I agree with you, BinLA. Where some symptoms can disappear in a day, hour or even instantly, other symptoms can take weeks, months or even more than a year to die down. People with a burnout for example need months or even years to get back on their feet. Real physical changes have taken place and some of them need time to reverse. I am not educated enough to tell you exactly what they are though.
Psychogenic symptoms are always a mix of the 'mind' influencing the 'body' and vice versa. Often it is pretty difficult to say which of the two is holding you back at certain point during your healing process, because they are so intertwined.
In essence the mind needs to get out of the 'survival mode' that it is in before positive physical changes can occur, it needs to get in a state where it doesn't need to be hyper-vigilant anymore. This can partly be achieved by convincing yourself that the symptoms are benign, but it may also be necessary to deal with what set it off in the first place; suppression of certain emotions (anxiety, anger, guilt, etc.) that get triggered in certain situations are often at the core of 'psychogenic' symptoms. And then there is the fact that certain things cannot be changed in an instant. I cannot run a marathon when I simply lack the physical endurance and strength, I need time to make the necessary physical changes to be able to do that.
Try to be patient and push yourself to a limit that you feel is right for you. Have faith in what your body is capable off, but be reasonable and kind towards yourself too. Try to not let set backs set you back, as they are normal and sometimes even valuable as you can learn from them. For example, if you get dizziness when you enter the gym, try to figure out why the gym triggers your brain to do that.
I can go on and on, but the point is that recovery is a personal process. Hope you can recover by this PPDS article on its own, if not I suggest to read the program by Alan Gordon to get an idea about what tools there are to make more progress. http://go.tmswiki.org/newprogram (Pain Recovery Program)
To answer your question: Yes, I had the same experience and sometimes still have (mind you, my symptoms nowadays are just a shadow of what they used to be in strength and frequency). Personality is certainly part of the equation. You might ask yourself why you tend to run yourself in the ground, where others are more kind towards themselves and simply stop and take a break. Often a big part is the result of your childhood, the time during which your brain develops itself and creates many mechanisms to deal with certain situations. The good news is that the brain stays plastic during your lifetime, so to a certain extent you can change it. Don't expect that you can change your personality completely, but you can make changes to sharp edges of it by being more mindful for example. You might also want to read one of the books by Steve Ozanich, as in my mind he has a similar personality of pushing through whatever it takes.
that's it, need to eat now
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Alan has completed the new Pain Recovery Program. To read or share it, use this updated link: https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/painrecovery/Dismiss Notice
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