The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Why ME/CFS Isn’t Just Tiredness: A Psychologist Breaks It Down

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

ME/CFS isn’t just tiredness, it’s a life-changing, often misunderstood neurological condition that impacts everything from mobility and cognition to emotional wellbeing. In this episode, clinical psychologist Dr Beth Godwin shares her powerful lived experience with ME/CFS, including how it affected her career, identity, and day-to-day life. We discuss spoon theory, post-exertional malaise, pacing, and how to offer meaningful support to those living with chronic fatigue. Whether you’re a psychologist, aspiring psych, or someone navigating illness yourself, this episode is an honest, compassionate guide to understanding ME/CFS better. #chronicfatiguesyndrome #MECFS #PostViralFatigue #MentalHealthPodcast Whether you’re a psychologist, aspiring professional, friend, or someone navigating chronic illness, this episode is a must-listen.⏱️ Timestamps:00:00 – What is ME/CFS and what does it affect?04:16 – Long COVID vs ME stigma06:47 – Identity loss and emotional grief08:14 – Perfectionism, pressure, and post-viral burnout13:57 – What a bad day with ME/CFS might look like17:20 – The emotional toll of having to cancel plans19:55 – How to support someone living with ME/CFS22:46 – Can aspiring psychologists train with this condition?24:44 – Spoon theory and pacing explained30:49 – What not to do: graded exercise therapy33:18 – Life after diagnosis: how Beth reshaped her career36:17 – Free resources and where to follow BethLinks:📚Grab your free Diet Culture Guide: https://lifeforeverybody.co.uk/dietcultureguide& Connect with Dr Beth here: 📲 https://www.facebook.com/share/1ByzRm4Rxp/?mibextid=wwXIfrhttps://www.instagram.com/life_for_every_body?igsh=MXFhOGx1a3A3bXlsdA%3D%3D&utm_source=qrhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-beth-godwin-155562175?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app 🫶 To support me by donating to help cover my costs for the free resources I provide click here: https://the-aspiring-psychologist.captivate.fm/support📚 To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0 📖 To check out The Aspiring Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97 💡 To check out or join the aspiring psychologist membership for just £30 per month head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/membership-interested🖥️ Check out my brand new short courses for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals here: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/short-courses✍️ Get your Supervision Shaping Tool now: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/supervision📱Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work...

What's it really like to live with ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? In this episode, my guest Dr. Beth shares her personal experience of managing this often misunderstood condition. From what a bad day really looks like to treatment options that can actually help, plus stick around right to the end so that you can learn the one piece of advice you should never follow if ME or CFS is on your radar. Hope you find it super useful. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast.

I am Dr. Marianne, a qualified clinical psychologist. Today, my guest is Dr. Beth Godwin, a qualified clinical psychologist who somewhat had her life turned upside down when she started to experience symptoms of ME, chronic fatigue syndrome. We're going to dive right in to my chat with Beth. And please, if you do find it helpful, please do drop a like, drop a comment, consider sharing this content. If you're on Spotify, drop in a question or a comment. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts,

please do rate and review. And if you're on YouTube, please do make sure you're subscribed, like the video, drop a comment, especially if it resonates with you. And following or subscribing to a show wherever you get your podcasts, really is the kindest thing you can do for free

for any podcaster or creator that you rate. Let's dive in and catch up with my chat with Dr. Beth, and I will see you on the other side. Hi Beth, so lovely to have you along. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you especially for being here because I know with your condition, it means that, you know, you have to choose where to spend your energy. So thank you for sharing some

of your energy with our audience. You're very welcome. So before we begin, could you tell us what ME forward slash CFS is? I can and I can try and pronounce it as best to my ability, but they do make it very difficult by giving them long medical terms. So ME is myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS or ME. And it's often thought of as just feeling tired and that's largely due to the chronic fatigue syndrome title that has given it that misconception but actually it's quite a complex and chronic neurological illness that can

