You keep getting flu-like symptoms, but you are never actually sick. I’m talking about low-grade fevers, sore throat, swollen lymph nodes. You feel like you’re coming down with something all the time, but your lab tests are normal. No virus, no bacteria, just something. Here is what it is: your immune system is responding to emotional overload the same way it would respond to an infection. When you are under long-term stress, your body starts producing pro-inflammatory cytokines, the same chemical messengers it would release if you had the flu. That is why it feels so real: the fever, the aches, the heaviness. Your immune system is overactive, trying to protect you from something, but that something is not a virus; it is the emotional war you have been living through. When I was starting my own weight loss journey after surviving narcissistic abuse, you may have noticed it, I realized something strange. Every time I pushed myself even slightly, like walking a little faster or exercising more than usual, I would feel feverish within hours. At one point, I genuinely thought I had cancer, it was that frequent, that intense, and that scary. So I stopped trying to push. I learned to go gently because my body wasn’t just out of shape; it was inflamed from trauma.
Sign 5: Delayed Fatigue Onset
You feel fine during an activity but crash hours or a day later. This is the one that confuses people the most. You manage to get through a social event, a work meeting, even a walk. You’re okay while it is happening, but hours later you crash. You can’t move, you can’t think, you can’t feel anything except exhaustion. This is called delayed fatigue onset. Your body uses emergency energy, usually adrenaline, to get through something it perceives as stressful, and it works, but for a while. Once the event is over, your system crashes. Why? Because your adrenal glands, which are supposed to help regulate your energy through cortisol and other hormones, are already depleted. They do not have any backup, and so you fall apart, not out of nowhere, but because your body paid for the activity with energy it did not actually have. This is why pacing is everything in recovery, not just emotionally, but physically. You can’t go back to functioning like nothing happened because your body is still in triage mode.
Sign 6: Digestive Issues
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