Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: How to Recover and Get Your Life Back
with Miguel Bautista
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello and welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and on this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metal and chemical toxicity. We talk about more advanced topics than you’ll hear on other shows. We talk about bioenergetics, advanced biohacking topics, and all kinds of fun things. Today we’re going to be talking about chronic fatigue syndrome.
We’re going to be talking about going from bedridden to fully functional by using nervous system regulation techniques with Miguel Bautista. He’s the founder of cfsrecovery.co and has dealt with a lot of different health issues related to chronic fatigue. He talks about how he learned to address this. He has worked with thousands of people to help them recover from chronic fatigue. So we’re going to learn all about his tips and tricks to help you on your journey to recovery.
Miguel, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Miguel Bautista
Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your story dealing with chronic fatigue?
Miguel Bautista
First off, I just want to say thank you so much for having me on. I’ve listened to the show, and what you’re building is something pretty special, and I want to acknowledge you for that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh, thank you.
Miguel Bautista
I know what you’re doing isn’t easy. It does take a lot of time, energy, and hard work, but apart from that, you’re creating a huge impact with several hundred shows. So I’m honored to be here and be a part of this. Actually, last thing before I jump in, for everybody listening, do me a huge favor and go leave a five-star rating on whatever platform you’re tuning in from. I actually left mine a while ago over on Apple Podcasts, so come join me in doing so.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Thank you. I never remember to ask people to do that. I probably should.
Miguel Bautista
Yeah, let’s help Dr. Wendy impact more people. So, a little overview about me. My name is Miguel. I run CFS Recovery, and we help people dealing with really mysterious, debilitating symptoms like fatigue- the kind of fatigue where no matter how much they rest, they still feel like a zombie or brain fog, where no matter how much they sleep, they wake up feeling just mentally drained, along with dozens of other symptoms that just don’t make sense.
It can feel super frustrating, and people can start to feel hopeless. They want nothing more than to get back to who they used to be. A lot of people who are sick just really struggle to find answers that actually work while being told it’s all in their head, and they end up trapped in the cycle of really just surviving instead of thriving.
So what I do is I help people fully recover using nervous system-based approaches and neuroplasticity so they can get their lives back and really become the 2.0 version of themselves. And yes, although we’ve worked with thousands of individuals, I’ve actually fully recovered myself from my own health issues.
Not too long ago, about seven or eight years ago, I dealt with 50-plus symptoms myself. I was actually bedridden and at my worst, completely hospitalized for about two months. I couldn’t even walk. So I had to learn to use a wheelchair, then a walker, and eventually learn to walk on my own two feet. I had to build my life from scratch.
But what I’m most proud of is seeing and being able to help people also get their lives back. Nowadays, people see my life, and they say, “Wow, how do you do so much? How can you work and travel and exercise and not feel any symptoms? What’s the secret sauce?” And what I always tell them is there’s no such thing as a magic silver bullet.
There are a lot of things that went into getting my life back, which I’m excited to share about today. But really, I went from zero to hero, went from surviving to thriving, and today I’m living my best life. It’s been a long journey to get here, which I’m happy to dive into.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, tell us, what do you think led to you having chronic fatigue syndrome?
Miguel Bautista
There’s a handful of things that led to me developing dozens and dozens of symptoms. I think, like a lot of people, my personality had a lot to do with it. I was somebody who was a type A personality, a go-getter, a very competitive person, but more so with myself. I would always just push the absolute limits in everything I did, whether it was school or working, always trying to be the best.
Like many people, it was really hard to take a day off. When I tried taking a day off or resting or sleeping longer, I just felt super guilty about not being, quote-unquote, “productive.” And so that led to me just really over-pushing myself. I mean, I was completely taxed Monday to Friday from working about 60 or 70 hours a week, and then the weekends came, and it was very difficult to just sit still and do nothing.
A lot of people feel lazy when the weekends come, so they feel like that’s the time to get ahead. But anyways, it started with just a few symptoms. It starts like with most people, just feeling extra tired, then having some sleeping issues and having just more fatigue doing simple things like going up and down the stairs or doing groceries. Also, you have more shortness of breath. Your workouts, you can’t recover as fast.
