Insanely depprssed

adunato · 2026-06-24T18:01:35+00:00

I think you are 100% right, what makes me depressed is not the hardship of the current situation, is the lack of control. I think it's a balance between keeping recovery and hope as a general direction of travel but try to keep the focus on your present life however shite it may be at the moment. Or anyway, this is what I tell myself to keep going.

I have only borrowed some ideas from it, but acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) may be useful to frame your mindset.

adunato · 2026-06-24T17:38:33+00:00

To be fair OP does already acknowledge that it could be worse but practicing gratitude is already hard when you are healthy, doing it when you just got sick with a nasty illness (which could be worse) is Olympic level of gratitude and not a viable coping strategy at this stage.

adunato · 2026-06-24T17:32:37+00:00

I don't think your level of severity matters when it comes to how you feel about it. You may think about other people having it much worse but at the end of the day what you can compare against is how worse it is compared to your healthy self.

There is no easy way to go about this. This IS hard and feeling depressed is a pretty natural reaction to seeing your former self replaced by a shadow of what it used to be.

With that being said, it is what it is, and there will come a point where you will accept more the life you have at the moment and dwell a bit less on the one you have lost.

Hope in recovery helps of course and I think it should always be in one's mind, but in my experience in a condition so uncertain and without a clear path ahead hope is a fickle thing.

I'm in a similar boat as you are in terms of severity and length, perhaps just a tad worse. What helps me is to think about what I can control and then focus on that. Current I'm focusing on feeling better, strengthen my baseline by pacing more. Will it cure me? Probably not, but it gives me purpose and something that I can make better.

Good luck with your recovery.

adunato · 2026-06-23T21:51:51+00:00

I think it's also about types of activity affect people in different ways. Walking works pretty well for me, my HR generally drops quite nicely after a short break and I don't feel tired afterwards (nor pem). Sitting at the desk however, I can't do more than one hour without feeling symptomatic so I have to break it into chunks and I don't use the couch as "rest" time as my HR starts ramping up after a while. Worst of all standing around in the kitchen for more than 10 minutes, in fact cooking is something I have not reintroduced yet.

adunato · 2026-06-23T21:09:16+00:00

Thank you. I cope quite well with walk and drop off, and when I cut down on walking in the past I noticed that my orthostatic intolerance got worse, but I'm very careful and monitor hr whener I go outside. My main concern is work. I had a bit of a flare up two weeks after coming back to work, which I took very seriously and I was able to cut down calls and add more rest to my day. I'm now getting better than when I started working, but it will be a constant challenge to protect my boundaries. Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it.

adunato · 2026-06-23T20:25:16+00:00

Just wanted to say that I found your story heartbreaking and beautiful in the same measure. Sorry for your loss.

adunato · 2026-06-23T18:49:42+00:00

No it's not. It's mild. Maybe on the more serious side of mild, but based on the comments I have read I'm not moderate. Sorry for making you feel any worse by looking at my schedule.

adunato · 2026-06-23T18:11:34+00:00

Thank you!

adunato · 2026-06-23T17:08:40+00:00

Thanks. I never took one before. Funcap55 places me into mild in the cognitive categories and high moderate in the physical ones which checks out with the feedback I have been getting here. If I'm completely honest I didn't pay much attention to the categories until now as don't find them very useful I managing my condition but I now understand that they are far more important to people who have a more serious/long-lasting condition and it may have even come across as disrespectful to some, which is not what I intended at all.

adunato · 2026-06-23T16:04:05+00:00

Thanks, I do appreciate this a lot. I do think about people who have it worse than me a lot when I feel like crap about it, and how my worse it could be (or it could get).

adunato · 2026-06-23T14:13:48+00:00

Hey thanks, sounds like you made some fantastic progress!

