Learn how to pace yourself with an activity tracker built for your illness

Get better control of your flares with our free pacing journal.

Choose from an interactive energy tracker with custom, automated visualizations or a PDF pacing journal that can be printed and filled in.

The Importance of Pacing

Pacing goes by many names: “energy pacing”, “spoon theory”, “activity pacing”, “fatigue management”, “energy conservation”, “exertion tracking”, “activity management”... the list goes on.

What all these terms refer to is the concept of taking proactive steps to manage one’s energy levels.

The goal of pacing is to minimize the frequency and intensity of flares and worsening of symptoms that come from "over-doing it".

  • If you live with a complex, chronic illness, you know that when you push yourself too hard, you may pay the price later.

  • You might even end up see-sawing between periods of high energy and extremely low energy, or high pain and low pain.

  • As one study put it, "“The aims of activity pacing include to reduce overactivity–underactivity cycling (fluctuating between high and low levels of activity) in order to improve overall function and reduce the likelihood of exacerbating symptoms.”

To pace yourself is to intentionally do things a bit more slowly than you would naturally do them. By pacing, you can sustainably take on tasks without fear of crashing or burning out. This requires you to take a structured approach to scheduling your activities.

The benefits of pacing are significant:

  • People with ME/CFS in one study reported much more positive results from pacing than from alternative therapies. And anyone with a health condition that often involves pain or fatigue can benefit.

While pacing cannot fully negate chronic illness symptoms, it can help mitigate symptoms. Once you have found your limits, energy tracking provides you with data to help you stay within those limits. Hopefully, you avoid "boom or bust" cycles that drastically exacerbate symptoms. It is important to be aware, however, that even pacing has it limits and no strategy can help you 100% avoid flares.

Most importantly, pacing empowers you to understand your own body, and how energy utilization affects you.

  • You get to decide which activities and tasks to prioritize.

  • You get to decide when and how to expend your precious energy.

Complex, chronic disease can be a huge burden to carry. Pacing is a necessary strategy for minimizing that burden as much as possible.

How To Effectively Pace Yourself

Pacing can be difficult because it requires both proactive effort and sacrifice. Here are some tips to make pacing something that you do habitually and effortlessly.

Plan ahead, and have a system... but be flexible!

  • The only way to make pacing a habit is to create structure around it. Create a system that forces you to schedule major energy-draining activities. The exact setup of the process and tools you use to do this do not matter, so long as you do it consistently

  • When scheduling must-do activities, try to break them down into smaller chunks. And spread them out over a longer period of time as much as you can

  • Of course, you cannot know everything that will happen in advance, so you will need to be flexible when life happens. Include some buffer or slack in your schedule to account for this

Find your baseline

  • Pacing isn’t very effective if you don't know your limits (i.e., your "baseline"). You can schedule your week ahead of time and adhere to the schedule perfectly, but this won't help much if you think your baseline is higher than it actually is

  • You will need to experiment with your schedule to find the activity limits that your body can tolerate. This may take time - be prepared to tinker until you have landed on the activity level that is right for you

  • Throughout, be sure to listen to your body closely. It will tell you when you have pushed too hard!

Build in breaks, and give yourself grace

  • Key to the benefit of pacing is that it lets you purposefully incorporate breaks into your schedule. Alternating between periods of activity and rest provides recovery time. This recovery time is much less than what you would need if you didn't stay within your limits through pacing

  • One way to ensure you actually take enough breaks is to use reminders or alarms

  • However you choose to integrate breaks into your schedule, remember that it will take some getting used to. You won't be able to do everything you want to do, which can be hard to swallow. And it may be challenging to establish your baseline. For these and many other reasons, practicing self-compassion is critical when pacing

Get comfortable saying "no" and delegating

  • Pacing requires tradeoffs. It requires that you take things more slowly than you naturally would and it requires that you carve time out of your schedule to take intentional breaks. This inherently means that you have less time to do all of the things that you want to do. So you will need to ruthlessly prioritize among all your tasks and activities, big and small

  • You'll need to get comfortable saying "no" to things that are not "must-do" to save time and energy for things that are

  • If you are able to, delegate as much as possible to friends, family, neighbors, and vendors

  • And remember, don't push yourself unless you absolutely have to or want to!

