Fibromyalgia Symptoms: Root Cause Perspectives and Natural Treatments

You may have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, but if you're like most people, the experience still feels confusing. Your body hurts, your energy is low, you can't think straight, and many of your tests look normal.

The diagnosis gives the symptoms a name, but it doesn't fully explain why your body feels this way in the first place, other than the idea of central sensitization. To gain a greater understanding of what's happening in fibromyalgia, it helps to take a holistic, root cause view.

Instead of focusing on symptoms and muscles, a root cause view explores why and how your nervous system has become sensitized. It may also cause us to ask why your ability to adapt to stress is lower than it used to be, and how we can improve your resilience.

Understanding the larger pattern in fibromyalgia considers the roles of stress physiology, gut health, and lifestyle. Perhaps most important is also an exploration of your emotional trauma, which has been found to play a huge role in the onset of fibromyalgia.

Adopting a holistic, root cause perspective can help lend clarity into why symptoms persist and what it may take to calm your system again.

Why Do Fibromyalgia Symptoms Continue After a Diagnosis?

When you’re diagnosed with fibromyalgia, the expectation is that there’s something you can do to feel better and return to what you remember feeling like before the symptoms began. You're expecting a treatment to help manage the symptoms, or preferably, something that can resolve them.

But with poorly-understood conditions like fibromyalgia, the diagnosis only serves to recognize the condition. The scientific community doesn’t know what causes fibromyalgia, and the standard treatments aren't curative.

It's worth noting that even if the condition was well-understood, conventional treatments would still be inadequate. It's my opinion that chronic illnesses cannot truly be resolved with pharmaceuticals. They can be managed with pharmaceuticals, but I can't think of a single chronic disease that can be truly cured with pharmaceuticals.

Since pharmaceuticals are partially effective, this leaves the door open for complementary treatments. Aside from indispensable lifestyle recommendations, there are many natural medicines that may be helpful in fibromyalgia.

What Fibromyalgia Really Means

Since there are often many body systems involved in fibromyalgia, it can seem very confusing. But all of your body systems are, in a sense, plugged in to your nervous system.

Indeed, the basic premise behind fibromyalgia is that your nervous system has become both overly sensitive and less adaptable to stress.

Central sensitization explained

By now, you may have heard the term “central sensitization.” It sounds technical, but the idea is straightforward. Central refers to your central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and sensitization means it’s become more sensitive.

To summarize, it’s widely accepted that the central nervous system has become more sensitive in fibromyalgia. In other words, the volume of your senses is turned up, so sensations that would normally register as mild pressure or discomfort can instead register as pain.

Also consider the role of your peripheral nervous system, which is an extension of your central nervous system. These are all the nerves that plug into your spinal cord from your extremities, like your arms and legs. They carry the incoming sensory signals toward your brain.

When the sensory signals get to your brain, something interesting happens. Your brain decides whether or not to make you aware of the incoming sensation. If you're made aware of it, the question is whether or not it's then flagged as danger and turned into a pain signal.

This is usually what happens in fibromyalgia. A light touch or other mild pressure sensation can be flagged as a threat and the pain response ensues.

In fibromyalgia, it seems that your central nervous system is amplifying pain signals for no good reason. It’s trying to protect you from sensations that aren’t harmful. Why would it do that?

That's a good question, and it's one that’s currently unanswered by the scientific community. I do offer some conceptual understandings that you might resonate with as you continue reading.

Because the nervous system reaches nearly every part of your body, this helps explain several features of fibromyalgia: pain that moves, tenderness to light touch, increased sensitivity to temperature, and symptom flares after poor sleep or stress. The system that should filter and regulate incoming signals becomes less selective.

Are you a highly sensitive person?

The concept of central sensitization makes me wonder if highly sensitive people, who I'd estimate make up about 10% of the population, are more inclined to develop fibromyalgia and other chronic pain disorders.

Highly sensitive people typically feel overstimulated quite easily, can have strong emotional responses, and can be easily startled. It seems that their nervous systems are generally more reactive than others, perhaps predisposing them to central sensitization.

