Your mind vs your body

Sometimes you wake up and plan the things you want to do and your body does not agree with the plan.  It seems like your body is the bad twin while the angelic one in your brain is giving you goals to achieve that are good, sensible and forward looking.

It doesn't matter how much I tell myself it's not my doing, it's the RA.  Even though I have a good reason for rationing my energy I still have that sense of being haunted by the things I am not doing.  

Self preservation and pacing is necessary, but even after all this time I don't always convince myself it's true.  Deep down I still feel that I can do anything - it's just that when I do what I think I can do or should do, then I pay for it for days.

Too often before you can even make a good start on an activity your body quits on you. It has many ways of forcing you to do what it wants.  In fact it has the upper hand.  The brain may be the controller but the infrastructure (body) needs to be sound for you to carry on.

So while we sit where the body put us we can wonder about these points:

1. Do I get so little done because of the activity of my chronic disease?
2. Is the  illness worse and making me more tired?
3. If I exercised more would I have more energy?
4. Was I always lazy?  (Note: Reading and eating peanuts was my favorite pastime when I was 11. May have been a bad sign)

RAcanuck put this another way in her blog post:

 "After a while your head can get kind of abusive towards yourself, you should be doing that! Why can’t you do this? It’s like a complete separation between what the disease does and what your mind thinks, is it because our eyes cant see it? or because we feel it and we’re ignored and discounted by most? I and surely most folks were taught to not be lazy and to get things done, it’s not a bad thing really unless you end up with AI disease. Then you're stuck on that mindset and your body is stopped in its tracks, the two don’t jive really."

Before you get too discouraged think of the points made in this article titled  Consequences of the inflamed brain

"sickness behaviors...are not symptoms of weakness induced by the infection, but rather are an organized set of changes designed by evolution to keep the organism (you) from foraging and thus being subject to predation during a time of weakness"

                                       care2.com
I also found another paper titled Fatigue In Chronic Disease which is helpful despite being published in 2000.  Fatigue needs more attention.