Building Body Awareness for Pacing
This worksheet is designed to help you become familiar with the various bodily and psychological cues your brain is assimilating to judge whether you should push or back off. Bringing awareness to this process and logging your findings helps you to bring "body awareness" (called interoceptive awareness) in the research. Importantly it does so in a way that helps explore with curiosity, building accurate insight, rather than creating more fearful cues.
In this worksheet, you are invited to log a number of different things before, right after and 3-5 hours after you have done one specific thing that you often are challenged in knowing whether to do it or not. That could be walking for a certain duration, forcing yourself to the gym, finishing off a piece of work, going to bed early, etc.
The important thing is that you pick one thing to focus on first. We want to keep the variables as controlled as possible so that you have the best chance of making sense of your experience. First thing’s first is picking the thing you are going to use the worksheet on. Pick something you often struggle to know whether you should push on with or back off from. It might be something that you have backed off so much from that you haven’t done it in a long time. Make a fixed and feasible duration that you are aiming for each time e.g. reading for 10 minutes or 8 pages or walking for 5 minutes.
Use the sheet to check in every time before you do or contemplate doing the thing. Sometimes you will decide not to do it and that is ok.
After a couple of weeks (depending on how many instances you have – you might want longer), look at the data you have collected.
Consider the questions:
Consider the questions:
- How did it feel to check in this way?
- What are you more aware of now then before?
- What can you take from your experiences of having done the thing?
- Are there specific signals that feel more trustworthy in telling you to ease off?
- Are there more indications that you can work with to determine when it is a good idea to push a little?
The author
Meet Dr. Sula Windgassen
Dr. Sula Windgassen is a leading Health Psychologist, CBT and EMDR therapist, and Mindfulness teacher with two doctoral degrees - a research PhD in Psychological Medicine at Kings College London, and a practitioner psychologist Doctoral Qualification with the British Psychological Society as a Health Psychologist.
Dr. Sula is chartered with the British Psychological Society and accredited and regulated by the Health Care & Professionals Council (HCPC).
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