgia Chronicles

 I want to put down here my thoughts on fibromyalgia, which I think I have. I haven't bothered getting an official diagnosis, because there is not any treatment.

Symptoms: Achy all over, especially back, back of legs. This is described as pain in the literature, I have a high pain tolerance or rather an insensitivity, so I expect it is the same thing. The best way to describe it is like a flu minute the respiratory symptoms, and fever symptoms. I have felt something like it before when I did heavy Olympic lifts with small rest intervals - I expect it has something to do with energy levels. Muscles feel easily fatigued.

Cravings - intense food cravings.

Demotivation - I feel like I can't do anything

Trouble focusing.

Overall feeling bad.

I experience this about 1-4 days a week


Triggers:

Stress - too much to do, or problems hanging over me that I'm not sure what to do about.

Noise - Someone talking over background noise is particularly bad, but an unrelenting stream of noise will do it pretty much every time. Lucky me I live with young children.

Exercise - Intense exercise, such as the limits of strength or endurance will trigger this. Usually, it affects me the next day and I am wiped out. An early harbinger, in retrospect, was getting wiped out by doing deadlift PR attempts. Again this is the next day.

Cope

I tend to want to just watch shows. I am a reader but reading is not sufficiently distracting from the discomfort, so TV shows.

Avoid doing things.

Avoid noise.

Nap. A nap is the best. A sufficiently restful nap will actually restore me to normal functioning. That is often not possible with work and family obligations.

Being Still. This looks like me sitting there and staring off into space. I am trying to hear the still silence beneath everything. It is a form of meditation, I suppose. It works ok sometimes, but definitely worse than a nap. Related to this, being outside.

Treatment

I've been trying to address the energy. I've used vitamin B1(benfotiamine) and coq10, sterculia oil, and saturated fats to support the energy system. Not a lot of success.

Exercise - Paradoxically a low level of physical activity helps. Nothing miraculous, just an attenuation of symptoms. Can't be all out. The problem with this is that I always want to go harder or heavier so this requires a degree of self-restraint.

Next: Thinking about how naps help, I'm guessing that good sleep may be the best treatment. I suffer from insomnia. I'm usually up twice a night and often need an hour or more to go back to sleep, and then I'll work up an hour early. I was reading raypeat about insomnia being a low metabolism problem, but I am often hot when insomniac and can sleep after cooling down. My assumption is that I have a spike of cortisol, which wakes and revs me up. This might be useful if I could work on my stressors in these hours of the night, but my work doesn't lend itself to that. So, treatment is Ashwa and magnesium before bed. As a bonus, Ashwa looks like it helps normalize thyroid T3 and T4, so if that is involved somehow it might help with those. I may throw in glycine and ZMA.


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