Saturday, April 13, 2024

Can Depression Cause Weakness And Fatigue

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Muscle Damage Through Injury

Tired? Depressed? Feeling off? How you can combat pandemic fatigue

There are many ways in which your muscles can be directly damaged. The most obvious is injury or trauma such as sporting injuries, pulls and sprains. In any muscle injury, bleeding from damaged muscle fibres occurs inside the muscle, followed by swelling and inflammation. This makes the muscle less strong and also painful to use. Localised pain is the primary symptom but weakness also results.

Too Much Focusing Is Draining Here’s A Better Strategy

If these diversions aren’t working for you now, she recommends trying a change of scenery if you can.

For Payne, who lives in Baltimore, that meant staying at her parents’ home in West Virginia for three nights.

“It was not a very exciting trip, but we got away and it was a completely different environment. And I didn’t have any projects around the house that I could do other than reading or listening to a podcast, sleeping, eating,” Payne says. “And that was really, really renewing for me.”

However, Cyrus, who is also at Johns Hopkins, says some of her patients say their normal coping strategies aren’t working.

That’s because we are running on an emptier gas tank than usual, she says. “Your coping strategies that might be able to refill you a certain percent, you’re starting lower. So it’s not quite getting you where you need to be.”

If that’s the case for you, try changing up your routine, Payne says. “If you’re walking every day and that’s no longer helping, you try biking.”

What Antidepressant Medications Are Most Likely To Cause Fatigue In Depression

Dr. Fava: Although fatigue is viewed as a common side effect of the more sedating antidepressants, such as the tricyclic antidepressants, substantial rates of treatment-emergent fatigue have been reported with SSRIs and SNRIs. A pooled analysis by our group has shown that bupropion’s use is associated with significantly lower levels of residual fatigue compared to the SSRIs.

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What Causes An Elderly Persons Legs To Give Out

Causes of nerve damage include direct injury, tumor growth on the spine, prolonged pressure on the spine, and diabetes. A spinal cord injury. Spinal cord injuries are among the most common reasons that legs give out. These injuries vary in severity but should always be evaluated immediately by a spine specialist.

Try Eating A Few More Nutritious Foods

7 Causes Of Fatigue In Young Women

Depression disrupts eating habits, which in turn can cause feelings of fatigue. Like implementing better sleeping habits, developing a more nutrient-rich diet can improve fatigue and exhaustion.

Some foods might help with depression, and a balanced diet helps to boost energy. This typically includes a range of unrefined carbs, proteins, and fats, with an emphasis on veggies, whole grains, and healthy oils.

Aside from just the types of food you should aim to eat, it also might be better to eat small meals and snacks every few hours than three large meals a day. More frequent eating, as opposed to a food overload in a few sittings, may result in more sustained fuel for your body.

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What Is Muscle Weakness A Sign Of

Muscle weakness is a very common complaint but there is a huge range of possible causes. People feel tiredness or reduced strength in their muscles.

Are you suffering from muscle weakness? Well, you might think its a symptom of your anxiety. Well, anxiety is one of the common causes of muscle weakness.

Nervousness or being afraid can cause your body to feel weak and tired. Daily psychological stress can also cause your body muscles to weaken and eventually lead to muscle loss.

Muscle weakness can be a sign of lack of exercise or aging. Muscle injury or pregnancy can also lead to muscle weakness.

There are many medical causes for muscle weakness. Chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases can also eventually lead to muscle weakness. Other possible causes of muscle weakness include stroke, cancer, depression, fibromyalgia, and multiple sclerosis.

Muscle weakness at a very young age is a sign of either congenital muscle disorders or malnutrition.

If you feel fatigued or tired or you feel like your body has become very weak, its best to discuss your symptoms with your doctor.