Track your activity and symptoms

  • Scheduling your activities ahead of time is one half of pacing. The other is tracking your actual activities

  • This lets you determine how closely to your intended schedule you are coming. And it makes it possible to establish your baseline level of activity and to highlight when you are pushing your limits

  • If you also track symptoms in parallel, you may be able to tie spikes in symptoms to spikes in activity. You can track your symptoms subjectively ("I felt significant pain") and/or objectively (e.g., with a heart rate monitor, or a pedometer)

Don't forget to account for mental activity

  • Let's say you are laying in bed as part of your scheduled break time. But you use the time in bed to catch up on emails and get some online to-dos done. While you intended this as a rest and recovery period, in reality, you are expending mental effort

  • Mental effort can be just as draining as physical effort. Be sure to build mentally strenuous activity into your schedule and to track how often you engage in mentally strenuous activity

Pacing is not about giving up everything you want to do. View it as choosing what you want to spend your time and energy on, instead of having your schedule chosen for you by how much energy you have left. Also remember that pacing is just one tool in the toolkit to manage your condition. Getting good sleep, eating well, and adhering to your prescribed treatment regiment are all equally important tools that you shouldn't neglect.

But pacing can be one of the most effective tools for managing symptoms and taking control of your care journey. To get the most impact from pacing, we recommend using a pacing journal or tool of some sort. A pacing journal gives you the necessary structure to make pacing a consistent part of your routine. Without this kind of structure, it is easy to slip back into the "boom or bust" cycle of flares.

Luckily for you, there are many pacing tools available, including the one we have created and offer for free. You can download a Google Sheets-based version of our pacing journal or the printable PDF version:

How To Use Our Pacing Journal

Step 1: Click link above to copy the Pacing Journal. Rename the file

Step 1 - Create a copy of the Pacing Journal

If you would like a simple PDF version of the Pacing Journal tool, you can download one at this link.

To create your own copy of the interactive Google Sheets version of the tool (which comes with automated data visualizations), follow this link. A page should appear with a blue “Make a copy” button. Click that button to create your own copy of the document.

Once you have successfully created your own copy of the tool:

  1. Rename your copy by clicking on the name of the file and naming it whatever you like.

  2. Make it as easy as possible to find and use the Pacing Journal tool by “starring” the file. Click on the star icon in the top left of the page. Now, next time you want to use these files, you can simply go to your “Starred” folder in Google Drive and they will be there.

  3. Move the file to wherever you want it to live in your Google Drive by clicking the icon to the right of the star icon and selecting a specific folder to place the file in.

  4. Read through the “Instructions” tab to get a feel for how to use the tool

Step 2 - Use the Pacing Journal to track your activity levels

Open the Pacing Journal tool (it is easiest to do this on your desktop computer) if it isn’t already open. Go to the “Main” tab.

  1. Navigate to the section for the current month. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to use the dropdowns in the top left of the section to select the current month and year (you should see a bright red dropdown cell in the top left of a section if you haven’t already selected a month)

  2. Next, find the appropriate sub-section for the given week (there is a Week 1 sub-section, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, and Week 5 in each month)

  3. Next, find the row for the specific day of the week for which you would like to input information. There are two rows for each day - the first of the two rows is for tracking your activity level. Use the dropdown cells to input the activity level for the given day and time (each column in the spreadsheet represents one hour of the day). There are five possible activity levels to choose from:

    1. High Demand

    2. Medium Demand

    3. Low Demand

    4. Rest

    5. Sleep

  4. Lastly, if you have additional notes that you would like to include (e.g., maybe you experienced a particular symptom midday that you would like to make note of) you can make note of them in the row below the activity level tracking row

Step 3 - View your pacing data

To see a visualization of your pacing data, navigate to the third tab in the file (the “Charts” tab). There are four different visualizations in this tab:

  1. The first shows you your activity levels by day for the current week

  2. The second shows you your activity levels by day for the previous week

  3. The third shows you your activity levels by month

  4. The fourth shows you your activity levels by week

You don’t need to do anything to view the data visualizations. The charts will auto-populate as you add data to the “Main” tab. If the charts are empty, then you have not inputted any data yet into the “Main” tab.

If there is a different type of data visualization that you would like to see, let us know at info@chroniushealth.com!

Step 2: Use the Pacing Journal to track your activity levels

Step 3: View your pacing data

Want an even more robust tracker?

The Google Sheets-based pacing journal that is linked to in the page above is helpful, but it can only go so far. To truly make the most of your activity data, your doctor will want that data alongside the rest of your medical history and medical records. This lets them view it in the broader context of your holistic health data.

That’s why, in addition to the Google Sheets-based pacing journal, we created an even more robust tracker. And we built it right into the Chronius platform. When you track your activities using the Chronius platform, your data is seamlessly integrated alongside the rest of your medical records. With one click, you can push your activity data into your “Health Summary”. There, it will be part of your complete health story rather than sitting out alone in a separate app or file.

To gain access to this activity tracking functionality, sign up for the Chronius platform today.