Mind-Body Connection & ANS Retraining Isn't The Cure For MECFS.

Nor Do You Need To Buy An Expensive Course To Try It

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The Basics

ANS dysfunction is common in MECFS and worsens symptoms like dysautonomia & adrenaline surges

Patients with MECFS who have recovered frequently report lowering their sympathetic activation as a factor in recovery.

There is no evidence that ANS retraining or mindfulness can cure MECFS.

You do not need to spend money on expensive courses to learn mindfulness, parasympathetic activation, vagus nerve stimulation, or ANS retraining.

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What is ANS Retraining?

The autonomic nervous system is made of two parts:

The parasympathetic nervous system which controls your "rest and digest" functions like sleep, digestions, and healing.

The sympathetic nervous system which controls your "fight or flight" reflex.

In patients with MECFS, the sympathetic nervous system is overactive and the parasympathetic nervous system is underactive. These systems are also unbalanced, swinging from one extreme to the other.

ANS retraining refers to using exercises to rebalance the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system.

No strong evidence exists to support ANS retraining as a cure for MECFS. However, many patients report it to be a helpful intervention for symptom management.

Plenty of free resources on parasympathetic activation including through vagus nerve stimulation are available. You do not have to spend money to trial this intervention.

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What Is Mind-Body Connection

The mind-body connection refers to the fact that our mental state and physical state affect one another.

Mental exercises such as meditation have been shown to be effective at reducing symptoms such as chronic pain.

Physical conditions like mast cell activation can cause mental health effects like anxiety and "feeling of impending doom."

Mind-body practitioners attempt to use this connection to treat physical illness with mental exercises like meditation or working through past trauma.

As with ANS retraining, there is no evidence any mind-body intervention can cure MECFS. But many patients find certain exercises helpful for symptom management. Lots of free exercises are available online and in apps for you to try.

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Reasons why ANS retraining is not a cure.

While ANS dysfunction is a testable and clear dysfunction in people with MECFS, it is not the only dysfunction.

Likewise, mindfulness can be helpful in managing mental health comorbidity and central sensitization, but these are not the root causes of MECFS. Even in central sensitization disorders like CRPS and mental health conditions like primary depression, mindfulness is only 1 of many interventions utilized.

ANS retraining and mindfulness cannot address other underlying dysfunction in MECFS such as metabolic dysfunction, immune dysfunction, low blood volume, and neuroinflammation.

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Why Do People Think ANS Retraining Is A Cure?

Almost all ANS retraining programs market themselves as a cure. They must because otherwise, it would be obvious they do not offer anything besides freely available online advice.

Because of the nature of MECFS, fixing any single component can have beneficial effects on your ability to cope with others.

This means that for some patients, improving ANS imbalance will be the small change that pushes them into recovery or remission. It gives their bodies the room to heal. This can also happen with other treatments like targeted mitochondrial supplements, POTS treatment, or immunotherapies. These therapies don't fix everything but they can still the trigger for improvement.

Furthermore, people who have chronic fatigue due to depression, burnout, or PTSD can more often be cured by rebalancing their ANS. These patients never had ME, but they may mistaking believe they had chronic fatigue syndrome due to not understanding that chronic fatigue and MECFS are not the same.

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How Can ANS retraining & mindfulness be helpful?

ANS retraining and mindfulness can help bring your body into a restful state. True rest is an essential part of pacing and adrenaline surges and "wired but tired" symptoms of ME can make resting extraordinarily difficult.

Breathing exercises, therapies, and biofeedback that focuses on parasympathetic activation can help you to break out of adrenaline surges and find rest. This in turn can allow for effective pacing which is the most helpful treatment we know of for managing MECFS.

Unlike some false "cures" for ME like GET, CBT, NLP, homeopathy, hypnotherapy, etc. ANS retraining and mindfulness offer legitimately helpful interventions. But just because they are helpful doesn't make them a cure or change how dangerous and harmful ideologies can be peddled in courses that claim to simply be about ANS retraining.

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Victim blaming. Why you didn't "fail" ANS retraining.

One of the ways that ANS retraining programs claim unreasonably high success rates is to claim that everyone who completes their program is cured and those who are not cured simply failed to complete the program. They just weren't "dedicated" enough.

This is of course victim blaming.

The more severe your ME is the more you will suffer from adrenaline surges, executive dysfunction, pain, trauma and other complications that further disrupt and disbalance your ANS.

For patients with severe pain or symptoms at rest mindfulness and meditation may be extremely painful or impossible to pursue.

None of this is your fault. All of it makes ANS retraining more difficult. This doesn't mean that you are "failing" ANS retraining and it doesn't make you "non-compliant."

It means you had a harder job. Many people with ME have an impossible job.

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Lack Of Evidence on ANS Retraining

ANS retraining is at best an experimental treatment.

While mindfulness has been shown in a pilot study to improve MECFS no significant evidence supports any brain retraining program for ME.

There is substantial evidence that HRV is disrupted and lowered in MECFS and that dysautonomia is a substantial factor in ME patients' symptoms.

But while there is evidence that ME causes ANS dysfunction that does not mean that fixing the ANS will fix ME (which is not the same as chronic fatigue!). So far no scientific studies show this to be the case.

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ANS Retraining & The Biopsychosocial Model Rebranded

Many programs that advertise ANS Retraining or Mind-Body connection as cures for MECFS are simply peddling a new and updated version of the biopsychosocial or BPS model of MECFS.

The BPS model of MECFS assumes that there is no root cause of MECFS and that symptoms are simply due to deconditioning and irrational fears.

Many new mind-body practitioners assume that there is no root cause of MECFS and that symptoms are simply due to an imbalanced autonomic nervous system and trauma-based fight or flight response.

These programs may appear more legitimate than trauma healing or CBT because of the use of objective metrics like HRV, but they are really just turning back to the psychosomatization of this biological illness.

While these programs may be less harmful because their interventions may actually help with symptom management, they still distract and detract from the important awareness and research of MECFS as a biological illness.

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Myalgic Encephalomyelitis is a complex #neuroimmunologicalDisease with no FDA-approved treatments or cures.

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Yet some people claim that simple "brain retraining" or "autonomic nervous system retraining" can lead to complete recovery.

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The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is responsible for our fight, flight and freeze reflex related to Sympathetic Activation and the rest and digest mode triggered by Parasympathetic Activation.

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Studies show that pwME have unusually high levels of sympathetic activation and low levels of parasympathetic activation. In other words, we are in fight or flight all the time. We have ANS imbalance.

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BUT the evidence does not suggest that increasing parasympathetic activation will cure ME. Increasing parasympathetic activation can be done in many ways and is easily testable. If it were a cure for MECFS we would know. It is not.

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This is likely because there is much more wrong in ME bodies than just ANS imbalance.

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Increasing parasympathetic activation can reduce symptoms and be a helpful tool! Which is why it is so incredibly frustrating to see so many practitioners marketing it for exorbitant prices and alongside toxic positivity and dangerous false promises.

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Chronic fatigue can be caused by depression, PTSD, burnout, and other illnesses for which autonomic nervous system treatments can have extremely result in a cure. When these patients are mislabeled with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome their recoveries are then weaponized against pwME.

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At its best awareness and regulation of our autonomic nervous system is one helpful tool to control symptoms.

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At its worst though, autonomic nervous system retraining is just pseudoscientifically coded language rebranding the theory of ME as a psychiatric illness.

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You do not need to spend hundreds of dollars to access mindfulness and vagusNerve exercises that will increase parasympathetic activation. All you need is realistic expectations and a simple google search.