Learning to Manage Your Energy

Here’s how it works:

• Each day after you’ve been awake long enough to know how you’re going to feel that day, evaluate your energy level. 
• Realistically decide how much you can do that day.
• Write down the tasks you’d like to accomplish with your allotted energy on separate pieces of paper and put them in the envelope. 
• As you complete each task, remove it from the envelope.
• When your envelope is empty, it’s time to stop for the day.

The “Fifty-Percent Solution”

Once you’ve learned to budget your energy and you’re consistently living within your energy envelope, you can start building an energy reserve.  (It’s like starting a savings account after you’ve learned to budget your money.)  The fifty-percent solution is just what it sounds like.  When you do your energy evaluation each day, only plan to do fifty percent of what you feel like you can do.  For example, if you feel you can clean house for 30 minutes, only do it for 15.  Rather than depleting your energy every day, you can slowly begin to build an energy reserve.

When you repeatedly push your body to its limits, it’s not able to heal and rebuild.  According to Dr. William Collinge, author of Recovering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Guide to Self-Empowerment, the rest you get on a good day is of a higher quality than the rest you get on a bad day.  Allowing your body this quality healing time will eventually pay off with a consistently higher energy level.

Sources: 

Campbell, Bruce.  The CFIDS/Fibromyalgia Toolkit, A Practical Self-Help Guide.  Lincoln: Authors Choice Press. 2001.

Collinge, William. “Promoting Recovery: The fifty-percent Solution.”  ProHealth.  5/25/06.