『Living the Could Life』のカバーアート

Living the Could Life

Living the Could Life

著者： Robert and Theresa
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Life becomes different for those who experience later-in-life challenges. Living The Could LIfe offers tips adjusting your life so that you can still travel and do all the things that you love. No toxic positivity here, just lived experiences from hosts and guests.© 2026 Living the Could Life 旅行記・解説 社会科学 衛生・健康的な生活
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  • Spoon Theory Part 1

    Spoon Theory Part 1
    2026/07/07
    How to Regulate Your Energy Level In this episode we talk about the Spoon Theory. Keeping your spoons organized is easier said than done. The practice of using spoons to keep track or your personal energy economy is not only helpful to people with chronic illness. Its usefulness extends to those who have experienced later-in-life disruptors. Don't forget to come back next week to hear the rest of the story. You will learn how to set your daily spoon limit. There will also be some suggestions for applying the spoon theory to travel. Living The Could Life contains affiliate links. They don’t cost you anything, but we may earn a small commission if you use them. We may have been hosted on a trip, excursion or other travel-related event. We may have received or experienced a product for review. Any opinion is our own. AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES. Transcript Click Here for Transcript Theresa: Welcome back to Living the Good Life, everyone. Today we're opening up a conversation about an idea that has entirely reshaped how millions of people talk about health, chronic illness, and daily survival. It's a framework that is so widely adopted that it's evolved into its own cultural identity. And so today we are going to talk about spoon theory. Robert: It's fascinating because if you spend any time in chronic illness circles online, you'll see people calling themselves spoonies. But if you aren't initiated, you're probably asking, why spoons? Why not batteries, dollars, fuel gauges? Theresa: And to understand that, we have to go back to a diner in 2003. The concept was created by an essayist and advocate named Christine Miserandino. I hope I pronounced that right. Christine was living with lupus, an autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks your healthy tissues like your joints, your skin, and your organs. She was sitting in a diner with a close friend who looked at her and asked what it actually felt like to have lupus. Not the clinical definition, but what it felt like to live with it day to day. Robert: And that's a notoriously hard thing to articulate. When you look healthy on the outside, people assume your internal battery works exactly like theirs. To demonstrate, Christine looked around the diner, grabbed every spoon she could find from the tables around, and handed them to her friend. She handed her 12 spoons. Theresa: And she told her friend, this is your energy for the day. For a healthy person, energy feels virtually limitless. If you want to go to the store, you just go. But for somebody with a chronic illness, every single action requires a choice. And every choice costs a physical asset. In this case, a spoon. Robert: Christine had her friend walk through a typical day. But right out of the gate, before her friend even got out of bed, Christine took a spoon away. Why? Because her friend had woken up late, or slept poorly, or woke up in pain. Then, getting dressed, that's another spoon. Taking a shower, that's two spoons. Because standing up in hot water causes dizziness. Before her friend had even left the house for work, half of her spoons were gone. Theresa: The epiphany for her friend came at the end of the simulated day. She realized that if she cooked dinner, she wouldn't have enough spoons left to wash the dishes, or drive to see a friend. She had to learn the crushing reality of economic rationing applied to her own muscles, joints, and brain cells. That's the origin of the spoon theory. It wasn't born in a laboratory. It was born out of a desperate need to make an invisible struggle visible to someone who loved her. So now we're going to talk a little about the science behind chronic fatigue and biology. So we'll talk first about energy. Because spoon theory isn't really about spoons, obviously. It's about the invisible cost of living in a body that doesn't behave the way you want it to. Robert: Exactly. For people with chronic conditions, energy isn't just feeling tired. It's metabolic load. It's inflammation. It's neurological processing. It's pain management. It's sensory regulation. It's executive function. Theresa: And the science backs this up. For example, chronic inflammation increases metabolic demand. Pain consumes cognitive resources. Neurodivergent brains use more energy for sensory filtering. Autoimmune disorders cause fatigue through cytokine activity. Depression affects dopamine and motivation pathways. Anxiety keeps the nervous system in a flight, in a fight or flight. Robert: So when someone says, I don't have the spoons, they're saying, my body is already working overtime just to exist. Now let's pivot into the mechanics. While the metaphor uses silverware, the underlying reality is governed by absolute biology. When someone says, I don't have the spoons for that, they aren't being lazy or unmotivated. Their cells are facing a literal energy crisis. Theresa: Exactly. Let's ...
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    18 分
  • Part 2 More Spoon Theory

