Spoon Theory

Spoon Theory is an analogy to understand why sometimes people can appear to be functional and sometimes not be able to. Spoon Theory started as an explanation for chronic health ability and has been extended to understand mental health ability. If you understand Spoon Theory you can better manage your life, or you can be a better ally for people with disabilities.

Understanding Spoon Theory

Spoon theory was originally coined in 2003 by Christine Miserandino [External Link] to help explain the physical fatigue of her chronic health condition, lupus. Lupus is a complex disorder that effectively means that you are always tired, and frequently become very fatigued to the point of exhaustion. When Christine tried to explain this to people, they would not understand why she would sometimes be very capable and independent, and at other times she was very much not, and that this could change rapidly. Spoon Theory has been adopted in more recent years to explain the mental fatigue often experienced by neurodivergent brains.

Maintaining Mental Health if frequently about resource management. Do I have enough neurotransmitter to do this task? Do I have enough bravery to overcome my anxiety to do that? Do I have enough attention to focus on this? Can I put enough *flails at a concept* towards remembering the details of this course, without having to pull the necessary ability away from relationships?

Spoon theory is a good way to simplify this “spending”. The various cost of tasks is simplified to spoons. We get a certain amount each day, depending on how well we slept, whether we took our medication and have we eaten enough suitable food. These build body reserves that we then spend to do tasks. It is kind of like an electric vehicle that is charged by solar panels and a house wall battery. If the day was cloudy, or there is a tree in front of your panels, or the day is short, the battery won’t charge fully and you can’t go as far during the day. As we spend spoons, we deplete the vehicles batteries. We can quick charge our body a bit with food or snacks, or the car at some super markets, so we can go for a bit longer. If we are pulling a heavy load, we can deplete faster.

We spend spoons to do tasks, both starting them and completing them. Not all tasks are created equal, and not all people find the same task has the same cost. Getting out of bed is quite cheap for most people, but it is darn expensive if you are depressed, have back pain or slept poorly. Some tasks replenish your spoons, such as eating, but you needed enough spoons to make the food in the first place. How often have you stood at the fridge door looking for some food to eat, but you only see ingredients? That is an “out of spoon” error.

Picture of a wallet full of spoons, symbolising having a certain quota of spoons available to spend, a la spoon theory.

Some spoons are specialised. When you run out of social spoons, you may be able to use other spoons at a ruinous rate (three to one, or for some environments five to one etc), with the result that you get very tired very quickly. Running out of spoons looks like a melt down, shut down, anxiety attack, panic attack or self harm. Sometimes it is worth the cost to keep going, but sometimes you really should just leave. After running out of social spoons, you may have the spoons to be Arts and Crafty, but having run out of social spoons, you can’t “People” (socialise or be near people) or make decisions with people right now.

Other Metaphors

Spell Slots

Some people prefer the Spell Slot metaphor for understanding personal resources. This is heavily based of the classic Dungeons and Dragon’s Wizard Spell Slots, where high level spells can do amazing things, but you get very few of them, and low level spell slots can do mediocre things, but you get lots of them. You can sacrifice a high level spell slot for a low level spell, but not the other way around. You need to have a long rest to replenish your spell slots – interrupted rest does not gain anything.

The power of this metaphor is that helps some people to explain why they can only do 1 big thing a day, if they have enough recovery time, perhaps a few medium things, and quite a few mediocre things. If you do too many mediocre things, you can’t do as much bigger level stuff.

Coins, Tokens and Sales

Another common metaphor is how many coins or tokens you have to purchase your tasks today, much like going to the store.

  • Sometimes the store has a sale on certain items / tasks, so today you can get / do more
  • Sometimes the store has an overall sale, so everything is a bit cheaper
  • Sometimes items / tasks are out of stock
  • Sometimes the store is closed for the day, so you get no items / can do no tasks
  • Sometimes you get a two for one deal, but it may not be what you are after

This metaphor helps to explain another aspect of why sometimes people can do things better or worse. It helps to explain how the “cost” of items can fluctuate from day to day without over complicating why it does. It’s just what the store has today.

Getting the Correct Diagnosis

Healthy Neurotypicals do not need Spoon Theory for themselves. If you have read this and thought “wow, I can really use that to help me manage myself better”, then the most likely three causes are:

  • Poor diet and exercise
  • A biological body or neurological condition
    • Neurological conditions are often over simplified to “mental illness”
  • An environmental stressor
    • Such as:
      • Lots of change
      • Conflict at work / home
      • Financial hardship

It is rare that the problem is just poor diet and exercise. Often there is a base biological component that is causing you to have poor diet and fail to exercise enough. That could be a general body condition (heart, allergies, autoimmune or a neurological condition [often over simplified to mental illness]). A good place to start investigating this is your GP. GP’s can rule out basic common body health conditions that can lead to low resources with some basic pathology tests.

