Instant Genius - How to pace yourself in an exhausting world

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

How can we rearrange our lives to get a bit more energy? In her new book Pace Yourself: How to have energy in an exhausting world, Amy Arthur traces the latest science that can help you find the right pace in every aspect of your life to make your day-to-day a little less exhausting. This episode, Amy talks us through surprising insights like why having toast for breakfast may not be the best start to your day, warning signs for spotting when you’re close to exhaustion, and her top tips for protecting your energy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name. Hello and welcome to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized mastercast in podcast form. I'm Noah Leach, news editor at BBC Science Focus. We all know how tiring life can be, whether we're still recovering after a busy Christmas,

managing a hectic schedule throughout the year, or literally choosing between two cereals in the supermarket. But these could all be signs that you're exhausted and you really need to start pacing yourself. In this episode, we speak to Amy Arthur, whose book on this very subject is called Pace Yourself, How to Have Energy in an Exhausting World. Amy talks us through the latest science on pacing, with surprising insights like why having toast for breakfast may not be the best start to your day, her warning signs for spotting when you're close to exhaustion, and her top tips for pacing yourself to protect your energy. Amy, the subtitle of your book, Pace Yourself, is How to Have Energy in an Exhausting World.

My first question is, why does this happen? Why does some of us feel so exhausted? Species once preferred energy conservation, right? It was all about how we could run faster but use this energy or how animals could grow thick of fur to prevent heat loss, which is energy loss. Lots of the things that happened through natural selection by evolution were about energy conservation with the end goal of survival. It wasn't just survival of the fittest. It was survival of the most energy savvy. But now we're at a place where energy conservation is the one thing we don't want to do. We want to spend our energy. We have to be using it. We have this kind of busy is better idea. And there's studies that show that lots of people do believe that to be

busy is to be better. And if you're seen as not being busy, you'll appear lazy or you'll appear unproductive and unworthy of the achievements that you've had in the past. We will even go out of our way to add stuff to our to-do list just because we don't want to sit with the feeling of not having anything to do. We don't like being bored. We don't like being idle. We have kind of found ourselves

at a place where we have to be using our energy and it's not doing anything good. I mean, that's just people in general, but there are so many people who have conditions as well with fatigue as a really prevalent symptom. It appears, you know, so many things you'll Google and fatigue will be one of the top symptoms,

but it's one of the ones that we, you know, we can't take a pill to solve it. If we feel fatigued, we don't tend to go to the GP, it'll be something else that will influence our decision to make an appointment. And then we might mention fatigue as a symptom. But it's one of the things that we just kind of take for granted as being part of modern life. There are millions of people with my condition, which is chronic fatigue syndrome or myogic encephalomyelitis, MECFS for short, because it's got a mouthful. And then you've got the rise of things like long COVID as well. Cancer fatigue is a really big problem that people struggle with. And then you've got fatigue as a

symptom of general acute illnesses as well. So we are generally, you know, a very fatigued bunch of people nowadays. And like I said before, I don't really think that we've found the right way to tackle that as a problem as a society or as individuals. Yeah. Well, you're definitely trying to make a headway with that in your book. And obviously, as you said there, you've experienced fatigue in a really personal and intense way with MECFS. And I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about your, your story there. So what is the condition and how has it changed your day-to-day life? MECFS, we don't have an idea yet of what it actually is. You know, it is generally brought on by bacterial or viral infection. It's a condition that has many, many symptoms, fatigue as being one of them. There's a lot of pain involved, cognitive

problems. There's something that's kind of considered a hallmark of the condition, which is called post-exertional malaise, which is this really interesting symptom of if you do something, the resulting symptoms and resulting effect on your energy levels is generally really out of proportion before I was ill and might be able to go for a walk for five minutes and feel fine, then having a ME, my reaction to that walk would be really severe and really dramatic. And it can be quite unpredictable, especially when you have the first few years of the illness. It's something that is very similar to long COVID. And actually there's a lot of people now who believe a lot of long COVID patients actually have

in MECFS. but it can come on with no real trigger or it can be related to trauma. So it's not necessarily an infection that can lead to it. In my case, it was an infection. So when I was 15, I went to the GP and I ended up having to be rushed to hospital because I was severely dehydrated. I was paralysed in my limbs. And it turns out I had an E. coli infection, which had gotten really, really serious.

