Pacing for Chronic Illness.
If you live with chronic pain or chronic illness, it’s likely that you’ve experienced (or are experiencing) the frustration that comes with not being able to predict your energy levels, symptoms and pain. When things are so unpredictable it often feels easier to isolate from others and give up attempting to attend events, work, or do the things you love. But what if there was a way to learn how to build in more flexibility to your days, engage with things that are important to you, and better understand your energy and symptoms? This is where pacing comes in.
Pacing for Chronic Illness: What is Pacing?
Photo by Airam Daton
If you’re familiar with spoon theory , pacing is essentially that. It’s the idea that you learn how to assess your capacity (spoons) and adjust your activity accordingly. This may look like being more active when energy (spoons) are higher, resting when noticing symptoms, or planning extra rest ahead of strenuous or valued activities. Pacing isn’t about doing less. It’s a shift in how we look at activity by switching focus to the energy (spoons) you have rather than the tasks that need to be completed. It teaches you to match your tasks to your energy levels instead of pushing through your tasks until you run out of energy. Pacing is how we learn to break free from the push/crash cycle.
Push/Crash Cycle
Photo by Liza Summer
The push/crash cycle is the cycle we often end up in when living with chronic pain/illness. It’s the idea of pushing yourself to do everything because you feel good on a given day. Overdoing it on your good days inevitably leads to a crash. This often looks like increased symptoms and pain, and a need for an extended recovery period. In other words, it’s not always worth the initial push. This is where pacing can teach you to better manage your energy on those good days, to support you in decreasing the impact of or occasionally even avoiding the crash altogether.
How Can Pacing Help?
Pacing can be one of the most important skills you learn as someone living with chronic pain or chronic illness. It’s an important addition to work with values and valued living. It can help you to:
- Regain control over your time
- Engage more with activities
- Incorporate valued actions
- Reduce frequency/severity of symptoms
- Understand your limits/capacity
So, how do you learn pacing?
Figuring Out Pacing – Chronic Illness Therapist | Chronic Illness Group Therapy
Photo by MART PRODUCTION
Figuring out pacing can be difficult. The who goal for pacing is to support you in developing a better understanding of your energy and symptoms, allowing you to incorporate more values and flexibility into your life. You will likely struggle in the beginning, but it will get easier over time, but you will never be perfect with it – and that’s okay.
So, how do you begin to figure out your own pacing?
- What’s your baseline?
Use an activity tracker to figure out how your typical day and activities impacts your symptoms. - Focus your attention on one activity at a time.
Pick something you value and want to keep doing without pushing yourself too hard. - Find ways to adapt to your current needs.
How can you accommodate what your body needs right now? - Experiment with your activities throughout the day.
Adjust when, how, how long, etc you engage with an activity. Assess how it feels and use that date to continue to experiment. - Adopt the 10% rule.
Increase (or decrease) activities by 10% as a way of assessing your current capacity. - Stay curious.
This isn’t a one-time thing, and you’re going to have to assess and change your pacing depending on your needs and how they change.
This is just a basic outline of beginning to explore pacing. While it can be done on your own, pacing can be difficult and often benefits from the support of a therapist and/or loved ones. As a therapist that works with chronic illness, I often support clients individually or in group therapy with taking the first steps towards pacing and navigating the barriers and challenges along the way. If you’re interested in therapy for chronic illness – book a FREE consult for individual or group therapy today.