affect the brain, the nervous system and now they're even looking down to a cellular mitochondria level. But the main features that you will tend to see are fatigue, un-refreshing sleep, no matter how much sleep you've had you don't wake feeling refreshed from the night before. We have what we call post-exertional malaise, also known as PEM, which we could talk a little bit more about, cognitive impairments like brain fog or concentration or forgetfulness, pain and there's also a crossover with orthostatic intolerance so people's blood flow not behaving as it should so I'm also diagnosed with POTS which is postural orthostatic tachycardia Syndrome so yet more

technical terms which basically means that my heart and my blood flow doesn't do what it should do when I am standing up or when I'm walking around the way it does with somebody without orthostatic intolerances. And it's quite a tricky diagnosis to receive because there's no tests for it. So it's a diagnosis of exclusion where everything else that you can possibly think of has been ruled out probably over a number of years before you're finally given the diagnosis. And what we know now is that it frequently follows in some people a viral infection where the body hasn't fully recovered. And that's what happened in my case. And it's now what we're seeing with COVID and long COVID as well.

Yeah. And I guess I was definitely thinking about the parallels and I think long COVID, it feels like long COVID is more accepted and more validated. Whereas with ME, I feel like there is more stigma, but I'm talking about that as a mental health professional and as kind of perhaps knowing people have had ME, that might feel quite different when you are a psychologist and you have a diagnosis of ME. Could you talk to me about stigma and kind of, you know, what people say about it or think about it? This isn't just, you know, I've not long had lunch. This isn't just, oh, I'm having the post lunch slump, is it? But I think perhaps some people

think it is that. Yeah, absolutely. I think people just see it as feeling a bit tired or needing more rest and it's so much more complicated than that so you know mild version of ME might look like a little bit more rest, extra rest in between activities but it can also be managing that cognitive fog. It can be mobility difficulties that somebody finds it hard to get around, limiting activities all the way to the severe end of ME where somebody can be bedbound because they don't have the energy or the capacity to lift their body out of the bed, they can't tolerate

light or sound, they might require full-time care and I think you're right there is difference in the stigma towards long COVID than there is EMI and possibly that's because of the times that we're in where EMI was called yuppie flu in the 80s and it was looked at as more kind of laziness. Whereas with the long COVID there's been so much more research done to show the effects of COVID and post viral fatigue. Yeah, thank you for illuminating us on that. And I think until really meeting with you today, even, I hadn't appreciated how it can be, you know,

psychological, physical, like everything, identity, I guess even because it's not necessarily something that people are born with, it's something that they have to adapt to and perhaps the people and the systems and maybe even the work or occupational environments around you perhaps no longer fit or people's expectations of you. Maybe they miss the old you, but you likely also really miss the old you too. likely also really miss the old you too. Like it's a whole sea change, isn't it? Absolutely and it impacts on every part of somebody's life. It's not just on one part.

It's work, it's education, it might impact on how much you can do, it might impact on the type of work that you can do and obviously at the severe end people aren't able to work at all and the person that you were before it might not be the person that you can be now. So prior to my diagnosis I was always described as busy, you know, working full-time in the NHS and weightlifting four or five times a week and then my hobbies on top and then my socialising on top and all of that busy identity has to change and adapt and the people around you have to also adapt to those changes too and recognise that you have these energy limitations and there can be a lot of grief for not only the life that you have lost but

also the life that you had planned and thought that you would have might now look very different. Yeah, it's kind of reminding me that when I was at uni I think we studied multiple sclerosis and there was some evidence that people with a type A personality were more likely to get an MS diagnosis. Do you know if there's any correlation for any traits in ME and CFS? Yeah there does seem to be some trends with perfectionist types, the people who probably are going to get an infection and then don't take the time to recover because they're so keen to return to work. And that was, you know, speaking from my experience, that is definitely what happened with me where I had a viral infection of some sort, but

you know, that couldn't stand in the way of work. I had to get back to work and see my clients and rush back too soon. And then obviously became unwell again. And later down the line, this has obviously impacted my nervous system somehow. Yeah. And I think, you know, the audience listening to or watching this will be doing so either because they are struggling with these symptoms or they care about someone or they're working in mental health.

