One of the reasons I prefer to think of my experience of dis-ease as dysautonomia, as opposed to ME/CFS or Chronic Lyme, is that many diagnoses describe similar chronic systemic dysfunction (see specifically how this played out for me here.) ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia, chronic Lyme disease, and long Covid all come under the same umbrella, along with Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS,) which, like fibromyalgia, is characterized by physical pain, sometimes with no discernible abnormality (like this example of hitting your elbow, but the pain is chronic.)

Many of these conditions begin with a trigger: the last straw in a chronic sequence of some combination of stresses. Symptoms may actually be the result of the body protecting itself: the body perceives danger, and directs energy and attention accordingly. Sometimes, this connection is very intuitive to us. Other times less so.

Stress	Physical Symptom	Body-Talk
Too much hard training	Heart rate suppression (inability to attain high training heart rates)	“You won’t stop doing intervals, I won’t let you do intervals.”
Hand on hot burner	Burning, pain	“Take your hand off the burner, idiot!”
Trauma, “stuck” emotions, threat to safety	Inability to sleep deeply, despite chronic fatigue	“Shut down all but the essentials to conserve energy, but don’t let the guard down.”