OK, so this sounds silly, but for the past two and a half weeks I have been assigning a number from 1 to 10 for how much activity I did each day, and a number for how bad my symptoms were. I made a line graph, and the correlation is really striking. Of course I knew that when I do a lot, I'm weaker the next day, and so on, but I really had no idea how strong the correlation was. The higher my "activity" number, the longer it takes my "symptoms" number to settle back down.

I thought I had a good sense of how activity affected my symptoms, but I was struck by how much stronger the connection was than I'd realized.

This is very helpful for me, because on the days I'm taking it easy, I sometimes wonder whether I'm just using my illness as an excuse to be lazy. Now I have "hard evidence" to remind myself.

Abby