Simple everyday tasks are often difficult when you live with chronic pain and enjoying life might seem impossible. However, if you can pace yourself, the impossible might become possible. Your pain might stay under better control and allow you to do more.
Pacing Yourself Won’t Cure Pain But it Can Make it More Manageable
Living with chronic pain can feel overwhelming. It can stop us in our tracks or linger in the background, constantly influencing our lives. But pain isn’t the only issue. It consumes so much of our energy and brings along a hefty dose of fatigue.
Pain and fatigue can prevent us from doing the things we’d like to do, which is incredibly frustrating. But if we pace ourselves, we might manage to do more. Pacing doesn’t magically cure the pain, but it can make it more manageable.
It Sounds So Simple, But It’s Not
Pacing might sound straightforward, but it’s not always easy.
It’s easy to forget to pace ourselves. It’s easy to ignore the pain and push boundaries. And it’s so easy to think, “I’ll just keep going for another few minutes.” I’ve been there, done it, and have worn that t-shirt far too often.
Even after many years of practice, I’m still not great at it. I always want to do more than I’m capable of. On really bad days, I manage fine—simply because I have no other option. But on better days, I struggle to pace myself. I push too hard, do too much, and turn that better day into a bad one.
I often hear my husband saying, “Pace yourself, Liz. Pace yourself.” Common sense also tells me to pace myself. But when I’m in the middle of something, a stubborn streak in my brain tells me to keep going. Before long, I hear my pain screaming at me, but I try to block it out. Instead of listening to what it’s telling me, I fight against it. I keep going until my pain takes over so much that I can hardly walk to my bed. Then I hear my husband’s voice saying, “You should have listened.”
It’s Difficult to Pace Yourself When Your Mind Tells You to Keep Going
I’m sure I’m not alone. No matter how well you accept your situation, most people still try to do more than they’re capable of. We don’t want pain to constrain us. But if we constantly fight against it, it will just constrain us all the more.
So, instead of fighting, we take one small step at a time. Our goals might feel far away, but if we listen to our bodies and pace ourselves, we can keep moving forward. Step by step, we’ll get there—because pacing wisely is how we win the race and make life a little bit easier.
How to Pace Yourself – In Simple Steps
When you pace yourself, it might feel as though you’re doing less, but you’ll probably manage to achieve more in the long term. Activities, chores, or hobbies will take longer, but there’s more chance of you completing them rather than being forced to stop due to your pain.
Hopefully, the following pointers might help you to pace yourself.
1. Take Rest Breaks
You can’t pace if you don’t rest.
Resting isn’t being lazy—it’s helping you to live a better life. Taking a break, whether you have a seat for twenty minutes or lie down in bed for a couple of hours, can allow you to do more later. A rest break can mean napping, or it can mean anything that isn’t taxing on your body or mind. A short walk to stretch your legs can work, as can sitting down with a cuppa, reading, playing a game, or chatting to a friend. Or you could just sit down, relax, and breathe.
2. Be Realistic
Be realistic about your limitations.
You know your pain better than anyone. You know exactly how it affects you. You know when it’s at its worst and when it’s at a more manageable level. You’ll also know roughly how much time it takes before it screams at you when you’re active.
Underestimate what you’re capable of rather than the opposite, so that you don’t do more than your pain will allow. Don’t try to overachieve because your pain will complain if you do.
Remember that there are seven days in a week and 52 weeks in a year, so everything doesn’t need to be crammed into one day.
3. Break Everything Down Into Segments
Break tasks, chores and hobbies into small manageable segments.
It might feel as though you’re not going to achieve much, but in the long term, you will achieve more by doing this.
For example, if you’re wanting to cook a special meal, don’t leave it until the last minute and then try to do everything at once. If you do that, you’ll be in agony and will probably be in too much pain to enjoy the food. Instead, start early in the day by gathering and then preparing the ingredients. Peel the potatoes and put them into cold water, then take a rest. Chop the carrots, then take a rest. Keep doing small amounts throughout the day so that by dinner time, you only have to heat the meal, then serve.to heat the meal, then serve.
4. Stop BEFORE Your Pain Stops You
Try to pre-empt your pain and stop before it gets worse.
If you think that your pain is likely to get worse after 30 minutes of activity, stop after 25 minutes. That means you stop before your pain gets worse. You can rest, then possibly do more later. If you push your boundaries, your pain might be out of control and it will take longer to recover.
