Mental Fatigue Quotes

Symptoms of Amor Deliria Nervosa PHASE ONE: -preoccupation; difficulty focusing -dry mouth -perspiration, sweaty palms -fits of dizziness and disorientation -reduced mental awareness; racing thoughts; impaired reasoning skills PHASE TWO: -periods of euphoria; hysterical laughter and heightened energy -periods of despair; lethargy -changes in appetite; rapid weight loss or weight gain -fixation; loss of other interests -compromised reasoning skills; distortion of reality -disruption of sleep patterns; insomnia or constant fatigue -obsessive thoughts and actions -paranoia; insecurity PHASE THREE (CRITICAL): -difficulty breathing -pain in the chest, throat or stomach -complete breakdown of rational faculties; erratic behavior; violent thoughts and fantasies; hallucinations and delusions PHASE FOUR (FATAL): -emotional or physical paralysis (partial or total) -death If you fear that you or someone you know may have contracted deliria, please call the emergency line toll-free at 1-800-PREVENT to discuss immediate intake and treatment.

Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn't. It's just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.

People without depression won’t understand that, but the fatigue of mental illness makes your very body a prison.

Not only during the ascent, but also during the descent my willpower is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attention has diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is now greater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing - and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is like death through freezing - a pleasant one.

Not only during the ascent but also during the descent my willpower is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attention has diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is now greater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing—and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is—like death through freezing—a pleasant one. Reinhold Messner   The Crystal Horizon I

Statistics say that a range of mental disorders affects more than one in four Americans in any given year. That means millions of Americans are totally batshit. but having perused the various tests available that they use to determine whether you're manic depressive. OCD, schizo-affective, schizophrenic, or whatever, I'm surprised the number is that low. So I have gone through a bunch of the available tests, and I've taken questions from each of them, and assembled my own psychological evaluation screening which I thought I'd share with you. So, here are some of the things that they ask to determine if you're mentally disordered 1. In the last week, have you been feeling irritable? 2. In the last week, have you gained a little weight? 3. In the last week, have you felt like not talking to people? 4. Do you no longer get as much pleasure doing certain things as you used to? 5. In the last week, have you felt fatigued? 6. Do you think about sex a lot? If you don't say yes to any of these questions either you're lying, or you don't speak English, or you're illiterate, in which case, I have the distinct impression that I may have lost you a few chapters ago.

The moments of silence are gone. We run from them into the rush of unimportant things, so filled is the quiet with the painful whispers of all that goes unspoken. Busy-ness is our drug of choice, numbing our minds just enough to keep us from dwelling on all that we fear we can’t change. A compilation of coping mechanisms, we have become our fatigue. Unwilling or unable to cut ourselves free of this modern machine we have built, we’re dragged in its wake all too quickly toward our end. The virtue of a society’s culture is reflected in the physical, mental, and emotional health of its people. The time has come to part ways with all that is toxic, and preserve our quality of life.

First and foremost, depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability.

Dear Stress, I would like a divorce. Please understand it is not you, it is me. –Thomas E. Rojo Aubrey

Mental aerobics must be done prior to the exam. Work your mental muscle. If smart nurses fail this exam it is usually from mental fatigue.

Oftentimes, what we experience as mental fatigue or emotional distress is simply a signal from our body that we’re not getting enough of something we physically need: nutrients, exercise, or rest.

Four cups of coffee a day may keep depression at bay.

I deserve to be loved. I deserved your love, but in your eyes, I wasn’t good enough. However, that is okay, because I have love all around me. I am learning how to love me, and it is such a good feeling. My soul isn’t dehydrated or fatigued because I am nurturing my soul, mind, spirit, and my inner being.

Mental illness and chronic fatigue are comparable to a dead soul inhabiting a surviving body.

Burnout occurs when an individual has experienced prolonged demands, chronic stress, fatigue, a lack of support, and a decrease satisfaction in what they are doing.

it’s hard to be spiritually strong and mentally alert when you are emotionally stressed or physically fatigued.

