Managing Chronic Illness | How do I know if I should push myself?

Howdy. We're gonna have a chat today. I'm Cassie Winter. I'm a productivity and self care expert for those who are neurodivergent, chronically ill and disabled. Today we're gonna talk about one of the questions I receive the most often and that is, "how do I know if I should push myself?" This is gonna be a more in depth chat than usual, so go ahead and grab your favorite beverage, I've got some hot chocolate, and let's get into it, shall we?

Watch the video at the link below, or read on for the full transcript.

I have asked myself this question so many times. I myself have been chronically ill since the age of 14 and I was born neurodivergent and then I developed depression, and I have CPTSD, and ptsd. So I also have those forms of neurodivergence. As someone with many intersecting disabilities, I have far less usable hours every day than a neurotypical or able-bodied person. These days I've been averaging about two to four usable hours a day.

And that means time that I can, do work for this business, do chores around the home, do things to feed myself, care for my body. The rest of the time I honestly have to rest and recover. And that means that all the things on my plate somehow need to fit into those two to four hours these days. And just like every other person on the planet, I have too much on my plate.

It's a genuine sign of our times, which dumpster fire, that even those who are neurotypical and able-bodied and have more privilege in this world are experiencing rising rates of burnout and overwhelm. They have too much on their plates that they can't conceivably handle and have work, life, balance, whatever that is. So what does that mean for those of us who are marginalized, who have disabilities, who have less usable hours, capacity and ability?

If normal people are struggling, we're screwed. Especially for those of us in countries whose governments and systems do not support us properly. So when pretty much anyone comes to me with this question, "how do I know if I should push myself?" All of that context just floods my brain. And the neat and tidy answer is: what would be the consequences of you pushing yourself? What would be the cost?

If you're someone with disabilities, for example, how much time and energy would you need to recover? And what would that time and energy spent to recover put on hold? Because if you're already behind now, if you push yourself on one thing to get ahead on it, because you're going to have to rest and recover from that, other things are going to fall even further behind. So there are a lot of consequences to pushing ourselves.

The catch 22 is there are potentially even worse consequences for not pushing ourselves. What do I mean by that? Because of our intersecting disabilities and identities, survival is often a huge issue. Our Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? We're struggling to get all of those primary ones being shelter and food and then on top of that, medical care. I understand that I have a tremendous amount of privilege in that I am partnered to someone who makes a decent wage and I do not personally have to struggle with the food and shelter part.

Now that my partner and I are married, however, I no longer benefit from the Oregon Medicaid stipend situation. So my insurance premiums have gone from $160 a month last year to over $400 a month as just, just for me. Last year because I had a big surgery at the beginning of the year, I met my deductible and out of pocket max by the end of February, which meant that basically all the rest of my medical care throughout the rest of the year was covered.

And now not only do I have that additional high monthly premium that I got to pay for no matter what, I'm now also having to pay for everything else that I need. And as a disabled individual, that's a lot. Especially since my left sacroiliac joint has decided to throw a tantrum this month. So that's fun. So where was I? Just surviving is usually the top of the priority list for those who are disabled in any way, shape or form.

It shouldn't be that way in my opinion, but that is the reality for so many of us. And then if you're in the United States right now, many people with marginalized identities are also at risk for their safety, AKA the survival part, getting worse over here. Not a fan. So when someone asks me "how do I know if I should push myself?" It's usually coming from a place of all of those systemic oppressions where they have to spend their precious time and energy, those usable hours, their capacity, their ability on basic survival needs that the community and the systems around them should be helping provide for them.

But it's also coming from a place of like I don't want to get worse. The problems are already sky high. I know that there are consequences for pushing myself, and those consequences often make it solves one problem, usually an immediate urgent and immediate on the Eisenhower matrix scale problem. The rest of them they get worse. So going back to the the simple answer, it's making an educated guess about what those consequences would be if you were to push yourself and then asking yourself, am I willing to experience those consequences?

