Cymraeg
Pacing is a rehabilitation approach that balances rest and activities in daily life to manage symptoms such as fatigue and chronic pain.
The following advice aims to explain how you can do everyday activities at home, at work and in your hobbies or social life without making fatigue or pain worse.
Fatigue and/or pain can make everyday activities difficult. You may have some good days and others that feel much harder. This can often lead to you doing too much on a good day which then leads to doing even less on a bad day. This is called Boom and Bust and it is what we want to avoid. We need to flatten the curve to give stability to your days.
Most people base what they do and how much they do, on how they feel. Everyone gets tired. It’s expected after a hard day at work or strenuous activity. Tiredness is what you feel when we don’t get enough sleep. Fatigue is different, it’s a feeling of a lack of energy or exhaustion that happens even if you have your full 8 hours and cannot be relieved by sleep. Often people with long term pain or fatigue do more when the pain feels better or they feel less exhausted. This can mean that they often overdo things. This then leads to an increase in pain and/or feeling of fatigue and a decrease in activity.
The following advice aims to help you manage your fatigue/pain so that you can do the activities you want to do without making your symptoms worse.
Fatigue is very different from feeling tired. It is an overwhelming feeling that is not relived by sleep. The level of fatigue you might feel is not in proportion to the activity levels you have done. Fatigue can mean fuzzy head, increased pain and a general feeling of lack of energy.
The danger of having fatigue or pain is that you don’t do enough activity. Too much rest can make you symptoms of fatigue and pain worse. Your muscles will become weaker and in turn cause more pain. This can make it even harder to get moving!
To effectively manage fatigue and chronic pain we need to think about our energy levels.
Each person has a certain amount of energy available to them on each day. We can think of this in terms of energy batteries.
A person who has fatigue or chronic pain will often have a smaller battery of energy which empties quicker and takes longer to re charge. Like a battery on an older mobile phone!
Pacing our activities and our energy expenditure can help us to do more in each day. We need to think of keeping our batteries being topped up and not letting them completely drain or this can lead us into the Boom/Bust cycle again. We need to do things a bit differently.
To help us Pace our activities we can use the 4 P’s;
The 4 P’s help you plan, stop you doing too much and make sure you have energy left at the end of the day.
Planning
Look at what you want and need to do each day. What time of day are you at your best?
Prioritising
What has to be done?
What do you want to do?
Pacing
Break activities into blocks with rest periods.
Permission
Give yourself permission to ask or help and to rest. You can say NO. You do not have to do it perfectly.
Another way you could use the 4P’s is to make a list of all your favourite things to do. You could then give these activities a score out of ten for how much energy they use and another score for how much you enjoy them.
When planning your day, it is important to include some physical activities. It is good for us to keep our bodies moving regularly to ease pain and keep our muscles strong.
Activity can be going to the gym, going for a walk or even moving around your school. These are all types of physical activity.
Make sure you choose an activity you enjoy, one you can have rests during if needed, and remember, something is always better than nothing.
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