Walls of orange

Descriptive · both axes Stress that stays high when it should fall

What the guide says A healthy body's stress rises with a load then drops during rest. After overexertion it doesn't: stress stays elevated through the evening even at rest ('stuck sympathetic'), and that day sets up a crash.

Do I see it in my own data?

Present?: Yes. Stress that stays stuck high is a real and familiar shape in my data.
When: Scattered throughout the record, not concentrated before crashes. It is a common day, not a rare warning.
Under what circumstances: She names many causes, and my own days bear that out: a heavy or late meal, an upsetting phone call, visitors, a hot bath, a poor night. Sometimes I can recall the trigger; often the wall is just there and I cannot say why, which is exactly her point, that a wall of orange is hard to read back to one cause.

Where this one stands

I read this as a crash signal and expected it to hold. But she describes it as a descriptive, many-caused read of stuck stress, not a crash predictor. The narrow PEM crash-test was weak; the phenomenon is broader than that.

The shape, across the four years:

the week before a crash (pooled) an ordinary day (range)

This signal's pooled path across 26 crashes (the bold line, with its spread) against the ordinary-day range (the grey band), by day before the crash. It reads the crash, not its approach: through the week before, the crash line sits inside the ordinary-day range, and never clearly leaves it, even at day 0, the crash itself. An honest negative here (+3.5 pp, not supported). Bands are the day-to-day spread across the crashes (wide at 26); 0 is my own normal.

The week before a crash for Walls of orange: this signal's pooled mean vs an ordinary day's, per day, in standard deviations from my own normal (0). Bands (not shown here) are the day-to-day spread across 26 crashes.
Day	Crash week (mean)	Ordinary day (mean)
day -6	0.6	0.5
day -5	0.6	0.4
day -4	0.4	0.4
day -3	-0.1	0.5
day -2	-0.1	0.4
day -1	0.6	0.5
the crash (0)	-0.0	0.2

Wiggers describes stress that stays stuck high, and she is explicit that it has many causes: overexertion (PEM), but also low blood volume (POTS), food, alcohol, emotion, illness, hormones. It is a descriptive read of why the body will not settle, not a forecast of a crash. I did run the one crash test I could, on the PEM interpretation, stress not coming down after I overdid it: across the whole record it was weak, firing on about half of crash lead-ups and about half of ordinary days (H02b, single-pool null). That is an honest negative on the narrow PEM version, not a verdict on the many-caused phenomenon she actually describes. (The early standout, +31.8 pp, was an over-time difference, not a verdict, see the driver ledger; modelling out the medication only moves it toward null.)

The numbers, for the record Single-pool NOT-SUPPORTED. Sensitivity ~50%, specificity ~54%; PPV ~2.3% at the ~2% base rate, lift ~1.07x (Tier C). The earlier +31.8 pp was a high-crash-year figure that did not survive on the full pool.

The curve above is the real pooled shape; the fuller write-up (how it was tested, and what it means) is coming as this finding’s page is built out. For now, the shape, the status, and the working note are the honest summary.