Am I willing to pay the price for pushing myself? And then even then, if you do an educated guess, you decide you're willing to pay the price, experience those consequences, you go and do the pushing. And then because life be lifeing and disability is more often than not dynamic, the consequences may very well end up being worse than you had calculated. In my signature productivity and self care program, the Action Navigator so much of what I do with how I'm educating my students and coaching them through things is try to help them find solutions and systems that they may have not thought of before in order to kind of circumnavigate this horrible catch 22.

Where can we in our day to day life make adjustments so that overall we can get some more usable hours back, some more spoons if you will? How can we set up systems for ourselves that if we stay the course and make tiny adjustments day after day after day, they compound. And that sky high set of problems shrinks over time. So instead of being caught in this cycle of push really hard, recover and things get worse, then having to push really hard, recover and things get worse.

We're going the low and slow approach, the tortoise instead of the hare. And I understand that to be able to do that is also a privilege because being able to do that implies a certain amount of support in your personal life in order to choose the low and slow route over the do it all now, pay for it later, rinse and repeat cycle. The reason I built my business in the first place was because the kinds of support that I did have access to at my lowest, for example, traditional therapy, I was going to so many doctors trying to get diagnosed for what on earth was wrong with me.

It took me 15 years to get diagnosed with my primary issues. So I was disabled for 15 years of my life and I became disabled at 14. So half of my life it took to find any sort of answers. But the support systems I had available to me, including my parents and my friends, they didn't have, and even my therapists I cycled through, many didn't have the expertise to help me with my specific problems.

And because of that, even though I did have some external support, I felt very alone. An individual facing all of these problems and all of that burden was on me to solve my problems, to improve my life and my station and my situation and move forward. I had to become an expert in so many different areas in order to get to where I am now. And if I think of the world that I would want to live in, where our communities and systems automatically supported those with less privilege, those marginalized identities, disabilities, et cetera, such that instead of survival being our priority, living could be our priority.

So many of my students are so intelligent and creative and just profoundly wonderful individuals. And it breaks my heart to think how different our world could be if barriers to survival were removed for this group of people. The art that would be in this world, the progress in science that would be in this world, and the astounding thing is so many of them manage to do that stuff anyways, but even then, they're nerfed, as it were.

If I hadn't had to figure out how to survive, how to be a person in this haunted meat suit of mine, I probably wouldn't have stopped writing fiction in my early 20s. I probably would have kept going. And who knows where that could have gotten me. To do creative work is what's in my soul. All right, we've gone down the tangent rabbit hole. I need to circle back a little bit.

I built this business in order to help people who are, have been, will be in situations like where I was, where the systems of support that they have access to are not moving the needle and they're having to become experts themselves in order to move forward. I want to, like, give them a shortcut for all that. Like, I've been there. Here is everything I have learned to help you move forward, to take the edge off, to give yourself even just a tiny bit of energy and capacity and usable hours back.

So that way, if just a little bit more living were in their lives instead of surviving, I've seen how transformational that can be, and that's why I do what I do. I wish this business didn't have to exist. I wish this wasn't such a gaping hole. And I wish there were more standardized, systemic ways providing this kind of support. One of the things I've heard a lot about my program is that this is what occupational therapy should be.

And I recognize that there are occupational therapists out there doing this kind of work. They're just few and far between and hard to find. Because the other, the compounding factor in all of this pisses me off is that you have to be good at marketing in order to reach people that need your help. Suffice it to say, January 2025. Wild time to be trying Facebook ads for the first time.

As if you've been around a while, you've noticed, like, I just don't have the capacity to do weekly YouTube videos, let alone at the quality that I want to put out into the world. So my upload schedule very erratic. The YouTube algorithm doesn't like that. I'm lucky if a new video gets like 500 views in the first month. I have over 12,000 subscribers. So you might be someone with a disability who's literally like within a 5 mile radius of an expert in your disability and you may never find out.

