I’m 100% Healthy After Long COVID – And I Hope You Will Be Too
- Eleanor Kirby
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Our latest blog is from Eleanor Kirby who recovered from long covid using mind-body approaches, specifically brain training using the Lightning Process, combined with deeper emotional work and lifestyle changes.
COVID and how it became long COVID
COVID itself was pretty uneventful for me. April 2020 was a mix of a lack of smell, being asleep for a fortnight, one horrendous headache, and watching all ten series of Friends! After a month, I was still fatigued and then I developed more symptoms.
Terrible exhaustion, conversations sounding too loud, dizziness when I moved my head, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), tinnitus, Post Exterional Malaise (PEM), the list was endless. My body felt completely dysregulated and exhausted.
Importantly, before long COVID, my life was stressful: a new city, house, and job. As I learn about some of the theories of why long COVID comes about, I think that what was happening in my life fed into the dysregulation and stress response that persisted after the viral infection had gone.
You will see, at the very end of the blog, how I have changed my life to live without the stress and symptoms.
The severity of long COVID
Gradually, my fatigue got worse, and by July 2020 I couldn’t walk up the stairs and moved in with my parents. I was sleeping 18 hours a day.
I had three particularly strange symptoms. The first was an overwhelming urge to stay absolutely still. When I moved, I wanted to scream and cry. The second was that I went completely white in my hands and feet (and looked pale in my face too). Finally, brainfog. This was the worst. It was like my body was on autopilot, I had in-depth conversations yet wasn’t really ‘in the room’. I could manage one activity yet had no conscious awareness of activities.
GP support – kind, but not helpful
My GP said that the symptoms of long COVID sounded like those of ME/CFS. She advised that I should try to leave the house every day using a wheelchair but not to ‘overdo’ it – and it might be permanent. I had an enormous amount of guilt that my illness was my fault for ‘overdoing’ it.
I came off the phone call and it was if a bomb had gone off in my life.
I ordered (what turned out to be an extremely unhelpful) book on Amazon about ME/CFS. One chapter recommended “total rest for body and mind”. So I began staring out of the window, for hours sometimes. The book also recommended tracking my symptoms. I obsessively wrote an hourly diary in the hope of working out what ‘overdoing’ it meant for my body. Measuring my heart rate, headaches, sleeping, everything!
The only respite I had during these months was seeing my wonderful family and best friends on Zoom…. And interestingly, during these distractions, my body felt a bit better...!
Finding a way out!
I began researching in online medical journals: what was it that allowed some people to recover from CFS/ME after a viral infection, and some not?
I came across several articles from around the world that talked about how a virus could trigger the brain/body to become stuck in the body’s ‘emergency physical response’ mode — ‘fight, flight, freeze, fawn’. This really rang true. My symptoms were reflective of my brain/body trying to protect me by making me stop doing anything – freeze.
There were many free and paid courses that I could have done to teach my brain and body to be healthy again. I happened to read in the British Medical Journal that the ‘Lightning Process’ course showed fair to good results in teenagers with ME/CFS. It had been tested on teenagers, so I knew it couldn’t be too difficult or dangerous.
The Lightning Process – sounded strange but I gave it a go!
Any courses that I looked at (free or paid) seemed to have a similar idea – teaching your brain to be calm and use healthy neural pathways again.
My background is in physics and I’ve always been interested in scientific evidence, so considering ‘alternative medicine’ was unheard of for me! I was very sceptical that my real physical symptoms could somehow be ‘switched off’. However, for years I have noticed that when I am stressed, I often get eczema, so I understood that there is some sort of mind-body connection, so I did the Lightning Process 3-day course over Zoom, with my mind as open as possible.
During the course we learnt simple mental exercises, such as visualising positive memories of when we had felt healthy and awake. This was designed to remind our brains that we knew how to use the ‘normal’, healthy pathways. We also learnt about how language influences the brain, both positively and negatively. The words we use to describe our symptoms and experiences with them can signal danger (or safety) to the brain and either reinforce the symptoms (or help to unlearn them).
Most importantly, we were encouraged to interrupt our thoughts and switch from concentrating on tracking symptoms and instead to focus on distraction and recovery. This seemed to work a little like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), but we were doing it on ourselves.
Alongside the mental exercises, we examined how we thought about ourselves and our lives. Many of us, it turned out, were quite stressed about different aspects of our lives. Again, by forcing our brains to think more positively we re-trained them to use the ‘normal’, healthy pathways.
Recovery – how it progressed
Day 1: We learnt basic calming visualisations, how to interrupt our symptoms and focus on our recovery. I nervously tried it out over Zoom with the trainer and it did really calm my brain and body – it was such a peaceful feeling after months of chaos.