    Part 2 More Spoon Theory
    2026/07/14
    Finding Your Baseline In this episode we continue our exploration of Spoon Theory. We have models for you to find your own baseline. In addition we suggest how Spoon Theory and setting a baseline applies to travel. Want to apply Spoon Theory to travel? It's all about conservation of energy. Einstein might agree. Living The Could Life contains affiliate links. They don’t cost you anything, but we may earn a small commission if you use them. We may have been hosted on a trip, excursion or other travel-related event. We may have received or experienced a product for review. Any opinion is our own. AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES. Transcript Click Here for Transcript Theresa: Welcome back to Living the Good Life, the podcast where we talk about rebuilding a life after change, the kind of change that shifts your energy, your identity, your body, or your sense of what's possible. This is a short overview of what we discussed. We talked about several types of medical issues, especially that drain your energy. I feel relieved that I do not have something where my mitochondria doesn't convert ATP to energy or an autoimmune disease, although I have been suspected of having one, even though I have some of the symptoms and blood test results that might indicate that. But just to get you up to snuff, we basically talked about how difficult it is for some people to make it through the day. We use spoons as an example of a type of energy currency. Robert: And we talked about where that whole idea came from. It started in 2003 when an advocate for lupus decided she needed a practical way to demonstrate to a friend how her energy allotment worked every day. Theresa: And she used spoons because she was in a diner and that was an easy way to explain. So one thing that we thought about, and this applies to travel because we will be talking about how the spoon theory applies to your travel, is that, I don't want to say in the old days, but when we were both younger, people used to collect souvenir spoons every time they traveled. Robert: And when we took a trip, we were sometimes asked by people who were collectors to see if we could find a spoon from a particular location. Theresa: And we were thinking about that. And because we don't go to souvenir shops very often, we were wondering. So let us know if people do still collect spoons. People put them in wooden cases and you'd see them hanging on a wall in their homes. Robert: And they'd show off their new spoons that they had just gotten from a trip or from a friend. Theresa: And then we realized also when we were younger, when we had our kids, it was pretty common for somebody to buy a spoon for the newborns. Robert: Usually a silver spoon. Theresa: Usually a silver spoon. I think we may still have one. They tarnish because they're silver. Maybe that's something that looks into the future about spoons. Keep track of your energy. Robert: We will give a few examples of people and how they allocate their spoons each day. And it's kind of an interesting way that you decide how many spoons you're going to commit each day to certain activities. Theresa: And it's really beneficial to plan your spoon usage for traveling. Even if you don't have a chronic disease, it's still good because honestly travel can be very exhausting. And let's explicitly define the word baseline because it is vital. So in clinical terms, your baseline is the amount of activity you can engage in daily without triggering a flare-up or post-exertional crash. Finding your baseline is the prerequisite for figuring out exactly how many spoons you have to work with each day. Robert: Let's look at how someone actually calculates and allocates their spoons in real life. It isn't a static math problem because unlike a regular bank account, your initial balance changes every morning. Theresa: Oh that sounds like if you've invested in the stock market, right? So let's create a comparison to illustrate how wildly a spoon budget can fluctuate based on different body disruptions. We'll look at three distinct profiles. A healthy individual, someone with an auto-inflammatory condition like lupus, and someone with a profound neuro-immune disruption like ME-CFS. So we're going to compare the spoons that different people use. We have the healthy person, somebody with lupus or some kind of joint inflammation, and then somebody with the ME-CFS profile. And just to remind you that's basically mitochondrial failure. So the first thing you do in the morning is wake up and cry. Robert: Now the healthy individual has a healthy budget of lots and lots of spoons and it costs them zero spoons. They've had a nice restorative sleep. Theresa: The person with lupus might take two spoons because they have morning stiffness and joint pain. Robert: The individual with ME-CFS has had an unrefreshing sleep. They have severe PEM on waking and it's costing ...
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    22 分
  • Living The Could Life Workbook Primer