What really kind of triggered it for me, where I knew, “Okay, this is definitely serious,” there was this one day where I’d been burning the midnight oil as it had for a couple of years. Well, most of my life actually, but now I was going full tilt. I was in the library, and all of a sudden, my heart started pounding, and I was studying this sales book, trying to be better at my job as a personal trainer at 19 years old. All of a sudden, I get this tunnel vision. I hear this ringing in my ears. I can’t breathe. I run immediately to the front desk and say, “Call the ambulance. I think I’m having a heart attack.”
Within about 15 minutes, there were about eight paramedics there because they thought I was having a heart attack. Well, I did. They thought it initially, because my heart rate was 180, and my blood pressure was, like, 150 over 50. And for anybody who knows basic health, those are very bad numbers, or they’re just not normal numbers for somebody who’s sitting down. It essentially felt like I was sprinting down the street. So anyways, I go to the hospital, and they do all these tests, all these scans for a few hours. I’m thinking I’m going to die.
And they just told me, “Hey, on paper, everything checks out. You’re perfectly fine. You just need to drink some electrolytes.” That was the beginning of about a four-and-a-half year journey going through the medical gauntlet, getting really sick, going back to work, and just this kind of horrible cycle where four and a half years later, I ended up in the hospital. That’s kind of how I fell into it.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about some of the underlying root causes of chronic fatigue syndrome and what’s the prevalence? There are so many people that are not only dealing with full-fledged chronic fatigue syndrome, but that are just exhausted. It’s just the number one complaint that all my patients have, and that have had in the past.
Miguel Bautista
You know what really kind of triggers it? There’s someone listening to this right now who used to be the most driven, active person in their circle, like the one who never sat still, was just always working, moving, and showing up. Maybe they were an athlete, a top performer at work, the person their friends counted on.
Then something happened. It could’ve been COVID, a traumatic experience, maybe a death in the family, or just years of pushing too hard. But eventually, it kind of triggers the nervous system into this kind of emergency state once it hits that maximum limit of stress it can handle.
Once that alarm goes off in the nervous system, in the brain, it really downregulates. It is essentially like slamming the brakes on what the body can do because it wants to reduce stimulus. So now, somebody who used to be very active, but now they can barely make it through a shower or barely make it to the groceries without needing to lie down, and they’ve seen 10, 20, maybe 30 specialists.
They’ve spent thousands on supplements and treatments, and every test comes back normal. Or at least most of them do. Nothing really explains what’s going on, and so they’re sitting there thinking, “If nothing’s wrong with me, why do I feel like I’m just slowly melting away?” It’s like things are just getting worse and worse.
The thing is, they probably stopped making plans because they don’t know if their body’s going to cooperate. So canceling birthdays and outings. This stuff really just gets in the way of life to the point where they just kind of have to watch life on the sidelines. Then the worst part is more so the psychological part as well because you start to believe that that’s just who you are now. You lose that identity. If you’re not this top performer, if you can’t go out there and kind of get after it in life, who are you?
But I just want to give people hope because on the other side of that, at least what I’ve seen of myself and thousands of other people is there is that version of you that does wake up actually excited to get out of bed, excited for the day. In this new version you’re out there like traveling, hiking, working, and you’re not tracking every symptom. Like you’re not second-guessing every decision or watching life on the sidelines anymore. So that’s something we really try to do, helping people understand where these symptoms come from and also what’s keeping them alive.
We want them to know, where are these flare-ups coming from? Why do the crashes keep happening? What does this brain fog even mean? We try to teach them that, hey, this isn’t all random. There’s actually a reason for this stuff. Once you understand why the body’s doing this, you are in a better place. As long as people have had their tests, scans done and the doctors aren’t finding anything that’s clearly causing this, an approach like this can work once you go after the nervous system. That’s what we help people do.
It’s a lot of education and helping explain the things that are happening to them because once they understand what’s happening logically, it’s very hard to downward spiral emotionally with the symptoms, which is actually what keeps a lot of the symptoms alive in many cases. It’s feeling the symptom and kind of panicking about it or going straight to Google. That’s going to make a lot of the symptoms feel worse, as long as there’s no other physiological causes for them.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about some of the underlying root causes, like say, infections or emotional trauma or just any kind of causes like that?