Especially when we are caregivers, we can often feel that pressure to hurry back before we're fully ready because we don't want to let people down or we've got to support the team or everyone else is off on long-term sick, you know, and it's, you know, we can understand these pressures, but actually really thinking about when I've had sick leave, am I fully ready to return, not to light duties, but am I fully ready to do my job? And I often think even when I've had a cold or I've had, you know, a vomit bug or something, even after the exclusion period where I'm technically allowed back, I think you always need a day of being out of bed and kind of mobilizing from your sofa to your kitchen and back again. But then you also need an extra day to really strengthen your body and your mind because it reminds me of when I'd

broken my arm two years ago and the physio told me afterwards that even kind of as short as a couple of days in bed gives the body the message actually we're wasting energy by continuing to fuel these muscles and so it tries to preserve its energy by stripping that energy back from the tendons, which means that your tendons start to contract. And she said that if you're not getting out of bed, if you're not doing things, if you're not flexing your body, it then takes a whole lot more effort to stretch them again. It's not two days. This might be weeks or months if you've been in bed for a week or for example.

And you know, if you're resting a lot, then your body is constantly getting the message, oh, we don't need to, we don't need to power these legs, we don't need to have that available. And, you know, I think to cut a very long rambling story short, When we're going back to work, we really need to make sure that we are mobilizing normally, that we are really up to speed, that our brain fog has lifted enough to be able to sit with clients and not have them to be constantly wiping our nose or thinking about ourselves. And we've got to be well when we return to work and actually that will stay with me now even more thinking about we deserve to rest and actually our future self, which then hopefully wouldn't get a condition like this, would thank us for that. Absolutely, and I think that is a huge thing that we need to recognise within this hustle

culture that we're in. And I remember one of the nurses that I was working with at the time said to me, if you're not careful, you're going to get post-viral fatigue. And I just didn't consider the long-term outcome that going back to work, which sounds so simple, could have had. But if I had heard that advice back then, perhaps I wouldn't have rushed back as quickly as I did. Amazing. And I think especially when we're working for the NHS, we have to know that

we can have usually up to six months on full pay, not always. And we wouldn't necessarily encourage people to take sick leave that didn't need it. But I know that even more recently, there's been kind of counting episodes of sick leave and people are only allowed so many episodes in a year but I still would say if you've already if you've had the episode because you've been on well you might as well make sure that you are well because certainly in the NHS it's not necessarily the days that are counted it is the episode so get yourself well that was really good advice but at that time I guess you couldn't, you couldn't heed it. It felt maybe it felt irritating or silly. Like how did that feel when she

said that? It felt like an exaggeration or perhaps overprotective or it just didn't seem real to me at that point that something that you just deal with, you know, like a flu or a glandular fever or a bug, you know, we just think, you know, that's what happens in life and you just go back to normality. So it just didn't feel within my, I guess, my headspace at that time that that was actually important. And although that virus was 2015, 2016, I think around there, my symptoms of ME didn't actually start to show up until 2020. Whatever was going on internally was just sitting in the background there until it became

so difficult that it would start to show up and present itself. Thank you. I'm sorry to hear how long you've struggled with this. Just to help us to kind of paint a picture, would you be able to give us an idea about perhaps what a bad day looks like for somebody with this diagnosis? I can. It's one of those diagnosis where everybody is so different, depending on where they are on the kind of mild to severe spectrum but also in the types of symptoms that they get

