That's the thing... I still can't always figure out the pattern.
Excellent point
@wabi-sabi. Let me revise or refine a little in the hopes of greater accuracy. I don't end up with durable experiential learning: e.g. if I walk six miles I will always crash for six days. That'd be
really nice. A manual for living safely.
Rather, I get feedback that helps me stay with and attend to what is going on in the moment regardless. Three weeks is a really long time to track things. Extremely daunting. I can see why you still feel confused about the cause and effect. I do too, of course, but these things do help me manage some of that equation.
Sometimes I can take a walk and while it uses my allotment of energy for the day, it does not crash me. I make the calculation (as we all do about energy expenditures)--this is worth today's portion of energy in order to be outside, to see the ducklings by the river, to smell some roses. And it works out. Both the Body Battery and Visible will tell me--before and after--if that was a good idea. Other times, I think I can take a walk without big consequences, the numbers look ok, and then I get out there and see the BB draining like crazy. I know to come home and curtail all activity for the day, do the things that help me avert PEM. The next day's Visible reading will tell me if I got down in time, as it were, or if I triggered something bigger.
There is no consistent line I can draw between what I have done and not done AND either a successful walk or one that tanks me most of the time, but I can catch things before they escalate.
A couple of weeks ago I had a really terrible eight days. Way out of the ordinary. At first, I thought--I haven't done anything physically out of the ordinary, I haven't changed supplements or diet, I am not under any crazy stress....it's just a bad day and I can mostly just slide on through it. But Visible was telling me that I was at a 'one' and my Garmin was showing me a body battery that would not charge up from the mid-30s no matter how much I rested.
Lacking these 'data', I would likely have rested a tiny bit more--but mostly tried to plow through-- and ended up in multi-week or even multi-month crash. The 'rolling PEM'
@Judee mentioned and which I lived with for years. I would have looked back (and at my notes, also not that helpful in the end)--and thought--I changed nothing, so this is likely pretty much nothing. But I could
see that something was really wrong in the numbers and that helped me be much more conservative about everything I did until those numbers started to rise again.
I still have no idea what it was that laid me so low. It could have been a virus or something like that?
That is just an example of something I did NOT do, could not find a trigger for the crash. But I could have made it so much worse if I had relied on that my memory or mental analysis to tell me that there was no 'cause.'
For anyone who is better than I am (probably everyone) at attending to what their body is saying, this may not be necessary. But I have a really hard time believing what my body tells me. I guess I spent a lifetime (pre-ME) pushing through things and that imprint is in my cells. I need all the help I can get to listen. And both of these --Garmin and Visible--help me do that. Some patterns and correlations become clearer, some do not. But I know that since I have had these tools, crashes are shorter and less constant.