Miguel Bautista
Absolutely. So viruses can do this and infections for sure. Basically, anything that adds stress to the nervous system. It’s like a threshold of the amount of stimulation our bodies can handle. Now, everybody’s got a different threshold limit. That’s why some people can go through the craziest life experiences and they’re fine. They’ll never get symptoms. Someone else could get cut off in traffic and their heart is pounding for the next hour.
Even more, it could be financial stressors. Not being able to pay the bills. Could be relationships. It could be a really stressful job. Maybe you do something that you hate. That’s going to add stress to the nervous system. It could be things like environmental issues, like if there’s mold in the house. That can definitely cause a lot of strain on the nervous system.
Like I said, it could be a virus or a very stressful period in your life where multiple factors overlap. So when people have something like this triggered, usually their nervous system is already maxed out to begin with, and it takes one or two more things to be the straws that break the camel’s back. There’s that saying.
Furthermore, there are some people who, all their life, have a type A personality, not getting much sleep, skipping meals, always putting so much pressure on themselves. Another thing is we see a lot of people who have difficulty saying no or setting boundaries. So people-pleasing tendencies, a lot of that stuff comes into play, and sometimes it’s like the perfect storm where your nervous system is just set up to be triggered by one more thing.
A lot of times it’s just that one thing that tips it over, but people don’t look back before that, looking at what led up to that point. But viruses, mold, and things like that can absolutely play a role in triggering someone into this.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So what is your message to people that are dealing with chronic fatigue, they’ve been in bed for a period of time? What message of hope do you want to tell them?
Miguel Bautista
First of all, I understand how difficult it is to try and deal with something like this, especially if, if you’ve seen the doctors and the specialists, and they’re not really giving you solid answers. Typically how it works, and this will tie into the hope thing, what I see people do over and over again doesn’t work. I want to be clear, I did all of this myself, so I know what it’s like to be in the trenches and feel very hopeless.
My longest stretch was eight months completely bedridden, just staring at the ceiling. I could barely go on my phone. I was in a blindfold and earplugs, and there were so many times when I was thinking like, “What’s the point in all of this? Like, I’m only getting worse, and nobody is telling me anything,” So I would say in terms of hope, try to listen to recovery stories. Try to listen to the stories of people who have gotten better from this.
It’s kind of tricky online because on one hand, when you Google a lot of this stuff and you’re looking for hope, you’ll see the complete opposite. You’ll see horror stories of people sick for like 50 years, 30 years, and all that stuff. But that’s all before technology happened, and you didn’t hear about these recovery stories. So it’s very easy to fall into that negative cycle of doom.
Once you find stories online of people recovering from similar symptoms you had, and once you find YouTube channels or podcasts like this that actually make sense, use that. Borrow that hope from them. Borrow that belief. Because when you’re in the trenches, I know how it is. Like you can barely believe in yourself to pull through this thing. So you want to lean on other people’s experiences, and that’s why I think community is so important. Like, one of the foundational ways we help people is put them together with other solution-focused people.
That’s the key word, solution-focused, that people who, even though they may be down and out, feel like they’re rock bottom, the reason they keep going is they know there’s even just a small chance that there could be a life after they get better. And once you see more and more people recovering, you are hopeful.
For example, in our community, there are moms and dads who they’re playing with kids. There’s one parent actually, she had three kids, but her kids were like six, eight, and 10 years old. They would have to bring her food for several months. She couldn’t play with them. She couldn’t prepare cakes on their birthdays. She couldn’t drop them off at school or watch their soccer games.
So she started asking herself, “What’s the point?” But her kids were her purpose. Anyways, she went from being very debilitated and hopeless to skiing with her kids less than a year later with no symptoms. So they went traveling, skiing, and were all happy and celebrating together. When you see stuff like that over and over again, it’s very difficult to not have hope. That actually becomes your default of “Wow, okay. I’m going to get out of this. It’s just a matter of time, and it is absolutely possible”. So keep on going. Keep filling your mind up with hopeful things.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about why rest alone isn’t enough to recover from chronic fatigue syndrome or even long COVID that a lot of people are dealing with today?
