A crash after my second step up

Heart rate as a pacing tool was more useful to me than how I felt, because how I felt was a lagging indicator by about a day.

The hardest part was other people's timelines. Everything written about this assumes a body that recovers overnight and mine does not.

What worked was splitting everything into halves. Half a shop, half a walk, half an evening, and stopping at half even when it felt unnecessary.

Reading and nodding. Nothing to add, and I wanted you to know somebody had read it.

Temperature regulation was a thing for me that nobody had mentioned. Warmth helped considerably and it took me a year to work that out.

I found the guides here more realistic about energy than anything else I have read, because they do not assume a body with a reserve.

Coming back at two years to say I am considerably better, that it was very slow, and that the slowness is the part I would keep.

Just marking that I read this properly rather than skimming it.

The thing I had to learn was to stop before I felt like stopping. Everything I did up to the point of tiredness was borrowed from the next day.

I had one crash early on that I traced to trying to do a normal week during a step up. I have never made that mistake twice.

My clinic was cautious and involved, which I would recommend asking for. Doing this without them in the loop would have been much harder.

My energy budget is a real budget with a real ceiling, and treating it that way rather than as a moral matter changed how I plan every week.

I want to say plainly that this has gone well for me, slowly, over two years, and that slowness was the ingredient rather than an obstacle.

I had to renegotiate work, which was frightening and turned out to be the single most protective thing I did.

Thank you for the update. Threads that stop are the worst kind.

The advice to exercise gently is complicated for us and I would say be very careful with it. Mine went badly and my clinic explained why afterwards.