And it was a really good thing that we'd kind of ended up calling the ambulance in the end. So it was quite unwell and in hospital. for about a week. And then when I came out, I got better, but not completely. I was so exhausted and in so much pain. And I was still having problems with like paralysis of my limbs. And we did loads of tests and it took months. And eventually they kind of really can't test for MECFS. Although there was a really exciting new study that came out recently about a blood test for it. But certainly, you know, a decade or so ago, they couldn't do anything other than rule out the stuff that we knew it wasn't. And looking at the symptoms that I had, they ended up diagnosing me with ME-CFS. So yeah, I was 15, 16, suddenly

having to live, so I used a wheelchair to go to school, and I really couldn't do very much. And they can't offer you too much. So pacing has been recommended for people with M-E-C-F-S since, well, in and of itself, it was introduced as the literature in 89, but energy management and stuff has been kind of known about for a while. And I was taught, well, I say to all, I was given this one-page leaflet, talking about pacing and understanding your energy levels and go away and learn that and then do it yourself. When I started looking into science journalism and pursuing that as a career, it kind of felt like an opportunity also to dig into this concept of pacing, which everybody had said, you know, was the way to manage your condition with MECFS, but I didn't know why or how or what did

it really look like. So it was great to bring those two things together, I guess, in the book. Absolutely. So this magical tool that you talk about pacing, let's come to that. So what is the science behind pacing? And why is it so important? So it's, I wish it was a magical tool. The thing about pacing, it's, it's not a cure. It's used as a treatment or a way of managing a condition and lots of conditions actually reference pacing. So pacing is recommended to people sometimes when they have surgery and, you know, they might have to limit their activities post-surgery in order to work back up to where they were before. I've talked to people who work with cancer patients who complain often of fatigue relating to treatments or cancer itself and pacing is recommended there too. There's pacing

programs for arthritis, there's pacing for chronic pain and for amnesia fess and on COVID. And essentially what it is, it's when a symptom or symptoms are correlated with activity or energy expenditure, it's about that energy management and activity management. So it's usually used where a symptom, usually fatigue, is made worse by both too much and too little activity because it's important to note that both things can cause us to feel a lot worse. So we know that severely reduced physical activity can cause extreme tiredness, but of course too much physical activity for anybody can cause fatigue.

There's a balance to be found and it's very individual and pacing is about understanding your own energy use, your own feelings of energy and fatigue, and how you can use those things to inform how you go about your days, how you plan your activity and how you still reach your goals and things, whether you're someone with an energy limiting condition like mine or someone who's living in this really exhausting world trying to manage their energy to do the things they need to have to do and want to. Speaking to someone today who has Emmy, but who has just released a book and has had a very successful career so far, obviously I'd love to come on to talking about some of the techniques that you've found to help you, which you've compiled into this kind of

book and guide to help people. But before we move on to that, I wanted to ask you first how we can tell if we're fatigued. So what are the warning signs we should be looking out for? I think, you know, most of us, we've got an idea of what physical fatigue feels like. You know, when our body's really tired, we've overdone it. We kind of have an idea there about that kind of fatigue, but I think there are a lot of things that will be going on in our daily lives that we may not be realising our actual indicators that we're doing too much. So, you know, there's a lot of cognitive problems that come with too much mental exertion or stress. So you can get trouble with attention and focus. We can find ourselves quite distractible. Procrastination, you know,

we're more likely to procrastinate if we're struggling to have the mental effort to put that mental effort towards the things that we want to do. If we've got a limited amount of energy, we tend to favour an activity that will use us less energy. So we might be likely to procrastinate from something because it seems like too big a task. Memory issues and brain fog, which is a symptom of lots of conditions, but also it's, you know, a symptom of fatigue, whatever the cause. There's also studies that say that we're more impulsive. We might be drawn towards like instant gratification. We might, you know, spend a bit more money than usual on small things because we think it'll pick up on mood and give us a small boost.

Feelings of cynicism and low self-belief and self-efficacy is a really big one that you see in people with chronic conditions, but also people who are generally kind of complaining of fatigue and exhaustion. There's obviously the physical signs, you know, there's localized pain, there's localized feelings of fatigue, but also you might notice that you're more susceptible to colds and infections. Like, we know that stress particularly has an impact on our immune system. when we're running ourselves down constantly. And then emotional kind of symptoms as well.

