Pacing Your Activities - YouTube

Hello I'm Wendy Holden and I'm a consultant rheumatologist and medical

advisor to Arthritis Action. If you have arthritis and pain it's important to

know when you need to pace your activities so that your pain doesn't get

worse and so that you can function as well as possible. The word pacing has

several different meanings but when we speak about pacing and arthritis we

generally mean a couple of linked things. Firstly pacing is about learning how to

divide up our daily energy so that we don't do too much in one day

Secondly pacing is about dividing our daily jobs into chunks so that we don't spend too

much time doing the same thing. If we are feeling well or we're having a good day

it's easy to overdo our activities because we want to catch up on

everything that we feel needs doing or even because we're just enjoying

ourselves too much and lose track of time. If we do too much then our body may

protest later by giving us more pain or we will feel exhausted later and not be

able to do much the next day this is called boom and bust or the boom and

bust cycle if we're constantly stuck in a boom and bust cycle then if we're

having a bad day it's very difficult to make plans and often our social life can

suffer we may then feel that we are letting people down or have to turn down

invitations because we never know how bad we will feel as social lives can

shrink some of us then worry or feel guilty that we can't do what we expect

we should be able to do for example look after the children or look after the

grandchildren as well as we should and this worry can then make our pains even worse

Learning about pacing and understanding how to pace our activities

can help us improve the bad days and can help us function much better overall

most people with arthritis know that exercise is good for the joints and so

they start an exercise program many people then find they have

to give up because they find at first that their pain gets worse and they

believe that exercise is somehow damaging their joints what is actually

happening here is that they're just doing too much too soon we would all

like to be able to exercise as much as we could when we were much younger but

it's important to be realistic and to know that that is not likely to be

possible or even sensible. When thinking about swimming for example the time

taken to get to and from the pool plus to get undressed and dressed again also

counts as exercise time and has to be taken into account when working out how

many lengths we can swim the key with exercise is to start very slowly with

very low goals that you can achieve easily for example if you think you can

easily swim 10 lengths without pain but that 20 lengths would cause you

considerable problems afterwards set your starting goal 11 or 12 lengths and

build up very slowly if we set goals that are too high we are bound to fail

and we will then get disheartened whereas if we set realistic goals that

we can achieve we will succeed and we can build on this success if we have a

long job to do pacing involves dividing this activity into chunks for example if

we have a lawn that will take two hours to mow it's a good idea to divide this

job into smaller sections say 20 minutes mowing maybe 20 minutes doing something

different this allows our joints and muscles to recover in another position

and we will have less pain afterwards similarly if you have an enormous pile

of ironing to do try doing one or two items at a time followed by a stretch or

another type of activity or a rest it's vital that we don't try to push

ourselves too hard with one repetitive activity for too long or our pain may

get worse if you struggle with housework try hoovering one room at a time or do

the upstairs and downstairs on different days effective pacing also involves

learning how to do slightly less than we would like to do when we're having a

good day this is one of the most important

hardest pain management strategies to learn but it is well worth the effort if

you would like more help with pacing your activities an occupational

therapist who is usually based in your local hospital will be able to advise

you further