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How The ‘lost Art’ Of Breathing Can Impact Sleep And Resilience

Another way that chronic stress makes us feel exhausted is by interfering with sleep, says Bufka. “When we’re feeling stressed, our sleep can get disrupted, which naturally leads to feelings of tiredness and exhaustion,” she says.

“We really rely on sleep to recover each day,” explains Epel. “And so for many of us, even though we might think we’re sleeping the same number of hours, it’s not the same quality. It doesn’t have the same restorative ability, because we’re getting less deep sleep, and we think that is tied to this chronic, subtle uncertainty, stress.”

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Fact: Caffeine Provides A Mild Boost

Whether in the form of coffee, soft drinks, or gum, caffeine can briefly increase alertness. Keep in mind that the effect takes about 30 minutes to kick in, so you may want to pull over and rest until you perk up. This temporary fix has its limits caffeine canât overcome severe fatigue and may have little impact on regular coffee drinkers.

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Shift Work Sleep Disorder

What Is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

Shift work can wreak havoc on your body’s 24-hour internal clock, or circadian rhythm. When you work nights or rotate shifts, your body doesn’t know when to be awake and when to sleep, which causes fatigue.

Daylight is often a cue to be awake. If you must sleep during the day, try to make your sleeping area as dark, cool, and quiet as possible. If you must work at night, keep your workplace brightly lit. Try to work night shifts all in a row and avoid frequently rotating shifts. Stay away from caffeine, and stick to a regular sleep-wake schedule as much as possible on days off.

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Prioritize Getting Good Sleep

Since depression may be causing you to have disordered sleeping habits, it can be helpful to develop better sleep habits.

Sleep hygiene pretty much just means good sleeping habits. Here are some ways of implementing sleep hygiene:

  • Be consistent with sleep and wake times. Try going to bed at roughly the same time each night and getting up at the same time each morning. This way, your body becomes accustomed to a certain routine that optimizes healthy sleeping.
  • Make sure your bedroom is quiet, dark, relaxing, and at a comfortable temperature. You can experiment with different room temperatures or try out a white noise machine. With patience, you might discover the best room environment to promote sleep.
  • Remove TVs, computers, and smartphones from the bedroom. This may seem like an impossible task sometimes, but avoiding harsh blue light will help you fall asleep faster.

Seeking Help For Fatigue And Depression

Most importantly, do not ignore the symptoms or your problems. You may believe it is just laziness or solely because of your difficult times with depression, yet brushing it aside and not facing these issues will only make your depression harder to treat in the long run.

Seeking help is not a bad thing or a sign of weakness. Iâm incredibly grateful my close friends noticed my symptoms as early as they did. It is helped me much more knowledge about fatigue and helped me on my road to recovery.

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Fatigue In Chronic Rheumatologic Diseases

Unusual and chronic fatigue with various etiologies was described for 27 % of patients in a primary care clinic . Fatigue is common in RA, SpA, Sjögren syndrome, systemic lupus erythematosus and vasculitis, although most publications concerned fatigue in RA or SpA . In RA and SpA, the frequency of fatigue ranged from 42 % to 80 % depending on the definition and methods of assessment . For 75 % of patients with ankylosing arthritis and 50 % of those with RA, fatigue was considered severe .

Several methods of evaluation have been used to investigate fatigue in rheumatologic diseases . The simplest and quickest scale is the visual analog scale , but this is a unidirectional scale. Multidirectional scales developed to include the different aspects of fatigue are the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36 vitality subscale , the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy Fatigue Scale , the Profile of Mood States, the RA-specific Multidimensional Assessment of Fatigue scale, the Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory, the Brief Fatigue Inventory, and the Fatigue Severity Scale . With the VAS scale, the mean fatigue level in patients with RA was 42.1 .

Fast Fix For Mild Fatigue

7 Causes Of Fatigue In Young Women

Some of us are simply tired with no medical cause. The good news is that exercise may give us a boost. Studies consistently show that people who engage in regular exercise feel less fatigue than those who don’t. When exercising for energy stay in the low-to-moderate exertion range, such as walking, yoga, or light resistance training to fight fatigue.

