How to Manage Your Energy When You Have Chronic Fatigue Symptoms
Not enough people understand the chronic part of chronic fatigue symptoms, let alone know how to help you manage them. By the end of this video, you'll have a concrete framework for understanding how much capacity you have so you can finally start accommodating and caring for yourself properly.
Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.
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So who am I to talk about this topic? I have multiple chronic illnesses including POTS and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and have had chronic fatigue symptoms since I was 14 years old. In fact, the day I wrote the script for this video, I could only do so after taking a long nap. (For reference, my body tends to be evil and not let me nap even though I desperately need as much sleep as I could get. Thanks dysautonomia.) And had to lie on my side and write by hand on my iPad because sitting up enough to type was out of the question.
Now it's your turn to learn how I relate to my capacity and I am so excited 'cause it has been such a helpful framework for myself and my clients.
So this framework is what I like to call, "The Three Gas Tanks." Unlike spoon theory and spoonie terminology which simply applies a blanket understanding of energy that you have available. (For example, an able-bodied person has like 30 spoons at their disposal at the beginning of the day, whereas someone with chronic illness, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, those kinds of things starts out with maybe like five spoons at the beginning of the day, and they spend two of them on a shower, and then all that they've got is three left.) That can be a really helpful model to understand the distinction between able-bodied capacity versus disabled body capacity. I have found, however, that being more granular about the energy available to me, and my clients have found this as well, has been so helpful.
I break energy and capacity down into three different gas tanks. If you were a car, you've got three different gas tanks and each one has a different type of fuel. The first gas tank is the physical gas tank. How much energy do you have to accomplish physical tasks? The second gas tank is the cognitive gas tank. How much energy do you have available to you to accomplish cognitive tasks? (And this is a really important gas tank for those of us who have mental illness and or neurodivergence.) Then the last gas tank is the emotional gas tank. How much capacity do you have to experience emotional things and/or perform emotional labor? This is another gas tank that is so important for those of us with neurodivergence, or a history of trauma or mental health issues. Being able to distinguish between these three different gas tanks is so helpful.
What I do with my clients inside of my program, "The Action Navigator" is every day in our private Discord community, I invite them all to check in. And checking in means two things. One, checking in with your gas tanks. And you actually share how full or not full your gas tanks are. And then the next step is to share which of the Discord channels you're gonna participate in that day to care for yourself and accomplish the things you want and/or need to accomplish. But that first part, remembering to check in with your gas tanks at the beginning and end of every day can be so amazing, 'cause you start to see much more nuanced patterns in how your capacity changes over time and what contributes to you having more capacity versus what contributes to you having less capacity.
So, if we break this down by gas tank, I usually use one emoji, two emojis, or three emojis for a gas tank, and I use the fuel pump if it's completely empty ('cause some days you wake up and a guest tank just, it just ain't there and that's fine). But if I have just like one battery emoji today that means it's gonna be mostly a sofa day. I'm not gonna be doing much besides my bare minimum physical movement to go to the bathroom, make myself breakfast, to do my one chore in the morning. That's about it. But if I have two in my tank, that means I have more availability to do physical stuff and I might do a VR game. I might do more chores. (My life is pretty boring on the physical front right now.)
Mainly, I try to save my physical spoons so I can go out dancing if and when I feel safe.
Cognitively it's the difference between, okay, all I can do today is basic administrative tasks in my business versus having two or three brain emojis in my gas tank. That's when I can do my best coaching work with my clients and that's when I can do my best content creation for this business. If I am on a low brain day, it makes it so much harder for me to do cognitively intense work.
And then, emotionally (this one I find really invaluable), it's like, do I have the capacity emotionally to be triggered? So as someone who has a lot of trauma, I get easily triggered a lot. And I also get overstimulated really easily, which is also related to the cognitive gas tank. But if I'm really low on gas in my emotional tank, that's gonna dictate how I behave socially that day. It will dictate who I feel capable of talking to. It will dictate what media I am capable of consuming, and it makes it so much easier to maintain boundaries to protect myself and care for myself when I'm really aware of how much capacity I have for handling harder things. And so that's why the emotional gas tank, and by proxy the cognitive gas tank, can be so important to understand.
So this leads me to my next really important point. These three gas tanks are not mutually exclusive and they affect each other.
For example, if you are someone who feels really good after spending an afternoon with your best friend, that is often the kind of experience where you feel like you have more physical energy afterwards than you did before. So, let's say you go into that encounter with your best friend and you've got like one battery bar in your physical gas tank, and you've maybe got like two heart bars in your emotional gas tank. And then at the end, because you had such a wonderful time with your best friend, your heart tank is overflowing. You feel so rejuvenated emotionally that that capacity tends to spill over into the physical gas tank, right?
