Don’t focus on the colour of the walls in your house if you don’t have good foundations or you’ll be forever sorting out cracks rather than enjoying the delicate mocha.

All these messages are built from the science and understanding of what actually works to get people a long-term recovery in our clinic.

I had a car once and the fuel gauge broke so I had no idea how much fuel was in the tank. I really didn’t want to run out of fuel so to start with I went to the petrol station every week and topped up the tank, I once went two weeks but it stressed me out when driving at night on the M18 thinking of what might happen if I ran out so I went back to weekly top ups. Then I discovered that 250 miles had always been fine so stuck to this until it was fixed. In short far better to over fuel than under fuel as running out is a massive issue.

How do we read our body’s fuel gauge? There’s no magic way of doing this it’s about learning from what it is telling us and pain or tiredness is one of the simplest ways it communicates to us that we are low on fuel. The problem is that the world doesn’t stop just because we are having a tough time so we frantically look for ways to keep going and often just kick the problem further down the road, paracetamol anyone…

Example:

Your back [insert painful body part] suddenly starts hurting and on the face of it you didn’t do anything to deserve it behaving like this. You drove home from a weekend away where it had actually been feeling quite good really, then 5 mins after getting back home “OUCH” and you only went to close the door.

How could you possibly have avoided this from happening? Well let’s consider the car with a broken fuel gauge, suddenly we had to plan and make strategies that normally we don’t have to because modern cars tell you to the mile how long before you will run out and make it quite obvious. Telsa’s even warn you when you are planning the route and include charging stations into the route.

The hardest medicine to take here is to accept that you over did it, once you accept that you can start to look for clues about what are the biggest fuel drainers and what activities actually put more fuel in the tank, the gainers.

Still here, good, let’s learn from this and make it less likely to happen again.

The quickest way to naturally improve your pain is to bring the control back to you. If you had an overworking team mate, which sounds more useful, sending them on a ‘How to delegate course’ in addition to all their work or taking some workload off them so you can send them in the time you created?

To learn how to read your fuel gauge you have to start thinking about the activities you do regularly and break them down into fuel drainers and fuel gainers. A lot of people would say work is a drainer, but such a big activity can’t be considered as one, we need to break it down, so the commute to work is an activity, your workspace is an activity to look at and see what it currently does for your body. Sitting all day might be a drainer but in 30 minute spells a gainer, improving the ergonomics might slow the drain so think of it as improving your miles per gallon (MPG)

There needs to be some form of activity prioritisation after they have been weighted up as drainers or gainers. 

If people are prepared to optimise what they currently have they can bring the control back to them rather than their body then stretch out this comfort zone of what it is capable of so that it includes all the things they want, do you know what you want more?

It’s far easier to say yes to things than no and this is a big part of the issue, our lives become full of things we feel obligated to do and we treat ourselves far worse than we would dream of treating others. Often just reorganising the activities during a day is enough to make a massive difference. Mo Farah doesn’t run at full speed the whole 10k because he knows he’ll get there quicker if he paces himself and runs his own race.

I’m not saying we have to become a self centred, selfish person but if you do want to get back in control of your body you at least have to know how much fuel is in the tank, what things drain it and gain it and then you can start to make sure you don’t set off on a 50 mile journey with 30 miles in the tank, as no matter how you cut it, you’re not getting there without major help if you do! 

The Key Takeaway:

Pain is our body’s way of asking us to slow down and if we ignore it or don’t learn how to read our fuel gauge then we run the risk of letting our body and pain be in control and us the victim.