Miguel Bautista
Absolutely. So I used to make the same mistake. That’s part of why I was completely bedridden for eight months and getting worse. This isn’t something you can wait out. Typically, it’s not time that solves this thing, which is what I thought, because for a normal person, if you’re tired, go to sleep, and you’ll feel energized the next day.
The problem is the nervous system, it’s almost stuck in this pattern where it’s locking the body down into this hypervigilant state. Unless we manually override that, things aren’t really going to change. In fact, it’ll probably spiral and snowball into more and more issues. So something that helped me understand why the rest wasn’t working was actually when I met my doctor in the hospital, and this story will tie into the question here.
I had seen about 35 to 40 specialists over a four-year period. No one knew, had any idea what was going on. They didn’t know anything about my condition. I mean, they saw the charts, and they saw me, but they had no clue why I was feeling like this. It wasn’t until I was in the ICU, actually, an intensive care unit. I mean, I’m beside people who are being told they have three weeks to live. It was a very stressful situation.
But anyways, after about four weeks of being in there, they ran every test they could. I was resting. I wasn’t really moving. They were feeding me, and I was getting worse. And they said, “Miguel, you know, you’re not going to die, so we have to send you home. We can’t keep you here. We need to open up the bed for other people.” And I said, “Well, I can’t go home. I can barely move.”
They gave me an option. They said, “Well, another option we have is there’s extra rooms in the psych ward.” And I said, “I’m not crazy, though. Like, do you think I’m crazy?” They said, “No, no. There’s just extra rooms. If you want to work with the psychiatrist there, that’s the only other solution we can think of. We had to work on your brain.” I said, “I don’t really have a choice. Like, I’ll do anything at this point.” So anyways, I agree. I ended up staying at the psych ward for four weeks.
They gave me some special wristbands. They said I could go home whenever I want. It was just so I could be closer to the doctor. But he looked at me and said, “Miguel, I know why you’re sick. I know what’s going on. You just have a hypersensitive nervous system. That’s why all your tests have come back normal. Your organs are actually okay.” So anyways, he would explain this to me over the next four weeks.
Here’s one analogy that really helped me shift my mindset from just wanting to rest more and actively doing something to recover. He said Look, it’s kind of like a computer and if a computer breaks down and you’re trying to fix it, there’s two things you can look at. There’s the hardware and then there’s the software. Very similar to what you’re dealing with, Miguel. What you’re dealing with is not a hardware issue, which is why we scanned your heart, lungs, muscles, gut, ultrasounds, X-rays, and everything is showing up fine. So the hardware’s okay.
Just like in a computer, you could check the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor. If that’s functioning fine, but the computer’s still having issues, you have to go deeper than that. It’s no longer a hardware issue, it’s a software issue. And he said basically the human brain is the software. It’s like a supercomputer. What happened, Miguel, was because you pushed it so hard over the years, you’ve maxed out your threshold. Basically your brain has a maximum limit of stimulation it can handle. So when you stacked all of these things, that alarm got triggered, which is why you had some symptoms in the beginning and over time you just kept trying to push through it, which is a mistake a lot of people make.
Type A personality, they’ll feel this challenge come up, they’ll try to push through it. And white-knuckle through it. He said because you kept pushing through that, the alarm systems got louder and louder and now your software has a full glitch in it. Your brain is sending the wrong signals to your body, which is why when your dad touches your arm, it feels like you got punched. Or when someone turns the light on, you have an instant migraine. Or they could close the door and you feel ringing in your ears or you hear ringing in your ears.
When it gets to this point, Miguel, time is not going to solve this thing. You need to manually go in there and update that software. Just like in a computer, if there’s a glitch or a virus, it doesn’t just fix itself. I mean, maybe now with AI if you’re running some agents or whatever, but the way the brain works, it’s not going to fix that. You have to manually go in there. No supplement, no medication is going to do that for you.
Now, those things might help. It might open a window of opportunity where it makes it easier for you to upgrade that system. But you lying down all day and waiting for this to go away is actually only going to get worse because now you’re stuck in this loop. You feel the symptoms, physical things, then you feel terrified emotions, and physical emotions.