They also need lots of alone time, benefit from quiet environments, strong boundaries, and a calm home environment.

I consider myself to be a highly sensitive person, and I understand the specific challenges that come with living in a world full of overstimulation, violence, and unnecessary noise.

Do people with fibromyalgia have low heart rate variability?

Yes, those living with fibromyalgia have been found to have reduced heart-rate variability (HRV) in addition to central sensitization.

Reduced HRV basically means that your nervous system is stuck in high-stress mode. A high HRV means that your heart rate can change rapidly to accommodate stress.

HRV can slowly come down over time in response to chronic stress, poor sleep, and with chronic illness, as the mechanisms that regulate HRV get tired. This is similar to how a diabetic becomes less responsive to insulin.

Generally, the result is a decreased ability to respond to and recover from periods of physical or mental stress. From a holistic treatment perspective, it sometimes makes sense to harmonize the heart and nervous system, so performance, endurance, and resilience improve. That can be accomplished with natural medicines, but not with drugs.

If you only look at muscles, fibromyalgia doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Your body isn’t showing obvious tissue injury or chemical imbalances, aside from notable changes in muscle oxygen status and muscle pressure (increased tension).

But remember that your body isn’t a machine, and there are more factors to consider aside from labs and imaging studies.

Why pain can exist without tissue damage

Pain is a signal generated by your nervous system in response to perceived threat. When you cut your finger, the pain you feel is caused by tissue damage. But pain does not require ongoing tissue damage to persist.

If your nervous system remains in a vigilant state, it can continue producing pain signals even after your tissues have healed. The premise is the same in fibromyalgia. You can experience pain long after the initial stimulus is gone.

A useful example is a soldier returning from war. In a combat zone, vigilance helps to stay alive. The nervous system stays primed for threat, reacting instantly to unexpected sounds or movement. That heightened responsiveness keeps the soldier alive.

The problem arises when that same system remains on high alert back home. A slamming door can trigger the same surge of adrenaline as an explosion once did. The reaction is real, but the environment no longer justifies it because the threats are gone.

In fibromyalgia, heightened pain signaling over time can also lead to changes in your brain that worsen the cycle. Pain receptors can increase in number, activate more readily, and become harder to turn off.

The good news is that if your nervous system can learn vigilance, it can also re-learn regulation. That’s an important distinction, because it shifts the focus from chasing structural damage to restoring balance in the system itself.

What triggers fibromyalgia flare ups?

Generally speaking, any physical or mental task that you perceive or experience as stressful can trigger flare ups.

One pattern I see repeatedly in clinic is that symptoms worsen during periods of poor sleep, travel, or emotional stress. Sometimes there are flares without a clear cause too.

The stress response is designed to help you survive short-term challenges. The problem starts when your system never fully returns to baseline after the stressor is over.

When that happens, small triggers can create big reactions. A busy week, a bad night of sleep, or even a minor illness can push symptoms into a flare. Patients often feel confused by this because the trigger seems too small to explain the intensity of the response.

I often explain fibromyalgia as a system that has become protective to the point of being overly cautious. It’s basically the equivalent of a car alarm that’s too sensitive. It’s reacting to every little thing that touches your car.

This perspective matters because it changes how we think about recovery. If your system is stuck in protection mode, the long-term goal is not to suppress symptoms, but maybe to help your system feel safe enough to decrease the sensitivity of that alarm signal.

That process usually involves several pieces working together: sleep, movement, stress regulation, nutrition, and perception, which all influence the nervous system.

When we look at fibromyalgia through this lens, the symptoms can feel more like messages coming from a system that needs recalibration through lifestyle, psychology, and natural medicines.

Watch My Free Fibromyalgia Webinar

If my perspectives interest you, then you’ll love my fibromyalgia/chronic pain webinar. I put together a free educational webinar that walks through these perspectives in more detail and explains how lifestyle, psychology, and stress physiology influence chronic pain.

The goal of the webinar is to help you to understand how these causative pieces fit together so you can start looking at your symptoms through a clearer lens. Furthermore, it discusses potential treatment options from a naturopathic perspective.

