Pacing not pushing

My #YearlyTheme for 2025 is “Keep pushing.” I’ve kept that in mind throughout the year, but as each day passed it felt harder and harder to do. How do you “keep pushing” when your body reacts negatively to exertion? For people with ME/CFS or Long Covid exercise harms the body. You can’t “keep pushing”.

The more I read the more I learnt about pacing. Work a bit. Rest. Work a bit. Rest. Easy to do if you’re at a desk, but often my day is 8 hours continuously on my feet with a brief snack for lunch between locations. The places I go are interesting and I love being commissioned, but the way I work is now harming me. Can I tell a client I need breaks? Will they go with someone healthier? If they did, fair enough as it’s their money and project, but I’ll lose work.

For now, I’m pacing when I can. Recovery days are essential. Carrying a water bottle is also essential. Slowing down is now too, essential. But how do I know if I’m going too fast? Usually, my body will crash and I will feel like I’ve just run 15 miles. That’s the only time I’ve felt something like Post Exertional Malaise, whereby the post-workout tiredness is delayed and disproportional to the workout. Pacing is meant to help you avoid triggering this issue, but you need to monitor your heart rate to do so.

While my Apple Watch can monitor my heart rate, it doesn’t do it enough to provide the data needed to avoid crashing. Some apps try to help, like Welltory or Stress Watch, but without real-time data, they can’t help. I would get an alert that 2 hours ago I was stressed and needed to rest. That information needs to be immediate. Alternatively, for around £65 and a monthly subscription you can get a heart rate monitor from Visible that will sync with your phone and send the data to them for analysis. It’s designed with ME/CFS and Long Covid people in mind. £15/month though. I couldn’t afford that.

So I bought a Garmin. The cheapest model with the Body Battery feature, and luckily 50% off. A Vivosmart 5. After reading a lot of ME/CFS posts about how useful it was I needed to try it. At £130 the device is expensive for one feature, which I’ll come to in a moment. At £67 it was, still expensive, but just about justifiable. When my Apple Watch battery makes the device unusable I will question whether to get a proper watch Garmin instead.

The Body Battery feature works by continuously analysing combinations of heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV) and movement data while you wear your device. The goal of this analysis is to identify meaningful physiological states and to describe the impact they have on your body’s energy levels.

While the Apple Watch can provide this data, it doesn’t offer anything like the Garmin Body Battery feature for people with ME/CFS. I can glance at my wrist and see if I’m resting or stressed. The graphs are helping me learn what stress is. After a large meal, the data highlighted how that was the most stress I put on my body that day. A big treat meal after a long commission could be bad in ways I’d never considered. While I would feel like I’m resting by sitting down to eat, the actual food processing inside me would keep me stressed and increase my chances of crashing. Data is fascinating. My hope is I can use it to better pace myself before my ADHD gets bored with the new toy. Small changes, big wins. Hopefully.

2025, Year of keep pushing/pacing. Push pace. This is why I prefer Yearly Themes over New Year Resolutions. They’re open to reinterpretation and exploration. There is no guilt-triggering depression caused by failure because you do not fail, you explore. I will push myself when I can, in the ways that I can, and aim to pace myself. Hopefully, the Garmin helps. It’s my illness tracker. Maybe the Apple Watch will one day add features for chronic illness tracking and ways of using the decade of data it has on me, without an AI doctor being weird. Keep calm, and keep on keeping on.

Links

• Pacing and Management Guides - #MEAction Network. Find #MEAction's original Pacing Guide and Pediatric Pacing and Management Guide for ME/CFS and Long COVID, with translations.
• Life with a Low Battery: Living with ME/CFS (Full Color, with Music) - YouTube. Join Mito, the newest member of the Bateman Horne Center, as she takes you on a journey to understand Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)
• How to use Garmin watch to reduce stress, charge body battery | Phoenix Rising ME/CFS Forums.
• My life with ME/CFS: Life changer - Heart rate monitoring keeps you away from crash level threshold - YouTube.
• How to use a pacing app on a Garmin watch - Many Lemons. Learn how to use the Long COVID pacing app with the Garmin Vivoactive 5 watch, which helps manage energy for those with conditions like M.E/CFS and Long COVID. The post includes instructions for installing and configuring the app, focusing on tracking heart rate to prevent overexertion, and emphasizes the importance of pacing for better health management.
• The Hearing Test | The White Pube. also a review of the Visible app, sort of
• Autism Acceptance Week: What is Autism and What Does Acceptance Look Like?. I was sixteen when the question of whether I could possibly be autistic arose and, at this stage, my understanding of autism was limited.