The Lightning Process: A new training for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) is a debilitating physical illness that effects 180'000 Australians. The initial cause of onset and the symptoms can vary hugely between individuals with this diagnosis. The medical profession plays a very important initial role of correct and timely diagnosis which if delayed causes obvious distress to a person with ME. After a diagnosis is made though, there is very little a Doctor is able to do to help that person recover apart from giving advice, treating symptoms with medications and referring onto other services such as a pacing program to manage the "energy envelope".

The Lightning Process is a new 3-day training program for people with ME/CFS. The training recognises that the stress response, flight and fight or Physical Emergency Response (PER) plays a huge role in keeping people with ME stuck. If you investigate the PER then you will find that there have been a lot of developments over the past decade in our understanding of how this system works and what effects it has on our body.

The PER is a response our body activates in response to any "threat". This can be cold weather, a broken leg, a bacterial infection, a police siren going off behind us while we are driving along, the thought of talking in front of a group of people or even someone in front of us with 15 items in their basket in the 10 item checkout lane! As you can see the stressor is not just what we might think of when we think of "stress".  It is an amazing response that effects every cell of our body to some degree. It is easy to imagine what happens to our bodily systems if you imagine you are the zebra and a lion has just appeared out of nowhere!

It is a very complex system but put simply when we activate this response certain things happen. We activate the sympathetic nervous system, which vamps things up. This is done by the release of adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol, dopamine and other hormones and neurotransmitters. The following things occur:

·      Breathing rate increases to deliver more oxygen to our working muscles

·      Blood pressure increases so we can move quickly while maintaining good blood supply to brain and working muscles

·      Heart rate increases to pump more blood around the body and deliver the oxygen and sugars to working muscles

·      Blood supply is diverted from your stomach to your working muscles (arms and legs).

·      You may need to urinate and defecate as the zebra running away from the lion you want to get rid of as much weight as possible.

·      Your thyroid activity increases to increase your basal metabolic rate

WWhen this response occurs it has to steal energy away from other less important systems. So the following things are affected:

·      Ability to think clearly. When I lion comes along it is important to make QUICK reflexive decisions!  So the ability to think clearly is diminished by lack of blood supply to the cognitive areas of our brain leading one of the common symptoms of ME called brain fog.

·      Digestion. With the blood supply diverted from the stomach you will be unable to digest food properly and will not get the nutrients from the food you have eaten. Also there is a tendency for the body to evacuate what is already there so again a loss of digestion and nutrition. This of course can lead to a lack of energy a problem common with ME suffers.  

·      Sleep. It is not important to sleep when a lion is around! So the stress response leads to poor/fragmented sleep and lack of sleep is in its self a stressor! You can be stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place! Lack of "good" sleep (slow wave sleep), or sleep that gets your body into the "rest and digest" part of sleep will lead to many issues. Immune system is affected, memory is impaired, energy restoration is poor as well as other issues. Many people with ME report never waking feeling refreshed which as you can see makes sense.

·      Immune system. The immune system can become be either overactive or underactive.  If overactive then you will suffer from medication sensitivities, food allergies, auto-immune problems and have a massive expenditure of energy. If underactive then you will be prone to infections, prone to things like cancer and generally be doing a poor job keeping old, damaged, foreign and mutated cells out of your system.  Many people with ME don't get colds but do suffer from sensitivities to medications, foot, light, sound etc.

·      Nervous system. Signals to and from the brain to the rest of the body via the nerves become confusing and disrupted. The nervous system is the system that controls everything in our body. We have 100 billion nerves in our body. That is 14 times as many nerves as there are people on this planet and each nerve has 2000-5000 synapses (joins to other nerves). Each synapse is effected by the PER. This in turn effects our ability to turn muscles on and off and the feedback we get about how comfortable a muscle, ligament, tendon etc is.  People with ME often report a decrease in their co-ordination, balance and fine motor skills as well as many pain symptoms such as headaches, back pain, muscle ache etc.

·      Muscular system. As you can see from what happens to the nervous system the motor system will not be able to work properly. This occurs when the PER is activated repeatedly. The muscular system becomes more on edge, it sends confusing signals back to the brain and the brain sends confusing signals back.  People with ME have a physical inability to do things they would love to do like go for a run or even walk 500m for some. In the extreme cases even get out of bed!

As you can see from the long list of changes that can occur if this response is activated repeatedly the body will not be able to functional normally. There seems to be a common link with people with ME that they are usually quite driven people who are high achievers. When they initially become ill due to the initial virus, medication reaction, stressful event, glandular fever etc. that activates the PER. Then when an ME sufferer seeks help but don't get any improvement in their symptoms then they activate the PER again. Frustration at not becoming well can activate the PER. Anger can activate the PER. Worrying about not getting well activates the PER. You can se how this system can be repeatedly activated and create the symptoms we know go along with ME.

The PER leads to a lack of refreshing sleep which activates the PER even more which leads to less refreshing sleep which activates the PER even more……lack of sleep also decreases energy restoration! A bad place to be in! Your body stops digesting food properly. You are unable to think clearly and start to have problems walking even short distances.

If you have ME or know someone who has ME and are reading this then many of these symptoms will have you nodding. I could spend the next 400 pages talking about the PER and its effects on many other body systems and functions but if you would like to know more then get hold of the book "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" by Robert Sapolsky.

The interesting thing is that the Lightning Process is a training program that first of all recognises that we all have an ability to influence many of our bodily systems. For instance you have not been thinking about your breath for the past few minutes but if you chose to now you could take a deep breath. People once shown how can increase and decrease their heart rates or temperature of their skin.  The hardest thing about ME is not knowing when the next crash will come and the unpredictable nature of the symptoms which can activate the PER.

Now before you feel like the end is near it is worth talking about the Lightning Process Training.  Over the period of 3 consecutive days and with a year of follow-up support, each individual trainee is shown how to interrupt the PER in all its forms and start to learn to do something new and life/health enhancing. And like anything new like riding a bike it takes practice and some hard work to end up reaping the rewards. There has been some amazing research in the world on neural plasticity many of them written about in the book "The Brain that Changes Itself" by Normal Doidge. The Lightning Process is all about neural plasticity and our ability to change our physical selves once we have the tool to do so! The Lightning Process is that tool. We believe that the best person to fix you is you! Only you are aware of what is happening physically to you and so you are the only person who can address the physical issues related to your ME in that moment.

The great thing about most of the ME population being driven people is that once they have been shown the tools and experienced positive change as a result nothing stands in their way to becoming well.

The Lightning Process addresses more than just interrupting the PER it covers a large number of issues that are relevant to each person in the training. The trainings are run in groups of 2-5 people or one on one if the person is bed bound. It runs over 3 consecutive days and there is a year of follow-up support so that every person can do the training with the knowledge that they will be supported after the training if they need it.