Spoon Theory & Life

Have you ever heard of Spoon Theory?

It’s a metaphor developed by Christine Miserandino, a woman who lived with lupus, to describe what living with chronic illness or pain can be like. Miserandino basically likens the amount of energy she has for different tasks to spoons. Though the original metaphor was meant for someone with a chronic condition, I think it can be useful for most anyone.

Think about your daily routine.  Like the number of physical spoons in your kitchen drawer, you have a finite number of spoons to “spend” each day. Let’s say you have twenty spoons. So, you get up, shower, get dressed. All of this “costs” one spoon. You get the baby ready and feed her. One spoon. You prepare breakfast for your family. Three spoons. You go into work. First thing up is a heated meeting. Five spoons. You have enough spoons to spread out through the day.

However, the “cost” for each task can be different for each day, depending on how you are doing. If you didn’t sleep well, if you woke up with a headache, if you were sick recently—all of these, and many other things, can make even small tasks loom large, or cost more spoons. So now, you get up, shower, get dressed. Three spoons. Get the baby ready and feed her. Four spoons. Prepare breakfast for your family. Five spoons. Go to that heated meeting. Eight spoons. You’ve used sixteen out of twenty of your spoons and it’s only ten A.M.! 

A few things really stand out to me with Spoon Theory. First, when I started paying attention to how I was feeling, I started noticing that sometimes I just didn’t have the energy for some things all of the time. Second, how when one task costs more spoons on a particular day, other tasks end up costing more too.

I really began to pay attention to how I was spending my spoons after I gave birth. To be fair, my body was recovering from major surgery, my sleep schedule was out-of-whack, and my hormones were all over the place. I suppose this is why Miserandino originally used Spoon Theory to describe living with a chronic illness—when our bodies are operating fine, we hardly pay attention to them. 

But after B.G. was born, simple tasks were daunting at first. Fen and I make our own soup stock by freezing the extra bits from veggies (things like onions peels and the tops of peppers), boiling them, and straining them. It takes almost no extra time to move the leftover bits into a gallon-sized bag in the freezer. Except…my back was aching and the baby was crying. I didn’t have the spoons to do the extra few steps, so I swept them into the garbage. 

We are striving to live this life in a way that is low impact. We usually buy individual laundry pods from a package-free store, but that means an extra stop when you can just get a tub of pods from the grocery store. So if we have the spoons, we’ll go to the package-free store. If we’re low on spoons, then we don’t. There’s no guilt, because energy—and time—is being conserved for something which, right then, is more important.

This, to me, is the real purpose for Indisposable Life.

It’s the striving to live consciously about how we are impacting the world around us, but not to let it drain us out. Do what you can with the spoons you have on each given day.

If you want to read more about Spoon Theory, please visit Christine Christine Miserandino’s website, www.butyoudontlooksick.com.

Thanks for reading!

💜

Laura