I never knew this kind of therapy existed.
Not because I hadn’t searched. Not because I wasn’t proactive.
But simply because no one in regular healthcare ever mentioned it.
In the Netherlands, occupational therapy is called ergotherapie — and that name alone already hints at the confusion surrounding it.
If you don’t know what it is, ergotherapie sounds vague and mechanical, almost like something practical rather than personal. It doesn’t evoke ideas of nervous system regulation, sensory processing, or learning how to function within limited energy. It certainly doesn’t sound like something that could transform the way you relate to your body — and your everyday life.
Yet that is exactly what it did for me.
I first learned about occupational therapy through someone walking a similar path. Not through a referral, but a suggestion — one of those gentle “maybe you could look into this?”moments. Curious, I brought it up with my GP and asked for a referral. At the time, I had no idea that this step would mark the beginning of becoming my own case manager — a role that would prove not only necessary but deeply educational.
What Occupational Therapy Actually Is
Occupational therapy isn’t about work.
It’s about functioning.
More precisely, it helps people who are navigating illness, injury, or long-term dysregulation learn how to function in everyday life—within their current capacity. This includes:
- Managing energy and fatigue
- Structuring daily activities
- Learning how to pace physical and cognitive effort
- Adapting tasks to prevent overload
- Understanding how the nervous system responds to stimuli
In my case, the therapy focused primarily on sensory processing and overstimulation—an area that had never been properly addressed before.
The occupational therapist I worked with was specialized in ASITT, short for Adult Sensory Integration Timmerman Treatment.
ASITT is a structured treatment protocol developed in the Netherlands for adults who experience difficulties with sensory information processing (prikkelverwerking). These challenges often arise after neurological events, such as acquired brain injury or whiplash, but can also manifest in long-term post-viral conditions or in individuals with highly sensitive nervous systems.
For me, this was the first time overstimulation was treated as a primary mechanism—not as a side effect, and not as a vague complaint.
Why This Would Have Helped Me Earlier in Life
Within the first few sessions, something became painfully clear:
I would have benefited from this therapy much earlier in my life.
For the first time, the physical and cognitive symptoms I experienced during overstimulation were explained in a way that truly made sense. Not dismissed. Not psychologized. Not minimized.
As someone who is highly sensitive — what I often describe as quantum sensitive — my nervous system responds intensely to stimuli. That sensitivity has shaped my entire life, yet it had never been properly recognized, mapped, or supported.
Occupational therapy gave language and structure to experiences I had been navigating intuitively for years.
Why Occupational Therapy Matters in Post-Viral Fatigue
One of the lesser-known aspects of post-viral fatigue is that healing itself can become destabilizing.
As my body slowly began to recover, I would occasionally experience bursts of energy. On the surface, that looked like progress — and in a way, it was. But my system hadn’t yet relearned how to use that energy safely. My nervous system and brain were still out of sync.
Especially in the early stages, my brain often failed to register fatigue in time. I would feel relatively capable, act on that signal, and only realize afterward that I had crossed a limit. The result was predictable: a heavy crash — sometimes delayed, sometimes immediate.
This is a common pattern in post-viral conditions.
Energy returns before regulation does.
Occupational therapy helped me understand this mismatch. It wasn’t only about conserving energy; it was about retraining my system to recognize early signals, pace effort realistically, and prevent the boom-and-bust cycle so many people with post-viral fatigue know too well.
I had to learn:
- How to respond to energy without overusing it
- How to stop before exhaustion, instead of after it
- How to distribute effort across a day or week
- How to recover preemptively, not reactively
Many of these lessons came through trial and error. But occupational therapy gave me the framework to learn from those crashes instead of simply repeating them. It helped me shift from reacting to symptoms to anticipating them.
Over time, that shift made the difference between constant setbacks and gradual, sustainable improvement.
The First Year: Searching for the Right Map
The first year of therapy was not easy.
Looking back, that had less to do with the therapy itself and more with the fact that my own health situation was still emerging. I was in the process of connecting the dots — understanding the long-term effects of the Epstein-Barr virus, the patterns of nervous system dysregulation, and why my energy behaved the way it did.
I hadn’t yet decoded my own blueprint.
Over time, it became clear that to receive truly effective guidance, I first needed to understand what was happening inside my body. As I worked toward bringing the Epstein-Barr virus into a more dormant state, my focus gradually converged around one central question:
How do I prevent relapse?
That question became the compass for everything that followed.
The Second Year: When the Therapy Started to Land
As I entered the second year, something had shifted.
I had gained a deeper understanding of how profoundly the virus had affected my system — and what that meant for my nervous system and energy regulation. With that awareness, the therapy began to resonate on a new level.
What mattered most was that my occupational therapist was receptive to the information I brought forward. That is not something I take for granted. In conventional healthcare settings, complex or non-standard cases often slip through the cracks because they don’t fit neatly within established frameworks.
This was different.
There was space for nuance. For collaboration. For adjusting the therapy to my system, rather than trying to fit my system into a protocol.
With that shared understanding, the therapy became effective in a very real, practical way. I learned how to recognize early signs of overload, how to pace without collapsing, and how to build resilience gradually — without triggering setbacks.
What Occupational Therapy Ultimately Gave Me
Occupational therapy did not cure me.
That was never the point.
What it gave me was orientation.
It helped me learn to ride the waves of life with my nervous system — instead of fighting them. It taught me how to structure my days realistically, work with fluctuating capacity, and protect my baseline while still fully participating.
Perhaps most importantly, it helped me develop the skills to lead my own healing process — informed, grounded, and free from self-blame.
For anyone navigating long-term illness, post-viral fatigue, or chronic overstimulation, occupational therapy is often overlooked — yet it can be a crucial missing link.
Not because it provides instant answers,
but because it teaches you to listen, adapt, and respond to your body with intelligence and respect.
This is my personal story with occupational therapy — one shaped by a particular connection and approach. Not every experience will unfold this way, as so much depends on the individual therapist’s skill, openness, and ability to truly meet you where you are.
This post is part of my personal biohacking journey—if you’d like to explore more of the tools and practices that helped me reset my system from the inside out, check out my Biohacking page for the full collection.