The body put its foot down

· Shiju Thomas · Life

The body put its foot down

I had stopped being able to climb the stairs.

Not in a dramatic way. I'd get to the third step and my legs would register that there were two more flights to go and they would just decline. Not pain, exactly. A kind of polite refusal. I'd sit down on the step for a minute, then I'd walk up the rest slowly, holding the rail like a man forty years older than I was, and I'd tell myself I'd been sleeping badly.

This had been going on for three months before I admitted what it was.

I was working at Telstra Media in Sydney, launching three products a . It was the kind of stretch assignment a younger man takes on the assumption that he will be the one person for whom the usual costs do not apply. I was also volunteering as a leadership coach in the evenings, which in the community I was part of is not a weekly commitment but a daily one. I was working until one or two most nights, and on the nights I was not working I was coaching, and on the weekends I was planning the next week.

I was thirty-something, very good at all of it, and enjoying it in a way I could not then articulate.

Then one Tuesday morning I could not get out of bed.

Not "did not want to." Could not. I was awake, I could hear my phone vibrating on the bedside table, I knew there was a meeting at ten I was supposed to be running, and the signal from my brain to my legs was just not arriving. It was the most frightening thing my body had ever done, because there was no obvious enemy. I was not injured, I was not sick in any way a doctor could easily point at. I was, as I would later learn to say, depleted, but depleted is the wrong word for it because depleted is something you recover from over a weekend. This was structural.

I spent four days in bed. Then I spent another week mostly in bed. I cancelled the meeting, and the one after it, and the product launch timeline, and the coaching evenings, and eventually my life as it had been built.

The doctor used the phrase "chronic fatigue" and I took some time off work

I thought what would happen next was rest. I would sleep a lot, I would drink green things, I would be patient, and I would slowly come back to myself. I was wrong about most of that. Sleep helped a little. Green things helped a little. But the fatigue did not really lift, and after about six weeks of being careful with myself, I was not better. I was in a different shape, but I was not better.

What ended it, or at least what started the ending of it, was a fifteen-minute conversation with a coach.

She was not trying to fix me. I had stopped expecting anyone to. I had arrived at her office largely because we had a standing call and it was easier to keep the call than to cancel it. I told her, in the dull voice of someone who has told the story too many times, about the fatigue, about the specialists, about the various interventions I'd tried, about how nothing was working.

She listened, and then she said, "What is this costing you?"

I laughed, because the question was absurd. The cost was obvious. I couldn't work, I couldn't exercise, I couldn't be present to my family, I couldn't do the coaching.

She said, "Yes. And what is it giving you?"

I started to answer and stopped.

She waited, which is a thing only very good coaches know how to do.

I said, eventually, that it was giving me permission to rest. I had not been able to give myself permission to rest. My body had done what I had been unable to do, which was to put its foot down and refuse. The fatigue was not an enemy. The fatigue was the only way I had left available to myself to stop.

She said, "So what does it mean to recover?"

I didn't have an answer for a long time.

I want to be careful with this next part, because the internet is full of people insisting that chronic illness is "really" psychological, and the people saying this are always people who have never had chronic illness.

The fatigue was physical. My cells were doing something my cells should not have been doing. I had to give up gluten, which turned out to matter more than anyone expected. I had to start meditating every morning, not as a spiritual practice but as a nervous-system intervention. I had to change my relationship to sleep, which is a relationship most high-performers do not realise they have. There were real, material, slow, boring changes in how I ate and moved and slept, and without those changes I would not have recovered.

But none of those changes would have happened if I had not first understood what the fatigue was for.

The fatigue was a strike. My body had walked off the job, not because the job was unreasonable in the abstract, but because the person employing my body was unreasonable. The person employing my body was me.

Recovery did not begin when I started the elimination diet. Recovery began in a fifteen-minute conversation in which I understood, for the first time, that I had been keeping myself stuck because staying stuck was the only way I had ever allowed myself to rest.

The coach had not fixed anything. She had just pointed at the trapdoor under my feet and asked if I knew it was there. Once I knew, I could not un-know, and once I could not un-know, the elimination diet and the meditation and the sleep hygiene became possible, because I was no longer doing them in service of getting back to the version of my life that had broken me. I was doing them to build a different life.

