This piece was written by Jenn Vesperman in the form of an email to me. Used with permission.
Dear?
You are allergic to stress. Let’s see if I can explain.
Everyone has a certain capacity for stress – a point at which they get irritable (or some other reaction), then a greater point at which their body demands that they leave the stressors, then a point at which they actually start to be physically damaged by it.
Imagine that a person’s capacity for stress is like a barrel with an open top, and a hole at the bottom. The capacity for things to enter the barrel is huge – the capacity for things to leave is reduced. The inflow is much, much greater than the outflow, so the barrel could easily fill, even with a perfectly open hole. Most people don’t get into that situation for long – they have brief periods of high stress, but never enough for the barrel to fill up.
Now look at a CFS patient. The barrel is the same size, the top is just as open. But the hole at the bottom is clogged up – only a trickle gets to go out. And there’s ALWAYS some stuff entering – the pain from the CFS, the brainfogs, the irritations, the fact that half the world doesn’t believe in it, the fact that the other half is sure ‘they’ can ‘help’.. And there’s the kicker: We get physical damage from the stress at the same point as Joe Average just gets irritated!
All of these things mean that a situation which adds a mild amount of stress, added to the CFS situation, may mean that your barrel is filling faster than your condition allows it to empty. Depending on your condition, your barrel may be filling faster then it empties even if you’re lying in bed asleep – my early ‘treatment’ was an attempt to remove me from inhalants and eaten allergies, to reduce the amount of stressors in my environment! (The good news is: it worked. And I now have a ‘resting’ state where my barrel can pretty much empty itself out. This lets me heal…)
Your capacity for stress is just the same as your family’s capacity – it’s just that your barrel is already partly full, there’s always some stuff entering it and you can’t clear it as fast.
And note that good things are also stressful. Never forget to allow for that when you’re making up your stress budget for the week…
And DO budget your stresses! If you set your stress budget up right, staying within it will allow your body a capacity for healing. If it’s set up to allow too much, or if you exceed it, your body will let you know – you’ll be suffering. Me, I wind up asleep for a week.
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