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    Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Versus Depression

    Depression is a leading cause of disability in the United States and with so many different signs and symptoms, it can be difficult to diagnose. In fact there are many other disorders that mimic depression including hypothyroidism, vitamin D deficiency, fibromyalgia, diabetes, dementia, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Chronic fatigue syndrome is a medical diagnosis with an unknown cause that affects young and middle aged adults primarily in the United States. Individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome often report feelings of excessive tiredness, lapses in short-term memory and feelings of depression secondary to their excessive fatigue.

    Chronic fatigue syndrome

    • A lapse in short term memory but an intact long term memory
    • Problems concentrating
    • Unable to perform everyday tasks due to extreme fatigue
    • Preceding viral infection
    • Inability to say or find a particular word during normal speech
    • Postexertional fatigue
    • Non-restorative sleep
    • Depression because of the inability to perform everyday tasks

    Major depressive disorder

    • Sleep disturbance
    • Suicide ideations

    Differences and similarities between chronic fatigue syndrome and depression

    Back Pain Or Aching Muscles All Over

    You might feel okay in the morning, but once youre at work or sitting at a school desk, your back starts to hurt. It could be stress, or it could be depression. Although theyre often associated with bad posture or injuries, backaches can also be a symptom of psychological distress.

    A 2017 research study of 1,013 Canadian university students found a direct association between depression and backaches.

    Psychologists and psychiatrists have long believed emotional issues can cause chronic aches and pains, but the specifics are still being researched, such as the connection between depression and the bodys inflammatory response.

    Newer studies

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    Symptoms Of Fatigue In Inflammatory Arthritis

    Just like there are many causes of fatigue, there are also many symptoms that may indicate what you have is inflammatory arthritis-related fatigue. Its very subjective and not quantifiable with a lab or measurable outcome, which is why fatigue can feel so frustrating and overwhelming, says Dr. Cohen. You cant quantify it, but you know its not normal.

    Heres a look at some of the key symptoms to discuss with your health care team:

    Extreme tiredness

    Dr. Khattri says that while symptoms of fatigue and feeling tired do overlap, fatigue is often at the extreme end. You feel like you have no control.

    With normal tired you know sleep can fix it, says CreakyJoints community member Lel. Fatigue decides when its over youre just a helpless bystander.

    Change in energy levels

    While some patients wake up feeling fatigue, others experience sudden, overwhelming changes in energy levels and simply hit a wall.

    RA fatigue stops me in my tracks. I feel myself fading out suddenly, then I have to rest . It feels like sandbags dropped on me, says CreakyJoints community member Kristina H. It hits me around the same time every day, or sometimes I wake up knowing its going to be a low energy day.

    Increase in flares

    Poor sleep

    Research shows that poor sleep can make the symptoms of fatigue worse, increasing sensitivity to pain, irritability, and making it that much harder to concentrate, says Dr. Cohen.

    Brain fog

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    Missed Milestones To Faded Friendships: The Unacknowledged Grief Of 2020

    What causes dizziness, fatigue, palpitation in young men? – Dr. Sanjay Gupta

    However, the trauma is much bigger for individuals directly affected by the pandemic, says Galea. That includes those who’ve lost loved ones, lost a job or housing, struggled with child care, or have had COVID-19 themselves some of whom report continuing to experience exhaustion that’s thought to be associated with the viral infection.

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    How Does Menopause Cause Fatigue

    The hormonal imbalances a woman experiences as she approaches menopause make her susceptible to fatigue reduced production of estrogen and progesterone cause internal activity that can inhibit restful sleep and cause sudden crashes in energy levels.

    Other symptoms of the transition may worsen fatigue for a perimenopausal woman. Night sweats, anxiety, or an underactive thyroid are often caused by menopausal hormonal changes and could all obstruct a woman’s sleeping patterns, thus exacerbating fatigue.

