What Happens After You Push Through- Because Of Course You Do! (#4 in Series)
What Happens After You Push Through?
If you’ve been following along, some of this might already be starting to click.
There’s a moment many people recognize: something in your body feels off, but you keep going.
Sometimes you have to, or it doesn’t feel like enough to stop. And sometimes you’ve been told it’s okay to push through, so you do. In the moment, that can work. What becomes more informative is what happens after.
What pushing through actually looks like
It’s not always obvious or dramatic. It can look like finishing a grocery trip when you already feel off, staying in a bright or loud environment longer than your body wants, or continuing through fatigue or dizziness because it feels manageable enough.
For me, it also looked like continuing to go to a dance class I loved.
It was where I felt most alive—dancing in a way that felt fully engaging and energizing. It was also one of the only places in my week where I connected with other adult women and felt a sense of community.
But my body was responding differently. My heart rate was reaching into the 180s—around or even above my estimated maximum for my age—and I would be flared and exhausted for days afterward.
So imagine my distress when I started being told that daily cardio would be the main treatment recommendation—aside from antidepressants. Which didn’t quite line up with what my body had been very clearly demonstrating.
What stood out to me was that I had been attending this class consistently for months. This wasn’t a new activity or a matter of needing to build tolerance to aerobic exercise. The pattern reflected a change in how my body was responding, not a lack of conditioning.
Giving it up felt like a significant loss. I kept thinking there had to be a version of it that would still work.
So at first, I tried to modify. I moved with less intensity. One night I even sat in a chair and tried to participate that way.
But the energy in the room, the lights, and the overall stimulation—things I had always loved—were still too much for my system.
Another way this showed up for me
Looking back, I can see earlier versions of this pattern.
In my twenties, during grad school, I was taking a full course load while also managing what was essentially a full-time workload between my paid job and clinical internship hours. It was a lot, even before you add in trying to take care of yourself in the middle of all of that.
At the time, I tried to “run off stress.” I’d go for a run and then end up lying on the floor afterward, feeling awful and sometimes trying not to throw up for hours.
I assumed I just needed to push harder or get in better shape. Which, in hindsight, was not exactly the direction my body was asking for.
What I didn’t understand then was that I was likely layering more stress on top of a system that was already maxed out. My body wasn’t asking for more intensity—it was asking for something different.
Looking back now, that pattern lines up closely with what’s called post-exertional malaise (PEM)—a worsening of symptoms after physical, cognitive, or sensory exertion, often with a delay.
PEM is commonly discussed in conditions like ME/CFS, and it’s also something many people with hypermobility spectrum disorders or POTS begin to recognize once they have the language for it.
At the time, I didn’t have that language. I just knew something felt off.
When I eventually shifted to things like yoga, the response was completely different. My body settled more easily, and recovery didn’t take days.
Which makes a lot more sense now. It just didn’t at the time.
Why we push through
Most people don’t push through because they’re ignoring their body. They push through because they have to.
Work still needs to get done, and you want to show up in a way that feels good—to be present, engaged, and reliable for the people you’re working with. At home, your kids still need to be fed, cared for, and nurtured. There isn’t always space to pause just because something feels off.
So you keep going. Because of course you do. Life doesn’t really pause when your body does.
The messages we’ve learned
We also live in a culture that celebrates pushing through—grit, determination, perseverance. These are qualities we’re taught to value, and often ones we genuinely want to model for our kids. We praise showing up, working hard, and not giving up.
And in many ways, those are meaningful strengths. But when it comes to the body, those same messages can make it harder to recognize when pushing through is no longer supportive. It can start to feel like the “right” thing to do, even when it comes at a cost.
The patterns we carry
The thing is, many of us who end up experiencing really complex health symptoms also tend to be the ones who push ourselves—perfectionistic, high-achieving, and often deeply successful by many measures.
We’re used to following through, showing up, and doing what needs to get done. We take pride in being reliable, capable, and engaged in the things that matter to us.
