Hands on the notebook, not on the to-do list — the first ten seconds decide the rest of the day.
Here’s something that happens often with autoimmunity and chronic fatigue: I can sleep deeply for hours and still not feel rested. I used to call that failure. Now I know it’s information to be read.
For years I thought of my energy as a battery: full in the morning, draining during the day, recharging while sleeping. It’s the model we all use, and it’s also why, when the “charge level” doesn’t add up as expected, we feel broken instead of just different.
But I come from aeronautics, and an airplane doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t have a single battery — it has multiple generators, multiple separate electrical circuits, essential and non-essential. And it has a priority list for shedding non-essential loads in case of failure — load shedding — decided in advance in the flight manuals. The pilot doesn’t choose what to switch off while the generator is failing. That choice is already written, made with a clear mind, before it was needed.
My energy works more like that than like a battery: not a single reserve that drains predictably, but different systems (physical, cognitive, immune) that deplete at different speeds, for reasons often independent of how much I “did” that day.
And the real difference between failing and adapting is not how much energy I have — it is whether I have already decided, before the crisis, what to shed first.
In control theory, before you choose an action, you estimate the state. You don’t decide what to do. You first understand where you are.
When I have no energy, I don’t start from the list. I start with SENSE.
Where do I feel stable contact right now? Feet on the floor of Romeo, our self-built expedition truck. Hands on the notebook. Not what I should feel. What I actually feel. Pain and fatigue are not betrayal, they are information.
Then I move to SELECT.
What can I not do today? Not what I must do. What I leave out. On March 7, 2023, a diagnosis changed what “today” could hold: “Sjögren’s disease with a fibromyalgia component and inflammatory arthritis.” Since then, eight hours of sleep no longer means what it used to mean.
Then I move to SIMPLIFY.
What do I remove instead of add? Because energy is not created. It is conserved — but not like in a battery: like in a system with multiple circuits, where shedding a non-essential load first, decided in advance, protects what really matters. I don’t add a tracker. I remove a commitment. I don’t add a routine. I remove a “should.”
And then I come to SUSTAIN.
What I learned early on: “A breath. A step. A choice. Day after day.” One unremarkable Tuesday that holds. Not a perfect green day.
I didn’t learn to decide when I have energy. I learned to decide when I don’t — with a priority list already written, not improvised in the moment of need.
That is what The 4S Method of Adaptive Intelligence® is: not a sequence of steps to follow in order, but four anchors to return to whenever the spiral spins up like a washing machine on spin cycle.
Sources
Fatigue Impact Scale (FIS) research on multidimensional fatigue — cognitive, physical, and psychological domains that don’t move in sync in chronic illness, Frontiers in Neurology (2025): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurology/articles/10.3389/fneur.2025.1618272/full
FAA Advisory Circular AC 21-38 v2.1, “Aircraft Electrical Load Analysis and Power Source Capacity,” on load shedding priority during electrical failure: https://www.casa.gov.au/aircraft-electrical-load-analysis-and-power-source-capacity
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