Pacing Isn't Failure: What "Doing It Right" Actually Looks Like
If you've lived with an energy-limiting condition for any length of time, you've probably heard the word "pacing" so often it's started to lose meaning. Rest when you need to. Don't overdo it. Listen to your body.
Simple advice. Almost impossibly hard to live by.
I was reminded of that this month reading a piece in Action for ME's member magazine, InterAction, where psychologist Katherine Langford shares findings from a survey she ran with patients and professionals to help shape new best-practice guidelines on pacing. You can read the full article here, and I'd genuinely recommend it — it's one of the more honest pieces I've read on the subject in a while.
Why pacing is harder than it sounds
The survey surfaced something that will feel familiar to a lot of people: knowing what pacing is and actually being able to do it are two very different things.
A few of the barriers that came up again and again:
Guilt. Resting properly is hard when part of you feels like you should be doing something else, or that rest is somehow "wasted" time.
Not wanting to rely on others. Especially for people who don't have someone available to help with day-to-day tasks in the first place.
Delayed feedback. Post-exertional malaise doesn't always show up straight away. You can feel okay in the moment and only realise later — sometimes a day or two later — that you've overdone it. By then the damage is done and the lesson is hard to connect to its cause.
The illusion of control. Maybe the hardest one. Pacing can start to feel like a system you can master, which means that when symptoms worsen anyway, it's tempting to conclude you must be doing it wrong. You can do everything "right" and still get worse. That's not a personal failure — it's the nature of the condition.
None of that is a character flaw. It's a systems problem.
The engineer's way of seeing it
Before Aevum, I spent years in R&D medical diagnostics, building laboratory automation instruments. A huge part of that work was designing systems that behave reliably under variable conditions — instruments that had to give trustworthy results even when inputs, environments, and materials shifted from run to run.
Living with an energy-limiting condition is a variable-conditions problem too. The article touches on this directly: the same task can cost wildly different amounts of energy depending on the day. Washing your hair on a good day and washing your hair on a bad day are not the same task, even though they look identical from the outside.
That's precisely why a single fixed routine — the kind most productivity systems assume you'll follow — doesn't hold up. What actually works is closer to what I used to build: something that captures data over time, helps you spot your own patterns, and lets you adjust the plan around the pattern rather than forcing yourself to match a plan that was never built for a body with variable capacity in the first place.
That's the whole premise behind the Aevum planners. Not another rigid schedule to feel guilty about falling short of, but a low-friction way to track energy, notice the early warning signs before you're deep into a crash, and batch what you can on the days you have more to give.
What actually helps
The survey didn't just list problems — it pointed to what people found useful:
Practical adaptations, like mobility aids
Learning to prioritise what matters to you, not what you feel obligated to perform for other people
Recognising your own early warning signs
Building small, repeatable coping strategies
Deliberately noticing small joys, not just managing symptoms
That list is basically a design brief. It's what I tried to build into the planners from day one — not because I read a checklist, but because I lived it first and built the tool I wished existed.
A bit of exciting news
Action for ME is featuring Aevum in the next issue of InterAction, alongside a giveaway and a lifetime discount code for members. If you're a member, keep an eye out — and if pacing has been the thing you know you should be doing but can't quite make stick, I'd love for you to give the planner a try.
Whatever tools you use, the survey's central point is the one worth sitting with: pacing isn't a test you can fail. It's a practice you adapt, over and over, to a body that keeps changing the rules on you. Go gently.