What I understand now, which I did not understand at thirty-something, is that most of the ambitious people I know are running some version of this scheme. The job is punishing, and we complain about the job. The coaching is punishing, and we complain about the coaching. The volunteer work is punishing, and we complain about the volunteer work. What we do not notice is that the punishment is the point. If we were not being punished by our schedules we would have to sit with the question of who we are underneath the doing, and that question is considerably more frightening than another late night.

The prison is not the schedule. The prison is the relationship the ego has with the self, in which staying exhausted is preferable to stopping, because stopping means meeting the self, and the self is an unknown quantity the ego is working very hard not to meet.

You can stay in that prison for a long time. I did. Most people I know do. The door is not, in fact, locked, it never has been, but the person on the inside has been told, in ways so consistent and so early that they no longer register as instructions, that walking through the door would be irresponsible.

The body, thankfully, does not care about these instructions. The body knows when it is time to sit down on the stairs. And if you will not listen to the body when it asks politely, the body will, eventually, stop asking.

I am, as I write this, fine. Better than fine. I work less than I used to. I eat without gluten, mostly, and I meditate most mornings, and I sleep like a person who has made a peace treaty with sleep. I still overcommit, because fifty years of habit does not fully unravel in one conversation. But when I overcommit now, I notice sooner. My body and I are on better terms than we were.

If you are reading this because something in your body is giving way, or because you have been telling yourself for a year that you just need to get through the next quarter, I am not going to tell you to slow down. That is not useful advice when you are in it. What I will give you is the question my coach asked me, which is the question that started everything.

What is this costing you, and what is it giving you?

Sit with both halves. The first one is obvious. The second one is where the information is.

The door is unlocked. You have always known that, somewhere. The work is not to unlock it. The work is to notice you have been standing in front of it, holding the handle.

A note for the curious

On the coaching question itself. "What is this costing you, and what is it giving you?" is a question I owe to my coach, and that she, almost certainly, owed to a tradition.


Byron Katie's The Work asks a closely related family of questions, most notably "who would you be without this thought?"

If you want the mainstream-coaching version, Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit names the "AWE question"—And what else?—which is the pattern my coach was using when she waited. These are all the same question, turned slightly. If one of them lands for you, the others will too.

On the mind–body side. The book I would hand you, and the one that most clearly names what I went through, is Gabor Maté's When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Maté's thesis is that chronic illness, particularly in high-functioning, chronically compliant, chronically nice people, is often the body refusing what the personality will not. He is careful, clinically trained, and unsparing. If the piece landed for you, read Maté next. Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score is the trauma-science cousin; it's longer and more clinical, but it covers the nervous-system mechanics underneath what Maté describes.

On meditation as nervous-system intervention rather than spiritual practice. Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme is the evidence-based entry point; the book is Full Catastrophe Living. For the plasticity-and-rest version, Rick Hanson's Buddha's Brain covers the neuroscience at a lay-reader level.

If you are dealing with chronic fatigue right now

I am not a clinician, and nothing I went through is a template for anyone else. Chronic fatigue covers a wide and contested territory: post-viral ME/CFS, long COVID, post-exertional malaise, and several conditions that overlap with but are not identical to what I experienced. The worst advice you can get is from a blog post, including mine. What I can do is point at the organisations that actual patients and clinicians in this space regard as trustworthy.

Patient advocacy and information.

A practical note on pacing. The single most important concept in this space is post-exertional malaise, or PEM: the phenomenon where symptoms get dramatically worse twelve to forty-eight hours after exertion. Push-through strategies, which work for ordinary tiredness, make PEM worse. #MEAction's pacing guide is the best short introduction. If someone tells you to exercise your way out of this, and you have PEM, be very careful.

On the dietary and functional-medicine angle. I gave up gluten and it helped. I am not saying it will help you. The functional-medicine literature on elimination diets and CFS is genuinely mixed, and the space contains both serious practitioners and expensive charlatans. Chris Kresser is one of the more evidence-anchored functional-medicine writers on this, if you want to explore it — but do it with a clinician you trust, not alone on the internet.

The honest summary. What worked for me was a combination of one psychological insight, one dietary change, one daily practice, and a willingness to rebuild the shape of my life. I cannot tell you which of those did the heavy lifting, and neither can anyone else with certainty. But the one I would not skip, if I were doing it again, is the conversation with the coach. Everything else was possible only because of that.

If you are in the middle of this, I am sorry. It is lonelier than it should be, and more misunderstood than it should be. You are not lazy. You are not weak. You are not making it up. Your body is doing the thing bodies do when they have been asked too much for too long, and it is trying to tell you something. The only real job, for now, is to listen.