Page 2 - An Analogy                                         page    1     2     3     4     5

Imagine that you live on a remote Scottish island. All your electricity comes from batteries stored in the shed. There are two wind turbines that keep the batteries fully charged. It is so windy that you have easily more than enough power to heat the house and run everything you want. You don't even have to think about it. You don't ever worry about if the power will run out.

But one day you do run out of power, and from then on you never have enough to heat the home and run your appliances. The wind turbines and batteries are tested and they are all fine. The only thing left is the computer that runs the whole system.

You try switching off the computer, waiting, then switching back on again. It is no better. You cannot replace the computer, so what do you do? Now you have to look very hard at the way you live, and you have to cut back heavily on everything you use: take a shower instead of a bath, only use the washing machine when it is full, fit better insulation around your house. But sometimes not even that is enough.

It is the same with you (and me!). Switching the computer on and off is like us having a couple of days in bed. It isn't enough. Medical tests often cannot show us that anything is wrong with us, and yet we know we no longer have enough energy to do the things we used to be able to do. We know we eat enough food, that our heart pumps enough blood around - even that the blood is full of supplies. Deep inside us though, the hormones, chemicals and electrical activity inside the cells control how much energy we can use, and something is wrong. These are much too fast and too complicated for us to properly understand yet. What we can do is organize our lives carefully so that we don't run out of energy and that we leave enough for our bodies to start repairing themselves. That way we can give our bodies a long breathing space - time and energy to help sort themselves out.