M5 : Lesson 8: Pacing & Preventing Relapses
Transcript
I’ll do 5 less than 8 pacing. Pacing your energy output. 1 of the most difficult aspects of healing from chronic illness is to gain discernment on pacing and managing the despair that we can have when we experience a setback. So on this module, I want to speak to this and give you a few pointers that help me and my experience. Remember that after we have had activity or after excitement, we need to learn to rest.
And ramp down our adrenaline in cortisol. We need to teach our nervous system to ride the polyvagal wave of energized and rest. This image. Try to remember this image through the day after you’ve had an upswinging activity. Rest and then have some more activity and then rest and it really should be a wave like pattern through the day.
Often, we’ll learn a new routine or a new tool that gets us excited and it takes energy and that tools sometimes will cause an energy burst to happen, and we think, oh, wow. We have more energy now. Let’s just keep going and do all the things that we haven’t been doing while we been feeling so ill. It happened to me a lot, and I remember I’d get moments of relief. And, yeah, this feeling good.
And so that day, I felt like I was a wild horse that had been set free, and I would just literally run myself ragged trying to do everything, and then end up back in bed the next stay for several days, and it was so frustrating. So throughout your day, think of your energy output, but also, recognize you need to rest and refill your tank. Doing nothing is just as important as doing these tools. This is where your body learns to ride the wave of activity and calm activity and calm, but you have to teach your body often with very small doses of activity at first. Maybe small doses of watching these videos or doing your tools, and then rest depending on where you’re at and your process.
I had to learn how to say my say to myself. I’ve done enough now. I can rest. I’ll return to my tasks or whatever after I recharge. There’s a lot of really fancy structured charts to learn pacing and incremental training and things like that.
But I’m just gonna give you a simple guideline. Does your day look like this? Up and down. That’s what it needs to look like. That is the same as that pendulation of contract, relax, So taking mindful moments of nothingness and stillness while feeling safe and supported in connection is part of your practice.
And I can’t give each of you an exact guideline personally. So you’re gonna have to discern that for yourself. And this is where maybe having a one on one mentor is vital for you to help you figure that out. I personally had a mentor to help me learn my pacing so that I could, you know, slowly get my endurance back in an appropriate way. Also, remember, you can ask on the forum for ideas for other people to help with your pacing situation.
There’s a lot of people here to help give you some input. Next, I’ll go over some general guidelines for pacing. The following are some basic tips. Try to move 15 to 20% slower in all of your activity. This is a somatic practice.
And it’s interesting, but when you try to move just a little slower, it actually has a huge impact on your stress response. It helps to pull you out of sympathetic. It sends the message that we don’t need to rush And that means don’t rush through this material either or it will backfire. 2nd, do one thing at a time. With very focused intention.
Really focus on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and just be present. Also, taking micro breaks to defocus your gaze and relax your mind, which is part of why we did the eye gaze Focus, defocus. It does the same thing for the nervous system. This is why I recommend maybe just taking some time and looking at the horizon and just relaxing. Also, please look for the dopamine draining activities in your life and eliminate them.
For example, Get off social media. It is a huge dopamine drain. And instead, connect with groups that maybe you really resonate with or with people who are on a similar journey rather than having random scattered input on a variety of topics, You’re not gonna get nervous system regulation watching people’s reels all day. And celebrate the winds. All of them that you’ve had even if a dip occurred afterwards.
Remind your brain that you have had changed. You have had relief. You’ve had 6 sass and that if you have a dip, it’s temporary just like it was in the past. And mostly, just try to be consistent right now with a little bit of movement every day rather than trying to walk as much as you can for 1 or 2 days in the row and then crash and then not walking for, like, a week or 2. It is better to walk for, I don’t know, 5 minutes a day, every day, rather than just walking three times a week for 20 minutes.
That daily routine helps to teach your brain that it’s safe to move and it will help you overall to get more capacity in the long run. Up next is module 9, where we’ll have a summary, and we’ll also after that, have an overview of all of the practice that you’ve learned so far.