From moderate to very mild, my path to 90% recovery (ME/CFS - Long Covid)

TL;DR 29yo male from France. Covid hit me 3 times and I went from fully healthy and fit to full ME/CFS with frequent PEM. I can finally say my energy/capacity has improved a lot over the last months. Not cured, but a very different life. I wanted to share my story, no bullshit, no "have you tried this magic treatment" stuff.

[Disclaimer] This story is just MY experience, as someone with Moderate ME/CFS, I am not claiming any of the approaches I took resulted in me getting better. No known cure or treatment is known for ME/CFS as of today, take my experience & learnings with a grain of salt.

4 things helped me manage the illness better:

1. removing most stressors from my life (I quit my job, moved back with my parents),

2. disciplined pacing (find my real baseline, track activities, add one stressor at a time),

3. take care of my mental health using mind-body approaches (meditations, gratitude)

4. time

I am now around 90% capacity, can now manage 7hrs of cognitive activities a day and 30m at around 130bpm, still get PEM about once every 2 months.

Who I was before, and how I got sick

French guy working in high stress tech startups in Paris. I worked out 4x a week (endurance/strength) for years, rarely sick, no health pbs whatsoever.

Then 2024-2025 wrecked me.

• June 2024 my 2nd Covid.

• January 2025 an intense flu that put me in bed 5 days straight, lost 4kg.

• March a stomach bug and a throat infection.

• May my 3rd COVID, 7 days bedbound.

• After that I was sick every month or so, always tired, with very subtle forms of PEM that I did not even understand yet.

The doctors were not helpful. One literally told me "you have no fever, no runny nose, your blood tests are normal, what's even the point in examining you". I dont really blame him TBH, the medical system in France is just crushed. A psychiatrist finally pointed me toward "post viral CFS" and told me to swim 30 min a day (bad advice as you all know haha), but at least it gave me a direction. I looked it up and just fit all the criteria. Official ME/CFS diagnosis from a Paris specialist came in January 2026 (took +3 months just to get the appointment).

My symptoms:

• debilitating fatigue (had to quit my job),

• PEM,

• a sore throat every time I talked too long or felt on the edge,

• severe brain fog the first 4 months, mild memory loss,

• random digestive issues / food intolerance out of nowhere.

Pacing

If I had to sum up everything I learned, it is this: lower the total load on your body so your body has room to truly rest and heal. Once pacing yielded more stability in my energy levels and PEMs were spacing out, I also felt my energy envelope was expanding so I gradually started testing my previous envelope limits very very cautiously.

• Removed my main stressors. Job, people that stressed me, decisions I kept chewing on, my own mind spiraling. It was hard to let go of my job, I loved it, but stress always triggered PEM for me, so I ended up leaving. I moved back to live with my parents.

• Increasing time spent on resting activities.

  • For me, the activity that actually made me rest the most, except sleeping ofc, was reading fantasy books lying down. How do i know? It was the activity other than sleep that yielded the lowest possible heart rate. I was grateful I could read for hours and rest at the same time.

  • Casual gaming on low pressure games

• Reducing time on draining activities.

  • Talking was a very tiring point for me, I felt I always had sore throat, the more I talked the worse the symptoms I got. At one point I could only talk at about 30% capacity, my voice was extremely softened.

  • Gaming on performance games like LoL was very draining, I had to reduce it.

  • Scrolling was numbing but I learned over time it was also draining my energy. Seeing normal people's lives did not really excite me anyway so I just uninstalled Insta, Linkedin and Tiktok

• Tracked my activities to understand my limits. I tracked all activities I did every day on my calendar, red for draining stuff, green for energising/neutral. So that it was more easy to identify what had led to a PEM.

• I tried to make every day look the same (fixed sleep, fixed activities) so that when I did something out of the ordinary, like a walk or a lunch with friends, it was way easier to spot what triggered a PEM. For me PEM mostly hit +48h later, which made it brutal to understand at first. The big realization: it is about rolling allostatic load. I could handle 1 hard day, but not 2+ hard days in a row. Post on this incoming if you're curious.

• 1 new stressor at a time: I came to learn this from experience, but every time I added 2 new stressors at a time, I would get PEM. For example: heat wave during summer (not in my control but still counts) + going to sleep later than usual, OR a longer than usual work session + a new stretching session etc.

• Sleep hygiene. Sleep mask, ear buds, lights off between 10:30 and 11pm, no alarm (woke up naturally at 7-8:30am), no screen 1h30 before bed, read books on my Kindle.

