The instinct is to stop entirely, and complete rest is usually the wrong dose. Tissue that is irritated by load also needs load to stay conditioned, and a week on the sofa can leave a foot stiffer and weaker without being much less sore when you stand up again.

The productive version is reducing instead of stopping: keep moving, cut the specific things the tally flagged, and give it ten days instead of judging after two.

Most bad weeks are accumulated load and settle when it comes off. Four patterns behave differently and are worth a clinician, not a strategy: pain that wakes you at night, pain with swelling, redness or heat, pain that arrived suddenly with no build-up behind it, and pain that has not settled at all after several weeks of genuinely reduced load.

None of those is common, and none of them is what this page is for. Recognizing them is mostly a matter of noticing that the usual explanation does not fit.

Two lines a day is enough: what you did, and how the foot was. After a couple of months the pattern is usually obvious and it is rarely what people expected. Often the flare follows a combination rather than any one activity, and the giveaway sits a few days before the pain.

There is a reason I put indoor footwear so high. When I filled in a standard foot and ankle questionnaire this year, I answered one question twice without meaning to. Asked about pain walking on a flat surface, I read it as barefoot and marked it severe. Asked about difficulty walking on a flat surface, I pictured myself in shoes and marked none. Both answers were true. No part of that form asks what is on your feet, and for me it is the whole difference.

A record is also the most useful thing to hand a clinician. “It flares sometimes” is hard to work with. Eight weeks of dated entries showing the pattern is a different conversation entirely.