Like we may find that we're more emotional than usual or even less emotional, more apathetic, you know, unable to really feel strongly to stuff that we normally would be excited about or upset by anxiety and depression. So it's really important to as well get that checking with your GP and make sure there's nothing sinister actually going on. It seems that despite that list of symptoms that you mentioned there

and none of them being particularly pleasant and if we notice them, even if we don't connect it to fatigue and exhaustion. Despite that list, a lot of us still just push through, even when we're just completely exhausted and feels like we've kind of reached the end of our tether in a way. So what are we risking if we don't pace ourselves? Yeah, it's tricky, isn't it? And it's so tempting to push through it.

And it's so, you know, you feel like you can't drop things. You can't, you know, reduce your to-do list or slow down for a moment. But actually, it's really important to resist that temptation to push through. So especially if you're getting colds and infections, there's some suggestion that if you don't adequately rest when you're ill, you may be more at risk. Say if you have COVID-19, then you may be putting yourself more at risk of developing post-row-a-a-l-heat, tea, long COVID if you don't rest adequately afterwards. There is, you know, it's not a clear-cut thing because obviously there are people who still get long COVID who did rest properly and there's people who that doesn't apply. But it is important to give yourself time for your body to recover from those sorts of things. things, but also, you know, in terms of the workplace, we know that chronic stress over a long period can lead to health problems and social relationship problems. And it's also not good for

our productivity or creativity. Like being these exhausted states isn't conducive to really good productivity or you're not going to make your most creative when you're battling all these small things as well. Even in studies of athletes, you know, physical activity, they don't push themselves 24-7 actually for them to reach peak performance. they need to balance rest and activity. Rest is a really crucial part of any athletic schedule. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals

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This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership, in part

with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. Let's turn there. I feel like we've been giving teasers about what you can do and all these parts of life where you can change things.

So I wanted to move on to the different areas of life where exhaustion springs from. But I wanted to start with what we possibly all immediately go to when we think of exhaustion, which is that physical side. But you say in the book that this isn't about just exercise, which people might be surprised by. So could you unpack this type of exhaustion a bit and explain some of the reasons that we might feel this physical lethargy? You don't have to be someone that's going to the gym every day to be using a lot of physical energy. Actually, even in people who do exercise regularly, the majority of their kind of bodily energy is spent on non-exercise.

physical activity it's called. So obviously our body's using a lot of energy to keep our muscles going. Even like sitting at a desk is, you know, holding our skeleton in a particular posture that needs muscle contraction and muscle relaxation, which obviously is going to be using energy. But also, you know, we're running from the train to our office or we're running around after kids or we're, I don't know, going up and downstairs all the time. Like we're doing a lot of physical stuff and our body is working really hard for us. And we're probably not necessarily giving it the credit for all that stuff it's doing. And personally, I have to be really careful about physical energy because I know it's one of the things that ties me out really quickly. So it's important to really think about

how you're using that sort of physical energy on a day-to-day basis, but also for the weeks and months and wondering about the balance of it. So, you know, are you someone that perhaps is going to the gym once a week to try and get there and you can have exercise quota for the week and tick that off the to-do list and then the rest of the week opting for, you know, sitting down a lot of the time and trying to do as little physical activity as possible. And actually, it can be better to spread out our physical activity and energy across the week rather than doing these short bursts and then the rest of the time, not using as much of the energy. Using very little physical energy can lead us to a lot of feelings of boredom and

restlessness and not necessarily make us feel any better. You know, you might think that saving energy would make you feel better, but there is that balance to be found between too much and too little. So, yeah, I think when we think about physical energy, we need to broaden our ideas of what the physical energy is. Can we change our eating and sleeping habits to get more physical energy? Does this tie into those solutions? Yeah, so I mean, aside from making sure you get enough rest, and I think rest is a really important thing we can touch back on later, but especially feelings of physical energy are so tied to how well we've slept and how our diet. it is, I think, and certainly poor sleep will definitely affect your cognitive energy levels

and your emotional regulation and stuff. But yeah, I think looking at your diet and sleep habits is a really good way to start thinking about how could I have a bit more energy without adjusting all of the other stuff that I've got to do, which is part of pacing and we can talk about that. There's studies at the moment that seem to suggest that looking at blood sugar and people who are non-diabetics might be worth investigating for feelings of energy and fatigue. Again, it's all very individual and some people won't notice fluctuations in their blood sugar as much as others. I certainly notice that if I have something that's really high sugar, high carb and nothing else, saying, you know, if I start my day with a piece of toast and some jam, actually, that's not

