A good week is a trap and I keep falling into it

Started 25 September 2025 · 8 replies · 422 hearts · read 4.3k times

HattieExeter, UK · 25 September 2025

10 months ago

Exeter. Chronic fatigue plus this, careful pacing, and I want to talk about the thing that makes this circle different from the tiredness conversations elsewhere on the site.

Post-exertional malaise. For anybody reading who does not have it: it means that when I overdo something, the price is not paid that evening. It is paid two days later, and it is not tiredness, it is a whole-body crash where my legs ache and my brain fogs over and I cannot follow a conversation, and it lasts anywhere from a day to a fortnight. The delay is what makes it so hard to learn from, because the cause and the consequence are never in the same room.

Here is my current problem. Since about May I have had noticeably more good hours. I am not going to make claims about why — I will come back to that. But the effect has been that I keep spending them. A good Tuesday arrives and I clean the kitchen properly, or I walk further than I planned because it was pleasant, or I say yes to something on a Saturday. And then Thursday happens.

Three times this summer. Each time I have known perfectly well what I was doing while I was doing it.

What I want to ask the circle is not how to pace — I have had eight years of learning that and I could teach it. It is: how do you handle the psychology of having more capacity than you are allowed to use? Because the pacing I learned when I was very ill was easy in a bleak way. There was nothing to spend. Now there is, and I keep spending it, and I am starting to think that having a bit more is harder to manage than having none.

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RenFacilitatorBristol, UK

Hattie, I hold the movement circles and I want to be very clear about what I am not going to do here, because this is where people like me get it wrong.

I am not going to tell you to build up gradually. Graded increases are the standard advice for deconditioning and they are the wrong tool for post-exertional malaise, and plenty of people with your condition have been made significantly worse by well-meaning people with my qualifications. You know your envelope. I do not.

What I will offer, because you asked about psychology rather than method: the people I have worked with who manage a good spell best are the ones who decide in advance what a good day gets spent on, before the good day arrives. Not a limit — a plan. A good Tuesday is for the thing on the list, and the kitchen is not on the list. It is much easier to hold a decision you made on a bad Sunday than to make one on a good Tuesday.

55me too 12

NemoneLewes, UK

Lewes. Long words, longer walks — and I have had to redefine longer twice since 2022.

The thing that helped me with exactly your problem was stopping calling them good days. I call them capacity days now, which sounds like management jargon and which changed my behaviour immediately, because a good day invites you to enjoy it and a capacity day invites you to allocate it.

Silly. Worked.

51me too 14

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK

I hold sleep-and-fatigue and I mostly want to mark why this is a separate circle, for anyone who has wandered in from over there.

What Hattie is describing is not the fatigue we talk about in my room. Advice that is helpful for shift-worker exhaustion — push through, get up at the same time, keep moving — can be actively harmful here. When the two conversations get mixed, people with post-exertional malaise get told things that hurt them by people who are being kind.

So if you are reading this circle from the outside: read, and be slow to advise.

53me too 9

XanBerlin, DE

Berlin. Queer, thirty-four, sceptical of everything, and long covid since the second wave.

My version of your trap is social. The crashes are invisible and delayed, so when I say no to a Saturday I am declining on the basis of a Thursday nobody will see. Two years of that and I have lost friends who think I have become unreliable, which I have, in the only sense that matters to a calendar.

No solution. Solidarity, and a strong dislike of Saturdays.

57me too 15

BramberSteyning, UK

Steyning. South Downs, chalk, sheep, walking — much less walking than the profile suggests, these days.

What I do is a hard stop rather than a limit. Twenty-five minutes, timer, and I turn round whether or not I feel like it. The turning round while feeling fine is the entire skill and it is miserable and it has cut my crashes by more than half.

48me too 11

PolaGdańsk, PL

Gdańsk, Baltic coast, brisk walks — brisk being relative. I keep a note of what I spent a capacity day on and whether Thursday came. Not a symptom diary, just two lines.

Six months of it and I can see that some things cost me nothing and some things cost me a fortnight, and they are not the ones I would have guessed. Standing still in a kitchen talking to people is worse for me than a slow walk twice as long.

46me too 10

LucasSão Paulo, BR

São Paulo. Late to everything including this. I have no long covid but I have read this circle for a year because my sister has it, and I want to say the thing I have learned as an outsider.

I used to tell her she seemed better. I stopped, because I realised that you seem better is heard as a bill. Now I ask what she has got today.

54me too 8

HattieExeter, UK

Capacity days. Nemone, that has gone straight into use and I have already caught myself allocating one.

Ren, thank you for the paragraph about what you were not going to say. Eight years of people with certificates telling me to build up gradually and you are the first one to name why that is the wrong tool.

And Lucas — I am sending your reply to my mother, with love.

58me too 9