    Heart Disease And Fatigue

    Symptoms: Fatigue from an activity that should be easy

    If youre exhausted after an activity that used to be easy — for example, walking up the steps — it may be time to talk to your doctor about the possibility of heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women. If your fatigue is related to your heart, medication or treatments can usually help correct the problem, cut the fatigue, and restore your energy.

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    Can Anxiety Make You Shaky And Weak

    Most people feel weak in their knees as if there is no strength left in their legs when they are nervous or anxious. This is because the anxiety of panic attacks can stimulate your fight-or-flight center in the brain. Stress hormones can increase your heart rate and cause your chest and other body muscles to be tensed and tightened.

    Your whole body in response to stress becomes activated. Your muscles become super active leading to muscle trembling, shaking, and twitching. You might experience psychogenic tremors .

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    How Can I Combat Cancer Fatigue

    Quick Tips Regarding Anxiety And Fatigue Weakness USA 2021

    The best way to combat fatigue is to treat the underlying cause. Unfortunately, the exact cause may be unknown, or there may be multiple causes. There are treatments to reduce certain causes of cancer fatigue, such as anemia or hypothyroidism. Other causes must be managed on an individual basis.

    The following are tips you can use to combat cancer fatigue:

    • Conserve energy.
    • Manage your stress.

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    Muscle Weakness Anxiety Treatment

    Try not to feel anxious or worry. Easier said than done, right? But worrying about your muscle weakness can it worse. Treating muscle weakness requires persistent commitment and patience as it is a tricky issue.

    When caused by anxiety, it might not be as dangerous but living with muscle weakness can be really stressful. You can follow several simple strategies to decrease the feeling of muscle weakness.

    Anxiety can trick your mind that your muscles are weak when actually they are not. Just go for a walk and/ or do some simple exercises. It wont cure your condition but will definitely help in overcoming some of the stress.

    Try to breathe slowly and deep. This will reduce the effects of hyperventilation. Take slow, concentrated, and deep breaths as long as 15 seconds per breath. This will also make your whole body relax and calm.

    Most of the time its just your brains perception that you are weak and tired. Distract your mind and try not to focus on your muscles as much. Focusing or thinking a lot about your muscles can make them feel weaker than they actually are.

    Distract yourself through phone calls, mental exercise, games, or other social activities. If you prefer yoga or stretching, you can always do that as well.

    In case you wish to opt for more medical strategies, you can discuss your condition with your doctor. He might prescribe you anxiety-reducing medications and/ or therapies such as cognitive-behavioral therapy.

    Ways To Overcome Mental Exhaustion

    When youre mentally exhausted, even fun things sound like work. This can make it even more challenging to manage stressors. But it takes effort and awareness to change the patterns that lead to mental exhaustion. The good news is, you dont have to tackle it all at once to start feeling better. Here are 11 ways to overcome feeling mentally tired:

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    Why Does Depression Cause Fatigue

    Depression and fatigue often go hand-in-hand, as fatigue is a common symptom of depression and can make you feel worse if you do not find a way to tackle the problem. You may believe that your lack of sleep, energy, and motivation is just a part of depression that will pass over time. However, these things may be part of a bigger issue, which is known as fatigue. If left untreated this problem may become more severe and more difficult to treat as it progresses.

    The combination of depression and fatigue can decrease your concentration, motivation and ability to do many every day simple tasks, leading to issues with work, education and even personal relationships. It may be that you do not even realize that fatigue is part of the problem at hand.

    You may find it hard to keep up at work, leading to higher levels of stress or negative emotions. Studying may also become harder and more intense if you lack the necessary concentration or motivation to attend classes, hand in assignments on time and revise for your exams.

    Light exercise and daily tasks may become the most daunting part of your day. These examples of fatigue work alongside depression and can decrease your progress in recovery and treatments if left unacknowledged.

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