the best way for me personally to start my day because I do notice I get this kind of all those carbs and sugar very quickly turn to glucose and that circulate around in the blood and the feeling of high blood sugar feels like energy you know you feel like you're ready to go seems like it would be a good thing however that blood glucose very quickly gets used up gets absorbed into cells and broken down for various things but actually the resulting dip in your blood sugar can then make you feel really groggy and really tired so it's better for me definitely for others i know to think about a balanced blood sugar. So rather than having these peaks and troughs

and constantly going high energy, low energy, high energy, it's better to try and get kind of a more stable balance. So there's ways, you know, if you really do want to have toast for breakfast, trying to pair it with something that's high in protein less. So avoiding the jams, which have got a lot of sugar, which is quickly going to become blood glucose, going for something that's, you know, high in protein,

peanut butter, it's not going to add sugar, that sort of thing. just really thinking about what you're eating and what you're giving to your body as an energy source is actually really useful for some people. It's a good time to move on to mental exhaustion, which we've talked about there. And obviously all of these things that exhaust us can affect us in all three of these ways. So how can we recharge ourselves during the working day so we don't just end it exhausted when we come home at five or later and we just collapse and that's kind of the evening gone? And maybe we wanted to do something with that time. or that's kind of actively doing something for ourselves or even just rest and sometimes you feel

too exhausted even to rest. So how can we pace ourselves just day to day when we're working? So I think one of the big things is being aware of your mental energy levels and the things that you're doing that will use more of them and when you need to schedule them. So we tend to think, right, if I'm going to be maybe hybrid working and I'm only in the office two days out of the five, I'm going to cram all of my in-person meetings into those two days because it makes, sense. I'm in the office and we try and do it because it makes sense. However, we end up finding that meetings can be really, really draining. There's a lot going on, whether we're presenting, whether we're not taking, whatever we're doing, they can be quite intense and quite tiring.

So if you've given ourselves two days of that, then the first day we're working back at home, we're recovering from that. We're exhausted. We've got loads to do that's built up because we've just been in meetings all the last two days. And we're probably not going to be the most productive during those days in the office or at home afterwards. So thinking about the way we plan our weeks to be more conducive to good mental energy, to, you know, if I'm using a lot of creative mental energy, say I'm doing something really creative on a morning,

then maybe in the afternoon I want to give myself a task that's a bit less creative and allows that part of my brain to kind of rest for a bit while I do the more easier answering of emails or filling around with spreadsheets. I don't know, spreadsheets can be quite creative, I have to say. But also make sure we're making time. for mental rest while we're doing activities. Our brains tend to work on problems when we're not

even thinking about them. So like mind wandering is a really good rest activity because what that is is when we allow our minds to kind of go off on their own, to daydream, to indulge in things that aren't structured that don't have stress attached to them, we actually activate something called the default mode network in our brains. And that's usually a good way of kind of getting our brains to kind of work on a problem behind the scenes almost. So we can daydream for a little bit, step outside, get some vitamin D in the sunlight while you're at it, if you're working in a dark office like I am. And then we come back to the task and start using mental energy again. We usually feel a bit more renewed motivation. We feel a bit more energetic. Perhaps we feel less

tired of staring at the same screen for an hour already. So a lot of us are kind of optimizers with all aspects of our life. I definitely feel this way. And the book, discusses how we should set boundaries to avoid overcommitting every part of our spare time in order to fit things in, whether it's admin or work or being creative or resting and socialising. And I particularly wanted to just come to that last one. So a lot of people do feel this FOMO, fear of missing out and therefore result in overcommitting to things. So how can you, as you call it in the book, protect your spare time? What would you recommend? We do live in this kind of time where you can get FOMO so easily.

