Episode 7 – Where to Start?

Shownotes Having a map and knowing where you are on that map can make all the difference to your fatigue recovery journey. Anna shares the framework she uses with her clients which includes the different stages of recovery and the most important tests, interventions, supplements and attitudes for each stage.  Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Where to Start? Hello, and welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh, a trauma-informed functional medicine nutritionist and chronic fatigue survivor. Today I wanted to talk about where to begin or a high-level view of fatigue recovery.  Fatigue recovery is multifaceted. You can do a lot of research and read many things, and it can become very overwhelming very quickly to know what you need to be working on and, more importantly, what order and how to approach it. Albert Einstein said the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple, and I’m not going to hold my hand up and call myself a genius. But I would like to simplify this fatigue recovery journey for you by giving you a framework or at least an idea of some roadmap that you can follow on your fatigue recovery journey.  What I’ll share with you today is essentially the framework that I use when I’m working with my one-on-one clients. It’s this sort of big map that I have in my head. When I’m taking a client history, when I’m conversing with my clients, I’m filtering the information that I’m gathering from them through this lens, and then from here, making decisions about where we begin, what we do, how we structure things, how we order things, what tests to take, what supplements to take, and all those other parts of fatigue recovery. I’m a big-picture thinker, that’s my strength, and I think that works well in functional medicine and working with these chronic and complex cases because I can see the big picture, and sometimes that’s much more helpful than getting zoned in on the teeny tiny little details.  I tend to work from the outside in, in the sense that I tend to deal with what I call the big rocks first, and then as we work on each rock one at a time, we can get a little bit more granular on what the specifics of those rocks are. This is a five-step process, which makes it sound super simple and super easy. But in reality, we all know that recovering from a chronic and complex health condition, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or burnout, is anything but simple and easy.  But I’m just going to break it down into this five-step process to simplify it for you and make it easier to communicate. Stage one of your fatigue recovery journey revolves around removing anything that is threatening the system, anything that’s triggering the system, and creating a relative sense of safety. I use the word relatively because it’s very hard for us always to feel 100% safe today. There’s so much complexity in everyone’s lives. But we want the body to feel relatively safer than before so that some interventions and processes can land in the body. This is where there’s both an art and a science to healing, the sciences, all the technical details, which I’m very well versed in. But then...