It’s like this snowball. So that’s kind of why resting isn’t going to solve this, because not only is the nervous system in a downward spiral, deconditioning also happens. So if you’re lying down all day, the next time you stand up to go to the washroom, your legs are going to feel even weaker. Your lungs are going to feel weaker and you will have shortness of breath. I felt this.
It got to the point where maybe three months in, two months into being bedridden, I was needing help from my 75-year-old grandma just to go to the washroom, and I couldn’t even shower myself. She had to wipe me down because just walking to the washroom was equivalent to me playing a full football game, and I used to be a football team captain in high school.
So it’s crazy what the body can do and what it can stop you from doing. That’s kind of my explanation of why rest doesn’t seem to help this, and we’ve seen it with so many people. They’ve tried waiting it out, and they’ve just kind of deteriorated. But once you kind of understand what’s going on and how to update that software, things can really turn around fairly quickly.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I can only imagine even just being sick for a week in bed makes you really weak, and you have to recover from that. I can only imagine a couple months or years even, and the toll that takes. So can you talk about some of the tools you use for recovery or, the step-by-step process that you use, the protocol that you use to help people lead their way out of chronic fatigue?
Miguel Bautista
So it took me a while to figure out, okay, what is the best approach for this or for this? Because everybody’s nervous system is so different. I’ll share what most people do. That way, people can try to avoid the mistakes, and I’ll share what we found to really work. So usually, this happens in three steps.
First, people chase diagnosis, which they need to do. That’s usually the first bit of this journey is going from specialist to specialist, hoping someone will finally tell them what’s going on. You got the neurologist, endocrinologist, infectious disease. You get the blood work, MRIs, X-rays, all that stuff, and then you’re crossing these things off the list.
The tests keep coming back normal. So eventually, you start to feel like you’re going crazy, like you’re making it up. So at some point, you go, “Okay, the doctors are probably not going to help me solve this thing. I have to solve this for myself.” And so they do a lot of research on their own. There’s lots of Googling.
They find supplements, all these other external fixes, and sometimes thousands or tens of thousands of dollars are spent on things trying to fix the mitochondria or heal the liver, heal their gut, which can help a little bit. That can give people a little boost, but then they’re right back to where they started or worse because now they’ve added this belief that nothing works for me.
And then, third, they try to push through it. They think if they just go harder, if they just toughen up mentally or force themselves to be positive or just power through like they used to, that they’re going to break out of this thing. But the body punishes them for that. So one good day leads to three bad days, and then they crash.
So their world becomes smaller and smaller. They start to get terrified to do the simple things. Now, with all of these approaches, those approaches treat the symptoms. They don’t address the source, like the root cause. As long as they’ve had the tests and scans done, it’s highly likely this is a hypersensitive nervous system issue.
So that’s the way we see it, and that is our whole approach. We see it as a nervous system that’s just stuck in survival mode. We call it a chronic threat response, like it’s in 24/7 fight or flight. It’s not that the body is broken. It’s actually doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is protect us from overloading ourselves with too much stimulation and danger.
The problem is we don’t know how to turn that off. It’s not something that’s really taught generally in school. So until we address that, until we teach the nervous system that it’s safe to come out of survival mode, nothing else really sticks. I mean, for me, there was a time when I took 30 different supplements. I was taking 30 to 40 pills a day, and it wasn’t working. The good days don’t stick.
So number one, we like to educate people on what’s going on. Practically, what does that look like? We can tell them, day to day, what do they actually do? And so, we have something called a nervous system health assessment we’ve developed. We’re able to look at the different stages that somebody is at in this whole kind of condition. It’s like the severity levels of chronic fatigue syndrome or long COVID or people dealing with these issues. There’s like bedridden, couch-bound, low-functioning, and high-functioning. Based on that, we’ll go even deeper, and we’ll look at what is this person’s activity balance.
We also look at it cognitively versus physically, because everybody’s different. Some people can’t take a shower because they’re so sick. But they can look at their phone for eight hours a day and that won’t make them any worse. Other people can’t even look at their phone for five minutes, but they can do chores around the house and things like that. In this case, patients experience completely opposite balances of the nervous system. One is physically more capable, not cognitively capable. The other one is flipped. So we want to identify where somebody is at.
