What is it?
A sense of fatigue, either mental or physical-a feeling that you never really have much energy. Chronic fatigue takes millions of people to their doctors yet in more than four out of five no physical cause is found.
What causes it?
• Overwork either at home or in your job.
• An undiagnosed underlying physical disease such as anaemia.
• An underlying emotional or psychological problem such as depression, unhappiness, a sense of failure, sexual or marital tensions, and so on.
• A shortage of magnesium.
• A shortage of potassium.
• Iron-deficiency anaemia.
• A lack of folic acid in the diet.
• A shortage of good-quality sleep.
• Too little exercise.
• Being bored with your life and yourself.
Prevention
• Many people are overworked, especially those in stressful jobs and women who do a job as well as looking after a family. Many such people don’t realize how tired they are getting because it all builds up slowly. The answer to this problem is to work less if at all possible, and to make a real effort to relax more. If you have a stressful job you should take up a hobby something totally different from your job and preferably something that is not goal-centered or competitive. If you have demanding responsibilities looking after a family, make sure that there are at least a couple of periods during the week that you spend doing something just for you and not for the family-go to an exercise class, or an evening class, or join a group of people who share an interest with you. Find labour-saving ways of running the house; get other members of the household to do more and to think more about you. Spread the load of heavier jobs among the family.
• Go to your doctor and ask for a blood test and a general check-up. You may be suffering from a treatable medical condition and it is a waste to walk around feeling under the weather with something that could be treated. This is what often happens with anaemia in women.
• If no physical cause is found, see a counselor or other trained professional to try to sort out any emotional or psychological problems in your life. Many people find such conditions every bit as draining as true physical illness, yet often no notice is taken until they become a form of psychological illness that cannot be ignored. Mental and emotional wear and tear creeps up insidiously on us and makes the strongest person tired. Often, the help of a professional can make all the difference to knowing how to cope with what seems to the sufferer to be an impossible situation. Many things can’t be changed but the way you deal with them can be.
• Magnesium is vital for many of the body’s vital functions and gross deficiency signs are unlikely to go unnoticed. However, as with iron deficiency, most doctors are not trained to recognize mild magnesium deficiency. It has only one noticeable symptom-chronic fatigue. In one study of magnesium and fatigue 200 men and women who were tired during the day were given magnesium. In all but two the tiredness disappeared.
• Similarly, potassium can be in short supply. This deficiency is well recognized in long-distance runners and in those taking diuretic drugs (water tablets). In one study researchers took people at random and measured their potassium intakes. Those with a deficient intake (60 per cent of the men and 40 per cent of the women) had weaker grip strengths than those with a normal intake. As potassium intake fell, so did muscular strength. A study of 100 chronically fatigued people (84 women and 16 men) found that on a magnesium and potassium supplement 87 improved in 4-5 weeks.
*235/72/5*
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