Took me nearly a year to figure out how to beat the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). But I think we are finally there.

In December I wrote a blog entry about my CFS hypothesis, basically how it works. I still believe this is true but there was one thing I still had to figure out.

Back then I concluded that the main issue and cause is stress. But what stress? Stress is incredibly misunderstood. It's not long working hours. It has nothing to do with that.

When I fell ill, my response was to rest. Everyone told me to rest. If you feel bad, you rest - intuition. But for me, this was exactly the wrong medicine.

This might sound crazy, but by now I'm convinced that my body wasn't telling me to do less, but to do more.

Think of life as a balance sheet of positive and negative stressors. Perhaps you can handle quite a lot of negative stress if there's enough positive excitement to counterbalance it.

Throughout my twenties as a startup founder, my life was ultra exciting. Every day brought new challenges, victories, possibilities. At times I was under crazy amounts of stress, but there was always a lot of exciting things as well. Then that stopped.

My working theory is that my symptoms didn't appear because I was doing too much. They appeared because frankly speaking my life had become too boring. What looked like my body breaking down might actually have been my body protesting the absence of excitement.

I can't prove this scientifically, of course. But what I can say with certainty is this: by introducing more excitement into my life and treating boredom as the ultimate enemy - which paradoxically means adding quite a bit of stress - my symptoms have mostly disappeared.

After almost exactly one year I am about to hit my all-time best performances in cycling so that today I can confidently say: I am back.

And I am glad I didn't believe anyone who would assume my condition was permanent.