• Pre-emptive naps every single day, two 20-min naps (11am and 5:30pm) with Yoga Nidra meditations. Either I fell asleep or I just deeply relaxed, either way it was dedicated rest. Stabilized my energy a lot, did not mess with my night sleep.

• Heart rate under 120bpm, I wore my Garmin and tried to avoid going above 120bpm as long as my state did not stabilise or improved. And I learned not to panic if you went over for a few minutes, in my experience it is not an instant PEM threshold. 120bpm was just a marker to tell me that I should not spend too much time doing this activity for now.

  • Now I can safely stay at 140bpm for 30 minutes without PEM.

• Luck & circumstances.

  • I went back to live at my parents and my mom took care of me in terms of meals. I cannot thank her enough for that. Still had to pay for my appartment though, did not want to lose it.

  • Also in France, when in sick leave, our salary is usually maintained at 70%. That is one advantage of getting massively taxed.

Mind body approaches saved my mental health

This sickness is so debilitating so I would feel really depressed at times. I suspected if I got fully depressed, then my odds of recovery might not improve and pacing discipline would be harder. So I did the following things:

• Being there for myself: This illness is brutal, and I felt a lot better once I started giving myself credit just for getting through it. That let me drop the impossible expectations and quiet the constant self-criticism I used to run on. I felt like I deserved to rest, not like I needed to do more.

• Savoring the little things practice: When I was bedbound during PEMs, there was not much to appreciate so I worked on appreciating the small stuff: a good music, a good movie/series, a good meal. That helped me have a better time despite all this bullshit.

• Meditated most days to help me cope with the change and try to stay optimistic despite my diminished physical state: I used visualisation: I visualised feeling healthy and full of energy and that felt good and made me remember what may be at the end of the tunnel. This had in turn effects like me being able to feel mentally more happy overtime.

• Yoga Nidra as mentioned above, I did yoga nidra (Non sleep deep rest) so that even though I was not sleeping, my body was calm and still resting.

• Social activities within my energy envelope gaming with my best friends, dinner/lunch/walk with friends: this one was really hard as it usually was the cause of my PEMs. So I really had to time each session and enjoy what I could, I knew how important it was for my morale.

Alongside everything else I changed, my overnight HRV (Heart Rate Variability = a rough proxy for parasympathetic, "rest and digest" activity) climbed back toward baseline: from 40ms in November up to about 70ms over 4 months. Then it dipped back to around 61ms in the spring before climbing again. It now sits at 82ms, slightly above my pre-illness baseline of 80ms.

My monthly average overnight HRV, measured with the Oura Ring app, November 2025 to July 2026.

It is important to note that the dip in April/May did not result in less energy. I did link it to a shift in mindset though: I was more stressed and putting too much pressure on myself, which seemed to limit my ability to deeply rest. As soon as I recognized the mental pattern, I worked on that and my HRV started going back up again. I cannot prove causation, but that's how I experienced it.

My energy envelope expanded progressively over the same period. I genuinely can't say whether the meditation drove that, or whether the better sleep, lower stress and simply not being acutely ill anymore did it. I was not healed yet and still got PEMs, but my energy envelope was definitely expanding. I later dug into the research behind these mind-body approaches and wrote up what the science does and does not say.

What did not work for me:

• Antidepressants. Because the doctors assumed I was depressed (I wasn't), I got put on them (Duloxetine). Zero effect on my ME/CFS, because the problem was never depression. Worse, they wrecked my sleep and left me with a spinning head for 2 full weeks after I stopped. So be careful with the default "you're just depressed" route if that does not match how you actually feel.

• Vitamins/supplements. I did not have any vitamin deficiency in my blood analysis. Also I did not want to add new variables to my scientific approach to getting better, the more variables I had to take into account, the less confident I could say something was working or not.

• Worked slightly: Red light therapy. Did about 10 full-body sessions, felt a slight boost. But I kept getting better for months without it, so honestly I can't credit it for much.

Where I am now

• I still get PEM every 2 months, I still have symptoms, I still cant go back to full-time work at a company because I dont want to risk falling back to my initial state

• I can now be active most days 7+ hours, working on stuff I like and it has been a few months that I have been able to gradually start sport back, soft runs, soft lifting

• I know how lucky I am to have made it this far. I am so grateful for getting 90% of my life back, and I pray for you to get it back to

How can I help?

I am recovered enough that I want to spend the next while giving back to this community before I figure out what to do with my life. I'm planning to post more on pacing tips and other learnings.

Anything questions you may have, I'd be happy to answer! Don't hesitate if you want to DM, especially if you are french 🇫🇷!

Whoever is reading this, I hope your life gets better! 🫶