👉 Sign up to watch the webinar here

Why Standard Treatments Don’t Resolve Fibromyalgia

Most conventional treatment plans focus on the symptoms. Pain medication, sleep aids, and sometimes antidepressants are used to help people function day to day. Relief matters, and you need support just to get through the day.

Pregabalin (lyrica) and gabapentin (neurontin) make good sense for pain reduction because they blunt your nervous system's pain signals. But they don't have a lasting effect.

There's also cyclobenzaprine to relax your muscles, trazodone to help sleep, and the antidepressants like amitriptyline to help improve your mood. They're helpful, but they can't address causation, so the switch enabling fibromyalgia remains on.

Symptom management versus system regulation

Symptom relief doesn’t change what’s driving the underlying pattern. If your nervous system remains reactive, symptoms can return when the medication wears off or when stress increases.

Improved sleep is often a major goal in fibromyalgia, given how important it is to reset your nervous system and relax your muscles. Dreaming is also an important therapeutic process for emotional processing. We all know what a poor night's sleep feels like. And most fibromyalgia patients have some sort of sleep issue.

Taking pharmaceuticals to help with sleep makes sense, because sleep is when your nervous system and muscles quiet down. Theoretically, the medication can help improve system regulation by promoting restorative sleep. But does it?

Patients often describe feeling like they are managing the condition rather than improving it.

As a root-cause doctor, when I think about sleep issues in fibromyalgia, I return to the idea of vigilance. When your nervous system is on guard, it's afraid to fully let go and relax into deep, restorative sleep.

Medications can reduce pain signals or improve sleep quality, and for some people that creates meaningful improvement. The limitation is that medication usually does not rebuild recovery capacity. If medication could fix central sensitization and improve HRV, your experience with fibromyalgia would probably be easier.

Exploring The Root Causes of Fibromyalgia

What I’ve found in my clinical experience is that there are several common reasons why people develop chronic diseases. In naturopathic medicine, we call this concept the "unity of disease."

It basically means that all chronic diseases are caused by the same factors involving a few core ideas pertaining to your psychology and lifestyle.

I’ve laid this out for you neatly in my True Cause of Illness Guide, where you can read about the root causes of illness and gain a greater understanding of which areas of your life might require some attention.

In this article, I’m focusing on a few root-cause topics that are often overlooked in conventional medicine: emotional stress, gut health, and lifestyle.

Psychology and lifestyle

Mindset influences your body function more than you may realize. When I say mindset, I mean your beliefs, thoughts, and emotions—all of which together create a certain perspective or way that you’re viewing the world.

Consider the case of someone living with fibromyalgia who’s a perfectionist and has been for many years. As a perfectionist, they’re constantly trying to attain perfection in almost every aspect of what they do.

Being a perfectionist places a high demand on the nervous system. It sometimes comes with anger, impatience, and frustration with others when things aren’t done the way they want.

Then, they might spend extra time and energy working on those things until they are the way they want them to be. It can lead them to patterns of overworking, which can disrupt sleep routines, suppress appetite, and potentially sensitize their nervous system as one consequence. 

Research from 2019 tells us that the psychological state of people living with fibromyalgia tends to be rather poor. Fibromyalgia patients frequently report low self-esteem, negative self-image, and a depressive mindset. It makes sense.

It’s a condition that basically impedes all aspects of your life, from simple daily habits to socializing and sleep. As you know, it can make your day-to-day existence miserable.

That’s exactly why more therapies that address your psychological state should be recommended, if you’re open to them.

Recent research is starting to recognize how important your emotional state is, calling for more studies that examine the relationship between pain, perception, and emotional stress.

In clinic, I often see improvement when people start noticing how they relate to their own limits. Learning to pace yourself, set boundaries, and reduce internal pressure changes how your body responds to stress. It changes your perspectives. This part of healing is about reducing unnecessary strain on your system.