If the basic common body health conditions investigation turns up nothing, then it it time to talk about mental health. For my clients, the most common causes of low resources is Autism and ADHD, which unfortunately most GP’s are not good at recognising and referring to specialists. Consider the people in your social circles that you get on the best with – are any of them diagnosed with Autism and or ADHD? If so, it is worth investigating as you likely were attracted to connect to them due to similar neurology – wolf packs.

It is important to note here that people can have both body illness and neurological conditions.

Situational stressors can be exhausting and it may be more complex to resolve on your own, or the situation is outside of your experience and you are not sure what to do. If this has been going on for more than 6 months, seek expert help, such as our therapists.

Once you have identified what is causing your resource drain, it is important to treat it. Sometimes that is just medicine, or a medical procedure, sometimes that is just good therapy, often it is both.

Identifying as a “Spoonie”

People who struggle with chronic conditions like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, Heart conditions, Spondylosis, ADHD, Autism and so on, where you find yourself unable to do as much as your used to do, as much as you would like to do and struggle to do enough to survive have taken on the group name of “Spoonie”. As in, “I’m a Spoonie”, or “we are all Spoonies here”.

You can do a general web search for spoonies in your area and see if your particular diagnosis is welcomed in their group. This is excellent for both increasing your social confections, but learning tips and tricks from them for what may be useful for your situation, gain industry contacts for who is good at supporting or treating and so on.

There is no official test for inclusions. Effectively, if you use Spoon Theory or a variant as a metaphor to better understand yourself and help manage your resources, then you can call yourself a Spoonie.

Optimising Spoons

The power of understanding Spoon Theory is that we can look at tasks that are commonly expensive for you and work out ways to make them cheaper.

  • If a problem with social is that auditory processing differences means lots of energy is used to compensate for noisy environments, ask for the gathering to be held in a quieter place, or bring noise cancelling headphones to help filter out some noise
  • We can gang a few similar tasks together so that the startup cost only needs to be paid once and only the doing task cost is needed
  • We can pre-choose some things, so that the default option is both simple and cheap, and only chose differently if you have spare energy and desire to do so

ADHDers Release Block Amounts of Spoons

Often ADHDers release spoon reserves in block amounts. If a task isn’t complex enough, or important enough, no spoons are released for that small task, as it is deemed too unimportant – this isn’t a conscious choice, this is a hindbrain resource management decision.

  • A common hack ADHDers employ is to add complexity to some tasks so that the task is complex enough or deemed important enough to release a big block of spoons, which can then all get used up instead of wasted.
    • Added complexity examples:
      • Multitasking with some other tasks
      • Background music/tv in the background
      • Adding a personal challenge
      • Body Doubling
  • Urgency can trick your brain into releasing a block of spoons, but over use of this can leave you exhausted without much being done.
    • Urgency Enhancing examples:
      • People are coming over
      • The due date is nigh
      • Manufactured accountability, such as promising someone it will be done
      • Negative self talk
  • More Hacks

Optimising Tasks

When your resources are low, trying to optimise our tasks to use less spoons is hard. Much like the staring at the fridge example at the top, where you need spoons to cook and consume nutritious food, you need enough spoon resources to put into optimising your tasks so that they cost less spoons later, which then gives you enough spoons to optimise another task. This becomes a recursive improvement.

It can seem initially frustrating to put effort into streamlining some processes that is hard when you don’t immediately see the benefits of that streamlining. However, when you next do that task, you’ll find that it’s easier and you have extra spoons for other things. This can require financial set up, or logistical set up, or sorting and categorising. Maintenance of this efficiency can be hard when we are exhausted, because we ran out of spoons, and some point in optimisation, too much spoon resource goes into optimisation that improving becomes a nil gain scenario.

Without changing the way you do tasks, you can’t improve the cost of the task, or find better ways to spend your spoons. It is also important to note that some things just can’t get cheaper, so put your optimisation efforts into things that can.

We can over streamline and fall into perfectionism. This can lead to endlessly trying to ease our anxiety by doing some kind of improvement that never pays off, because you are fixing the wrong thing.

Interoception aka Spoon Resource Metre

It is a skill to learn how to keep an eye on your spoon level and start to shut the task down before you get that empty. This form of interoception is one that many people with mental health struggles struggle with, but as you work to learn this skill, it becomes incredibly powerful and can halt meltdowns, shutdowns and breakdowns. It is a hard skill to learn on your own, therapy helps a great deal.

Optimising Spoon Regeneration.

It takes time for spoons to regenerate. We need to

  • Eat nutritious food regularly
  • Sleep
  • Rest and down time.

Down time can look like switching off (reading, watching TV, staring at a wall) or doing a fun and different activity. To tell if it is spoon regenerative, when you finish that bit of the task, you will feel more able to do other things.

This is just a quick snapshot.

If you want some help beyond this, perhaps contact us for an appointment.