For most people, COVID-19 means a week or two of feeling rotten and then a return to normal. For some, the return never quite arrives. The fatigue doesn’t lift. Thinking feels slow and cloudy. Sleep stops working. A walk to the mailbox can cost the rest of the day.
If that sounds familiar, you are not imagining it, and you are not alone. This article explains what long COVID is, how it affects daily life, what recovery tends to involve, and where hypnosis fits – honestly, including where it doesn’t.
What is long COVID?
In 2024 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a consensus definition, now used by US federal health agencies. It describes long COVID as an infection-associated chronic condition that follows a COVID-19 infection, lasts at least three months, and affects one or more systems of the body. It can be constant, come and go in waves, or slowly worsen.
A few parts of that definition surprise people:
- You don’t need a positive test. A diagnosis can be made without one.
- A mild case can still lead to it. Long COVID can follow a mild infection, or one with no symptoms at all, and it can appear weeks or months after you seemed to recover.
- There is no single test for it. According to the CDC, no lab test can yet confirm or rule it out. Doctors diagnose it from your history and an examination.
It is also common. CDC survey data from 2023 put the share of US adults living with long COVID at about 6%, and more than one in four of them said it significantly limited their day-to-day activities.
How long COVID affects people
More than 200 symptoms have been linked to long COVID, across almost every system of the body, and no two people have quite the same picture. The NIH-funded RECOVER study, the largest in the US, found these were the most common among people with long COVID:
- Post-exertional malaise – a crash after activity (87%)
- Fatigue (85%)
- Brain fog (64%)
- Dizziness (62%)
- Digestive problems (59%)
- Heart palpitations (57%)
Others include shortness of breath, a changed sense of smell or taste, a lingering cough, chest pain, headaches, poor sleep, and anxiety or low mood.
Post-exertional malaise (PEM) needs its own explanation, because it shapes everything about recovery. PEM is a worsening of symptoms after even small amounts of physical or mental effort. The CDC notes that the crash typically arrives 12 to 48 hours after the activity and can last for days or even weeks. That delay is what makes it so hard to manage: you feel fine while you are doing something and pay for it later, so cause and effect are easy to miss.
The effects reach well beyond the body. Long COVID can keep people out of work or school for six months to two years or more. People describe losing their sense of who they are – the reliable employee, the hands-on parent, the person who never got sick. Many also carry the strain of not being believed, because routine tests often come back normal. Fear of the next crash, grief for a life that has been put on hold, and frustration with a body that won’t cooperate are understandable responses to a real illness. They are not the cause of it.
What does recovery take?
The honest answer starts here: there is currently no cure for long COVID. Medical care focuses on managing symptoms and protecting quality of life and function.
The encouraging part is that many people do improve, though usually gradually and unevenly rather than in a straight line. A large US study published in JAMA found that more than one in five adults had not recovered three months after infection. Women and people with existing heart disease tended to take longer; people who were vaccinated before infection tended to recover sooner.
What helps, in practice, usually comes down to a few things working together:
- A medical team on your side. Start with your primary care provider, and ask about a long COVID clinic if one is within reach. The CDC’s guidance is to focus first on the symptoms that bother you most and build a rehabilitation plan around them.
- Pacing, not pushing. Because of PEM, “push through it” can backfire. Pacing means working within your available energy, breaking tasks into smaller pieces, resting before you hit empty, and increasing activity only slowly, with your clinician’s guidance.
- A symptom diary. The CDC recommends tracking symptoms and activity. Patterns show up on paper that are invisible day to day, including which activities set off a crash.
- Sleep and a calmer nervous system. Many people with long COVID have signs of an unsettled autonomic nervous system – the part that runs heart rate, digestion, and the stress response. Anything that helps the body genuinely rest is worth having.
- Support and patience. Recovery is slower than anyone wants. Being kind to yourself through the setbacks is not a nice-to-have; it is part of how people keep going.
Where hypnosis fits
Let’s be clear about what hypnosis is not. It does not cure long COVID. It does not clear a virus, repair tissue, or replace your medical care. Researchers have not yet run clinical trials of hypnosis for long COVID itself, so anyone promising a cure is going well beyond the evidence.
What hypnosis can do is work on the parts of the experience that run through the nervous system and the mind – and with long COVID, that is a large share of the day-to-day burden.
- Calming a stress response stuck on high. Long illness keeps the body on alert. Hypnosis is a focused, deeply relaxed state, and practicing it – in sessions and at home with recordings – gives your system repeated experience of real rest.
- Sleep. Hypnosis is widely used to quiet a busy mind at bedtime and make sleep feel more restoring.
- Pain and discomfort. A 2019 review of 85 controlled studies found that hypnosis produced meaningful pain relief for most participants. Those studies used short-term pain, and the authors called for more research in chronic pain, but the direction is encouraging.
- Pacing with patience. The hardest part of pacing is often emotional: the pull to do everything on a good day, and the guilt of resting. Hypnosis can strengthen the habit of stopping before the crash, and help you go easier on yourself when one comes anyway.
- Worry, frustration, and grief. Fear of relapse, health anxiety, and grief for the old routine all add weight. Working through them can make the load you are already carrying feel lighter.
- A reset for foggy days. Short self-hypnosis routines give you a way to settle and refocus when your mind feels scattered.
There is supporting evidence from a related approach. In a 2023 Dutch trial of 114 people with long COVID fatigue, those who completed 17 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy reported significantly less fatigue than those who received usual care. The researchers were careful to say this does not mean long COVID is psychological. It means that how the mind and nervous system respond to a physical illness can be worked with – and that is exactly the territory hypnosis covers.
If your symptoms change or get worse, see your doctor first. Hypnosis is something you add to good medical care, never something you use instead of it.
Working with Yovanna
At Mind’s Eye Hypnosis in Simsbury, Yovanna works alongside whatever care you are already receiving. Sessions are relaxed, collaborative, and paced to how much energy you have that day. They can be held online from home through secure telehealth, so a harder day doesn’t have to mean a wasted trip, and many clients use recordings between sessions to keep the practice going.
You don’t have to push through this alone. Book your free 1-hour consultation and let’s find a gentler way forward. Serving Simsbury and the Farmington Valley.
Hypnosis complements, and does not replace, care from your doctor or long COVID care team.
See also: Hypnosis for long COVID · Hypnosis alongside medical care
Sources
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, A Long COVID Definition (2024) – nap.nationalacademies.org
- CDC, Long COVID Clinical Guidance (updated March 9, 2026) – www.cdc.gov
- Thaweethai et al., RECOVER study, as reported by CIDRAP – www.cidrap.umn.edu
- CDC Household Pulse data, as reported by ABC News (August 2023) – abc7chicago.com
- JAMA recovery cohort, via Scimex – www.scimex.org
- Thompson et al., The effectiveness of hypnosis for pain relief, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (2019) – doi.org
- Amsterdam UMC CBT trial, as reported by WebMD (May 2023) – www.webmd.com