Breaking the Boom and Bust cycle of pain and activity

One of the most fundamental tips I learned over the years was how to break the ‘Boom and Bust’ cycle of pain and activity.  It has taken many years of constantly trying to find a balance, but I’m closer now than I have ever been at finding the middle way.   Read on for some of my tips on how this has helped me to live a ful and active life with Ehlers-Danlos Syndome.

The Boom and Bust cycle is probably the most powerful way that people with chronic conditions stay trapped in the downward spiral of inactivity, deconditioning and pain.

It had me in its jaws for probably well over a decade before I even started to realise what was happening.

Associating our self-worth with what we do

To understand how deeply we can be stuck in these patterns of Boom and Bust it takes a little understanding of where our habits around doing ‘stuff’ comes from.

Let’s go back to when we were young and we did some small task - maybe we put our toy away after using it.  It’s likely that someone important to us noticed this and praised us in some way.

Instead of linking this praise to the action of putting our toy away, often what can happen is we link the action (putting the toy away) with being a good person, with getting praise, with being loved.

In other words, we develop a habit of tying our self-esteem and self-worth to how well we perform tasks.

Writ large, our entire identity can be build around constructs of the things we do, the tasks we perform, the roles we hold and the achievements we make. To feel better about ourselves, more worthy - particularly in the eyes of those we care about - we feel the need to do more, and to do those things better.

Boy, was this a painful realisation for me when it all came crashing down around me when I had my health crash back in 2010.

Driving ourselves to exhaustion

I’m a very driven person. I do stuff. I get things done. I’m competent. I can do it by myself!  I don’t need other people’s help, I’m a capable, independent woman.

Pretty strong views, right! 

Imagine what happened when suddenly I was barely able to get myself out of bed to the bathroom …

In some ways, I am grateful for my health crash.

It made me face up to the bonkers reality I was forcing upon myself.

Boom

I was literally driving myself to my absolute limits both physically (I walked the Coast to Coast - 200 miles - in atrocious weather!) and emotionally (having a tough time at work and with my relationship), and I was constantly pushing, pushing pushing regardless of the physical and mental exhaustion that was creeping up on me.  New projects, joining a hockey team, supervising and assessing DofE expeditions, starting a business … you name it, I said yes to it!

What I later learned is that this kind of stress can completely screw up your endocrine system and ultimately switch on chronic pain processes.  I had weeks and months where I was wired like the dynamo bunny (BOOM!) and yet more weeks where I was barely able to drag myself out of bed to get to work (BUST!) (but yes, you guessed it, I was still forcing myself to play hockey, and doing all the other stuff as well as working!).  

Being in this constant state of exertion means your body simply has no resources to rest, recover and repair.  Eventually, I had an epic BUST.

Bust

The Boom phase definitely had early warnings of the forthcoming Bust phase.  I caught colds that lasted for weeks, after expeditions I would be totally wiped out for days, and there were increasingly often days where I could barely function effectively, with atrocious attention spans and difficulties with memory.