because everybody's symptoms are so different. So some people might not be able to get out of the bed, might not be able to shower, might not be able to use the bathroom, you know, make a meal, they might have to block out light from their room if it's becoming too much sensory overload. Other people might just, I say just, like it's simple, it's not. Other people might need to plan breaks, they might need to take themselves away from loud environments. Myself, at a difficult day, can look like pain. So I get pain more than I get fatigue, whereas other people can get fatigue more than they get pain. It's

just different in how it presents itself. And then I can have a few months where I'll have a sore throat every day and then that passes and then I'll have few months where I have nausea every day and then that passes. I don't know why it changes but it does. I only ever really get the fatigue part of this diagnosis if the flu in that you feel heavy and you have no energy just without the snots and the coughs but that physical feeling is the same. I can also pick up infections very easily which is something that I didn't know until I had it in that my immune system doesn't protect me in the same way that somebody without this diagnosis might have. So that requires being quite careful around people and if I do pick up an infection

I don't quite recover like I used to. It takes a lot longer. Forgetfulness, brain fog, I suppose some people might feel the emotional side of having all of these different symptoms, you know, it's not just physical, it's not just the cognitive symptoms, it's then dealing with them. And grief is a part of that, like I've already mentioned, a massive amount of apathy, you know, if you're tired, normally you don't have motivation and you don't want to do things. So when you're in a crash, it's very difficult to feel like you can be bothered about most things until you can come out the other side of that crash and the frustration at being held back from the things that you want to do but either know that you can't

or that you shouldn't for now. Yeah, I think even the identity around yourself and your relationship to work, I know I would find that really challenging adjusting because I often say, psychology for me feels different. So I might say to my children or my husband, oh, I've got work, I'd rather stay in bed and read my book, especially because I'm reading a really good book at the moment. But whenever I'm with a client or doing something like this, like I really love it. And is that something that's different? Like you can't almost switch on the gear that you used to be able to kind of keep in the tank.

Do you know what I mean? To be able to give your best to your work. To be able to do that, it has to be very carefully planned. So I have to think about rest breaks. I have to think about how many people in a day. I have to think about if I'm seeing that person, what am I doing after that? What am I doing before that? Have I eaten?

Have I hydrated? So it just takes a lot more forethought than I used to have to do. Yeah. And it's reminded me of trying to sort out, you know, it's going to be a real nightmare trying to sort out, you know, it's gonna be a real nightmare trying to sort out with your mates when you're actually gonna meet up if you all live in different parts of the country.

Frankly, if you all live in the same part of the country, it's still a nightmare, modern lives, right? But I was looking through my diary and I was like, I can't do that weekend because actually I've got simply read and then the next day I've got a calligraphy course and then I'm going out for dinner the next day. You, I guess, would kind of probably not choose to do three activities like that all together. But also how is it to look ahead and book anything and put money on the line for things

that you may or may not be able to do ultimately? Yeah, I can't tell you the amount of concerts, gigs, theatre tickets that I've just had to write off or try and last minute resell because it's not something that you can totally have control over. You know, I can plan until the cows come home, you know, I can really put thought into what that week looks like if I've got an activity, but it's what it is on the day. Some days that planning pays off and some days the body has other ideas and says, no. It does make you kind of a flaky person that you have to cancel last minute, which I never have been. I think there's perhaps, flaky gets a bad reputation really, or it's not the most appropriate word here. It's that

you're unwell. You can't do it. If you'd suddenly come down with a vomit bug, people would understand, wouldn't they? But I guess it's, oh, how many times is Beth going to say she's tired? But actually that's really dismissive, isn't it? And that's not fully embracing you or embracing the person with this condition. And actually, we need to get over ourselves really, and think, well, how can I support Beth? You know, perhaps, rather than going out for dinner, perhaps if I was to say, can I bring us dinner? And I'll, you know, perhaps we'll make sure we're finished by 8pm. Would that feel okay? Or is that not okay? But I want to see you, I want to spend time with you, but I want to meet you where you are. Is that kind of a helpful accommodation?

