The ‘Spoonie Theory’ is a creative way to explain what it is like living with a chronic illness.
Think of spoons as energy.

Living with a chronic illness can most of the time mean you often have a limited amount of spoons a day. Meaning if you do too much in one day, it can leave you short of spoons for the next day.

Each activity, like getting out of bed, taking a shower, making a meal, exercising or going shopping etc. requires a different amount of spoons. The amount of spoons an activity requires, changes according to the state of your illness, which as you know, varies each day. Some activities some days require the use of 1 spoon and other days they might need the use of 3 spoons.

This is where, listening to your own body comes in very handy.

So you have to carefully choose which activities you want to do each day according to how you feel. You can also ‘borrow’ spoons from the following day. However, the more spoons you borrow, the less you have the next day. Borrowing spoons from the following day, and doing more activities today, might result in you being more tired, less energetic, or in more pain the following day if you don’t replenish and relax.

If you only had 12 spoons per day, how would you use them?

Take away 1 spoon if you didn’t sleep well last night, forgot to take your medication or skipped a meal and take away 4 spoons if you have a cold since then your body needs even more energy to fight with an that additional illness.

As a form of positivity, and help within the chronic community, we like to say that we are giving some of our spoons away to others that need it more. Of course this isn’t literal, as you cannot give ‘physical energy’. Think of it as giving some ‘positive mental energy’ to them instead.

So, if one of your friends or family members is running out of spoons.

Give them some of yours, and help them replenish theirs.

I hope this gives you a nice, easy and fun way of understanding and explaining this to others.