Pacing myself

It’s a sunny Sunday morning, and I wake up at 9ish ready to start the day. Glancing at my Garmin, it says I’ve had 7.8 hours of good sleep. Let’s go! Before I get going, I check my Body Battery, 38% full. Let’s rest! The day before, I was in Manchester doing portraits for the LGBT Foundation, which was lovely but required a drive there and back and the energy to get good portraits of 30 different people. That day left me with a Body Battery of 5%.

I knew this day was coming and on Friday I rested on the couch playing video games and cuddling my cat. Unfortunately I awoke on Saturday to a Body Battery of 52%. It had only increased by 27% overnight. The watch told me that I about 7 hours sleep, but it wasn’t a good 7 hours of sleep. Apparently I was stressed before sleeping which contributed to the poor nights sleep, which of course I would be as I needed a good nights sleep.

Before I had this watch I tried to get 6-8 hours sleep, but with this new data it’s asking me to think about the factors that will affect the quality of sleep. Maybe I do need to read before bed instead of watch TV, or do some sketching or listen to music. Some sleep tweaks are needed.

Tracking these metrics is fascinating, but it’s strange to think about how I need to work at resting. Two days before a shoot, I need to have a restful evening and a good night’s sleep. One day before, I need to rest all day so I can recover enough energy to do the job on the day. Throughout the day, I need to pace myself as I need enough energy to get home. When I’m back home, more rest as I need the energy to edit the photos either later that day or the following day.

It’s a lot. Before I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I only had to deal with anxiety, depression, autistic overthinking and ADHD distractions and the occasional migraine. Now I have to deal with pacing to avoid fatigue on top of all that, which is tiring in itself. At least I can think about this and plan for it. Assuming the Body Battery feature isn't just marketing. Let’s go, for a bit, then let's rest.

Links

• Transcestry celebrates a decade of community collecting at The Museum of Transology. In its largest exhibition to date, the museum reaffirms its mission to defy the erasure of trans, non-binary and intersex lives from history with a show-stopping collection of hundreds of objects from the community.
• Turner Prize nominates neurodiverse and refugee artists. The four artists in the running for this year's prestigious art award are revealed.
• My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s. It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving cost-performance ratios and gradually dropping costs and new material and… etc.
• URGENT ACTION: Write to your MP to protest the Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC's proposals to impose draconian bans on trans people from single-sex spaces.. The trans community is facing a major crisis in the UK after the Supreme Court ruled last week that for the purposes of The Equality Act 2010 sex should be classified as biological (i.e. as recorded at birth).
• Guest blog: What being a feminist man means to me. Do you identify as a feminist man? Today's guest blogger talks about what the term means to him and how he aims to live up to the goal of being feminist.
• The Best Photo Stories of 2024: LGBTQ+ Projects | AnOther. As the year draws to a close, we look back at some of the most powerful photo stories published on AnOther, which shine a light on queer individuals, communities and creativity