Long COVID is a real physical condition
People all over the world are experiencing ongoing symptoms such as:
- fatigue and post-exertional crashes
- brain fog and memory issues
- breathlessness or chest tightness
- heart palpitations
- dizziness or nervous system sensitivity
And one of the hardest parts is… it often doesn’t follow a clear or predictable path.
You might have days where things feel a bit better, only to find yourself back where you started.
It can be confusing and deeply discouraging.
Why isn't it going away?
Most people catch COVID and get better a week or two later. But for others, even a fairly mild form of COVID can lead to months or years of worsening symptoms. This isn’t just about the virus itself - it’s about how the body has responded to it.
Current stress or past trauma cause nervous system dysregulation. An additional threat such as a virus can be the tipping point into a large scale physiological stress response as the body goes into protection mode.
This isn’t just emotional stress. It’s a physical state in the nervous system caused by activation of the amygdala in the centre of the brain, the HPA axis and the adrenal glands that causes:
- surges of energy to heart and lungs (palpitations, myocarditis, fast shallow breathing)
- reduces the function of the immune system, digestion and hormone regulation
- causes inflammation and pain
- reduces mental clarity
Why isn't it going away?
If that stress response stays active, the body cannot activate its normal repair mode and symptoms persist.
Most approaches focus on managing symptoms. And while this can be helpful for day-to-day coping, it doesn’t address why the body got stuck in the first place, so it doesn't provide a long-term solution.
When the body is supported to come out of this high stress state, it can restore physiological balance that enables natural healing to take place.
This is not achieved by pushing or forcing, but by helping the body to feel safe enough to reset calmly.
How Empower Therapies can help
The Switch 4-day programme draws on all this research to help you gently turn off your stress response, giving your body the chance to heal naturally. You’ll learn to spot thinking and behaviour patterns that fuel fatigue, then use practical techniques to undo these limiting patterns.
The major difference between The Switch and other brain retraining techniques is that we also address the original root cause of your illness by using The Deep Switch to access and resolve any original trauma that is maintaining the stress response and is inadvertently preventing your recovery.
Plus we address lifestyle choices that have been scientifically proven to benefit recovery.
If you don’t feel quite ready to jump into a 4-day course or you are not yet well enough to manage course attendance, you might like to start with our webinar series, which gives an overview of mind-body health, the role of stress and thinking patterns, and some basic techniques to start using on yourself. This webinar is a general approach, rather than being specifically about long-COVID. For some people it’s enough on its own and for others it is their inspiration and lead-in to doing the full Switch programme. This can be watched in short chunks if you are too unwell to watch for two hours in a row. Some people who have a severely low starting point (e.g., bed bound or house bound) need to do a few ten-minute Zoom sessions with me to gain enough improvements to be able to cope with any sort of course.
Long-COVID recovery rates at Empower Therapies
16 – full recovery!
3 – at least 90% improvement
3 – 70-80% improvement
3 – 40% improvement
1 – no improvement
0 – got worse
1 – unknown, though reported improvements at the course
Note: People were deemed as having a full recovery from their own self-reports stating that they no longer had any symptoms and were able to do all the activities of their normal, healthy life. Percentage improvements are also based on clients’ perceptions of how close they are to their full, healthy life.
Five of these clients had long-COVID so severely that they were hospitalised many times, were wheelchair bound and could not think clearly enough to do simple tasks like tie their shoelaces. Another was housebound and required assistance to walk from her bed to the toilet. No matter how serious their illness, significant improvements, or full resolution of symptoms, have been experienced by almost all these clients.
This data represents outcomes post-course for clients who attended The Switch for long-COVID. My long-COVID results have consistently shown around 80% achieving great outcomes — however, it’s important to clarify what this 80% represents. It reflects 80% of the people who both chose to enrol in The Switch, passed an assessment confirming their readiness to participate, and commenced the programme. Within this selected group, 80% have achieved great outcomes.
For context, over the same two-year period, 115 people attended The Switch for CFS or long COVID. Only one CFS participant discontinued after starting the course (and was still included in the data). An additional 24 people applied but did not progress through the preparation stages and therefore did not attend The Switch; these individuals were not included in this dataset.
Recovery times of the 16 people who are 100% better.
1 – Next Steps webinar
4 – within the four days of The Switch course
3 – 1 week after The Switch
1 – 2 weeks after The Switch
6 – 1 month after The Switch
1 – 3 months after The Switch
I realise this is a very small sample size without formal research, so no big conclusions can be drawn, but it is looking highly promising as a fast and effective treatment for many who experience long-COVID, and I hope that a formal study will happen soon.
What does the research show us about how mind-body relates to long-COVID?
An article published by the Oxford Immunology Group states,
“Psychosocial factors are also very important in regulating our immune activation and the response to SARS-CoV-2. Two of the main biological systems involved in the stress response, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis or the autonomic nervous system, are also key in the regulation of our immune response. Therefore, strategies tackling our levels of stress and/or the stress response, including psychosocial intervention, physical exercise or potentially dietary interventions, could be also useful in counteracting some of the negative effects of chronic inflammation.”
What causes Long-COVID?
Here is an infographic from the Clinical Immunology Journal showing the role of stress in long-COVID. My work is very much in alignment with this principle that a severe stress response in the body (at a physical level) is responsible for why people stay sick after an initial illness experience such as a virus.
Among the clients that I have seen so far for long-COVID, there was a significant stressful event, or long-term background stress, prior to catching COVID so it is likely that their stress response was already quite activated. Catching COVID was the final tipping point where their stress response became so strong that it was causing severe depletion of body systems such as the immune, digestive, neurological and hormonal systems, over-stimulating organs such as heart and lungs, and causing inflammation, palpitations, POTS and neurological disturbances.
How can you help yourself?
1. Preliminary research shows that it is important to get enough rest in the early days of your recovery. When you feel tired, rest. Don’t push yourself to do exercise before you are ready. When you do feel like exercising only do gentle exercise with slow gradual increases. This step is applicable for the first 2-4 months after your COVID illness.
2. Get your hope back about recovery being possible by watching some of the movies on this website. Just knowing that there is an answer to long-COVID can help people to relax and calm their stress response and get a bit of a lift in energy levels.
3. Start actively reducing your stress response by doing things like meditation, breathing exercises and activities that you find particularly relaxing.
4. Watch the Next Steps to Recovery 2-hour webinar for some techniques for calming your body, changing your body language to create health improvements and catching faulty thinking patterns.
5. If you are still feeling unwell after about 4 months you are likely to have slipped into the chronic illness zone rather than the acute zone. This is where it is now a good idea to look into attending the full four-day Switch programme to rewire your brain and body back into wellness.