I was turning into a zombie as I was aging.

Mrs. Astor had long held that artists of any ilk - painters, authors, actors and the like - merit no recognition unless safely dead, and that meeting them risks both needless mental fatigue and the possibility of social contamination.

Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn’t. It’s just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.

You get ill, you are accused of being mentally ill, denied effective treatment, then when you campaign for ‘real science’, you are accused of terrorising those who do not believe in your illness...after all, if your message is that people who say they are suffering from ME or CFS are mentally ill, then accusing them of irrational attacks adds strength to your case.

This approach is supported by a growing body of research. Psychologists increasingly believe that play holds the key to true productivity, partly because it provides a sense of psychological relief. As one recent study put it: ‘the psychological function of play is to restore the physically and mentally fatigued individual through participation in activity which is pleasurable and relaxing.

Simply being in the presence of natural landscapes tends to reduce stress and promote relaxation. Such experiences lower mental fatigue and boost mental clarity while enhancing both work performance and healing. One early study found that surgery patients recovered faster and required less pain medication if their hospital room had a window overlooking a natural setting. Another found similar effects in a prison population: prisoners with windows facing out toward rolling farmland and trees had 24 percent fewer sick call visits than their counterparts with views of an empty interior courtyard.

Even mild dehydration can cause headaches and fatigue, affect your concentration, impair short-term memory and impede mental function. If you want to be at your most productive, it’s important for your brain to be firing on all cylinders. Therefore, you should make sure you are sufficiently hydrated before starting work.

Tightly focused attention gets fatigued—much like an overworked muscle—when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy.

To a great extent fatigue in such cases is due to worry, and worry could be prevented by a better philosophy of life and a little more mental discipline. Most men and women are very deficient in control over their thoughts. I mean by this that they cannot cease to think about worrying topics at times when no action can be taken in regard to them.

When you feel tired or fatigued, more often than not it’s either because your brain has too much or not enough glucose to convert into mental energy.

If your doctors are in the habit of prescribing drugs that are doing you no good, then it is time to change your doctors.

A journey into self diagnosis and treatment was required when the medical profession left me suffering for years with mental illness and chronic fatigue.

Light is life.

Part of recovering your health is to break long-term toxic habits.

Sleep apnea is known to cause mental illness and chronic fatigue.

Many people report reduced back problems when sleeping on memory foam.

Butter tea has been known for centuries to improve health in people exposed to high altitudes.

You do not realize how much incompetence is in the workplace until you become a supervisor.

I am a person suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and I am appalled that it has been given such a trivial name. Here is a disease that totally disables most of its victims; a disease that causes balance disorders, resulting in some of us requiring wheelchairs, cognitive disorders that leave us unable to perform formerly simple mental tasks, and immune disorders that lay us open to multiple infections and to autoimmune problems. And all the medical profession can come up with to define this syndrome to the general population is "fatigue!

Why is it so difficult--so degradingly difficult--to bring the notion of Time into mental focus and keep it there for inspection? What an effort, what fumbling, what irritating fatigue!

These findings show that nature can have a calming and restorative effect, giving our mind a rest from the intense and mentally fatiguing focus and concentration required in much of our day-to-day lives.

A heated and often bitter debate persists over whether chronic fatigue syndrome (or myalgic encephalomyelitis (or the postviral fatigue syndrome) is physical or psychological. Although many doctors avoid controversy by stating the obvious—namely, that the mind-body split is artificial and all diseases have physical and mental components—what is really at issue is whether this illness is real or imaginary.

Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods — giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacks the brain and central nervous system. If you’re lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with a bib around your neck, but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure. No less arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and — hardly surprising, really — chronic depression.

...and it's that time of the day when the fatigue sets in. No, not the physical type of fatigue that goes with a stretching of limbs or a session in my sauna; which in fact is sparkling signifying it's existence for sheer aesthetics rather that practical use! It was that mental fatigue , when my soul was exhausted and weary; that I needed a shot of Gatorade; just to calm my nerves, stopping me from hallucinations and let me fall asleep!