Henceforth, we like to help build people up in, in three buckets. Number one is the physical bucket. Number two is the cognitive bucket, which is like talking to people, going on phones, using the brain to actually think. Then the third one is what most people miss. It’s actually the emotional bucket. That really comes down to, how are we responding to symptoms? When we feel sensations in our body, do we automatically go into panic mode like in the worst-case scenario? Do we tell ourselves, “Oh, we’re relapsing? We’re back to square one”? That is actually the biggest thing, the biggest hidden factor that most people miss.
So we typically focus on that first. It’s like, what is your reaction when these symptoms come up? And actually, even before that, how do you even view the symptoms? If you view it as something bad and your body is out to get you, you’re at war with your body, it’s very difficult to do anything else after that. Physical things and cognitive things, those are actually easy compared to dealing with the emotional part. So we actually try to address that first. In real time, what does that look like?
When somebody, for example, stands up from the couch to get water and their heart starts pounding or skipping, they feel kind of dizzy, they could do one of two things. One, they could go, “Uh-oh, am I having a heart attack? Should I call 911? Did I stand up too fast? What if I just undid all that progress in the last week?” So that would be a scenario we wouldn’t want to do because that’s like feeding the fuel in survival mode in your brain.
The other way to go about it is, “Oh, I feel some palpitations. Interesting. You know, that’s just a glitch in my nervous system. That’s my body just being hypersensitive, but that’s it. I’m going to be okay. It’s going to slow down. I’m going to go get the water.” So it’s really bringing in as much logic as possible into the equation.
I mean, there’s some people, including myself, like there was this, what was his name? John. Almost every time he stood up, heart palpitations and shortness of breath, like every single time. So every five minutes of the day, he was thinking he was having a heart attack, even though he got his heart checked eight different times in emergency visits. We knew it was okay. Once we ruled that out, we had to kind of train him to say, “Okay, when I have the heart palpitations, it’s just a hypersensitive nervous system. “It’s uncomfortable at first, but next thing you know, he’s doing chores around the house. He’s taking showers. He’s cooking food. He’s still feeling the symptoms, but his emotional response is completely different.
There’s more logic. Every time the fear comes up Fear is like a fire. The logic is like pouring buckets of water on that fear. It’s very difficult to do two things at once. It can’t be emotional and really logical at the same time. So you have to combat that, all that emotion with logic. That’s usually where we start with people. What are their kryptonite symptoms? Usually it’s like one or two specific things that terrify them. They’re almost allergic to that symptom. Just thinking about that symptom makes their heart pound.
So we want to work on the response to those. Once people deal with that, the capacity opens up. They’re able to do more physically and cognitively. Like John, within a few weeks, he was able to go drive his car and hang out with his friends when he hadn’t done that for several months. So the biggest thing is addressing the emotional aspect. Then once we get some traction there, that opens up capacity for physical and cognitive activities.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
What does real recovery look like day to day? Because I know you talk about taking these baby steps and retraining the nervous system, but I know a lot of people just have given up hope because they’ve tried so many different things. What does that day-to-day recovery look like?
Miguel Bautista
In the beginning, recovery can feel very messy. It actually rarely feels like you’re doing everything perfectly right because you’re actually still feeling the symptoms. My doctor taught me so many things over a month period, dozens of different diagrams and analogies, and there was a lot.
By the end of it, when they were about to release me from the hospital, he found me when I was bedridden. Now, four weeks later, I’m walking out of the hospital. He said, “Miguel, if there’s one thing to remember out of all of this, if you forgot everything, it’s this one thing. Your success is determined by how well you respond to symptoms”. So if people can remember that one thing it keeps it very simple. But what was the original question again?
Dr. Wendy Myers
What does real recovery look like day to day? I know people, they have health PTSD essentially. They’ve had so many scary symptoms, and they end up having this PTSD reaction every time they have a symptom. It’s really just this vicious cycle.
