Pacing, Activity Diary and Spoon Theory
- Marie Pham
- Apr 2
- 2 min read
If you are experiencing good and bad days, it’s very likely to are experiencing a boom and bust cycle. For more information on boom/bust patterns, have a read:
An activity diary can be helpful for setting up a snapshot of your week and to understand how things can influence your day. A way to help understand this is using “spoon theory”.Spoon theory is the idea that we have a certain number of spoons (energy or tolerance) in a day. Some days are more or less than others and this can depend on whether you had a good night sleep, or you’ve done something rewarding which can help boost your spoons.With the number of spoons you start with in the day, you want to start to notice how many spoons you spend on certain tasks or activities. For example, you might start with 100 spoons, and it takes 10 spoons to make breakfast, 20 spoons to walk the dog, 40 spoons to do 20 minutes of vacuuming, and 30 spoons going to an appointment. Before you know it you have spent all your spoons for the day.Without realising you may be spending all your spoons and this will impact on how you feel the next day. If you have a number of days in a row of spending spoons, this can lead to a flare up.
To learn more about flare up management:
An activity diary can help with understanding how you spend your spoons and how it affects you. Tracking this for a week or two can help with problem solving and modifying
your routine to create a baseline of what you can confidently manage.This will help to smooth out the boom/bust cycle and reduce flare up intensity, duration and frequency in the long term. This also creates a stable base to start introducing new exercises and activities without going into negative spoons.Another thing you can start to add to your diary if this is helpful is to use the traffic light system for your activities. Colour coding your tasks can help you see what the impact of your activities and tasks are in a day. The following is a description of the traffic light system:
Green: Activities that feel easy and manageable
·Yellow: Activities that add some strain but are still okay
Red: Activities that are a big challenge and may increase painSpeak to your pain coach to see what would be the best tools for you with pacing and activity tracking. Everyone is different and it’s working out what would be the best fit and time to try this strategy.
Please see below Marie's activity diaries:
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