All I can really add is to move your shit.
And don't be afraid to push yourself a little bit. (DO NOT YELL AT ME YET READ THIS WHOLE THING FIRST!) When you reach a certain age, you cannot get any improvement that you don't actively take. But more importantly, especially if you're a spoonie, you're going to need a good intuition for when pushing yourself is good pushing and when it's bad pushing. I was seriously ill about ten years ago and there was a period of my illness when ANY pushing was bad, because I was actively deteriorating and so couldn't recover.
But when my illness turned around, how I felt when I pushed myself changed. In both cases, I felt like shit after I pushed myself. But after good-pushing, once the initial physical backlash passed I felt better, whereas after a bad-push I felt worse.
So like, let's say you're a spoonie and going up a flight of stairs is pushing yourself. If it's a bad push you'll feel like shit, and keep on feeling like shit. If it's a good push you'll still feel like shit in the immediate aftermath but a day or two later you'll either feel neutral about going up those stairs again or you'll actually want to go up them again. The itch to repeat something means it's a good, productive pushing of yourself, but if that itch isn't there then at most you're maintaining (which is also something that you want to do but at least it's not harmful), at worst it's actively harming you.
I remember when I was in the recovery phase of my illness, my body was still putting the brakes on my energy expenditure. I decided to ride my bike about a hundred metres down the road and back during a time when I thought I might be getting better because I wasn't actively getting worse, but I wasn't sure yet.
When I came back I just about flopped off my bike. I ended up ditching my bike in the grass and staggering indoors into the shower, and turning the cold tap on and blasting myself because I felt like I was going to throw up and pass out.
If this was pre the recovery phase, I'd have just felt like shit for weeks and barely been able to move. But instead, because my body was recovering, it was like my body suddenly realised, oh, hey, actually, everything isn't as bad as it used to be, let's ease up again.
Next day I was back on the bike and even though I was still exhausted, I didn't react that badly again, and despite that exhaustion I kept having that itch to get moving again, which hadn't been there until I biked. It was a real turning point for my recovery and was the first time that my recovery really accelerated.
I think this is where the misguided "just push through the pain" thing comes from, because your body is about as in tune with itself as we are and sometimes misunderstands its limits. It can only recalibrate those limits by pushing them because it's forced to dip into reserves that it didn't realise was there, and wouldn't have unless it was made to. But what people who preach pushing yourself misunderstand is that it only works if your body has more reserves than it realises it has, so if you're actively deteriorating or merely stable, pushing yourself will not magically make you better. This is something that SO MANY PEOPLE do not get!!! THIS WORKED FOR ME BECAUSE I WAS RECOVERING! And I am sharing it because you may have some recovery capabilities that you're not aware of, but you also may not, especially if you have a chronic illness or you're a spoonie with something permanent! Most people who feel like shit in their forties are perfectly able to recover a lot of function and do need to just take that progress and do it slowly because they just need to move around a little to unstick things, but if you're a spoonie with a chronic condition this will not apply to you and you will need to navigate it differently, and most people do not know how to advise on that.
All I did by pushing myself was recalibrate my body's estimation of my strength and energy reserves; it realised that I had more than it thought, so it started easing the brakes, and I knew that it was doing so because I kept feeling that craving to get moving that I didn't have when I was deteriorating. But if I'd tried the bike only a few months before it would have been a disaster. Shit, there was a period where walking up a flight of stairs would require a recovery period before I could get up and go back to bed, and it did nothing to improve my health (because my problem was actually gastrointestinal and you can't exercise your way out of a stomach bleed).
TLDR: get moving to calibrate your body. Any progress you want you have to take, but you need to learn the difference between when pushing yourself will help and when it will harm. Some progress you can't even take because your body won't have the resources to give it to you. Learn the difference between a real limit and what your body thinks is a limit, but be aware that those two things tend to only be misaligned during actual recovery (your body is trying to protect you by conserving your energy and might not realise that it has more stores than it used to!) and that if your condition is stable or deteriorating pushing yourself won't be the miracle pop culture medicine tells you.
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
izzy806
turnnoffyourmind