Emotional stress and trauma

While medical references acknowledge the role of emotional stress in fibromyalgia, it’s role is still undervalued, in my opinion. There's not enough time in most healthcare offices to delve into your emotional history, so that could be partly why an emotional evaluation is neglected.

On top of that, if you have emotional trauma around neglect or abandonment, interacting with the conventional medical system can prod that trauma. Feeling rushed out the door, dismissed, and ignored are common reasons why people avoid the doctors office.

I’m usually the first practitioner to ask patients if they've experienced a physical or emotional trauma around the same time that their symptoms began. And if not, I ask about childhood too.

It’s rather important to understand when your symptoms first began and what was occurring at that time in your life. I’d say about 75% of my patients report significant life events or traumas that coincided with the beginning of their symptoms, not just for fibromyalgia, but more many other chronic conditions too.

What I find to be interesting is that the medical references specifically note that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a contributing factor.

Indeed, the frequent reporting of PTSD in fibromyalgia patients has prompted research through the years.

Most recently, a 2025 article explored the hypothesis that PTSD and fibromyalgia could both be considered "maladaptive responses to stress perpetuated by persistently heightened threat perception and low ability to soothe the threats."

In plain English, that means the stress response is overactive due to changes in your perception about what's a threat and what isn't. That would certainly help to explain central sensitization and reduced HRV. In some ways, this makes me think that perhaps fibromyalgia is like an extension of PTSD.

Some research has thoroughly reviewed the role of childhood trauma in fibromyalgia patients. As you might have guessed, even one trauma increases risk for fibromyalgia, and the risk increases directly with the number of traumas experienced.

Other research simply concludes that it's vital to address trauma in fibromyalgia. And furthermore, that an individualized approach emphasizing emotions and trauma resolution may substantially improve quality of life.

Trauma defined

Since trauma seems relevant and potentially even causative in fibromyalgia, it's important to understand what exactly qualifies as trauma. As it turns out, there are lots of different types of trauma, and listed below are some examples:

• Severe illness or injury

• Violent or sexual assault or abuse

• Domestic violence

• Sibling abuse

• Verbal abuse

• Emotional neglect or abandonment

• Death of a loved one

• Mugging or robbery

• Car accident

• Military combat

• Hospitalization

• Childbirth

• Perceived or actual life threatening illness

• Long-term misdiagnosis of a health condition

Do any of these seem relevant for you? Most fibromyalgia patients I've treated report more than one of these.

The overall contribution of emotions in chronic diseases is highly understated in conventional medicine, but is something I find to be vital in my root cause approach. Hence, it's often a starting place in my practice.

Gut health

Generally, a healthy gut is a vital component of a healthy body. Every naturopathic doctor (ND) will tell you that. And as the scientific community learns more about the gut microbiome, the more we understand its importance in health and disease.

Case in point: there was a recent study from 2024 that demonstrates the powerful relationship between your gut microbiome and the production of fibromyalgia symptoms:

• Gut microbiomes from women with fibromyalgia were transplanted into mice.

• Some days after the procedure, the mice spontaneously developed pain and increased sensitivity to pain stimuli.

• Then, when researches transplanted gut microbiomes from humans without fibromyalgia to these same mice, the symptoms reversed.

Really interesting, right?

This is one of many studies that demonstrate the pervasive influence of the microbiome on overall body function. This is partially because the gut microbiome produces chemicals involved in pain, sleep, mood, and energy.

These chemicals are referred to as neurotransmitters and they include dopamine, GABA, serotonin, and so on.

Neurotransmitters like GABA are important in fibromyalgia because they’re what turn the pain signals off and tell your nervous system to relax.

While I don’t think the microbes like viruses and bacteria are directly responsible for causing fibromyalgia, they definitely play an important role.

If your symptoms developed after the flu or other acute illness, there was probably something else going on before you got sick that led to the fibromyalgia. The infection was basically the last straw.

The microbes respond to the environment inside your body. The gut environment contains most of the microbes and is influenced predominantly by your diet, which means that the food you eat every day is crucial to your overall health.

