You don’t need help cleaning your house?
We have an 90 square yard flat, and I do almost all of the cleaning. My wife sometimes suggests getting a cleaner, that's after a week where I've been worse. But someone cleaning once a week is no use, something has to be done every day. I do it all in regular short stints (5' or 20'), much of it on all fours, task-switching. It's me that defines what is dirty. My wife may be a bit messy, very taxing job and life, so I have to re-order and simplify things, so that she's satisfied and I can clean easier.
Or doing laundry at times?
My wife does that, cos she puts high demands on it. I always used to do it in earlier partnerships. And I could / can do it now with fibro, too. The tough bit for me is putting the stuff up on to the washing line and getting it down again. My workarounds are doing it in 2-3 minute stints if necessary, task-switching (including arm stretches), re-defining perfection to 80%, not using clothes pegs, doing most on low lines, except bed stuff, etc.
My 2 organic food stores and any others I need are around the corner or 10-15 cycle minutes away. If it weren't that way, I'd make sure it was. I've simplifed any errands etc. so most take under 30, preferable 20 minutes.
For me, even sweeping and mopping my studio floor can throw me into a fibro flare for days.
So I don't mop.... Sweeping with broom or hands or vacuuming I do a room at a time, or rather preferably 10 minutes at a time, or as short as necessary to not get a backlash of more than 10 minutes, so I can switch there and back until it's finally done after a few hours, and a few other tasks too. Back to the laptop or some other task that strains a different part of my body....
And driving can even hurt sometimes.
Oh, that would be the worst thing for me. I've hardly ever driven, and also don't like being driven, and can't either. The other day after 10 minutes I needed 30 minutes to recover. I can't go by train any more, can't commute to work etc.
It’s the physical things that burden me now and it’s incredibly frustrating at times because I used to be very active.
Yeah, what I'm having (and able) to learn recently since adjusting to my continually increasing amount of symptoms, aside from finding treatments for each of them, is to reduce my energy output to about let's say 60%, instead of burning thru at 80% and needing hours, days, weeks, months of backlashes / flares. That way I can live much more effectively. I can even carry heavy things, but only for a very short time. Also I've learnt to make each break very effective, active, concentrated, and use each for other things, so I hardly ever feel as if I'm having a break, I'm just doing something different, just as active as ever, just having to sit or move very slowly most of the time...
I try my best to stay grateful for what I have, but of course physical inability still gets to me at times. And I’m still pretty new at asking for help so it still feels foreign to me.
What I've been practicing with other people is to tell even strangers exactly what I need without ado, or just take it. Occasionally I do ask people to do something for me, or let them if they offer, but usually it's a case of me saying, let me do it, I need to, even if it takes 2 minutes. My wife kept wanting to help me take my shoes and trousers off a year ago. But because I didn't let her, kept at that and doing stretches, she doesn't offer it any more, cos she realizes I need to use it to not lose it, but also because it's got better again.
I know I have to make peace with it for it to feel like a more comfortable place. I’m happy for you that you’re so independent and your fibro seems to let you do more physical things.
These are all just tons of mental and physical tricks I've learnt - I know how to throw my limbs and torso around so that it takes little energy, use anything around me to do so, incl. gravity and impetus etc. It looks a bit strange, at the end I look at my wife and grin "ta-daaaaa" and make a clowny gesture.... ;P
I’m not sure I understood your response. Maybe you would be so kind as to elaborate. Good to find my own one, as in sleep schedule? Check with others, as in doctors or those in forums? Then you list a couple supplements and give catching early daylight as a supplement example? I feel like I’m reading this incorrectly perhaps.
No, all read perfectly. It's good to re-check what we believe is good sleep hygiene and see if it is right for me at the moment, or if something else is necessary. Improving my broken sleep started off with identifying 30 "wakers" = insomnia triggers, realizing that most normal herbs / supps either didn't work or zombified me, so took over a year to find GABA, overdose of passiflora and quite a few more that increase serotonin, also cold showering before sleep, sometimes during. And of the sleep/insomnia experts I prefer Huberman and Selsick, who use similar supps to me (e.g. GABA) but added some sleep hygiene tips like early daylight that I was not familiar with despite regularly going to a sleep lab psychiatrist. I think if I listed everything I usually need to do just for sleep alone, it'd be about 50. With the result that I am "only" up 4-5x per night, however now usually under 1h, and almost continual
deep sleep - if I don't sleep deeply, I immediately get up, cold or warm shower or do NSDR (all things the sleep experts suggest, except my body crazily likes cold showers, but then these sleep experts don't have my fibro body).
If you’d be so kind, which supplements have you found work well for your sleep? I understand everyone is different.
Wow! Thanks for the hot tips. Now I know how to post like a pro
JayCS thank you so much for taking the time to read my post and respond to it. I appreciate your insights.
*grin* - I do my best.
My main sleep supps are quite a lot of GABA (also used by Huberman), balanced with glutamate, overdosed passiflora (normal dose does nothing), PQQ, quercetin, CoQ10, rhodiola, luteolin, magnolia bark/honokiol, from Huberman myo-inositol and apigenin. But an antihistamine (rupatadine) after the 3rd jab, not the 1st and 2nd has now also put a bit more oomph behind all these, so I no longer have to sleep 9 hours to get restored, 7 to 8 is enough, which is weird, it's less than pre-fibro (but then I was working 50h/wk, so that's an unfair comparison).
As magnesiums I've used malate and threonate in the evenings, glycinate wakes me up tho (same as theanine), and I don't think any make that much difference to my sleep, At the moment I'm only taking glycinate in the mornings, and sleep is the same....
(Melatonin, 5-HTP, ashwagandha, L-tryptophan, L-taurine, levodopa, valerian, hops, chamomile: all absolutely no help, the first 5 very harmful.)
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So many passwords these days! And my brain fog is too real.
) (I've almost gaslighted myself sometimes cos of it 
