Fibromyalgia: Not a Mystery Disease
Physiology held in tension too long, with no parasympathetic window
The prison of tension
Fascia wraps the entire body. It is slow to stretch, deeply interconnected, and always adapting to the forces around it. When muscles never unclench, fascia remodels itself to match. It binds tighter, bracing in anticipation of the next blow, the next shock, the next boot up the arse.
This is what the body looks like when it never gets to come down. Muscles held in flight. Nerves locked in red alert. A shape that begins as survival eventually becomes a prison.
The missing parasympathetic window
Every healthy body moves between sympathetic and parasympathetic states — between action and recovery. Fibromyalgia shows us what happens when the recovery window is lost.
The parasympathetic nervous system is meant to open a door to rest: muscles soften, fascia glides, organs are perfused, sleep restores. Without that window, the system never resets. Adrenaline is recycled. Muscles stay tight. Fascia thickens. The body begins to register safety as impossible.
The reflex that won’t let go
When a muscle is clenched in anticipation, the nervous system reinforces the contraction through spinal arc reflexes. These are fast, protective loops: a signal comes in from a tense or threatened area, bounces through the spinal cord, and comes straight back out to the muscle as a command to tighten more.
In a healthy body, that reflex cycle ends when the threat passes. In fibromyalgia, it doesn’t. The reflex is repeated so often it becomes the baseline. Muscles remain contracted even without a conscious trigger. Fascia, wrapping those muscles, stiffens around the chronic contraction, sealing the shape in place.
Why women are over-represented
Fibromyalgia is heavily skewed toward women, and the reasons are physiological.
Iron-deficiency anemia is common in women through the reproductive years. With less oxygen carried in the blood, the body compensates by driving heart rate and breath rate higher. CO2, our body’s natural muscle relaxant is lost and the breath rate in the brain stem is re-patterned. This keeps the system running in sympathetic overdrive, with no parasympathetic window to let muscles and fascia release.
At the same time, women generally carry less muscle mass and lower testosterone than men. Muscles need loading — strong contraction and release — to keep fascia elastic and gliding. Without that cyclic loading, fascia becomes sticky and tight, reinforcing the arc reflex loops that lock muscles in contraction. Testosterone also supports repair, strength, and resilience; with less of it, recovery from chronic contraction is harder.
Together, these factors explain why fibromyalgia is not mysterious, and why women are more often caught in its grip. It is not weakness or imagination. It is the physiology of anemia, low muscle loading, and chronic tension written into the body.
Why the pain feels everywhere and nowhere
People with fibromyalgia describe pain that shifts and spreads. One day it’s the shoulders, the next the hips, then a headache stitched to the spine. This isn’t “imagined pain.” It’s fascia — a single, body-wide fabric — tightening as one unit. When tension is systemic, pain feels systemic.
Doctors still talk about fibromyalgia as if it’s mysterious, because it doesn’t fit the tidy boxes of anatomy or lab tests. But fascia doesn’t respect borders. It binds the foot to the jaw, the diaphragm to the pelvis, the back of the skull to the soles of the feet. Pain maps follow fascial lines, not organ charts.
Not weakness — survival
Fibromyalgia is not weakness, and it’s not “in the head.” It’s the physiology of a body that has lived too long without release. A body locked in anticipation. A body denied the parasympathetic window where repair lives.
Over time, survival mechanisms become self-perpetuating. Muscles guard even when danger is gone. Fascia holds shape even when there’s no new blow coming. The nervous system, once tuned to protect, becomes the very source of suffering.
Painful. Misunderstood. Real.
Fibromyalgia is not a mystery disease. It is the visible cost of never being able to come down. Of fascia and muscle writing survival into the body itself.
You can read more about fascia here: Cobwebs and Highways
About the Author:
Catherine Broué works with the body as a whole system, focusing on breath and the nervous system. After two decades in ICU and dialysis, she turned to the deeper question of real health, guided by mentors and the insights of Christian Bohr and Konstantin Buteyko. Her work centres on the body’s true regulators — breath and the central nervous system — and the return to parasympathetic dominance.