Miguel Bautista
I actually reframed the way I look at the progress. I call them progress cycles because that’s how it works. It’s very similar to working out. When you work out, especially when you’re starting out, just like in recovery, it is like a skill and it’s something new for your body. Because you’re actively increasing activity and you’re likely going to flare up from that. Just like the gym. If you want to get stronger, if you want to go from here all the way to up here and improve your strength and endurance, there is a path to get there, and you don’t get there without getting sore, right?
So very similar to recovery, usually there’s three steps. It’s not just using your mental willpower to push through and be mentally tough. You want to expand activity slightly, which means doing slightly more things in your day-to-day activities. Could be physical, could be cognitive.
But here’s what always happens, or nearly every time. After you increase the activity, the body starts to react. It starts to flare up a little bit. It’s almost like if you were working out and your muscles got sore. Well, now it’s not your muscles, it’s actually your nervous system reacting. So instead of your muscles feeling sore, now you might have a dozen symptoms come to the surface again. But if you know that’s happening, it helps you stay calm when that storm comes. So typically phase one is like you increase activity. That’s phase one of a progress cycle.
Phase two is, now you’re feeling symptoms. Let’s either maintain or dial it back a little bit. A mistake a lot of people make is as soon as they feel the symptoms, they immediately go back to like full retreat of, “Okay, I feel some symptoms. I’m going to lie in bed all day because I think I feel like I just touched fire. Let’s run away as fast as we can.” You don’t want to slam on the brakes. You want to slow down a little bit, but probably not the best to stop everything you’re doing. I mean, you could take naps, that’s fine, but probably just slow down and keep things in motion. Phase two is dialing back as your body is adjusting to this new level of stimulus.
Phase three is after enough time, could be a few days, or a few weeks. Actually, if you’re highly functional, it could be a few hours. But eventually your nervous system kind of stabilizes, and it calms down, the symptoms die down, and guess what? You have now reached a new level of capacity. But this works in cycles. Throughout recovery, you can have hundreds of progress cycles and go through those three phases of increasing, then you dial it back, and then you stabilize, then you increase again. So it’s kind of like shifting gears in a car.
I’ve seen so many people, including myself, as soon as you rest enough, then you have all this energy, you try to play catch up you’re like, “Well, I missed out on the last two weeks of life, so let me play catch up. I’m going to do this and this and this and this.” And then that’s how you fry the engine. Think of it like a car. You just fried it. You just hit the gas all the way. It’s not too good for the engine. So you want to do it gradually.
Imagine your nervous system, it’s like a manual car. You don’t shift from gear one to gear six, which is what most people do if they have a type A personality. You go from gear one, gear two, gear three, and it’s like learning to drive manual. I’m guessing there’s not too many super young people listening to this. People listening to this, if you remember back in the days, there were manual cars. You had to learn to shift gears. At first, it’s clunky. It’s not the smoothest. But over time, you get pretty good at it.
Just like recovery, you learn to increase activity just enough, and also dial it back just enough without slamming on the brakes and then the car stalling out. That’s like your nervous system stalling out and flaring up big time. It’s definitely not pretty. In the beginning, you’re second-guessing yourself like, “Am I even doing the right stuff? Is this working?” Like, “Why do I actually feel just as bad this week as I did, like, two months ago.” But you may just be in a flare-up. You may be in the middle of a progress cycle.
What you’ll notice is that even though your symptoms might feel the same, the amount of activity required to trigger those symptoms is way higher. So symptoms could stay the same, but it takes three times more activity. Now, instead of just doing dishes and vacuuming for 20 minutes to cause symptoms, it takes you going out to do groceries, getting the mail and walking the dog to trigger those same symptoms.
Actually, if you slow down a little bit, you have less symptoms. Eventually, it’s like learning to ride a bike as well. You get better and better at it. Recovery is a skill. And usually, in the beginning, so many people, they’re terrified. They’re second-guessing themselves every step of the progress cycle, especially in those first few months. Eventually, they get really good at it.
For example, we have these private chats with people when they work with us. Almost every day in the beginning, Monday to Friday, it’s, “Hey, did I do this right? Hey, I’m flaring up. Is this supposed to happen?” And they’ll ask the same questions for a month straight. Then you’ll notice they start to have that confidence because they’ve seen the patterns. They know how this goes. They know the flare-ups always end, and they always feel a little bit better after. So they start to recognize the patterns.