Not gonna lie, I keep pretending this is alcohol. I do not drink alcohol. My dysautonomia would not allow it. My pots would flare so bad. But one can pretend. All right, let's go back to pushing ourselves. So let's say you have come to the conclusion that you need to push yourself. Then the question becomes, what kind of accommodations or support can we put in place in order to decrease the potential for harming ourselves, making things worse?

And what are our boundaries around pushing ourselves? If you've been in the chronic illness space for even five minutes, you've probably familiar with the meme that you wake up, it's a good day because it's a good day. You do a lot of stuff. You get it all done. You're finally able to knock off a few feet of that sky high problem list. Then you go to bed feeling satisfied.

You wake up the next morning feeling like you've been run over by a truck. And you may remain in bed for weeks. It's a meme for a reason, because it's relatable boundaries. And something in my program, I call it the stopping muscle, which is one of the six muse muscles that I talk about in the Action navigator is so important because like if you imagine, let's say a power lifter, Right.

Powerlifters are very, very specific about the exercises they're doing, the amount of weight they're doing, the style of movement and number of reps, not to mention managing their diet to an extent that would throw me into an eating disorder. So but let's say Powerlifter, working on their biceps, doing bicep curls. If they didn't stop. Let's say they're doing this is an arbitrary number. I don't know anything. I'm learning about weight training to help this haunted meat suit.

I'm by no means an expert. Let's say they're doing 50 pound bicep curls. If they didn't stop, they would go beyond failure and potentially injure themselves. Right, right, right. That would even happen to an able bodied person. They go too far. So whether or not. You are choosing to push yourself boundaries that stopping muscle is so important in order to help us move forward without causing more damage.

And this is actually a great place to talk about. A concept that I recently learned from Annie Short. She's the expert that I'm learning about weight training for Ehlers Danlos from. And oh my God, I love her work. Cannot recommend more. I'm hoping to not be too shy at some point in the future and be like, "hey, you know, you want to come on my YouTube channel and talk about this sometime?"

I'm just going to let one of her recent Short form videos roll about capacity. "Ehlers Danlos and capacity. Let's talk about it. So let's say your capacity is here. That's all you can do right now. For a lot of us, the temptation is to work at capacity. Maybe we tell ourselves that I used to be able to do more than this, therefore I should be able to do this much now.

Maybe we're comparing ourselves to others and thinking we should be able to do as much as they can. Maybe you're in a rush to get to your results faster. Maybe you've been told that this is the rate that you should be working at, or maybe you're just frustrated with how slow things are going. Let me teach you a trick that I've learned from working with some of the best strength athletes in Australia and seeing how they train.

The best strength athletes I've worked with very rarely go to max capacity in their training sessions. Instead, they acknowledge where that capacity is and then work within that capacity. And then we start to see something pretty cool happen. This will actually start to expand their capacity out. This means that over time their capacity might go from this to this. And what we do then is we still work within our capacity and that will again expand our capacity out.

Now, over time of working like this, what we see is the capacity expands out even more. And then we might even get to the point where it's really expanded out. And remember, this black outline is our capacity and the green is where we're working. Look at where we're working here. Compared to the original capacity that we started with, we're now doing more than we ever could before, but we're still training in this safe zone where we've got this buffer zone where we're not pushing too hard against our capacity and causing a flare up or sickness, et cetera.

Now I've said this is how the elite strength athletes train. It's also an excellent approach to training for conditions like eds. And I wanted to highlight the fact that it works for elite athletes because so often we're told that these approaches are what we have to do in order to avoid injury. But I wanted to show you, yes, it can help with our eds, but it can also help with our performance.

This is not about holding yourself back and it's not just about preventing flare ups. This is actually the best way to train, no matter who you are." Isn't that cool? I love that framework and it makes so much sense. And it doesn't only apply to strength training. When we work within our limits, it builds our capacity. If we jump the fence and we do too much, it actually reduces our capacity going forward.

