Here’s a little anecdote entitled, “An hour in the life of someone with dysautonomia.”

This morning, I got out of bed, went to the toilet, cleaned the litter box, took a lukewarm shower, and fed the cats. All morning, I had been feeling a little bit dizzy, but this is a pretty regular occurrence for me.

As I was bending down for probably the 10th time that morning, to grab a bottle of water out of the case on the kitchen floor, a wave of nausea came over me, I began to sweat, and I could feel my heart pounding. I looked at the Fitbit on my wrist and saw that my heart rate was at 146 beats per minute.

I had to sit down. Right now. I went to my bed and sat down, took a few sips of a mini Gatorade I had put on the bedside table the night before, and closed my eyes. About 10 minutes later, my heart rate was down to 109 bpm. If my easygoing morning routine can do this, imagine what 10 minutes of cardio does.

Guess what? You don’t have to! The last time I “just tried harder” was with the stair stepper at the gym. I was on it for less than 10 minutes on the lowest setting and barely made it to the to the sink in the bathroom to throw up. I had to sit in the locker room shaking and nearly passing out for almost 30 minutes before I could move. My heart rate was 216 bpm.

Now we get to do a little math. Fun, right? The generic formula to find your maximum safe heart rate is to take 220 and subtract your age. At the time, that *maximum* heart rate was 178 bpm. Today, it’s 174 bpm. I was at 216 bpm after doing less than 10 minutes of simple cardio.

Using a more advanced calculator, I can show you my target heart rates for varying intensities of exercise that use a percentage of my maximum heart rate.

As you can see, my morning routine that shouldn’t be causing any trouble whatsoever, put me into a “moderate exercise” zone. These days, simply standing for too long can push my heart rate into the 200s. I wish I was joking.

Here’s a fun diagram of my daily heartrate from a couple of weeks ago.

Do you want to know what “vigorous” activity I was doing on this day? Wrapping gifts while sitting on my bed.

So yeah, you can take your “just try harder” and shove it.