Food influences the composition of bacteria in your gut. This in turn affects the production of neurotransmitters as well as many important and influential processes that occur elsewhere in your body.

Evaluating your gut is one part of a comprehensive systems review, which I typically recommend in my approach to fibromyalgia treatment.

What Helps Calm a Sensitized Nervous System?

Mindfulness and routines

When your nervous system is stuck in protection mode, one major goal is to help it feel more calm and less reactive. Grounding practices are helpful for this goal.

Think about how you can consistently ground yourself in a predictable lifestyle, focusing on the fundamentals like sleep routines, meal times, and reduced stimulation. Predictability is a key factor in grounded lifestyles.  

If your body learned over time that deep, quality rest is a luxury and high stress is normal, reversing that pattern takes time and intention. Slowing down is important, and it helps to retrain your nervous system.

If you’re the type to rush and try to get a long task-list done every day, you might benefit from a slower, more intentional lifestyle. It feels good to slow down. It feels more natural.  

I often encourage patients to think less about fighting symptoms and more about creating conditions where their body can settle and find its balance again. Mindfulness can be a great starting place to start living more intentionally.

Gentle exercise

Exercise advice for fibromyalgia can be confusing. You might be given conflicting advice from different providers. But generally, exercise is considered the most important lifestyle factor.

Regular exercise is considered to be the most important lifestyle habit in fibromyalgia treatment.

What works best is consistent movement that respects your limits. Aerobic exercises like walking, water therapies, and cycling are favored for various reasons. But mobility exercises, stretching, and restorative yoga might also be good places to start.

Tai chi group class.

I also think about Qi Gong or Tai Chi which are forms of exercise that blend movement with intention and mindfulness. Beginner classes are generally easy and not very fatiguing.

Regardless, beginning any new exercise will probably result in an initial increase in pain and fatigue, but over time your body will adapt and become stronger.

Regular, gentle movement is the key. Less recovery time is needed after gentle movements, which means that you won’t be creating even more demand for deep sleep and tissue repair as you would after an intense workout.

If you’re fatigued, even something as simple as a walk around the block can help reduce pain signals by releasing some of the neurotransmitters involved in pain regulation. These neurotransmitters also regulate your mood, appetite, and sleep. This is partially why exercise is considered central to fibromyalgia treatment.

I always remind patients to get outside and ground whenever possible too. Putting your bare feet on the Earth has broad benefits, including pain and inflammation modulation, according to research from 2015.

Homeopathy

In my opinion, homeopathy can be a highly valuable tool for fibromyalgia treatment. This is especially true if you have emotional trauma. Homeopathy can help work through this trauma, without the often-long process of counseling or cognitive behavioral therapy.

When your nervous system is sensitive, or when you’re a sensitive person in general, homeopathy is gentle enough to produce positive changes without overburdening your system. Pharmaceuticals can sometimes further irritate your nervous system, whereas homeopathy can calm it.

There are some homeopathic medicines that also work more directly on inflammatory molecules involved in pain responses. There are various medicines that aim to modulate these molecules, working in a similar way to pharmaceuticals, but without the additional toxicity or concern for side effects and interactions.

Homeopathy can also be very helpful for depression, anxiety, and fatigue.

The emotion code

Trauma can be challenging to address, especially if you've been disconnected from the traumatic experience for a long time.

What tends to happen is that you have these pent up emotions like anger, loneliness, or hatred, and you don't even know where they're coming from. Sometimes you're aware of the emotions and sometimes you aren't. It's almost as if they're "trapped" inside of you.

Steph is happy to help you explore and release trapped emotions!

The emotion code is a type of therapy that aims to identify and release trapped emotions. I find this therapy to be valuable when you feel that your emotions are playing a role in your symptoms, but aren't sure how to identify and release them.

If you’ve experienced trauma or abuse, the emotion code can be a great method to help process these past experiences and understand how they might be currently affecting you.

👉 In my practice, I refer to Steph Speeney, who you can book a free consult with to learn more about how the emotion code might help you.