Yeah, and actually my friends are so understanding and so supportive in that our relationships have had to be very much text-based now. You know, we'll send memes, we'll send gifts, you know, we'll do things like that that I can stay in touch and I can do whilst resting. And there's lots of accommodations so people will either come to me rather than going for a walk like we used to or I met up with a friend the other week for a coffee and it was, you know, thinking about where we sit there that's not going to be too loud so I don't have to overly concentrate on trying to hear her while they're banging the coffee grounders together. And also her accommodation was so lovely that she checked in with me

and said, you know, where's the pain levels? You know, do we stop here? Do we make another day now? You know? It was really appreciated. Thank you. That sounds lovely. I'm going to push for a few more. Are there any other ways we can support friends or support maybe people in our team or our family who might maybe not even have this diagnosis yet, but they are heading in that direction or do already have that diagnosis? Have you got any other top tips for us, if you can think of any? Yeah, I would say patience is the massive top tip. You might not get a response straight away. You might not get a text back. You might not hear from them for a while. And knowing that that is nothing to do with you and everything to do with how their symptoms are that day, that

week. Patience is a huge part of it and understanding. And asking, you know, there's nothing wrong with asking, you know, how can I help? How can we adjust this, meet up this activity? You know, how do we make it different? Do we change the place? Do we change the time? Because often I know my symptoms are worse in the morning than they are in the afternoon. So that person is the expert in themselves and what is going to happen to their symptoms and how to manage them. So just ask. Great advice. And as you were talking, I was thinking, well, obviously a lot of my audience are aspiring psychologists. And I was thinking about, well, what if there's an aspiring psych or someone that wants to retrain to become a qualified psych? Watching or listening to this and thinking,

can I do this with this diagnosis? But it also made me think about, I know that some courses, I think Lancaster, I know are one, are offering part-time clinical psychology doctorates now. So in part-time clinical psychology doctorates now. So I think it equates to 0.7 rather than 1.0 whole-time equivalent. And that's like four years and three months or something rather than three years. I know everyone is different, but do you think that sort of accommodation could help us to kind of get people with ME, CFS in our psychology workforce? Yeah, I think any flexibility has got to be helpful. And also thinking about the type of caseload or thinking about, even with lectures, are you planning in enough breaks? Can you take yourself off somewhere to have a rest during those breaks? I know

myself when I was training breaks were socialize, go for a walk, you know they were filled with more activity. So thinking about how do you plan those rest breaks into that structured day so that you can adjust your energy limits accordingly and it's absolutely doable because there was somebody in my year that successfully navigated training and graduating alongside ME, as difficult as I'm sure it was. Not that I realized at the time. No, hindsight is 20-20 vision, as they say. But, yeah, certainly, I think even going on to a cohort and forming those

relationships with people, that can feel like a very active process. It's very engaged. And I know every time I've started a new job and a new placement or done something new, it really messes with my sleep because my brain is like fizzing with the names, with the faces, with the smells, with the people. And so if already your sleep is not restful and then you're doing all of these new things, I'm guessing to use a term that I know you're familiar with and we will explain shortly, takes a lot of spoons. Yes, absolutely takes an awful lot of spoons and an awful lot of planning those spoons. Yeah, so let's talk about spoons. I know this was an idea that I think came about

on social media a few years ago for thinking about managing your energy levels when you have chronic fatigue, but you might well know more about the origins for that and be able to talk us through it there. So the origins were, I'm terrible with names and my brain isn't gonna let me remember them, but it was a woman who was explaining energy limiting conditions. So the idea is that within a day, you have a limited amount of spoons

and we imagine those spoons to be units of energy and you may wake up with less spoons than others on some days but we certainly have a limited amount of spoons compared to somebody without an energy limiting condition. You then take those spoons or units of energy and you have to decide and plan your day where you are going to spend those spoons. So getting up maybe a spoon, having a shower maybe a spoon or two spoons depending on the severity of your illness, taking a phone call maybe a spoon and it's important to recognize that it's not just about physical energy, it's also about social energy, emotional energy, mental energy and sensory energy. So how much our environment might use those

