Basics
Living with CFS
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When you are sick, everyday you are confronted with 1,000 decisions. Some of them seem small: "Should I go shopping today?" some large, "Should I accept this new client?" But all of them require you do two things:
Gauging your health is something you will get better at it with practice. Setting your priorities, though, is not as cut and dried. It is a difficult process each person must go through for themselves, often many times.
Making decisions based on your health and priorities is hard at first, but gets almost automatic with time. Here are some suggestions we have found useful in setting priorities and making decisions:
When you are sick, everything is hard. Simple projects can make you tired for hours. You can't do things you always took for granted. Similarly, as you get healthier, everything becomes easier (including getting even healthier!). This is one of the reasons to always make becoming healthy your number one goal. (As if you needed a reason to try to get healthy.)
Unfortunately, this often means putting aside some goals you have held for a long time. But remember, as you get healthier, it will be much easier to come back to them.
When making decisions, think only about what is good for you in your particular situation. It can be very tempting to compare yourself to others who are similar to you, but not sick ("Since I've been sick I've fallen behind on everything") or to yourself before you were sick ("I'm at 60% of normal").
But when you let your decisions become influenced by these comparisons, you aren't making decisions good for you, you're making decisions good for who you used to be or who you might have been. For example, a teenager who doggedly pursues getting her driver's license just because "that's what teenagers do," although she'd never trust her balance enough to use it, isn't deciding based on her own priorities, she's trying to live the life of her friends.
If you really need to make these comparisons, try to limit them to a few minutes when you aren't making important decisions.
The more experience you have making decisions, the easier it gets. You remember that one particular store always gives you a headache or that you get frustrated whenever you talk too long with one particular friend. Then, in the future you can avoid those bad situations.
You can also make general rules from specific examples, so you don't have to learn about each new store that gives you a headache. Different rules could be: "I won't make any plans that can't be changed," "I will avoid loud, bright, and crowded places," or "I won't take on more work than I can handle."
We'll say it until the cows come home. Put your health first.
| Basics
| Living with CFS
| Treatments
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