Chronic fatigue is a debilitating, multiple systems failure disease. It’s not like.. regular tiredness. It’s an utterly devastating disease, that sucks the life, energy, motivation, and productivity out of even the strongest people.
And everything about it is difficult. It’s difficult to suddenly lose the spark of energy that characterizes your personality. It’s difficult when you try everything to combat this thing, and you eventually realize you have to submit to it.
It’s difficult knowing you’ve been able to overcome everything else in your life, through fighting, doing the right things, and getting better, but when it comes to beating this disease, it’s beating you.
It’s difficult losing your ability to be productive. You start feeling like you’re destined to be bed ridden with a chronic illness for the rest of your life. And perhaps most of all, it’s truly difficult to know how smart, effective, or happy you CAN be, but that this disease is literally shutting off your brain’s ability to do any of that stuff.
It’s like being buried alive.
But there are things you can do, and perhaps I’ll post an entirely separate post on how to recover from chronic fatigue, what worked for me, and what might work for you, but for now, I think infusing the right type of nootropics into the picture might be a good strategy to carry you through, until you fix the many systems that have gone awry in your body.
But first, a quick primer on nootropics. Nootropics are simply chemical or natural compounds, that modulate neurological activity, to facilitate better brain performance.
They can be natural compounds like Bacopa Monnieri , or full on pharmaceutical drugs like .
Whatever the case may be, these compounds can have profound effects on the brain functioning of users. I’ve seen some nootropics take people from complete and total brain fog, to having reclaimed their youthful energy within 30 minutes.
I’ve used nootropics over the years to build successful businesses, to give speeches, to read long scientific papers and memorize every bit of them, and more. It’s not like drinking a cup of coffee. Nootropics are the next level up.
But the real question is, is it safe to take nootropics while you’re suffering from a chronic illness like Chronic Fatigue? I think the answer is, yes. But you should be careful, you should cycle, and you should consider that eventually, they might contribute to the problem (if you’re not careful).
You see – part of your problem, if you’re most people with Chronic Fatigue, is you have a virus that your immune system hasn’t contained, wreaking havoc on your body. It’s fussing with your cellular energy production, keeping you in a constant state of burnout, but most importantly, putting you in a place where you have an intolerance to pushing yourself.
The famous characteristics of Chronic Fatigue are that you get extremely tired, mentally useless, and have to basically become a vegetable after you push yourself even a little bit.
For some people, a 10 minute walk will do this. For others, a small weight lifting session. And for some people, pushing their brains too hard for a period of time will trigger their symptoms as well.
And nootropics will absolutely crank up your brain’s performance, putting you in a place where you might feel good for the moment, push yourself too hard, and then come crashing down with symptoms a day or two later. And that’s what you want to watch out for. So here’s what I suggest:
- Start with something very simple, like Piracetam + Choline. Piracetam is one of the safest, most well tolerated compounds on the planet. You can buy it online, from various nootropics vendors in the USA and oversees. It’s legal to have, and legal to take. Choline, is merely in the complex B family of vitamins, and contributes to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine.
- If you recognize that you have better brain performance from taking this combination of ingredients, or “stack” as its known (any combination of nootropic ingredients is called a nootropic stack), only SLOWLY ramp up your cognitive output. In other words, don’t attack a 30 page complex crossword puzzle. Just casually do 1/4th of a simple one.
- Your brain will feel energized, if the ingredients are working well for you. This is going to make you want to be physically active. But you must understand that if you haven’t corrected the issues causing your disease (the Epstein Barr Virus has been attacking your thyroid gland, as ONE example of what happens in some people with CF), you’re still going to crash the next day, or in the coming days. So – take it easy. If you feel up to a certain task, sure, do it, but do it slowly. Don’t overdo it. You are not better yet, you’ve merely manipulated your brain to have functional energy for the time being.
- Stop taking nootropics after a week. Give yourself a rest. As I discuss in the video below, you’ll be putting the body through exertion it might not be able to sustain, and if you start overworking your body’s energy system, like your adrenal glands, when you’re not able to physically sustain it, you might come crashing down hard in the very near future. Take a week off, and then cycle back on (start taking them again).
Can you take other compounds besides piracetam and choline? Sure. Those are just an easy start. You could take Aniracetam and Choline. You could take Modafinil (you’ll need a prescription for that, which you may be able to get from your doctor). You could take Ginkgo Biloba. You could take Vinpocetine, a natural compound known to improve blood flow to the brain. You could take L-Tyrosine, which turns up the neurotransmitters responsible for alertness and mental energy.
But with each one of them, you want to do your research. Understand what they do to you, and how they work. Start low on the dose range, and then work your way up, and always spend a good bit of time researching whether or not these compounds will interact with anything you’re currently taking. Especially medications.
Somewhere above in this page, there’s an image and link to our nootropic product, Cortex. Cortex works quite well at ramping up brain function, so you might find that it works well for you with Chronic Fatigue. Snag a bottle here, or above in the image.