spoons also and when you consider all of those things thinking where is the most important place to spend those spoons and once they're gone they're gone. Whereas with somebody who doesn't have a energy limiting condition you might have a rest and you might have gained some spoons back but unfortunately with most conditions you don't gain them back. You are then resting until the next day where you may wake up with the same spoons, less spoons, more spoons, you'll find out in the morning. Oh, it's really hard to have control, isn't it?

Yeah, it just takes a lot more thought and this is very much where the idea of pacing comes in. So, pacing is a strategy where you are going to balance how you rest and how you do activity. So again how you spend those spoons. Otherwise if you spend too quickly or too much you end up in that post-exertional malaise or PEM. So there is a very tricky balance of not overdoing but also not doing too little either. And it can look like planning rest in between activity. It can look like breaking down a task into more manageable chunks. So even things like getting dressed in the morning, you know, first most people just

stand up and get out of bed. But for a lot of people with energy-limiting conditions you might have to break that down a little bit. You might have to sit up first, then you might have to put your legs over the bed, then you might be able to do some standing up and sitting back down, then you might be able to collect the clothes and bring them back to where you are when you're sitting down. You also might have to cancel or decline plans like we've already talked about in order to protect the energy that you have.

Yeah, thank you. It's like a whole other world, isn't it, really? That's what I'm learning. Before I met my father-in-law, he had had a diagnosis of ME at that time. That's what he called it at that time. But he did get better. So I've been in his life probably about 16 years, something like that. So he got better before I met him. Is that common or is that uncommon? How much to people kind of are they able to recover and be perhaps the person they used to be before this condition? It's tricky really because it's so hard to get the statistics on even a diagnosis that it's hard to get the statistics on recovery. From my understanding, I see an ME service, from my understanding some people may have a lifelong condition, some people may end up in sort of a

leading a better life but have a risk of relapse and some people may build themselves back up to a life where they are free of symptoms. I'm not sure on the statistics of each one because the statistics are so difficult to get hold of, of who even has ME. Yeah, and I guess, you know, it reminds me of that episode of Friends where Joey Tribbiani kind of can't do certain things for a period of time because he's doing a medical research thing. Then as soon as he can do those things, he goes back to his old ways of being. It's like then if you didn't have an ME presentation, CFS, would you necessarily want to spend all your time filling in research about it? Would

you want to go out there and embrace the life that you've missed, you know? And I think it's, yeah, research is great so long as we can really get a sample of people, but it's not, it's not always easy and not always possible. Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose a bit like Joey, a lot of people end up in that boom bust cycle where they feel better. So they do all the things that they've missed and then they really have a good time, which then leads to a crash and and that's what we call the boom bust cycle. And it seems like you know if you

can pace as well as you can to break that cycle you have more of a chance at recovery. And kind of just before we kind of start thinking about you and what you're doing at the moment, is there any medication that's helpful? Is there any evidence based approaches like therapies that actually help to move the needle on this? Or is this all just kind of, I don't know, I guess acceptance and kind of biding your time? Support's tricky. I suppose it depends where you live on what's going to be available. I'm very lucky in that I have a local ME service that supports me. In terms of medication,

that isn't really a route that seems very popular, in that it's hard to know what to medicate and a lot of the medications that have been tried with myself don't do anything, but that's always going to be a intervention called graded exercise and I'm bringing it up because I want people to be aware that this is not something that should be recommended and if you hear it from a doctor, change doctors. Because it used to be an intervention where you start a small amount of exercise and you build up and the idea is that your body accustoms to that but actually what we found is that because of post-exertional malaise where it can hit you the day after or the day after that is it was actually making a lot of people worse. So it was taken out of the guidelines but unfortunately some people still are given it as