because you can see what everybody's doing on social media. It always looks like something exciting is happening, and you could have been a part of it if you just said yes. And so next time you say, you'll say yes. And we've just had Christmas. We're all probably a bit tired of kind of all this socialisation. And it's almost like we use Christmas as a way to make up for working all the time before that. So we cram everything into Christmas and seeing all these people and checking off all this,

you know, seeing this family member, seeing them. And then we get to January and we're all really exhausted. we go back into this cycle of just working and then being too tired to see anybody. So finding that balance of doing the things you want to do and seeing people because it's really important for our mental health, our physical health, even to do stuff with friends. We're more likely to be active if we're doing an activity with a friend, for example. So making sure you get that kind of fill of your social quota without overcommitting and doing too much can be difficult if you find you can't say no. And I guess for me that comes from

respecting your energy and respecting your own health enough to be able to say no or enough to be able to make a decision of, okay, well, if I'm going to go to this event, I'm going to do it for X amount of time or if it's going to be in a really busy pub, I'll stay for this song or if it's a bit more quiet and I can concentrate and I can feel more part of things, I'll stay for it longer, or if it's, you know, well, I need to be in a really busy pub, I'll stay for this song. or if it's, you know, well, I need to rest the day before and make sure I don't schedule too many things one off the back of another because I do know that I need to recover and give myself time to process. So one of the things that I talk about in the book especially is the toll of emotional acting or

emotional suppression. And this is something that we don't really think about when it comes to socialising because often we think, oh, well, when I'm out, I'll be fine and, you know, seeing people as fun and it's not that much energy to go and do something and see friends. But sometimes it can be. Like sometimes we feel emotions that we can't show. Sometimes we put on, especially if you're seeing family, you know, like you put on this kind of happier face perhaps. And these techniques for emotional suppression or pretending emotions actually takes a really big toll on our energy levels. We do see like studies in careers where that's quite common. So obviously acting, you show a lot of emotions that you don't actually feel.

But like retail jobs, you have to smile and seem happy all the time, even if you're getting shouted at. these kind of events of emotional suppression and acting do end up leading us to emotional exhaustion, which can lead to burnout. So giving yourself the time off from those things is really important. Like giving yourself time either to yourself or with one person rather than a big group so that you can feel how you feel and not feel like you have to put on a smile or a brave face or whatever. It's a good way to sort of try and balance those really hectic social events, which we sometimes have to go to or we have to network, we have to see family, trying to be aware of your energy levels and planning around that can kind of alleviate some of the

toll that then seeps into everything else you do as well. If we're still feeling that way, despite it being the new year and having every intention of getting off to a good start, what would be maybe one thing that we can do today to rest our emotions? Psychologists who study emotion tend to categorise it in kind of, there's like lower arousal and higher arousal emotions or low energy and high energy. So things like calm, relaxation, but boredom as well, those are like low arousal, low energy emotions. And then we've got the high energy emotions, kind of excitement and anger and, you know, joy and stuff like that. And if we spend a lot of time in these higher arous emotions, we're always

sort of draining that part of us. Actually, in the Western world, we tend to favour higher arousal and we look down upon the low arousal ones. You wouldn't want to be low arousal all the time, of course, but actually maybe we should be prioritising things that make us feel calm over things that make us feel excited. You know, if you're thinking about the stuff you do outside of work, when you choose to do things, do you choose things that will give you that kind of energetic feeling or excitement or even anger? Like the social media you consume outside of work, you know, we know that social media is designed to stir up engagement. The algorithms love stuff that either gets us annoyed enough to comment and share and post our thoughts or

excited enough to send it to a friend or to retweet or to try, whatever. All these things are designed to generate these higher arousal emotions in us. So it can be quite hiring emotionally to engage with that sort of stuff all the time. And if that's what you do for rest, if you say, well, you know, when I sit down after work before I start to hear, just scroll on Instagram for a few hours or whatever, you're probably not giving yourself the time to A, B, in these lower arousal emotions of boredom, calm, relaxation,

you're probably searching for feelings of higher ars and emotions. That's probably not the best way to give yourself that emotional rest. To trying to think of activities you can do that instill those lower arrasal emotions are really important. And they'll be really kind of subjective. And I find that creativity is really good for that sort of thing. But then that can also become, if I don't allow myself to be creative in a way that isn't about achievement, you know, I don't have to be the best. I don't have to make something that looks good and then share it on social media. They're all these ways to trip up and actually add more energy into a task.

So just being aware of when we say we're giving ourselves rest, are we actually giving ourselves rest? I think it's really important too. That was Amy Arthur on her new book, Pace Yourself, How to Have Energy in an Exhausting World, which is out now. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. By the latest issue of science focus in your favourite shop

or visit us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship,

so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.