Brain retraining

There is an emerging movement of former patients and researchers who believe that ME/CFS--due to it's complexity, the multiplicity of symptoms involved and systems affected, and the diverse ways that some people eventually recover while others do not--that the illness is a result of the dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, because the autonomic nervous system (ANS) is associated with the digestive, endocrine, circulatory and other systems that tend to be involved with ME/CFS.

This is not to imply that symptoms are imagined by patients, but that the nervous system is at the heart of the diverse manifestations of symptoms that show up physically. There are several voices in the brain training movement, such as Ashok Gupta and Dan Neuffer, that believe that the disease begins and perpetuates itself through a series of complex reactions involving the amygdala and other parts of the brain, where the brain and nervous system become sensitized to certain triggers resulting in a variety of symptoms, which themselves become triggers for symptoms, resulting in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The way beyond this ANS dysfunction involves rewiring the nervous system through brain training, including simple interventions that assist the patient in lowering their ANS arousal while also deliberately freeing up their attention to other sensations other than their symptoms.