@UkPoster (just clarifying that everything I'm about to say is of course my own subjective opinion coming from my personal experience and viewpoint)
I find it so depressing and disheartening and bleak that you are here trying to advance these frankly completely absurd and nonsensical ideas, and that there are so many others like you.
I know you obviously won't agree with me, but I suppose there's no harm in me adding my voice to the chorus, even though I am fairly sure it won't cause you to reflect or reconsider anything you're saying.
Unfortunately as a very sick disabled person with very limited energy, I don't have the capacity right now to go through everything you've said line by line and refute it, so I will acknowledge that this is a general emotional response to the general impression I have formed from reading your posts.
What you are suggesting as a "mechanism" just fundamentally doesn't make any sense.
I'm 37 years old, from when I was 19 to about 28 I was incredibly physically active. I cycled long distances across London pretty much every day, cycling was by far my principal mode of transport and I was working as a freelancer all over the city, from Barking to Notting Hill, to Finchley, to Peckham almost always doing it all on my bike. I was easily averaging 10 miles per day of cycling around London.
On top of that, I was carrying heavy equipment (amplifiers), working in the evenings (performing live music), hiking, surfing and running for pleasure and exercise.
Around age 27/28, my physical activity started declining because I started to find it harder to maintain all this physical exercise. Cycling began to feel difficult, walking up stairs began to feel difficult. Despite this, I pushed through for years, refusing to reduce my activity levels unless I physically couldn't move, which started to happen more and more frequently - a day would come up where I physically wouldn't be able to leave the house, because my muscles were aching so much, I had such extreme fatigue, headaches etc. I would rest for a day or two, feel better, and then get straight back to cycling, running etc etc.
Over 2/3 years, the stretches of feeling well and able to do physical stuff got shorter and shorter, and the days when I couldn't move became more and more frequent.
Despite this, I kept pushing on (doubtless because of all the absolute guff that is so prevalent that has wormed it's way into all of our consciousnesses whether we like it or not - that we're "scared" of activity bla bla bla").
I kept pushing on, my capacity kept reducing, I kept pushing on, my capacity kept reducing, etc etc.
This continued until I had sold all my bikes (I couldn't cycle at all any more), stopped hiking, stopped surfing, stopped live performance, and now am lucky to be able to walk 3000 steps in a day.
I think, as far as I'm aware, from talking to many other people with ME, that a lot of people have a similar trajectory. They start to notice that they are less physically able, push through, become even less physically able, etc etc etc, until they are able to do very little at all, and possibly become housebound or bedbound.
Your claim that somehow we become worse because we don't do enough because we're scared, is completely backwards and illogical.
How would that fit my experience, or the experience of many others that is similar?
At what point in my decline was I not doing enough? At what point was there some perfect amount that I should have been doing that would have then expanded my capacity again?
I think we get very frustrated because on such a fundamental level, what you are saying does not work as a way of explaining the trajectory of our experience. It's completely backwards. I really don't know how else to put it.
link.springer.com
www.frontiersin.org