So the straightforward answer when you're asking yourself, should I push myself? "How do I know if I should push myself?" Is one, what would be the consequences of pushing yourself in this context? What price would you have to pay? Make an educated guess. And then two, are you willing to pay that price? Are you willing to experience those consequences? And we're just going to like throw in the bonus question.

Is it absolutely necessary that you push yourself? Man, this is a whole nother topic. So yes, oftentimes there is the context of survival needs. But for those of us who have been in that hyper vigilant race for survival for years and years and years, especially if you have any form of post traumatic stress and your hyper vigilance is just wee woo, wee woo all the time, we have the tendency to see something minor as life or death.

It's like, oh my God, I need to push myself and deal with this or else bad things are going to happen. It's really important to be able to discern true need for pushing yourself versus an illusion of need. And this is where one of my favorite concepts that I've talked about before, showing up messy. In order to show up for the things that truly matter or are truly important to us, that means we need to be showing up messy in some way, shape or form.

This is day two hair. I did not have the spoons to do another shower last night. Wasn't happening. Wasn't happening. Looks a little bonkers. But I know I'm probably being harder on myself than I need to be. When we have that history of hyper vigilance and being unable to discern the nuance of priority, that's a really important thing to start working on and that is difficult to work on alone.

It can be really helpful to have someone like me or your therapist or another professional or even just a friend or a family member to bounce ideas off of and to work through whether something really is important enough to ask yourself the question should I push myself to get this done? And if you are alone, I really recommend the Prioritizing Grid method which I talk about in my free Anytime Reset guide, which you can get access to at a link in the description box below.

It's a really great way to get an accurate priority order while drastically reducing decision fatigue. It is Chef's Kiss one of my favorite things I've discovered in the past couple of years. If you want me to do a more in depth video like this one on that discerning whether or not something is important enough, let me know down in the comments. Because in this video I really just wanted to talk about the nuance of how so many of us who are neurodivergent, chronically ill, disabled are stuck having to push ourselves all the time, which just leads to burnout, Rinse and repeat.

Like I've said before, there is a way out, but it involves getting extra support which not everybody has access to. And that's actually one of the reasons why it is so important to me that I offer a sliding scale for my program so that those who are not financially privileged have access to my work and my education and my coaching. Because I was one of those people. I had no money because I couldn't work and I wasn't like going to go ask my mom for $5,000 for a coaching program.

Not that that existed in the early 2010s. But I digress. So the formula, the workflow, if you will. Step 1 Is this something I need to push myself through? Is this an actual, important and urgent situation? Or is my hypervigilance making me think that it's true and it actually belongs in a different Eisenhower Square? 2, make an educated guess. What would the consequences be of pushing myself in this instance?

What would the price be? What consequences would I experience then? Number 3, am I willing to pay that price? Am I willing to experience those consequences? And remember the consequences often include other things falling more behind and becoming more urgent. I have a guess that a lot of the times the question "how do I know if I should push myself?" Has an underlying, likely unconscious hope attached to it.

The idea that whatever the answer an expert like myself or a friend or a family member offers in response to that question will somehow fix something or many somethings. It'll make it okay. It'll make it safe. Like, yes, you should push yourself in this instance and it'll be safe. You'll be safe. Or no, you shouldn't push yourself in this instance and you'll be safe. It's okay. It's okay to need someone to tell you it's going to be okay, especially if you're an adult who knows that's a white lie.

You just need a little bit of emotional support. That's okay. I'm not judging anyone for experiencing that. There's also this element of wanting someone else to step up and save you for once because you have been having to step up and save yourself over and over and over and over again. There's this desire to be unburdened, rescued, saved. "How do I know if I should push myself?" The uncomfortable truth is only you can know the answer to that question.