advice so I'm bringing it up as a warning label that if somebody offers that as an intervention to ignore it and find somebody else. In terms of treatments I suppose CBT can be helpful for some people. I found because of my training, acceptance and commitment therapy has probably helped how you do that which is often a difficult thing to adjust to. Yeah absolutely thank you for illuminating us I think it's really interesting to think about what not to do so I really like that idea it's kind of like the graded exposure thing that people talk about in CBT but actually we don't we don'tT, but actually we don't want to do that. We don't want to do systematic desensitisation for people with ME or CFS. It's very helpful to know.

Could you tell us a little bit about you and what you're doing now professionally, Beth? I can, and it's very relevant because I think if I didn't have my ME diagnosis I wouldn't have created this new venture of life for everybody because I was quite happy doing one-to-one work in my therapy clinic and it's only when I've really had to start thinking about how I manage my energy that I've had to reduce my caseload and I'm not able to see the same amount of people that I could before. So it's really made me think about how do I help people in a way that protects my energy as well. So life for everybody isn't solely about helping people with chronic illness. I do share my ME experiences from time to time with it,

but it's a lot more about diet culture and about being stuck in diet culture. And it teaches people to listen to and respect their body. And nothing teaches you faster than a chronic illness to be able to do that but life for everybody is actually about how you do that within the diet culture that we're living in so when we live in a society that accepts that there are good foods there are bad foods like all the fear-mongering around processed foods that I'm seeing at the moment, that you have to burn off food through exercise, that you have to be thin if you're worthy or healthy and life

for everybody is helping people to question some of these accepted beliefs and unlearn the myths and we focus on practical tools about how to listen to your body, how to eat without guilt, how to move your body for joy rather than burning off calories and punishment and learning how to accept and respect the body that you're in now even if it doesn't match this ideal that the world is telling us we should have. Amazing, that sounds superb. Where can people learn more? If you've got social media, where's the best place to catch up with you?

Yes, you can find me on Facebook at Life for Everybody and we also have a Facebook group there where people can come in and can openly share what they're struggling with with their food and with their body image and you can also find me on Instagram under the same name, Life For Everybody. Amazing, I will make sure that I link all those details in the show notes and they'll be appearing on screen for people on YouTube as well and I know in business sometimes it can be a really helpful idea to have like something really amazing as a freebie so that people get a real vibe for who you are and the way

that you talk. Is there anything that people who are interested can grab from you? Yeah, absolutely. So on my Facebook page and on the Instagram in the bio section there is a free guide that introduces diet culture myths and how we might start to see them in our day to day life so you can start spotting them and also give some helpful hints and tips of how to start speaking more compassionately about your body. Sounds ideal and I'll make sure that that link is in the description

and in the show notes for this episode as well. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. This has been a fascinating, eye-opening look at all things kind of ME and fatigue for me. So thank you for illuminating us and for spending some of your spoons with us today. Thank you very much for having me. You're so welcome. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much to Beth for her time in speaking with us. And please do consider following Beth on her social media where she is life for everybody and grab her free resource too, which sounds brilliant. If this content has resonated with you, please do start some conversations

in the comments on YouTube. Please do rally around one another. And if this is content that resonates with you, let me know by sharing it, by watching it, by liking it, by engaging with it, because that helps me know that you would find similar content useful in future too. That said, I would love to know

what content you would find helpful. so please do make that known too. To hear other stories about clinical psychologists and other types of psychologists who have struggled with adversity and managed to get their way to be qualified, please do consider checking out the Clinical Psychologist Collective book, which you can get links to in the show notes or description. And if you are an aspiring psychologist and you would like to get my free guide for supercharging your applications and your interviews it's my psychology success guide and you can get that by going along to my website www.aspiring-psychologist.co.uk It's the aspiring psychologist Poshkitz

With Dr. Mary and Drift