This post is part of the Pacing Series

Last year, when I was diagnosed with autism, I started exploring the concept of autistic burnout, and part of that was learning about pacing systems. If you’re anything like I was a year ago, you’re probably thinking, “What the fuck is a pacing system?” I’m going to do a little mini-series on what I’ve learned so far about pacing systems, how I have applied pacing in my life, how it has helped, and what’s working for me right now. What works for me is not going to work for everybody. What works for me may not work for me a year from now. Let this series serve as a starting point for you to explore this idea further on your own.

Let’s Start With the Why

I first learned about pacing through a therapist who mentioned the Spoons Theory. The spoons theory (created by Christine Miserandino attempting to explain living with chronic illness) says that we wake up with a set number of spoons every day, and every task that we complete costs us a certain number of spoons. When we’re out of spoons, we’re basically done for the day. Some of us wake up in the morning with far fewer spoons than other people do. That’s just a fact of the life that we live.

Now, if spoons aren’t your thing, in my research, I did hear about fuck bucks (same concept): you wake up with a certain number of fuck bucks for any given day, and once you’ve given all your fucks away, you have none left to give.

Two of the main purposes of a pacing system are to stop the boom and bust cycle that we can experience, and also to provide a practical, tangible way to start healing internalized ableism.

If you’re not familiar, the boom and bust cycle is that cycle that occurs when we have a good day and we’re feeling pretty good. We figure we need to do everything that we didn’t get done on those days when we weren’t feeling particularly great, and we overdo so much that we end up crashing and having a long series of rough days. We finally feel good again and once again try to “catch up” and end up crashing again.

It’s important to note that, for a lot of people, that crash doesn’t occur until about 2 days after they have overextended themselves. Sometimes it’s really hard to put those two pieces together because we overdid on a Monday, Tuesday maybe we were fine, and Wednesday we crash. It’s hard to connect cause and effect.

Internalized ableism is that small voice inside of us that says that we “should” be able to do something. We “should” be able to clean our house top to bottom. We “should” be able to work an 8-hour day and then go to our kids’ concert without any ill effects. We “should” be able to do all of these things that other people who are not neurodivergent or who are not dealing with a mental illness are able to do.

Tracking our energy allows us to instead look the reality of our current circumstances, rather than comparing ourselves to others and deciding we’re failing. I’m sure I’m not the only one that gets to the end of the day and fails to realize I accomplished a lot that day. Or gets to the end of the day and fails to realize that, even though I didn’t accomplish much productivity-wise, I did regulate my emotions while in severe pain.

Pacing helps us be intentional about checking in with our body and determining how many spoons or energy units we’re using on a task, and then budget that according to our baseline or perceived daily allowance. We’ll go into these concepts of baseline and perceived daily allowance in more detail when we get to the how next week.

If you have a pacing system that works for you, please share it below so that our other readers can get ideas. Also, if you have specific questions about pacing, throw those in the comments below as well. I would love to have your feedback on what specifically you’re needing in your life!

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Resources

Neurodivergent Insights - Dr Megan Anna Neff wrote a book that I founds extremely helpful called The Autistic Burnout Workbook - highly recommend. She’s also here on Substack (the link above) and has a great podcast linked below.

Divergent Conversations - A podcast featuring Patrick Casale and Dr Megan Anna Neff - both of whom are neurodivergent. The podcast has so much information about living with neurodivergence and it’s fun to listen to. Linked above, but you can also find it on Spotify, etc.

a close up of pillows on a bed — Photo by Stockholm Paris Studio on Unsplash

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