You’re pacing. You’ve cut back on how much you’re doing. Maybe you’ve even gotten pretty good at recognizing when you need to stop and rest.

So why are you still completely wiped out some days?

It’s easy to look back over the day and think, “But I didn’t even do that much.”

Maybe you didn’t clean the house. You didn’t exercise. You didn’t spend the afternoon running errands. In fact, you might have spent a good portion of the day sitting down.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a low-energy day.

When we start learning to pace, most of us naturally focus on the things we physically do. We count walking through the grocery store. We count doing laundry. We count cooking dinner or working in the yard.

That makes sense. Before Long COVID or vaccine injury, you probably never had a reason to think about how much energy it took to concentrate on a conversation or make a string of decisions. Your body had enough capacity that these smaller demands usually didn't matter enough to notice.

Now they can.

And because we've spent most of our lives not thinking of these things as activities that need to be counted, they're incredibly easy to overlook.

What about spending an hour trying to straighten out an insurance problem on the phone?

What about planning meals for the week?

What about making decision after decision when your brain is already tired?

Those things may not look like activity, but they can still be demanding.

Your energy budget includes more than physical activity

When I talk about pacing, I’m not just talking about doing less.

Pacing starts with energy awareness: learning to recognize what is drawing from the energy and capacity you have available today.

And physical activity is only part of that picture.

Research is beginning to give us a better look at this in people with Long COVID. In one 2024 study, researchers followed 376 people with Long COVID and tracked their physical, cognitive, social, and self-care activities along with their symptoms. Greater effort across these different types of activities was associated with greater symptom severity.

In other words, what you do with your brain and your attention matters alongside what you do with your body. These are real demands on your available capacity, even though the amount they cost you will be different from person to person and even from day to day.

That’s why you can spend most of the day sitting down and still end the day feeling like you’ve run a marathon.

If you’re only counting physical activity, you’re missing part of your energy budget. And that's completely understandable. You're learning to notice energy costs that most of us spent our entire lives having no reason to notice.

Thinking takes energy too

One of the easiest energy drains to overlook is thinking.

Paying bills. Filling out paperwork. Planning meals. Researching something online. Following directions. Making appointments. Reading. Writing an email. Trying to remember what you walked into the room for.

And then there are decisions.

What are we having for dinner? Do I need to call the doctor about this? Which appointment should I schedule first? What do I need from the grocery store? Can I afford to do this today, or will it be too much?

None of these things look particularly strenuous.

But your brain is working.

Long COVID can make that work considerably harder. Problems with attention, concentration, processing speed, memory, and other cognitive functions are well documented. Research has also found that greater cognitive effort in people with Long COVID is associated with increased fatigue and cognitive symptoms.

This becomes especially important if you experience post-exertional malaise, or PEM. Mental exertion, not just physical exertion, can contribute to PEM. So spending an hour concentrating on paperwork can matter, even if you never left your chair.

Decision-making can be another hidden drain. One decision might not seem like much, but think about how many decisions you make during an ordinary day. When your brain is already working harder, repeatedly asking it to evaluate information, remember details, compare options, and choose what to do next adds to the load.

This is one reason I talk so much about getting things out of your head and onto paper, and creating systems that reduce the number of decisions you have to make over and over again.

Another strategy I use is a modified Pomodoro timer. The traditional Pomodoro Technique uses timed periods of focused work separated by short breaks, with a longer break after several work periods. I’ve adapted that idea to work better for me and my energy needs.

When I'm working, I use an app called FocusPomo to remind me to stop before I've been concentrating for too long. I work for 25 minutes and then take a five-minute break. After four cycles, I take a much longer break of at least 30 minutes. I might go lie down, knit, or do something else that doesn't require much thought. If you use Android, Goodtime offers similar customizable Pomodoro timers and breaks.

This isn't exactly how the original Pomodoro Technique is designed to be used. I'm using the timer as a pacing tool for cognitive activity. Instead of waiting until my brain feels exhausted and then realizing I've done too much, the timer reminds me to interrupt that sustained concentration and give my brain regular breaks.