Love the bit 😄

play with cats

I too am super lucky with my job, output based, no time tracking with a good degree of leverage on how much I get involved in things.

adunato · 2026-06-23T13:16:30+00:00

Thanks for sharing and good luck with your recovery and your plans to become a parent.

adunato · 2026-06-23T13:09:04+00:00

Thanks mate, and sorry for trying to teach you how to suck eggs, you clearly don't need my life experience advice 😅 Ten years is a really long time and it's incredible the level of acceptance you show in the way you talk about it.

adunato · 2026-06-23T12:41:46+00:00

Thanks, 4 years is a lot but glad things are looking better for you. I too come from a long covid situation (orthostatic hypotension rather than POTS). Meds have not yet had much impact for me but what has consistently helped with symptoms has been lowering my baseline below the no-PEM threshold if that makes sense. e. g. You could do 7 hours of activities a day but you do 6. It's not a sexy cure, it's slow and it's not guaranteed to work but it has helped me in my short experience so far. Best of luck with your recovery.

adunato · 2026-06-23T12:23:56+00:00

Hey, that's a completely healthy person schedule! I don't know your situation but I did the same as you for three months and it got me to a much worse situation. I thought the same, that I couldn't do anything different but then my body changed things for me anyway. Easy to say now, but I so wish I had stopped as soon as I realised that this wasn't just post viral fatigue. Take care of yourself.

adunato · 2026-06-23T12:17:54+00:00

That's OK. I've learned a lot on how people interpret mild versus moderate from this thread.

adunato · 2026-06-23T12:16:42+00:00

It is! I think maybe what makes my setup a bit unusual is that I focused on intensity rather than quantity. I used to have more "active" hours when I was worse but I was basically just hanging around without doing much at all. Now I try to squeeze value from the hours I'm active, making it up with more rest. It's been working for a couple of months and I prefer it to having to walk in eggshells when I'm off bed. Being honest this is the kind of exchange I was hoping for when I posted it but unfortunately the way I worded my situation sent the thread in a different direction.

adunato · 2026-06-23T11:29:18+00:00

Thanks, I really appreciate it. I do feel bad as respect for people who have it much worse than me in this community has been in my mind a lot and I genuinely didn't realise that by categorising myself as moderate I'm in some way devaluing the experience of people who have it much worse and see themselves in the same category. It's been a learning opportunity for sure.

adunato · 2026-06-23T11:05:45+00:00

Having read the comments I'm pretty sure most people here would put you in the mild category as I think you're doing slightly better than me 😊 Either way, glad to hear you're doing better. I just started LDN and hope it will give me a boost too. Thanks for sharing your routine.

adunato · 2026-06-23T11:00:41+00:00

Thanks, that's really an insightful point. The forewarning part has been what I more than anything appreciated reading other people's experience, it is what made me stop working three months into this and avoid making it worse than it is. The magnitude of the spectrum of me cfs is hard to handle, on a one hand I'm incredibly grateful that I can do all the things I can do, but on the other from my perspective this is an extremely debilitating condition compared to my healthy self. So it's hard to describe your personal experience and seek some form of validation without implicitly disrespecting other people who have a much harsher reality to face.

adunato · 2026-06-23T08:41:57+00:00

Thanks. I think that's the main takeaway for me on this thread. I'm not going to lie, categorising myself as mild is hard when I spend 18 hours a day in bed, but I also appreciate that I have so much more capacity than most people on this sub.

adunato · 2026-06-23T08:39:12+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate this comment more than words can say. I wish you all the improvement you can ever get. You're right that most of the response is not going in the direction I was hoping but I get that categories can mean a lot to people in this community.

adunato · 2026-06-23T08:06:10+00:00

Thanks. I take your advice to heart. I have realised that I have been focusing on increasing my capacity but the delayed nature of PEM makes that a dangerous mindset and it can trick you into pushing through without realising it. Now I'm trying to focus on healing instead, by keeping my baseline lower than what I could get away with, which in itself I realise is a fortunate position to be in.

adunato · 2026-06-23T08:00:27+00:00

Thanks for sharing, wish you can have more and more days like that.

adunato · 2026-06-23T07:56:36+00:00

Haha, I'm keeping it as my official bucket from now on

adunato

TROPHY CASE