Those qualities aren’t a problem. In many ways, they’re strengths. But they can also make it harder to recognize when our body needs something different. When something feels off, our default isn’t always to pause—it’s to keep going, to figure it out later, or to assume we can handle just a little more.
Over time, that pattern can make early signals easier to miss. Not because they aren’t there, but because we’ve learned to move past them. And when you combine that with a culture that reinforces pushing through, it starts to make sense why this pattern shows up so consistently.
At some point, I started realizing this wasn’t random.
What I started noticing
What helped me wasn’t focusing only on what was happening during an experience, but paying attention to what happened afterward.
I began to notice patterns that were delayed—symptoms showing up later in the day, a wave of fatigue at the end of the day, headaches that didn’t connect clearly to anything, or a body that felt harder to regulate the next day.
Because the response wasn’t immediate, it was easy to miss the connection. Which, honestly, is part of what makes this whole thing so confusing.
The part that’s easy to overlook
If symptoms don’t happen right away, we tend to assume they’re unrelated. But many bodies don’t respond instantly.
Sometimes the pattern looks more like:
event → delay → symptom
Once I started looking for that sequence, things began to make more sense.
When the body gets louder
Over time, I noticed something else. The more I pushed through early signals, the less subtle those signals became.
What had once been easy to ignore started to take longer to recover from. Symptoms became more frequent, and sometimes more intense. It didn’t feel like my body was suddenly changing. It felt more like it had stopped being quiet about what it needed.
A concept that helped explain this: PEM
There’s a term you may come across called post-exertional malaise (PEM). It describes a pattern where symptoms worsen after physical, cognitive, or even sensory exertion, often with a delay.
This is often the missing piece when symptoms don’t seem to match what’s happening in the moment.
That delay matters. It’s not always activity followed by an immediate crash. It can look like activity followed by symptoms later that day or even the next day.
For some people, this shows up as exhaustion that feels disproportionate to what they did, symptoms that linger longer than expected, or a reduced capacity the following day.
For me, PEM meant my body felt so heavy I could barely get out of bed. Even walking—or sitting and folding laundry—felt like the effort of cardio.
It’s also something that shows up across conditions—especially in ME/CFS, and often in people navigating hypermobility spectrum disorders or POTS. Which can be helpful to know, because it gives a framework for something that otherwise feels very inconsistent.
What this can look like in kids
For kids, this pattern often shows up differently. You might see a child hold it together all day at school, and then fall apart at home.
It doesn’t mean the day went fine. It just means the impact showed up later.
And as parents, we’re holding another layer
We help our kids do hard things—go to school, push through discomfort, build resilience. And sometimes it’s logistical. Parents need to work, and staying home isn’t always an option.
When a child has ongoing symptoms, it becomes a balancing act—supporting their body while helping them function, without teaching them to ignore what their body is telling them. Which sounds simple, until you’re actually trying to do it.
What helped
What helped wasn’t stopping everything completely if my body wanted movement. It was getting more curious about the sequence.
What did I notice first? What did I continue through? What happened afterward?
That shift didn’t give me instant answers, but it gave me better information.
A more helpful question
Instead of asking, “Can I push through this?” a more useful question became:
What tends to happen if I do?
Why this matters
The goal isn’t to avoid everything. It’s to understand your body’s thresholds, how recovery works for you, and when something manageable in the moment becomes something harder later.
If this feels familiar
If you’ve noticed that symptoms tend to show up after something rather than during it, you’re not imagining it.
You might just be noticing a pattern that hasn’t been clearly named yet.
What comes next
In the next post, we’ll look at why symptoms can feel inconsistent—or like they’re getting worse over time—and how understanding total load changes the way everything fits together.
Missed the beginning of the series?
Find Post #1 here: When your labs are fine- but you don’t feel fine (#1 in Series)
If You’re Not Sure Where to Start
Support, if you want it
If you’re looking for more personalized support in making sense of symptoms—for yourself or your child—you don’t have to navigate this alone.
