Finding the right pace

This is an issue that I return to again and again, and I know I'm not alone in this. Throughout our lives we all need to adjust our pace of living from time to time, and mostly it's something we can do without too much thought. We find ourselves doing less when we have flu, more when we have children to look after, we make adjustments for holidays, visits from friends and families, deadlines. Sometimes life circumstances bring about less welcome changes - we have too much to do and get stressed and exhausted, or find ourselves with too little to do and become dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Then we have to think a bit more about finding our way back to a pace of life that feels more natural.

For those of us with conditions which fluctuate, where our energy levels vary more frequently and extremely, the art of pacing ourselves becomes an issue that we have to give a lot more attention. For example, I have a number of friends with fibromyalgia whose energy and pain levels vary unpredictably and dictate that their pace of life has to slow down, and then speed up a little when symptoms recede - not too much though, or those symptoms are back again. In my case, with bipolar, my activity levels can vary hugely. When I'm low I do little more than lie in bed most of the time. When I'm high I do very little staying still. When I'm somewhere in between I find it very difficult to find a balanced pace.

When I'm low I know I need to try to do a bit more than feels comfortable. Sometimes this is because of something very basic, such as having been thirsty for hours and needing to get myself down to the kitchen to get a drink. It doesn't sound much but that can be quite a big change in pace. Sometimes it means making the effort to leave the house most days, see friends regularly, put washing in the machine. It's tricky because too little activity exacerbates the depression but too much is overwhelming and that can exacerbate it too. It's very hard to form opinions about how much activity is right because what's right on one day might be wrong the next.

When I'm high the opposite applies. They say when you're low do more, when you're high do less, but doing less is very hard. 3am seems about the right time to get up and start the day - if I've gone to bed yet - and doing several things at once seems the best way to go about it. At these times I think it's a good thing that I smoke because it means that I do actually sit down for 5 minutes every couple of hours. It's difficult to focus on finding the right pace when high because pacing yourself is sensible and sensible things are boring. Boring things are beneath my notice because I am doing much more important and exciting things with my time!

When my mood is more stable there is more scope and motivation for finding the right pace, not least because it's one of the main ways to try to prevent relapse. But how is it done? This week, for example, I started to feel a bit better on Wednesday. It was quite a novelty to want to do things and have energy to carry them out. For 3 days I kept myself quite busy, relative to what I've been doing of late. By Friday evening I was crying with exhaustion and had to admit that although the will was there, the stamina was not. 10 weeks in bed really does for your fitness levels and I hadn't taken that into account. So, back to bed for most of the weekend. Clearly I need to take a more gradual approach, but I'm not sure what that involves and how long it will be the case. Sometimes I attempt this by making structured plans, other times I play it by ear. Sometimes I don't trust my judgement, and sometimes I have good cause not to. Sometimes I rebel because I don't want to have to think about it. Very occasionally, I get close to getting it right - for awhile.