Recovery
from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
My Secret
Weapon: Pre-Emptive Rest
By Bruce Campbell
(Article adapted from the online
booklet "Recovery from
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: One Person’ s Story”.)
I used a variety of
self-help strategies, but if there was one secret to my recovery, it was
my use of planned rests. As I mentioned in the last article, when I was
first ill, I often experienced the cycle of push and crash, swinging
back and forth from too much activity to periods of rest. I would be
more active than my body could tolerate, experience intense symptoms and
then use rest to recover. Spending a few hours or a whole day in bed was
an effective strategy for recovering from periods of doing too much, but
my life felt out of control.
About nine months after
becoming ill, I learned that I could use rest for another reason besides
recuperation. I found that rest could actually prevent symptoms. This
idea was one of the strategies recommended by CFS researchers in England
who counseled patients to live their lives according to a plan, one
which included similar amounts of activity each day and also scheduled
rest periods taken no matter how you felt. The goal was to shift away
from living in response to symptoms (the cycle push and crash) toward a
consistent, planned life.
I was attracted to the
idea of gaining control over the swings in my symptoms and I could
accept the idea that a similar amount of activity each day could help me
achieve greater predictability. But I resisted the idea of resting each
day regardless of how I felt. I couldn’t understand why I would lie
down voluntarily if I wasn’t experiencing any symptoms. Also, I
thought of resting as giving in to the illness, so that rest meant a
victory for the illness.
Because other parts of
the program from England made sense, I decided to try resting every
afternoon, but I wasn’t sure what “rest” meant. Was I resting if I
was reading or watching television? Or did rest mean lying down? I did
some experiments and found that the most restorative rest resulted from
lying down in a quiet place with my eyes closed.
I was surprised at the
results from a 15 minute rest. Even that short rest seemed to help,
reducing my symptoms, increasing my stamina and making my life more
stable. After a while I added a morning rest as well. Over time, I came
to believe that my scheduled rest was the most important thing I did to
aid my recovery. Resting everyday according to a fixed schedule, not
just when I felt sick or tired, was part of a shift from living in
response to symptoms to living a planned life. The experience showed me
that rest could be used for more than recovering from doing too much; it
could be employed as a preventive measure as well. In the terms
suggested by one of the students in our self-help program, I learned the
difference between recuperative rest and pre-emptive
rest.
Taking pre-emptive rests
enabled me to reduce the time I spent in recuperative rest. The result
was that my total rest time was reduced. Resting on a planned schedule
greatly stabilized my life, enabling me to get off the roller coaster
and giving me a much greater sense of control.
I found that my rests
were even more effective after I started doing a relaxation practice at
the same time. Without the mental relaxation, my mind often raced from
worry to worry, so I experimented with various meditation procedures
during my rest time. I learned that techniques using imagery, such as
imagining myself lying on the beach or sitting beside a stream, were not
effective for me, however helpful they may be to some people. But
focusing my attention on my breathing worked. By lying down and keeping
my awareness on my breath, I could relax both physically and mentally.
I applied the idea of
planned rests in other parts of my recovery. For example, I used it to
expand my envelope for travel. I found that if I stopped during driving
trips for a ten to 15 minute rest every two hours, I arrived fresher at
my destination and had a lower symptom level throughout my trip. Also, I
used rests to expand the length of my walks. If I walked for a while and
then sat down for an equal amount of time, I could walk farther and not
affect my symptoms.
The principle I learned
from all these experiments was that rest could have a dramatic effect on
the energy available to me and on my symptom level. Taking a short rest
break to re-charge batteries expanded the number of productive hours in
my day. Also, I found that I could avoid a long period of bed rest by
taking a brief rest as soon I felt my symptoms beginning to get worse.
As I improved, I
experimented with the number of rests, eventually replacing planned
rests with brief rests in response to symptoms. But this was only after
I had recovered back to about 90% of normal. For most of the time I was
recovering, pre-emptive rests were crucial. For four years, my planned
rests both reduced my total rest time and helped bring stability back
into my life, a big payoff for two brief breaks in my day.
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