The Spoon Theory came about when a woman with Lupus was trying to describe to her friend what her day(s) were like.
It's overly simplistic. There's criticism that it also makes those who have chronic issues seem like they are more fragile than they are. There's something to that; however, I think that it's more the author's choice of what she describes as taking up your "spoons" that can lead to that particular issue with the analogy.
I find spoon theory useful as a metaphor for looking at executive function energy reserves- I don’t have to manage chronic pain, but I can still find myself running low on spoons in the course of a day after dealing with enough interruptions, frustrations, etc. For me, “spoon” is just a convenient euphemism for “standard measure of energy of executive function”; it would be just as useful to me to acronym that to SMEEF and talk about running low on smeefs, needing to conserve smeefs, etc.
It may be that there are circumstances under which the same amount of pain has a higher or lower spoon cost for you.
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It's overly simplistic. There's criticism that it also makes those who have chronic issues seem like they are more fragile than they are. There's something to that; however, I think that it's more the author's choice of what she describes as taking up your "spoons" that can lead to that particular issue with the analogy.
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It may be that there are circumstances under which the same amount of pain has a higher or lower spoon cost for you.
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