...and it's that time of the day when the fatigue sets in. No, not the physical type of fatigue that goes with a stretching of limbs or a session in my sauna ~ which in fact is sparkling signifying it's existence for sheer aesthetics rather that practical use! It was that mental fatigue , when my soul was exhausted and weary; that I needed a shot of Gatorade; just to calm my nerves, stopping me from hallucinations and let me fall asleep!

If emotion and fatigue lowered the potency of thought, what raised it? I began to reconsider my moments of delight in terms of this statement of the problem, moments whose essential quality had been a fusing of experience, a flash of significance uniting the meaningless and separate. If one assumed that thinking was a process involving some form of energy, it seemed quite appropriate to imagine my gesture of holding back from mental action as causing an accumulation of energy which automatically raised the potency. By preventing energy from continually flowing away in a noisy stream of efforts and purposes I could make it fill up into a silent pool of clearness.

Not only during the ascent but also during the descent my will-power is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attention has diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is now greater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing—and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is—like death through freezing—a pleasant one. Reinhold Messner The Crystal Horizon

Most of us have physical or mental conditions that have caused us distress in the past. And when we get a whiff of one coming—an incipient asthma attack, a symptom of chronic fatigue, a twinge of anxiety—we panic. Instead of relaxing with the feeling and letting it do its minute and a half while we’re fully open and receptive to it, we say, “Oh no, oh no, here it is again.” We refuse to feel fundamental ambiguity when it comes in this form, so we do the thing that will be most detrimental to us: we rev up our thoughts about it. What if this happens? What if that happens? We stir up a lot of mental activity. Body, speech, and mind become engaged in running away from the feeling, which only keeps it going and going and going. We

Fatigue is an excellent gauge of well-being because it is a very hard symptom to mask. The only way to get rid of fatigue is to treat the underlying causes. Fatigue has many faces, but they all say the same thing - the mental and physical load are too great.

The world, I tell you, is bored -- bored now to the explosive pitch. It's bored by all this incessant war preparation. It is bored by aimless violence, now here, now there. It is tired of hatred politics. It's tired of fresh murders every day. It is not indignant, not excited; it is bored. Bored and baffled... "I don't believe a man begins to know anything of politics until he realises the immense menace of mental fatigue, of world-wide mass boredom. It accumulates. It makes the most frightful convulsions and demoralisation possible. It makes them at last inevitable. Nobody wants fundamental changes in a world where hope and interest prevail. Then people accept their careers, settle down to them, rear children. But throw them out of work, in and out and no sense of security, deprive them of bright expectations, regiment them in masses, underfeed them, bore them with organised mass patriotism, and they begin to seep together into a common morass of discontent and impatience. Almost unconsciously... "They're like that now.

If the sleep disruption is repeated night after night, the actual measured impairments do not remain constant. Instead, there is an escalating accumulation of sleepiness that produces in adults continuing increases in headaches, gastrointestinal complaints, forgetfulness, reduced concentration, fatigue, emotional ups and downs, difficulty in staying awake during the daytime, irritability, and difficulty awakening. Not only do the adults describe themselves as more sleepy and mentally exhausted, they also feel more stressed. The stress may be a direct consequence of partial sleep deprivation or it may result from the challenge of coping with increasing amounts of daytime sleepiness. Think how hard it would be to concentrate or be motivated if you were struggling every day to stay awake. If children have

There had been a time when the mere business of driving a car was a relief to him; when he had found in the un-reality of a long, solitary journey a palliative to his troubled brain, when the fatigue of several hours’ driving had allowed him to forget more sombre cares. It was one of the subtler landmarks of middle age, perhaps, that he could no longer thus subdue his mind. It needed sterner measures now: he even tried on occasion to plan in his head a walk through a European city – to record the shops and buildings he would pass, for instance, in Berne on a walk from the Münster to the university. But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so important and taught him the habit of reality, and when she went there was nothing.

phase three clinical trial found that rhodiola exerts an antifatigue effect that increases mental performance and concentration and decreases cortisol response in burnout patients with fatigue syndrome; other studies have found similar outcomes including the amelioration of depression and anxiety.

