When reviewing the cell danger response and chronic fatigue, it becomes clear that persistent low energy isn’t a failure of the body, but a protective response designed to keep you safe.

What is happening?

When our mitochondria detect ongoing stressors such as infection, inflammation, toxin exposure, or unresolved emotional stress, cells can shift into a protective state known as the Cell Danger Response, coined by Dr Robert Naviaux.

This adaptive survival mechanism works to keep you safe, not as a malfunction.

During the Cell Danger Response, the body deliberately downregulates energy production. Energy is redirected toward defence instead of being used for growth, repair, and regeneration.

This can appear as ongoing fatigue, cognitive difficulties, hormonal disruption, post-exertional malaise, and a reduced ability to recover from even minor stressors.

These symptoms are signals, not failures as frustrating as they can be.

Many people inherently attempt to drive up energy with stimulants, intense exercise, or by refusing to pace when it is required.

While these strategies may assist someone in the short term, it typically only tends to reinforce the body’s sense of ongoing threat and perpetuates the cell danger response.

How true healing occurs

True recovery restores safety at the cellular level. Calming danger signals helps the body shift out of defence mode and back into repair.

Nourishing and regulating the nervous system, reducing inflammatory load, addressing chronic infections, a toxic burden and respecting the need to rest all actively signal that it is safe for healing to occur.

Mitochondria come to move out of survival mode and return to a state of resilience and productivity. Energy production improves not through brute force or coercion, but because the body provides the right conditions for it to occur.

Calm the signals of danger, restore a sense of safety, and over time, energy follows.

You can find other ME/CFS related blogs here.