Beyond Pacing: The Myth of Energy Management

Lesson 2: Beyond Pacing: The Myth of Energy Management

Many people living with chronic illness have been told that pacing is the key to managing their energy. The idea is simple: if you carefully balance exertion with enough rest, you can prevent crashes and slowly regain stability. But what if the very act of monitoring, limiting, and rationing your energy is keeping your nervous system stuck in dysregulation? What if the way you have been resting is reinforcing fear and depletion rather than building resilience?

This lesson explores how Structured Rests differ from traditional pacing, why they work on a deeper level, and how they actively support brain rewiring and nervous system regulation. Instead of attempting to manage energy through restriction, we will begin shifting toward a new rhythm — one that creates safety, stability, and a growing capacity for life.

Why Pacing Became the Default Approach

For decades, pacing has been the most widely used strategy for managing chronic illness, especially conditions like ME/CFS. It was developed as a survival strategy to prevent worsening symptoms — encouraging people to carefully ration their energy, stay within strict limits, and avoid pushing through exhaustion. Many people use Spoon Theory to describe this approach, imagining energy as a limited number of spoons that must be carefully distributed throughout the day.

Pacing was recommended with Graded Exercise Therapy (GET) and CBT for decades as strategies for ME/CFS and similar conditions. When GET and CBT were finally removed from official guidelines in 2021, pacing became the default recommendation and the only one left. The idea of “finding a baseline” — a safe level of activity that would not cause a crash — became a widely accepted method. But for many, finding a baseline was impossible. The constant effort to track, measure, and balance energy often led to increased hypervigilance, reinforcing the belief that energy is finite, health is fragile and must always be protected rather than expanded.

The Reality of Trying to ‘Find a Baseline’

I was told to track my activity levels and “find my baseline” so that I could stabilise my energy and avoid flare-ups, crashes and setbacks. I made charts, recorded everything I did in books, diaries and tracking systems. I tried to calculate a perfect balance between activity and rest. But no matter how carefully I tracked, no matter how hard I tried, there was never a baseline to be found. Some days I could do more, some days I could do nothing, and the unpredictability of symptoms made the entire concept impossible. Rather than creating stability, the constant effort of monitoring and managing energy became another form of stress — reinforcing hypervigilance and keeping my nervous system in a state of survival.

Why Pacing Often Reinforces Dysregulation

Pacing is often seen as the gold standard for managing conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, LongCovid, or nervous system dysregulation. The idea is that by carefully limiting activity, you can prevent post-exertional malaise (PEM), crashes and conserve what little energy you have. But here’s the problem:

✔ Pacing reinforces the fear of doing too much. The constant measuring, planning, and rationing of energy keeps the nervous system in a hypervigilant state, reinforcing the belief that your body is fragile and that any mis-step could cause harm.

✔ It assumes energy is a finite resource, rather than something that can be expanded. While Structured Rests support deep restoration and nervous system recovery, pacing often creates a cycle where the body remains stuck in depletion mode, never quite learning how to rebuild capacity.

✔ Pacing teaches the brain that activity is unsafe. Every time you stop yourself from engaging in gentle activities out of fear of a crash, you are sending a signal to your brain that activity is dangerous. Over time, this can make symptoms worse, leading to more restriction rather than less.

Not Enough Spoons

Pacing is often linked to Spoon Theory, which was originally created to help people explain their limited energy to others. The idea is that people with chronic illness only have a set number of “spoons” (units of energy) per day, and every activity — getting dressed, making a meal, talking or even thinking — costs spoons. Once the spoons are gone, the person is left depleted.
While Spoon Theory helped many people put words to their experience, it also reinforced a belief that energy is finite and must always be managed with caution.

Why Structured Rests Work Differently

Structured Rests are not about managing energy — they are about rewiring your brain and nervous system to recognise safety. Unlike pacing, which focuses on limitation, Structured Rests focus on building a new foundation of stability. Instead of treating energy as something that needs to be rationed, we begin teaching your system that it can handle gentle engagement with life.

✔ They provide predictability and rhythm. Your nervous system thrives on patterns of safety. By integrating Structured Rests consistently, you are teaching your brain that rest is safe and supportive, not a reaction to depletion.

✔ They shift the system out of survival mode. When the brain receives repeated signals of safety, it stops over-monitoring for threats and begins to allow for deeper regulation and restoration.

✔ They retrain your mind-body system to expand capacity over time. Instead of merely avoiding crashes, you are actively restoring and increasing your window of tolerance, allowing for more ease and engagement as your system becomes more resilient.

A New Way to Approach Recovery

Instead of seeing energy as something you must carefully measure and protect, what if you could shift into a state where energy naturally replenishes itself? What if your nervous system and brain, when given the right support, could begin to trust activity instead of fearing it?

This is what we are working toward — not just preventing symptoms, but creating a life where your system no longer braces against every action. Structured Rests are a way to gently teach your body and mind that restoration is possible, not through limitation, but through trust and rhythm.

What You Can Do Now

Let go of the pressure to measure your energy perfectly. You do not need to track every moment of exertion or fear going over an invisible limit.
Begin practicing Structured Rests as a way to create safety, not just to recover from exhaustion. (See below for a 5 minute guidance)
Notice how your body and mind respond. Are you holding tension around old concepts of traditional rest? Does slowing down bring up resistance? These are all signs that your system is still learning to trust this process.

💗 Pause here. Take a moment to soften, to feel the support of this new way of being. You don’t have to track your energy or calculate how much is left — you can just be here.

A short Structured Rest

If it feels right, take a Structured Rest now — just firstly get as comfortable as is possible for you.

This Structured Rest guidance is under 5 minutes long. All you have to do is click play and let yourself be guided. You don’t need to try to make anything happen. The important thing is to let yourself begin.

🌿 Take just 5 minutes for yourself right now. This is a step toward teaching your nervous system that restoration is possible.

🎧 Pop headphones on if you have some. And then press play and close your eyes.