I take no pleasure in, and set no store by, the suggestion that Professor Wessely effectively hijacked the WHO logo to give credence to his own view of ME as a mental illness. Nevertheless, I am uncomfortable that the professor does not appear to be doing his utmost to clear the air on this issue.

When I went to the medical profession complaining of fatigue and forgetfulness, they diagnosed me with Mental Illness, Sleep Apnea and Small Airways Disease. What I actually had was far larger and included Altitude Hypersensitivity, Circadian Rhythm Disorder and Urea Cycle Disorder, and all of them cause fatigue and forgetfulness!

For the last 48 years, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) has been formally classified by the World Health Organisation as a neurological disorder but for the last 29 years a group of UK psychiatrists (known as the Wessely School) have denied it exists other than as an aberrant belief; they insist that it is a mental (behavioural) disorder that can be cured by graded exercise and “cognitive re-structuring”.

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

The alternative to soul-acceptance is soul-fatigue. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the body. When we stay up too late and rise too early; when we try to fuel ourselves for the day with coffee and a donut in the morning and Red Bull in the afternoon; when we refuse to take the time to exercise and we eat foods that clog our brains and arteries; when we constantly try to guess which line at the grocery store will move faster and which car in which lane at the stoplight will move faster and which parking space is closest to the mall, our bodies grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the mind. When we are bombarded by information all day at work . . . When multiple screens are always clamoring for our attention . . . When we carry around mental lists of errands not yet done and bills not yet paid and emails not yet replied to . . . When we try to push unpleasant emotions under the surface like holding beach balls under the water at a swimming pool . . . our minds grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the will. We have so many decisions to make. When we are trying to decide what clothes will create the best possible impression, which foods will bring us the most pleasure, which tasks at work will bring us the most success, which entertainment options will make us the most happy, which people we dare to disappoint, which events we must attend, even what vacation destination will be most enjoyable, the need to make decisions overwhelms us. The sheer length of the menu at Cheesecake Factory oppresses us. Sometimes college students choose double majors, not because they want to study two fields, but simply because they cannot make the decision to say “no” to either one. Our wills grow weary with so many choices.

In 1990, when the insurgency first erupted, only 1,762 people were diagnosed with mental disorders. After a decade of inexorable violence, those numbers shot up to 38,696. Behind these figures was the fatigue, mental and emotional, of a people both battered and bruised. This was their private hell, one that remained invisible to the cameras and the public gaze, this was the loneliness that came with the feeling that you were losing your mind.

This is not an argument with psychiatry. Mental and physical illness are equally real and horrible. As with any long-term illness, some people with ME/CFS will develop comorbid depression and other mental health problems – where CBT can be of help alongside good quality general management. The argument here is with a flawed model of causation assuming efficacy for CBT and GET while taking no significant account of varying clinical presentations and disease pathways.

We live in the world, Jacob thought. That thought always seemed to insert itself, usually in opposition to the word ideally. Ideally, we would make sandwiches at homeless shelters every weekend, and learn instruments late in life, and stop thinking about the middle of life as late in life, and use some mental resource other than Google, and some physical resource other than Amazon, and permanently retire mac and cheese, and give at least a quarter of the time and attention to aging relatives that they deserve, and never put a child in front of a screen. But we live in the world, and in the world there’s soccer practice, and speech therapy, and grocery shopping, and homework, and keeping the house respectably clean, and money, and moods, and fatigue, and also we’re only human, and humans not only need but deserve things like time with a coffee and the paper, and seeing friends, and taking breathers, so as nice as that idea is, there’s just no way we can make it happen. Ought to, but can’t.