And then for those of us who experience social encounters differently, we find social encounters draining. We may have gone into a social encounter with a fair amount of physical energy and enough emotional energy to handle that encounter. But afterwards, we may feel completely drained. So, draining out the emotional gas tank, it keeps going and it pulls from the physical gas tank too.
So understanding how your three gas tanks relate to each other can be transformative. It suddenly gives you more control over getting some precious spoons back. And that's what we're gonna talk about next.
Now that you understand the concept of the three gas tanks, comment below and tell me if you had an aha moment about how your gas tanks tend to relate to each other. Go ahead and just type "aha" in the comments.
When coaching my clients, I often talk about the idea that awareness and understanding must come before problem solving and action. Now that you have an understanding of the three gas tanks, you're well on your way to having the awareness and understanding part down. I definitely recommend keeping the three gas tanks top of mind for the next few days or weeks in order to come to a deeper understanding of how your gas tanks tend to behave and relate to one another. That being said, this framework can provide ahas years from now, too. So don't just do it for a couple of weeks.
At last we have arrived at the point of this video: how to manage your energy as someone with chronic fatigue symptoms. Because getting medical support to improve your symptoms is incredibly difficult to access for so many of us, and even if we do have the privilege of that access it doesn't mean that the medical solutions even exist for our conditions yet, I want to highlight the things in your life that you do have personal control over so you can start improving your quality of life right now.
How do we do that? Accommodate, accommodate, accommodate.
By discovering where we're spending more gas from our tanks than we need to (or spoons for those of you who love spoonie terminology) we can have more gas available to us to spend on things that are difficult or impossible to change but are still important and meaningful to us.
For example, in my special interest hobby life. I'm a West Coast swing dancer and instructor. It's a spoon heavy activity, but it means so so much to me and I refuse to give it up. I save as many spoons as I can elsewhere in my life so I can spend them on dancing.
So how do we save spoons in the first place? We accommodate ourselves to make certain activities less taxing. Here's a quick workflow for determining how best to accommodate yourself.
One, decide which activities in your life tax you the most. Two, for each activity, which gas tanks get drained the most? Three, for each activity, how can you change, adapt, or accommodate yourself to spend less gas from that tank?
For inspiration, here are some of my and my clients' favorite accommodations.
Sit down as much as possible. Working from bed or on the floor instead of sitting at a desk is transformational for me. A lot of my clients benefit from having a shower chair. You can sit down while brushing your teeth. (And by the way you can watch TikTok while brushing your teeth. I do that and I love it.) You can sit down while doing the dishes. You can sit down while folding your clothes. Sit down!
Other accommodations include noise-cancelling headphones, noise blocking earplugs, such as the Loop brand earplugs. I love mine. Using a grocery delivery service like Instacart. Having a meal box delivery service such as Hello Fresh.
Another simple but powerful one is keep shelf-stable food and beverages in your bedside table so you can eat breakfast or snack without having to get out of bed. Not all accommodations involve a financial investment. They can (like having tools or services that help you earn the spoons back), but if that is something that is not available to you, I invite you to really think critically about how you can change or adapt certain activities to reduce how taxing they are for you.
For example, one of my favorite TikTokers, KC Davis (AKA @domesticblisters), just simply stopped folding clean laundry and she has a communal closet where her, her partner, and their children all have one closet. So all she has to do to put laundry away is take the laundry up to that room, sit on the floor, and toss the clean clothes (without folding them) into everybody's respective drawers or bins. That's the kind of out-of-the-box thinking I'm inviting you to do if you are someone who does not have financial means right now to add tools and/or services to your life.
And then, beyond simply accommodating yourself, is considering how your three gas tanks relate to each other. Like the example I was giving earlier, if you are someone who benefits so much from socializing with a good friend that it overflows into your physical gas tank, that's something you can take advantage of. If you are in a rut, if you're burned out, if you could really use some more spoons in your physical gas tank, arrange time to hang out with your best friend and you'll come out of that with more physical energy than you went into it.
This is why understanding the three gas tanks and how they relate to each other for you can be transformational to help you make better decisions to care for yourself in a compassionate way. They can give you more control than you had before over your capacity over time.
Now you have a really powerful framework for managing your energy as someone with chronic fatigue symptoms. Students in my Action Navigator program have access to an activity I call "Spoon Hunting" that guides them step by step through this process, but on steroids, for finding areas of their life where they can benefit the most from accommodations and figure out how to best accommodate themselves in those activities. So if you want to take an even deeper dive into this work, use this link to book a Zoom call with me to learn more about my signature course. It's packed to the brim with tools and techniques for mastering your time, getting organized and offering yourself radical compassion as a neurospicy spoony. I can't wait to meet you!
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I'll be back in two weeks with another video. See you then. Bye.