Something I just realised about my approach to pacing

One of the most important things for chronic fatigue syndrome is pacing: figuring out how much energy you can consistently use each day and sticking to it rather than overdoing it one day and crashing the next. The importance of pacing has been proven through both scientific study and interviews with people who have the illness and is about the only thing that helps everyone (and not pacing is one of the most reliable ways to make your condition worsen). But it's hard to balance the need to rest with the need to go out and have fun, do necessary chores, keep muscles exercised etc, especially at the start. Plus not every task suits being broken up into little chunks you can do a day at a time.

For the first few years, any time I had the slightest doubt about whether I was up to something I cancelled it, because my instincts were still wired for healthy!me. Whenever I ignored this mantra I made myself very ill and took ages to recover.

And then my instincts finally shifted to match my actual capabilities, which was good, but meant that I was cancelling things more than I needed to. Also my instincts for how much energy it takes to go out places are still based on when I had to walk rather than the much lower energy required to go out with my wheelchair.

Which has all added up to me erring on the side of not cancelling things when I'm not 100% sure I'm up to them, as long as the consequences for misjudging aren't too severe. It's a bit scary, but has been working pretty well so far! (I still cancel things I know I'm not up to, which is sadly quite a large proportion of things)

This post brought to you by me deciding whether or not to go to the Swancon programming meeting today since I'm still recovering from going out yesterday. Though there's still time for me to take a sudden turn towards the sleepy.

EDIT: lol nope, I'm not going anywhere today. The basic principle still holds though.