And the important part isn't the exact timing. Twenty-five minutes works for me, but it may be too long for you. You might need to work for 15 minutes and rest for 10, or use an entirely different pattern. Pay attention to how your brain and your symptoms respond and adjust the timing to fit your capacity.

The goal isn't to stop thinking or avoid making decisions. That's obviously not realistic.

It's to start counting cognitive activity as activity.

If you spent the morning dealing with paperwork, researching a health issue, and scheduling appointments, you didn't spend the morning “doing nothing.”

Your brain was busy.

And that belongs in your energy budget.

Emotional energy counts too

Some of the hardest energy drains to recognize aren't things you're doing at all.

They're things you're carrying.

Stress. Worry. Frustration. Grief. Conflict. Anticipation. Even excitement.

None of this means your Long COVID symptoms are “all in your head.” And it certainly doesn't mean you can think positively enough to make your symptoms disappear.

It means emotional demands are part of the total load your body is dealing with.

Think about how you feel after a difficult conversation. Or after spending hours worrying about something you can't control. Maybe you're waiting for test results, dealing with a family problem, worried about finances, or trying to navigate yet another healthcare issue.

You might have been sitting on the couch the entire time.

That doesn't make the experience restful.

And we shouldn't overlook positive emotions either. A wedding, a holiday, a long-awaited visit with someone you love, or another exciting event can be wonderful and still take a lot out of you.

This doesn't mean you need to avoid anything emotional. That's neither realistic nor the point.

Instead, include emotional demands when you're looking at your whole energy load.

If you know you've had an emotionally difficult morning, that might not be the best day to fill the afternoon with everything else on your to-do list. If you're going to an event you're really excited about, you might decide to leave more space around it for rest.

You can't control every source of stress or emotion in your life.

But you can stop pretending those things don't count just because they don't show up on your step counter.

Task switching: the drain hiding between the tasks

Sometimes the individual tasks aren't the biggest problem.

It's how often you're switching between them.

You sit down to answer an email. Then you remember the laundry needs to go in the dryer. While you're doing that, your phone rings. After the call, you go back to the computer but have to figure out where you left off. Then you remember something you need to add to the grocery list.

By the end of the morning, you've touched five different things and may not feel like you've accomplished much of anything.

But your brain has been busy switching gears the entire time.

Research on task switching has found a measurable cognitive cost when we move from one task to another. We have to disengage from what we were doing, reorient ourselves, remember what we're supposed to be doing now, and get our brains back into the new task.

When your cognitive capacity is already limited, those transitions are worth paying attention to.

One strategy that can help is batching similar tasks together.

Instead of answering one email now, another in an hour, and another after lunch, you might set aside one period to deal with email. If you have several phone calls to make, you might group them together rather than scattering them throughout the day.

That doesn't mean batching everything is always the best choice. Three phone calls in a row might be far too much on a day when talking takes a lot out of you.

As always, your capacity gets the final say.

The point is to start noticing the transitions themselves. If you're constantly bouncing from one type of task to another, see whether reducing some of those switches makes the day feel less demanding.

Sometimes the hidden energy drain isn't the task.

It's all the gear-changing in between.

“But I didn’t do anything today”

This is where all of these hidden energy drains start to add up.

You get to the end of the day completely exhausted, your symptoms are increasing, and you can't figure out why.

“I didn't even do anything today.”

But let's take another look at that day.

Maybe you started the morning answering emails and messages. You made a few decisions about things that needed to happen later in the week. Then you had a long phone call that required your full attention.

You spent some time researching a health issue, filling out paperwork, and thinking through what you needed to ask at an upcoming appointment.

By the time you were done, you were too tired to do much, so you sat on the couch trying to figure out what everyone was going to eat for dinner.

And at the end of all of that, you tell yourself:

“I didn't do anything today.”

Yes, you did.