Any respiratory viral infection, any inflammation in the brain or CNS—especially encephalitis and meningitis, fatigue and weakness, especially after long illness or in chronic infections, poor mitochondrial function, chronic wasting, unproductive cough from no known cause, joint inflammation, mental fog and confusion, low libido, lung infections, kidney infections, thick mucus in the lungs that will not move, immune dysregulation, dizziness, tinnitus, nocturia, cancer. It is especially effective for mycoplasma infections.

The fatigue of the climb was great but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one's second wind. I think that is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one's mental efforts. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existance of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as second wind. Whether mentally or physically occupied most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion. Thus they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort...

Grappling with a problem for which one has little aptitude or inclination (a geometry problem, say) exercises one’s power to attend. For Weil, this ascetic aspect of attention—the fact that it is a “negative effort” against mental sloth—is especially significant. “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.

Homo defessus — Never before in human history have so many people considered their everyday tiredness (because they are so busy and have so much to do) as a badge of honor. We are living in the era of Homo defessus, the exhausted man. I wonder if historians of the distant future (if there will be any) will look back at our epoch and decide to give it a name: “The Second Dark Ages,” because for the first time, humans not only deliberately sought exhaustion, but were also convinced that this mentality was their pride, an indisputable token of greatness.

Screw all mental illness stigma. Having the courage to admit yourself for psychiatric care to heal is phenomenal. Shrugging off a panic attack is badass. Battling through intense spells of fatigue and demotivation is incredible. Going to the psychologist to attend to your mental health is a boss move. Achieving things despite having little to no interest or pleasure is impressive. Frequently practicing self-care is fantastic. Picking yourself up after hitting rock bottom is exceptional. Openly talking about your mental health struggles is courageous. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The key to being a minimalist is making a routine out of just about everything that is not core to your mission. When decisions are automatic, you skip the conscious deliberation and associated brain activity. You move straight from encountering a situation (e.g., I need to get dressed) to performing an action (e.g., putting on the same shirt as I do every day) without expending energy in between. In a sense, you are cheating fatigue, saving your mental muscle for things that actually matter to you. The more decisions you make automatic, the more energy you’ll have for the work you deem important.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t the same conversation about mental health back then that there is now. I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early and will channel their feelings into something more healing than white marble floors. Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. Once the babies were born, I added on my confusion and obsession about the babies’ safety, which was ratcheting up the more media attention was on us. Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope.

I’m more than my anxiety, more than my depression, more than the things that cause my aggression. I’m more than my guilt, more than my desperation, more than the things that provide me frustration. I’m more than my resentment, more than the emotions I try to hide, more than the things that eat me up inside. I’m more than my indecision, more than my doubt, more than the things that make me want out. I’m more than my setbacks, more than my fatigue, more than the things that harm my physique. I’m more than my loneliness, more than my annoyance, more than the things that cause my avoidance. I’m more than my failures, more than my profanity, more than the things that cause my insanity. I’m more than my sadness, more than my irritability, more than the things that cause my fragility. I’m more than my sweaty palms, more than my shortness of breath, more than the things that drive me to death. I’m more than my pain, more than my blues, more than the alcohol I abuse. I’m more than my trembling, more than my shaky voice, more than the things that provide me such noise. I’m more than my restlessness, more than my tears, more than the insecurities that have plagued me for years. I’m more than the ear can hear, more than the heart can feel, more than the eye can see, I’m beautifully me.

ME/CFS is not synonymous with depression or other psychiatric illnesses. The belief by some that they are the same has caused much con- fusion in the past, and inappropriate treatment. Nonpsychotic depression (major depression and dysthymia), anxiety disorders and somatization disorders are not diagnostically exclusionary, but may cause significant symptom overlap. Careful attention to the timing and correlation of symptoms, and a search for those characteristics of the symptoms that help to differentiate between diagnoses may be informative, e.g., exercise will tend to ameliorate depression whereas excessive exercise tends to have an adverse effect on ME/CFS patients.

When I endeavor to examine my own conduct…I divide myself as it were into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator…. The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavoring to form some opinion. It was in this way, Smith concluded, that “we suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour.” The change of perspective accomplished by the impartial spectator is far from easy, however: Smith clearly recognized the “fatiguing exertions” it required.

Characteristics of CFS/ME include persistent mental and physical fatigue accompanied by a range of neurological, autonomic, neuroendocrine, immune and sleep difficulties (Carruthers et al., 2003). In turn, these manifestations produce a range of functional limitations including severe cognitive impairments (e.g. problems with attention, problem-solving, concentration, memory and verbal communication) and debilitating physical difficulties such as problems with general mobility and self-care, shopping, food-preparation and housekeeping (Taylor & Kielhofner, 2005). These impairments are often acute and enduring, impacting upon an individual’s personal, occupational and social lives.

Fatigue has built up after all this training, and I can’t seem to run very fast. As I’m leisurely jogging along the Charles River, girls who look to be new Harvard freshmen keep on passing me. Most of these girls are small, slim, have on maroon Harvard-logo outfits, blond hair in a ponytail, and brand-new iPods, and they run like the wind. You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at high speed. Compared to them I’m pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it. These random thoughts come to me as I watch their proud ponytails swinging back and forth, their aggressive strides. Keeping to my own leisurely pace, I continue my run down along the Charles. Have I ever had such luminous days in my own life? Perhaps a few. But even if I had a long ponytail back then, I doubt if it would have swung so proudly as these girls’ ponytails do. And my legs wouldn’t have kicked the ground as cleanly and as powerfully as theirs. Maybe that’s only to be expected. These girls are, after all, brand-new students at the one and only Harvard University. Still, it’s pretty wonderful to watch these pretty girls run. As I do, I’m struck by an obvious thought: One generation takes over from the next. This is how things are handed over in this world, so I don’t feel so bad if they pass me. These girls have their own pace, their own sense of time. And I have my own pace, my own sense of time. The two are completely different, but that’s the way it should be.

ME/CFS has a greater negative impact on functional status and well-being than other chronic diseases, e.g., cancer or lung diseases[8], and is associated with a drastic decrement in physical functioning[9]. In a comparison study[10] ME/CFS patients scored significantly lower than patients with hypertension, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and multiple sclerosis (MS), on all of the eight Short Form Health Survey (SF-36)[11] subscales. As compared to patients with depression, ME/CFS patients scored significantly lower on all the scales, except for scales measuring mental health and role disability due to emotional problems, on which they scored significantly higher.

The results of the most recent such study were published in Psychological Science at the end of 2008. A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous, and mentally fatiguing, series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were then divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy down town streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results. The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. “In sum,” concluded the researchers, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.

His breath gushed from him. He pressed his palms and forehead to the cold wood, letting it seep away his fatigue. Please let us pass. His bile pulsed. Balin bit his lip, shook his head. Open, he thought. He grabbed the knob again and twisted. It held. A stiff, solid mold of brass. Balin imagined the door within his mind’s eye: the grain of the wood, the shine of the knob. The knob turned in his mind. Balin’s hand shook. Numbness seeped up from his fingertips along his palm. Open. In his mind, the handle turned. Something within him pulled taut, stretched. Open. He squeezed the door’s handle and twisted. It held. Open! He gritted his teeth, thought the door to open, demanded the door to open. That tight thing within him stretched further. A blunt ache blossomed into a sting, like a pulled muscle, but it wasn’t physical. It wasn’t mental either. Something else. Something unchartered. Open. Open. Open. He twisted the knob. It did not move.

The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us as the phenomenon of “second wind.” Ordinarily we stop when we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played or worked “enough,” and desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth “wind” may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own—sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.37

Contrary to popular belief, the psychiatric concept of clinical depression is different from ordinary sadness. Depression adds to sadness a constellation of physical symptoms that produce a general slowing and deadening of bodily functions. A depressive person sleeps less, and the nighttime becomes a dreaded chore that one can never achieve properly. Or one never gets out of bed; better sleep, if one can, since one can’t do anything else. Interest in life and activities declines. Thinking itself is difficult; concentration is shot; it’s hard enough to focus on three consecutive thoughts, much less read an entire book. Energy is low; constant fatigue, inexplicable and unyielding, wears one down. Food loses its taste. Or to feel better, one might eat more, perhaps to stave off boredom. The body moves slowly, falling to the declining rhythm of one’s thoughts. Or one paces anxiously, unable to relax. One feels that everything is one’s own fault; guilty, remorseful thoughts recur over and over. For some depressives, suicide can seem like the only way out of this morass; about 10 percent take their own lives.

COULD IT BE B12 DEFICIENCY? The neurological symptoms of B12 deficiency that occur in young and middle-aged people are very similar to those in older people. They include the following: • Numbness, tingling, or burning sensations of the hands, feet, extremities, or truncal area, often misdiagnosed as diabetic neuropathy or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) • Tremor, often misdiagnosed as essential tremor or pre-Parkinson’s disease • Muscle weakness, paresthesias, and paralysis, sometimes attributed to Guillain-Barré syndrome • Pain, fatigue, and debility, often labeled as “chronic fatigue syndrome” • “Shaky leg” syndrome (leg trembling) • Confusion and mental fogginess, often misdiagnosed as early-onset dementia • Unsteadiness, dizziness, and paresthesias, often misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis • Weakness of extremities, clumsiness, muscle cramps, twitching, or foot drop, often misdiagnosed as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) • Psychiatric symptoms, such as depression or psychosis (covered in greater length in the next chapter) • Visual disturbances, vision loss, or blindness In contrast, a doctor ignorant about the effects of B12 deficiency can destroy a patient’s life. The

We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com

Richter compares the conditions of rat domestication with those now provided by the 'Welfare State'-ample food, no danger, no stress, uniform environment and climate, and so forth. But he notes that, under these seemingly favorable conditions, organic deterioration has taken place: a decrease in the size of the adrenal glands, which help the organism meet stress or fatigue and forfend certain diseases: while the thyroid gland, the regulator of metabolism, becomes less active. Not strangely, perhaps, the brains of the domestic rat, and perhaps their mental ability, are smaller. At the same time, the sex glands mature earlier, become bigger, show more activity, and result in a higher rate of fertility. How human!

Sam’s Club, Trader Joe’s, and other discount stores that sell cheap supplements should not be your source for SAMe. Instead, look at GNC, local natural-food stores, or the Internet. You get what you pay for, and cheap SAMe doesn’t work. If the SAMe you’ve tried in the past wasn’t effective, don’t give up; try a different brand, preferably one recommended by a functional medicine doctor. SAMe is highly unstable and needs to be enteric coated and kept in a moderate-temperature storage facility. To take SAMe, start with 400 mg. on an empty stomach (thirty minutes before or ninety minutes after eating). If you don’t see an improvement in your mental and physical energy, increase your dose by 400 mg. each day—up to 1,200 mg.—until you do. I find it is best to take SAMe all at once, thirty minutes before breakfast. The method allows you to get a substantial morning boost that will often last through the day. You can take SAMe in divided doses if needed, but always on an empty stomach. Don’t take it past 3:00 p.m., as it may interfere with your sleep.

That, in fact, is what Kruglanski and other researchers discovered. Our need to conquer the unresolved, as we’ll see, is essential to our ability to function in the world. But like any mental trait, this need can be exaggerated in some people and heightened in certain circumstances. As Kruglanski told me, “the situation you’re in, your culture, your social environment—change any of these factors, and you’re going to change someone’s need for closure.” Aversion to uncertainty can be contagious, picked up subconsciously from those around us. In stressful situations, we trust people in our social groups more and trust outsiders less. Fatigue heightens our appetite for order. So does time pressure. When our need for closure is high, we tend to revert to stereotypes, jump to conclusions, and deny contradictions. We may stubbornly insist, like Rudolf Schelkmann, that the dog is still a dog and not a cat.