5. Start the Day as You Mean to Go On
Get into the habit of pacing yourself throughout the day.
Pacing yourself has to start as soon as you wake and then you have to continue throughout the whole day, not just for a set activity. Take your time waking up and getting moving in the morning. If you rush the first part of the day, you might find you’ll crash well before lunchtime.
6. Prioritise
Try to work out what’s most important to you.
Some chores might need to be done every day like food preparation, personal care, and some basic household chores. Other chores might need to be done but can wait until you’re more able to do them. Cut corners where you can, accept help, and when you’re having a bad day, ditch any chores that aren’t essential.
Don’t just focus on chores. It’s important to prioritise time for the things you’d like to do too, like hobbies, visiting friends, and self-care.
Also, look ahead. Do you have appointments or special occasions throughout the week? Take them into consideration when making your plan. What you do today might affect you tomorrow. Therefore, you might need to have days when you do nothing but rest so that you’re able to attend your appointments and be fit to enjoy a celebration.
For most people with chronic pain, payback pain is real. So plan for quiet, restful days after busy, active days.
7. Set a Timer
Set a timer so you don’t overdo it.
Time disappears fast so set an alarm clock or a timer. And stop as soon as it goes off, stop what you’re doing and take a break.
Don’t ignore it and don’t put your timer on snooze mode to give yourself an extra ten minutes. Those extra ten minutes could mean you will pay for it later.
9. Accept the Unpredictability Factor
Chronic pain is often unpredictable so schedules don’t always go according to plan.
Accept that your plans might need to change sometimes. Some mornings you wake up, and you just know that it’s going to be “one of those days.” And sometimes pain can just kick in for no reason, and when it does, you need to listen to it. You are allowed to put a score through anything on your to-do list and rearrange it for another day. If you start an activity but your pain kicks in before your timer goes off, you should stop. Always listen to your body and just stop.
Never Feel Guilty for Pacing Yourself
You live with a debilitating condition, so never feel guilty for pacing yourself. Those rest breaks are important. You’re not being lazy. You’re being kind to yourself by doing what’s right for you. You might feel that taking so many breaks will stop you from reaching your goal, but in the long term, they will allow you to do more, not less.
And don’t beat yourself up if you get it wrong and overdo it. You’re human. It happens. It’s not a failure. It’s just a lesson. And it comes with a t-shirt just like many I have in my wardrobe…
Do you manage to pace yourself successfully? Or are you a little bit like me and find yourself doing too much and then struggling? If you are, I hope this post might help you.
Thank you so much for reading.
If this post resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
And feel free to share it with your friends or support groups.
Take care,
Liz.
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Pace to win the race
Great post. The pacing that I find most difficult is on a good day. I know I dhoildn’t but I push myself to get more things done, thinking that tomorrow I might not be able to do it. Of course, then tomorrow comes and having done too much on a good day, I pay for it. Note that a “good day” is relative. Not usually good by anyone else’s standards. LOL
Thanks for commenting, Cate. That’s exactly how it goes. It’s difficult to pace on those “good” days which is why we probably don’t have two good days in a row. And yes, I know exactly what you mean by a good day.
While I obviously wish you could always heed your own great advice, Liz, it’s almost heartening in a horrible way to know it’s not just me that can’t always do it. I found pacing ridiculously frustrating at first, then I got the hang of it a bit. But then the past few years have been manic and the window of time where I’m just about functional for the basics gets smaller and smaller. Of course then we feel we have to cram more in when we can. Even when there’s not lots of do-list stuff to do, it’s hard enough keeping up with lower level day to day things.
“I’ll just keep going for another few minutes” is something I say a lot too! But boy do we pay for it afterwards, and I think it can hinder us for longer that way compared to if we had paced it all out, and generously, the first time around. It’s not easy but it’s definitely worth it.
An excellent post & very good tips!
Caz xx
Oh, you’re definitely not the only one, Caz!! I’ve been doing this for so long that I really should know better, but no, I push my boundaries far too often. It’s not easy and if anyone ever says it is, I reckon they’d be telling little porkies lol. I will be trying very hard to take my own advice from this post.
Thanks for commenting.
Great tips! One of the strategies that helped me when I was severely fatigued was to plan how to make any task more efficient so that I could limit how much energy I needed to spend. It helped me identify some short cuts or find other ways of accomplishing what I needed to do. I really like the idea of setting a timer to avoid pushing ourselves too far.