Month two, they don’t message us as much. Month three, they’re pretty independent and, definitely no matter where somebody is at, usually within that year, within a year actually, they’re out there living their life and we can’t even hear from them. We don’t know where they went, and then they come back and they’re like, “Sorry, I was traveling. I was living life, so busy.” And we’re like, “That’s great. That’s what we wanted.”
Dr. Wendy Myers
What do you do for mitochondrial support to help people get their mitochondria energy production back online?
Miguel Bautista
For mitochondria, we actually don’t even address it directly. Some people take supplements for it. Most people in our ecosystem don’t. But we found if we can reduce that emotional load on them, it helps upregulate that mitochondria, because a lot of them, everything is just completely downregulated. Same thing with gut issues. There are a lot of people, their food sensitivities actually go away once they start addressing the root cause. Usually by the time people find us, they’ve tried mitochondrial things but there were way deeper issues that were actually causing this stuff.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So how can someone like to work with you, learn about your program and just get started?
Miguel Bautista
I put something cool together for the audience listening to this right now because I know you’re constantly showing up for your audience, giving massive value, so that inspired me to do the same. I’d love to offer everybody something I’ve literally never offered before. It’s just something free as well, and this is something we offer to our clients. I thought they were actually going to get mad once they heard something like this, but that’s okay. I wanted to give you guys a special gift.
So there’s two parts to it. The first part is the recovery roadmap protocol. It’s the recovery stage identifier, and this is not for somebody who’s just looking for an overnight fix. It definitely requires some work for this to work. But the recovery stage identifier, it’s a short diagnostic that shows you roughly where your nervous system sits on the recovery timeline.
Just based on all the people we’ve seen, we’ve worked with thousands of people. It’s going to show you why what you’ve been doing probably hasn’t worked and what you should probably be focusing on right now. For a lot of people, that’s super helpful because they know where they sit on this timeline versus people who have no idea where their nervous system is at. So that’s part one is the recovery stage identifier.
Number two, it’s the personalized recovery report. So this is the exact internal tool that we use with our premium clients, but it’s a detailed personalized analysis that’s based on people’s situations, symptoms, history, and main roadblocks. It’s going to show people what they likely need to change, probably what they need to double down on, but also the exact order those changes should probably happen in. So it’s like a decision-making framework for recovery. And I’ve set up a page. It is specifically for this podcast. It is www.cfsrecovery.co/detox.
I just ask people not to share that around. That’s how you can get those two things, the recovery stage identifier and the personalized recovery report Again, that’s www.cfsrecovery.co/detox, and they’ll be able to get immediate access to that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Fantastic. Thank you so much for offering that to my audience. I’ve known so many people that have chronic fatigue syndrome and work with them. I had colleagues that, just like yourself, suffered with this for many years. That started them wanting to help other people through various different methods.
I know it’s just something more and more people are dealing with, especially with long COVID, and not feeling like they can recover from that and get their life back. It’s just baffling and they don’t get answers from their doctor for, for the most part. So thank you so much for what you’re doing in helping people to recover from chronic fatigue.
Miguel Bautista
Thank you so much, and thank you for creating this platform. I know you’re affecting lots of lives as well. We got more people to save.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell people what your website is again?
Miguel Bautista
So it is www.cfsrecovery.co/detox, and also, we have almost 2,000 videos on the YouTube channel. It’s all free, and there’s hundreds of hours. Nearly any situation you could think of if you’re dealing with CFS or long COVID, we’ve seen it all. I share a lot of strategies on that recovery channel.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Is it CFS Recovery on YouTube?
Miguel Bautista
That’s right.
Dr. Wendy Myers
All right. Miguel, thank you so much for coming on the show, and everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks so much for tuning in every week to the Myers Detox Podcast. I love bringing guests from around the world, talking about all different types of topics to help you make those distinctions and discernments, so that you can get all the little pieces of the puzzle that you need to recover your health. That’s why I’m doing this, so that you can feel better. So thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