For example, on a long, hard run, the physiological, psychological, and mental fatigue associated with a maximum effort sends a danger signal to the body. What started out as a chosen and desired effort is interpreted as life threatening, something to be stopped. Your first response will not be a conscious sense of fear but rather physiological sensations. At this point, in fact, your conscious mind is still giving you full-steam-ahead signals, but the subconscious mind, intent on life preservation, begins sending the body an opposite set of instructions—muscle stiffness and pain, pounding heart, a struggle to breathe, sounds suggestive of dying. The message from the subconscious mind to the body is clear—shut it down.

We would routinely be exposed to the sunset as we were waiting to open up the telescopes for nighttime viewing atop the very high altitude Mauna Kea mountain in Hawaii, USA. That would be followed by exposure to bright industrial LASER light during the night. It was around this time that I started suffering with chronic fatigue and mental confusion. I had these exposures in my mid thirties and by my mid forties I was seeing rainbow halos around bright nighttime lights and my mental and physical health mysteriously collapsed.

Dr John Nash Ott had reported improved health that an outdoor lifestyle can bring in his books. He believed it could cure prolonged illness. I had a similar experience. I had achieved what had been impossible during the previous decade, a return to the weight I was in my thirties. I had far more energy and far less days of chronic fatigue. I was mentally alert and suffered far less forgetfulness and confusion. I slept better on a two stage sleep cycle that Dr John Nash Ott had reported as an effect of the outdoor lifestyle. I would go to bed earlier, typically a couple of hours after sunset and wake up around 1-2 AM before falling asleep again until morning twilight. My body had automatically aligned with the twilight times. It was common in the morning to be awake in bed listening to the morning chorus of the birds and the “Cock-a-doodle-do!” of the roosters.

La plus grosse campagne de sensibilisation à la santé mentale au Canada est une publicité à peine déguisée pour une compagnie privée qui empoche des profits grâce au système carcéral, au détriment de la santé mentale des détenu·es. Tant que la psychothérapie ne sera pas couverte publiquement et accessible universellement, les décideur·euses auront de ce sang sur les mains. Tant qu’un revenu minimal ne sera pas garanti à tous les membres de notre population, iels auront de ce sang sur les mains. Tant que le système d’éducation ne sera pas repensé pour contribuer à déstigmatiser réellement ces maladies et ces troubles, iels auront de ce sang sur les mains. Gaétan Barrette a de ce sang sur les mains ; tout comme Philippe Couillard et François Legault, pour ne nommer qu’eux. Ça aura pris une pandémie mondiale pour que ce dernier refinance quelque peu le secteur. La fatigue, celle qui envahit nos corps la nuit, le jour, peu importe, quand nous restons figé·es dans nos lits, elle est politique.

He knew from experience that it would be hours before he fell asleep, hours of useless mental turmoil that would lead to nothing but fatigue.

The choice of marching towards death in poor health or improved health is open to many sickened people.

You should aim to keep your bedroom in the range of 30% to 50% relative humidity for improved sleep.

Occupational sickness may entitle you to compensation, even if the sickness took decades to be correctly diagnosed.

The USA government is completely okay with sending you into poverty.

I was fortunate when my car needed to be replaced that automatic collision avoidance cars had become affordable.

The primary cause of illness and disease: Incorrect human environmental conditions.

I have noticed there are far more destitute people begging for money on street corners in the USA than in the past and they are younger.

I was surprised the USA medical profession could not diagnose low blood oxygen levels, multiple chemical sensitivity to abnormal air, food intolerance, malnutrition, altitude hypersensitivity, loss of circadian rhythm and loss of moonlight synchronization.

I found my correct diagnosis in books and on the internet.

Goodbye toxic world, hello freedom.

Sweets or the beats is what the bullies would say at my school. We would give them laxative laden treats!

Vitamin R – The radiation (R) vitamin that is essential to life, however too much or too little will make you sick.

I showed a profound response to mercury chelation therapy.

Mysterious disabling illnesses will make you dependent on people.

I had a very interesting career that sent me into ill health and onto disability.

Hello dementia and goodbye health, competence and memories.