If you have any sort of support network, yes, ask for their expertise and for their opinions. You know who you can trust. It can be so lonely and burdensome to be with the one with the power of choice in your life, because then the consequences become yours. If you mess up, it's because you messed up. To unburden yourself with that responsibility and accountability sounds magical. It's okay to make mistakes.

It's okay to make an educated guess, decide to push yourself, push yourself and find out your educated guess was way off and have a lot more consequences to experience. It doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't mean you failed. You did your best, and your best had consequences that you weren't aware of. So instead of coming to your rescue, which, man, I wish I could do that, if I had infinite funding, I would save y'all in a heartbeat.

So instead of focusing on that, let's focus on something that is within our control. If you are currently experiencing the consequences of your actions, you pushed yourself, you're burnt out, you're in a flare, yada, yada yada, the, the, the sky high pile of problems is even duller. That is not a reason to beat yourself up. That is not a reason to be unkind with yourself. You didn't fail.

You did nothing wrong. You did your best. There were simply consequences outside of your control. And that's okay. It sucks. It can really suck, but it's okay. Instead of seeing this as not only an opportunity, but like a responsibility to be mean to yourself, to judge yourself. Instead, you have the opportunity and the responsibility to be kind to yourself, to be compassionate with yourself, to care for yourself and move forward from there.

So the moral of the story for today is it really is okay to be kind to yourself. It really is okay to be Compassionate with yourself. Being nice to yourself doesn't make you a bad person. We've talked about a lot today and it's been more conceptual than necessarily actionable. We've got our like three questions like is this really worth pushing myself really? Or is my hyper vigilance lying to me?

What would the consequences be? What is my educated guess? And am I willing to pay that price? Am I willing to experience those consequences? That will help guide you to a more educated answer to the question of "how do I know if I should push myself?" I simply wanted to highlight and validate the totality. And I know there are other aspects that I did not touch on. So when I say totality, I'm not being literal.

I'm not being literal, but I wanted to speak to invalidate all that extra context that you may feel in the background like you sense it like the elephant in the room, but you can't see its shape, can't see how big it is, you can't say where the wrinkles are. You probably know it's not a simple question. "How do I know if I should push myself?" I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know.

I simply wanted to shine a light on it and validate it. Because you are not alone in that experience. And it's tough being a soul in a meat suit these days. You are not alone. You are not a bad person. It really is okay to be kind to yourself. It really is okay to be compassionate with yourself. And back to that marketing thing, it feels gross but like it's important that I talk about what I do so that people who need and would benefit from my work can find out about it.

If anything I've said today has resonated with you, you might really enjoy my program, the Action Navigator. It's an online productivity and self care program with a course. Everything I learned about this outside of my head, accessible to you day or night, whether I'm awake or drooling. And also a private community hosted on Discord and weekly group coaching calls with me so you can get that personalized advice and coaching simply in the context of a group call so everybody can learn what you are learning and you can learn from what others are learning.

I do not have the usable hours to be a one on one coach. Just wouldn't happen. I would burn myself out and I would not make any money because I'd be able to do like two coaching calls a week and the rest of the hours would be promoting said two coaching calls a week just that doesn't work. So group program it is, and if you're interested in that you can go to the link in the description box below.

If you would prefer to get a taste of the stuff that is inside the Action Navigator, you can sign up for the Free Anytime reset, which is an example of what I call a cheat sheet. Step by step processes and like I did all the executive function for you, the cheat sheets may be long, but that is an indication of the work that has been done for you so you don't have to do it.

And that's why version two is taking long, because there are more cheat sheets and I'm trying to be more explicit about doing all of that extra work on your behalf so when you're struggling you have an easy system to follow. So all that information is in the description box below. There's some links to some other videos you might enjoy in case you want to fall down the YouTube rabbit hole.

And if you do, thank you. I appreciate it. I will be back at some point in the future with another video. You matter. You are not alone and it really is okay to be nice to yourself. Bye.