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Sleep and fatigue

Fatigue and long covid together — untangling them

Started 13 January 2025 · 20 replies · 207 hearts · read 2.8k times

TychoLeiden, NL · 13 January 2025
1.5 years ago

A question rather than an update: Fatigue and long covid together — untangling them

Squeamish subject, so I am going to be plain about it and get it over with.

I am not looking for reassurance particularly. I am looking for somebody to say either that they had exactly this, or that they did not, because both would help.

I have written down when it happens and how long it lasts, because I could not answer either of those questions when my GP asked and I felt foolish.

No advice needed if you would rather not. Recognition is genuinely enough.

69

BassCoventry, UK
#1

I had assumed the fatigue was psychological and it turned out to be worth a set of bloods. Something unrelated came up and it was fixable.

10

SamPortland, OR
#2

Mine was much worse for the first three days after each step up and then fine. Once I saw that pattern in my notes I planned around it.

12

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#3

A standing thank-you to anybody who returns to a thread with the outcome. Threads that simply stop are the ones that leave the next person stranded, and one sentence months later prevents it.

17me too 9

RuthieLeicester, UK
#4

Sleep got better for me before it got worse. Two good months, then a strange stretch, then it settled at something new.

10

Ollie OPeterhead, UK
#5

Coming back to say the fatigue lifted at about the four-month mark and has not come back. I wanted to leave that here for anybody currently in it.

11

NkemPort Harcourt, NG
#6

Kiki, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

The four o'clock waking was the thing I could not solve. I have found nothing that fixes it and I have found it helps to know I am not the only one.

6me too 2

OrrinGlasgow, UK
#7

You have said something a lot of us have not managed to. Thank you.

8

HollisBath, UK
#8

What helped was scheduling the tiredness rather than fighting it. I moved the demanding parts of my week to mornings and stopped pretending afternoons were productive.

5

RunaAarhus, DK
#9

Naps helped me and made things worse for somebody I talk to weekly, so I am reluctant to recommend them. Worth trying and worth abandoning.

8

TobySwindon, UK
#10

What Orrin described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

What made the difference for me was a fixed wake time rather than a fixed bedtime. Somebody here suggested it and it took about ten days to work.

15

LeifTrondheim, NO
#11

My honest experience: my sleep is now noticeably better than it was before any of this, which was not something I expected or was aiming for.

6me too 9

PeggyRotherham, UK
#12

Leif, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

The exhaustion is real and it is not laziness, and I spent a month calling it laziness before somebody here corrected me kindly.

10

GethinMerthyr Tydfil, UK
#13

The bit in the middle is the bit I needed to read.

8

TorrinAberdeen, UK
#14

Mine correlated with hydration far more than I would have believed. Very dull, very consistent across three months of notes.

12

RufusGuildford, UK
#15

I found the tiredness hardest to explain to other people. It is not the tiredness of a bad night, it is a different quality, and there is no good vocabulary for it.

10

GigiNaples, IT
#16

Something practical: I stopped scheduling anything on the evening of the day I do it. That one change took the pressure out of the whole week.

13

NettieBarrow, UK
#17

My prescriber asked about my sleep before anything else when I raised fatigue, which I thought was a diversion and turned out to be the whole answer.

12

KezWigan, UK
#18

Nettie — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

The vivid dreams caught me completely off guard. Nobody had mentioned them and about a third of this circle seems to have had them.

6me too 4

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#19

Holding a boundary: we do not swap remedies in this circle as though they were prescriptions. Describing what happened to you is welcome; telling somebody what to take is not.

20

SinéadCork, IE
#20

Coming back to what Nettie wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

What worked was accepting that I had less in the day than I used to, temporarily, and taking things out of the week rather than trying to do them tired.

8