What to Consider Next

When fibromyalgia is viewed only as a pain problem, options are limited. If you look at it through the lens of a guarded nervous system, and if you consider the emotional and psychological contributions to pain signals, new possibilities become available.

In chronic conditions, it’s often helpful to have multiple perspectives. The conditions can be addressed from multiple levels, rather than just one approach. My treatment framework emphasizes psychology and lifestyle because I’ve found that these are often at the source of chronic symptoms.

What a root cause evaluation looks like

A root-cause approach explores how all of your body systems are interacting, and how your perspectives, emotions, and past experiences influence your body systems.

What's the relationship between your body function and lifestyle? Do fast-paced days result in more symptoms? Do slower days reduce symptoms? Do stressful events provoke flares? These are good questions to think about.

During an evaluation, I look for connections rather than isolated problems. When did symptoms start? What was happening in life at that time? What patterns make symptoms worse or better?

These questions help understand your body’s terrain so I can work on balance and harmonization rather than suppression.

The goal is form a well-rounded picture of what's going on and what potentially contributed to the development of symptoms. Once you understand the pattern, decisions become easier and treatment feels less like guesswork.

Watch My Free Fibromyalgia Webinar

If my perspectives interest you, then you’ll love my fibromyalgia webinar. I put together a free educational webinar that walks through these perspectives in more detail and explains how lifestyle, psychology, and stress physiology influence chronic pain.

The goal of the webinar is to help you to understand how these causative pieces fit together so you can start looking at your symptoms through a clearer lens. Furthermore, it discusses potential treatment options from a naturopathic perspective.

👉 Sign up to watch the webinar here

Let’s talk about you next.

As a naturopathic physician, I believe that every person is unique, and so is their healing path. I take the time to understand your story, lifestyle, emotional health, and physical health before making recommendations.

Whether I’m using nutrition, herbal medicine, homeopathy, or lifestyle counseling, my goal is always the same: to identify and treat the true cause of illness so your body can find its footing again.

You can book a 15-minute free consult right here or subscribe to my blog to get future updates on root cause healing and natural medicine.

References

Bhargava, J., et al. Fibromyalgia. [Updated 2025 Jan 31]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2026 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK540974/

Bussières, A., et al. (2023). Adverse childhood experience is associated with an increased risk of reporting chronic pain in adulthood: a systematic review and meta-analysis. European journal of psychotraumatology, 14(2), 2284025. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2023.2284025

Galvez-Sánchez, C. M., et al. (2019). Psychological impact of fibromyalgia: current perspectives. Psychology research and behavior management, 12, 117–127. https://doi.org/10.2147/PRBM.S178240

Kim, S., et al. (2023). Emotional Dynamics in Fibromyalgia: Pain, Fatigue, and Stress Moderate Momentary Associations Between Positive and Negative Emotions. The journal of pain, 24(9), 1594–1603. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2023.04.007

Luís, M., et al. (2025). Fibromyalgia and post-traumatic stress disorder: different parts of an elephant?. Clinical and experimental rheumatology, 43(6), 1146–1160. https://doi.org/10.55563/clinexprheumatol/1u08ax

Maire, C., et al. (2025). Trauma and psychological impact in fibromyalgia and other central sensitization syndromes: the role of anxiety and pain acceptance. BMC psychology, 13(1), 1251. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-025-03429-x

Minerbi, A., et al. (2024). Decoding the connection: unraveling the role of gut microbiome in fibromyalgia. Pain reports, 10(1), e1224. https://doi.org/10.1097/PR9.0000000000001224

Oschman, J. L., et al. (2015). The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Journal of inflammation research, 8, 83–96. https://doi.org/10.2147/JIR.S69656

Siracusa, R., et al. (2021). Fibromyalgia: Pathogenesis, Mechanisms, Diagnosis and Treatment Options Update. International journal of molecular sciences, 22(8), 3891. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms22083891

Zetterman, T., et al. (2023). Heart rate variability responses to cognitive stress in fibromyalgia are characterised by inadequate autonomous system stress responses: a clinical trial. Scientific reports, 13(1), 700. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-27581-9