Pacing in Practice (Part 1)

A lot of the advice seems really simple, but acting on it is a whole other thing.

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If you’ve read any of my work over the last year or so, you’ll know that I have a particular interest in pacing.

As a natural boom and buster, I tend to find it incredibly easy to overdo things and end up feeling significantly worse than I did before. And since I have some of those delightful conditions that are mostly left down to “self-management” (more on that in future issues), I’m always trying to figure what things I can do to help make my life easier.

Ultimately, for me, it comes down to two things:

1. Can I spend less time suffering?

2. Can I get to the end of the day without feeling like a zombie?

Like many people, I came into pacing with a mindset of loss. This makes sense, right? Often, we’re told that it’s important to pace, but we’re not taught how to do it and often feel like we need to stop doing most things in our lives. But, if we take Jessica Kellgren-Fozard’s lovely definition…

“Pacing is energy management with the aim of helping you learn your limits and thus maximise cognitive and physical activity to a point you are happy and comfortable whilst avoiding setbacks or relapses due to overexertion.”

…we can see that pacing can be something that can be an incredibly helpful addition to our chronic illness management toolkit.

I’ve been working with an Occupational Therapist, Jo Southall, for the last few years, and we even made two episodes of The Rest Room podcast all about how to get started with pacing. I highly recommend listening if you haven’t already.

The thing I constantly find about pacing is that in principle a lot of the concepts are quite simple. They make sense logically, and can often be really tiny steps that add up to a big change.

But in reality, it can require an entire overhaul of your life. It’s a new way of thinking, of acting, of existing in the world. Much of it, I find, is to my benefit. But it’s something that (although I am getting “better” at it) I struggle with every day.

This is why I wanted to take some time to reflect on my experiences of trying to figure out how to pace, what specific pacing tools have helped me the most, and why there are some wider issues around pacing that I still find difficult - and why that’s ok.

I’ve been having a very bad pain week, so I’m going to take my own advice and pace my writing, which is why this is (still a very meaty) part 1 of a 2 part series on a topic I could probably write a whole book on.