8.9K
EMPacing is often recommended to people with chronic conditions as a way to "manage" their energy levels.
*Pacing is where you monitor your physical activity levels and only do things for a certain amount of time or a certain number of activities per day, based on the idea that you will "use up" all your energy if you do more than the alloted time/distance and this will result in symptoms.
Some pacing programs have strict limits, such as not going over a certain number of steps per day or not doing an activity for longer than a set amount of minutes.
Don't get me wrong, stopping the "push crash cycle" (pushing yourself to exhaustion and then not being able to do anything and then repeating again) is important in recovery and being able to stabilise and find a "baseline" to build from can be helpful in the initial stages of recovery.
However, at a certain point, pacing can actually hinder your progress as it can cause fear of activity.
If you have been told/have told yourself that you can only do 3000 steps and then you get symptoms- that is what you will experience. The brain has "predictive coding" (or conditioning) where if it expects a certain outcome, it will generate that.
The concept of pacing feeds into the fear of over-doing it (a very real and understandable fear when people have experienced pushing themselves and it ending in a flare-up / crash). But this trains the brain to fear activity and view it as dangerous.
Therefore, when you do an activity that you feel is "outside of your pacing baseline", your survival brain will fire off danger alarm signals for the perceived threat of over-exertion, triggering the nervous system to produce symptoms (this all happens subconsciously without your awarness of course).
So what to do instead?
I tell my clients to pace their nervous system, NOT their physical activity. When we have an understanding of the nervous system and awareness of what state we are in, we can tune into when to "go" and when to "slow" and what actions to take in different situations- not based on how much activity we have done, but instead on how safe our nervous system feels.
What are your thoughts on pacing? 👇
@embodiedselfhealing