    Living The Could Life Workbook Primer
    2026/06/30
    A Bit More About the Living The Could Life Workbook In this episode we address some questions about our guided workbook. The gentle aspect of the book led to a few inquiries about the effectiveness of this 70-dday guide. We wanted to take an episode to dive deeper into the focus of the book and the importance of reading the intro and other parts of the workbook. We talk a bit of acetylcholine, Goldilocks and how relative stress may be. Living The Could Life contains affiliate links. They don’t cost you anything, but we may earn a small commission if you use them. We may have been hosted on a trip, excursion or other travel-related event. We may have received or experienced a product for review. Any opinion is our own. AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES. Transcript Click Here for Transcript Theresa: Welcome back to Living the Good Life, where we talk about real travel for real bodies. The kind of trips you can actually take, not the ones that you used to be able to take. I'm Teresa. Today we're talking about how real change happens in the brain, not through force, not through intensity, not through try harder, but through gentle, meaningful challenge. Inside the brain, there's a chemical called acetylcholine. Think of it as your brain's spotlight operator. When something is new, interesting, or requires your attention, acetylcholine turns the spotlight on and says, hey, this matters. Let's strengthen it. For example, if something is too easy, something you can do on autopilot, your brain doesn't bother requiring anything it thinks. Oh, we already know how to do this. So let's make this real with an example. People often say, I do Wyrtle every day. Isn't that good for my brain? And the answer is, it's fun, but it doesn't create any new connections. So acetylcholine barely moves. No spotlight, no rewiring. And my guess is, it makes fewer connections if you learn a second romance language. What do you think? As opposed to a Germanic language. Robert: I guess the grammar is different. Like German, the joke is they always wait for the end of the sentence. Theresa: Right. We should do that for this podcast. Make you wait. Robert: And yeah, I hear people say learning Greek is very difficult, where they say learning Spanish is a lot easier, but when you start becoming really fluent in Spanish, it's still pretty, pretty challenging, I think. Theresa: And I think other languages, like some of the Asian languages or Chinese, which is, I believe, called a tonal language, where, you know, high, high pitch. I know they use the example ma, like there's several different ways to pronounce ma, and it totally changes the meaning. But anyway, I was just wondering about that. I don't know. So, back to language. Your brain can't solve, learn, you know, a problem, the problem of learning a new language with its old circuitry. Acetylcholine spikes, the spotlight turns on, and your brain says, this is unfamiliar. I, I need to build some new circuits. Robert: Between entertainment and transformation. Theresa: Although I do think there's something good about trying to solve Wordo, even though you know how to play that, or do crossword puzzles, or things like that, at least keeps your mind active. Robert: Yeah, I like Wordo. Theresa: I do too. So, language learning is one example of a neuron builder, as we just said, but there are many other neuron builders, activities that reliably activate acetylcholine and support real change, and they're different for every person. Robert: Here are a few. Learning a new motor skill, such as knitting, tai chi, watercolor, typing with a new layout, learning a new sensory skill, photography, cooking with new spices, music training. Theresa: Oh, and you know all about the music training, right? Robert: I suffered through that long, long ago. Learning a new cognitive skill, a new software tool, a new route, a new planning method, learning a new relational skill, asking for help, setting boundaries, practicing micro-connection. Theresa: And, as I said, for some people, some of these are easy. For others of us, I mean, knitting, I remember when our first son was born, or before, I decided I would make a little afghan for him that was knitted, and it was just simple squares. Well, I had rectangles, squares, parallelograms, nothing was the same size, nothing the same shape, and, you know, but I watched people knit, and they make it look like it's the easiest thing ever. The common thread, though, with all these, they do require new maps, new patterns, and new attention. They wake up the spotlight. Robert: And they're all things you can do gently inside your wheel. Theresa: This is where gentle challenge becomes essential. It's the level where your brain says, this is new enough to matter, but safe. And safe is key. It's safe enough that I can stay open to it. Robert: Especially if you're living in a changed body. Pain,...
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    21 分
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