That afternoon, after being in the same bedroom for two months, I succeeded in walking outside to the post box! I had finally left the house! For the rest of the evening, I continued to interrupt any symptoms with calming visualisations, and it was working. Although I was petrified about how I would feel the next day, physically I felt better than I had in months.
Days 2 and 3 – I had dinner with my family, walked outside, watched TV and stood up at the sink for around two minutes! By using the same calming visualisations and focusing on recovery, I found that I could do more and more. It was hard, however, because my mind continually drifted back to feeling anxious and waiting for the next symptom. But week by week, it got easier. The visualisations were great and I was determined; I kept going back to them time and time again. Lucky I am such a determined person – it’s hard work!
I did the calming visualisation exercises every time I got a symptom, which was easily over 100 times a day at first. Each day I gradually encouraged myself to do more activities - and with a wobble or two, and lots of pauses to calm down and talk kindly to myself, I managed it.
Each week I ticked off more milestones: driving, walking, running, cycling, seeing friends, and finally working full-time in a busy secondary school! I had my life back.
Honesty about the Lightning Process
I am glad I did it, but there are many other less expensive brain-training courses that could potentionally achieve the same results. It just happened to be the one I found online. I am very aware of my privilege of being able to afford this course; lower cost brain-training resources are detailed at the end of this blog*.
Has it been easy? No. Even once my body was feeling normal, I continued to harbour a deep fear that I would relapse. Even after six months of working full-time, it was hard to trust my body completely. I still got odd symptoms, such as fatigue, pain in the centre of my chest, turning completely white or getting brain fog and mixing up words. However, this anxiety improved as I saw how much more I could do.
Reflecting on it all, I am quite proud of myself for working so hard at the mental exercises, counselling and coming up with a plan for a new life that I was excited about. It worked amazingly, but for me, it was hard-won at times: I did the Lightning Process exercises around 100 times a day for the first four months, at least. Even dragging myself out of bed crying at night and doing it because my body and mind were in a mess.
Will I continue to use the visualisations/mental exercises from Lightning Process or others similar?! ABSOLUTELY. Now, when I need it, in just a few seconds, I can do the Lightning Process mental exercises to bring my brain and body completely back to normal.
Was it worth it?! ABSOLUTELY. I am back to myself, having fun with family and friends, working in a full-time job that I love!
Reflecting on Long COVID After Five Years of being well!
Five years on, I’m still well — and I feel SO lucky. Life feels normal again: I’m back to teaching in a secondary school, going to the gym four times a week, running, and taking holidays. My brain is using the ‘right’, healthy pathways. I’ve even had COVID a few more times since, along with both the COVID and flu vaccines, and I’ve come through each one absolutely fine.
Looking back, there are a few key changes I made that I believe have helped me stay well — and they might help others too.
Firstly, I now live in a way that feels true to me. I do the things that matter, and I set boundaries — both at work and at home. This has meant saying no to extra work where I can, and focusing on school projects that feel meaningful. I also set boundaries in terms of housework: I would never be in a relationship with someone who expected me to do more than he did. It has taken me a long time to find a really nice man who naturally takes on half of the responsibility of the house. This is less of a matter of control and more of living how it feels right and ‘normal’ to live.
Secondly, although the Lightning Process was central to my recovery, private counselling alongside it allowed me to do the deeper emotional work of neuroplastic healing – and gave me powerful tools as well. One exercise was drawing a “jigsaw” of all the pieces I wanted in my life — the relationships, activities, and goals that mattered most — and then working out practical steps to bring those pieces together. It gave me hope, direction, and a picture of what “wellness” could look like. For a long time before this, I was overwhelmed by how life would look and, although it sounds strange, somehow it seemed ‘easier’ in my subconscious to stay ill. Many people who I have spoken to with Long COVID are perhaps in the same boat.
Finally, I gave up trying to be endlessly positive, and I’ve learned to feel the full range of emotions. Through videos and practices for “sitting with emotions,” I’ve felt anger, sadness, joy, or frustration. Now, I let myself notice emotions, experience them fully, and then let them pass. I tend to allocate 30 minutes a day for this and keep distracting myself at other times. Doing this seems to mean emotions don’t get stuck in my body or show up as physical symptoms.
Surviving Long COVID has been tough, and I have enormous respect for those who have struggled with it for even longer. I hope they find a way out.
This is where – I hope – the most challenging chapter in my life ends. A pandemic, an illness and a surprising cure!
*Free and low-cost brain-training resources:
The Way Out, a book by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv, provides a step-by-step plan for re-training the brain and treating chronic symptoms that are driven by nervous-system dysregulation
The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Center offers educational resources and practical tools to help individuals understand and treat chronic nervous-system driven pain and other persistent symptoms.
The Pain Reprocessing Therapy podcast shares insights and tools to help rewire the brain's response to persistent pain and symptoms.