You used cognitive energy. You made decisions. You switched between different kinds of tasks. You dealt with the emotional load that can come with managing your health.

You may not have walked very far or checked much off your to-do list, but that wasn't an empty day.

The energy demands were simply harder to see.

This is why learning to recognize your hidden energy drains matters.

When you only count physical activity, a day like this doesn't make sense. You can't figure out why you're so tired or why your symptoms have increased.

Once you start looking at the whole energy load, the picture can become much clearer.

And instead of asking, “Why am I so exhausted when I didn't do anything?” you can start asking a much more useful question:

“Where did my energy go today?”

Put on your Personal Health Detective hat

This is where I want you to start getting curious.

When your energy suddenly drops or your symptoms increase, don't only look at how much physical activity you've done.

Look at the whole picture.

What did you have to think about?

How much concentrating did you do?

Were you making a lot of decisions?

Was anything particularly stressful or emotional?

Were you constantly switching back and forth between different tasks?

You don't need to track every minute of your day or analyze every little thing you do. That's just going to create another energy drain.

You're looking for patterns.

Maybe you start noticing that an hour on the phone takes more out of you than you realized. Maybe paperwork is easier when you break it into shorter sessions. Maybe a string of decisions leaves you more depleted than you expected.

Those are useful clues.

This is what I mean when I talk about becoming your own Personal Health Detective. You're learning how your body responds, what increases your energy demands, and what helps you work within the capacity you have.

You aren't trying to create a perfect formula.

You're gathering information you can actually use.

The goal isn't to eliminate every energy drain

Once you start noticing all of these hidden energy drains, it would be very easy to look at the list and think, “Great. So now I'm supposed to avoid all of this too?”

No.

That's not the goal.

Everything you do is going to cost something. You can't eliminate every demand on your energy. If you tried, you'd end up sitting on the sidelines watching your life go by instead of actually living it.

And the goal here is to participate in your life.

Some things are necessary. Some can be changed, shortened, delegated, delayed, or done differently.

And some things are simply worth the energy.

A hobby you enjoy costs energy. Celebrating a birthday or doing something special costs energy.

That doesn't automatically mean you shouldn't do those things.

Pacing isn't about using as little energy as humanly possible.

It's about understanding the energy you have available and making more informed choices about how you spend it.

If something is important to you, knowing what it costs can actually help you protect space for it. Maybe you reduce some of the demands earlier in the day. Maybe you plan rest afterward. Maybe you shorten the activity so it costs a little less.

And sometimes you may decide that something is worth spending more energy on, knowing that you'll need to adjust afterward.

That's very different from accidentally overdoing it because you didn't realize the activity counted.

Energy awareness gives you information.

What you do with that information is up to you.

Start by noticing

You don't need to overhaul your entire life after reading this.

Start with one thing.

For the next few days, when you notice your energy dropping or your symptoms increasing, stop for a moment and ask:

“Where have I been putting my energy?”

And don't just count what you've done physically.

Think about how much you've been concentrating. The decisions you've been making. Anything stressful or emotional you've been dealing with. How often you've been switching from one thing to another.

You don't even have to change anything yet.

Just notice.

You may start seeing connections that weren't obvious before. And once you can see those patterns, you have more information to work with.

Those small discoveries are part of building energy awareness.

You spent most of your life not needing to think about the energy cost of a decision or an hour of concentrated thought. Learning to account for those things takes time.

So don't worry about getting it perfect.

Start by noticing.

Then use what you learn to make choices that fit the energy you actually have.

Want to learn more about pacing?

Recognizing where your energy is going is an important part of pacing with Long COVID or vaccine injury. If you're still figuring out what pacing actually looks like in everyday life, read What Does Pacing Actually Mean? next. It will help you take what you're noticing here and start using that information to work more intentionally with the energy you have available.

References

Physical, cognitive, and social triggers of symptom fluctuations in people living with Long COVID

CDC Long COVID Clinical Guidance

Cognitive slowing in Long COVID

Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching