Learning to feel tired: A learning trajectory towards chronic fatigue, 2018, Lenaert et al.

Its not an activity, its an expedition.

 

Uh, guess what... this is the basis of all drama. You see characters on stage or in a film and you empathize with them. You feel their joy, their suffering, and, in this case, their fatigue. The more you can personally relate to their experience, the more you will empathize. It is not startling to discover that people with a fatiguing illness relate to, empathize with and "feel" the depictions of fatigue in others more strongly than healthier people might.

Another example of this is in contagious yawning. I suspect nearly everyone has experienced this. You see someone yawn and you can not help but yawn yourself. In studies, the people who contagiously yawned the most easily were the people who were rated to have the highest empathy.

 

This is a really excellent point, and I'm saving your post for later reference!

 

Some docs ask this kind of thing out of ignorance but I am equally sure that the more experienced ones ask this sort of thing in this sort of way deliberately. It's one way of working out if you're being truthful and how badly impaired you are. If you weren't living with, or living with someone with ME, then you wouldn't know this.

In some ways this is a lot fairer than the WCA assessment (UK benefits test). Unfortunately, it doesn't take into account cognitive problems that might prevent the patient from giving an accurate picture of the problems they experience. Especially when they've been put on the spot with an unexpected question requiring a detailed answer.

 

The full text is available here:
https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/...arning_trajectory_towards_chronic_fatigue.pdf